UFO Info Week-End

It’s all way over-the-top but it powerfully underlines the way that sex gets perverted for this couple into goading blackmail a stimulus to

It’s all way over-the-top, but it powerfully underlines the way that sex gets perverted, for this couple, into goading blackmail, a stimulus to and attempted relief from murder.It’s not long, though, before the show makes a cacophonous change of gear. Tossing her raven mane and turning the “unsexing” speech into an orgy of groping autoerotisicm, Ms Smith also mimes to a spine-tingling Callas recording of Verdi’s opera and even takes to the floor with her partner in an incongruously tasteful rendering of the “Blue Danube” waltz. Behind a scrim and in front of a ruched scarlet curtain that lends a touch of Gothic camp to the proceedings, Paul Davies and Fern Smith roll and thrash about in a manner that suggests they are far from indifferent to each other. The witches have frequently been pensioned off, and there have been several attempts to demote the central couple to the level of their 20th-century shadow-selves, those infantile psychopaths Pa and Ma Ubu. All of which illustrates the compulsion to use deviations from Shakespeare’s tragedy as a way of asserting modern scepticism about belief and notions fundamental to the play: the idea, say, that evil is an external metaphysical force, objectified in the black hags. Joining this reductionist line-up comes Macbeth: Director’s Cut, Volcano’s abridged, bashed-about, brutalist reworking by Nigel Charnock, which narrows the focus down to a claustrophobic monomanie a deux, played out by Macbeth and his wife.
As a meditation on the philosophical basis of Shakespeare’s play, the show would be better named Macbeth: The Unkindest Cut but it begins arrestingly.

THERE HAVE certainly been some rum versions of Macbeth in recent years. Jane Horrocks’s Lady M urinated onto the stage in a production set in a Waco-style American Hare Krishna sect. But in the grilling heat of the current Globe performances, Rylance is well worth risking sunstroke for.Paul TaylorTo 26 Sept (0171 401 9919)A version of this review appeared in later editions of Saturday’s paper. With a newfound maturity and humility, Rylance’s queen confirms her right to reascend that seat by stooping and, in an oddly Christ-like gesture, kissing the clown’s filthy feet before he leaves.Paul Shelley is a disappointingly brisk and efficient Antony, with none of the requisite faded glamour. He parks himself familiarly on the throne where Cleopatra is just about to turn herself into an icon. True to the spirit of the play, which has to keep battling against farce as it pushes its way towards tragic dignity, the clown who brings the poisonous asps commit a comic act of unwitting lese-majeste.

But Rylance reacts, moment by moment, with a disarming instinctual swiftness (one second maternally stroking a messenger’s hand, the next, biting lumps out of it like a spoilt child): the effect is witty and tantalising because it blurs the line between what is calculated and compulsive in the character’s behaviour.There is also a moving strain of delicacy and sensitivity in this Cleopatra, as is shown by an excellent directorial detail in the final scene where – her wig now removed, revealing a scalp riddled with alopecia, and wearing a simple white shift – she braces herself for her self-transcending suicide. The irony is that he comes across as less of a toughened drag-act than some of our recent female Cleopatras (Helen Mirren, Frances de la Tour), who have made the queen’s capricious volte- faces look crashingly premeditated. Sweet-faced under a mane of curly black hair and laced into lovely, low-cut period outfits that give him the seductive hint of a cleavage, Rylance skips about barefoot, like some innocent heroine from pastoral. When Fiona Shaw triumphed as Richard II at the National, the casting drew its validity from the way it emphasised the childlike arrestiveness of this monarch.

With Cleopatra, a transvestite performance can, as Rylance proves here, enhance your sense of your queen as a fluid and compulsive actress who has enjoyed playing drunken gender-bending games with her lover and who always, even as she goes into her final, glorious apotheosis, keeps you guessing about the exact degree of sincerity behind the role- play.
At 39, Rylance is the same age as the heroine at the end of the drama, but he presents a Cleopatra who likes to put on an artfully artless show of guileless girlishness. They regain some of that frisson now in Giles Block’s new Jacobean-dress, all-male Antony and Cleopatra at the Globe, where the part of Cleopatra is performed with a beguiling persuasiveness and compelling mercuriality by the venue’s artistic director, Mark Rylance. WHEN SHAKESPEARE’S Cleopatra contemplates the grisly prospect of being led to Rome as Caesar’s captive, one of her chief anxieties is that she’ll be forced to watch the city’s transvestite actors travestying her in skits: “I shall see/Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness/I’th’posture of a whore.” Originally, these lines would have carried a certain irony, for in Shakespeare’s time, the role of this legendary “essence” of womanhood would have been played by a young male actor. “Up to the moment we heard that Iraqi troops were landing at the airport we still thought they were bluffing,” sources in London said yesterday.From the front page of `The Independent’, Friday 3 August 1990 The Law Report resumes with the Law Term in October. British officials said Mrs Thatcher regarded the Gulf crisis as a crucial test of the UN’s ability to prevent aggression in the post-Cold War world.Meanwhile, the failure of the US State Department and the British Foreign Office to forecast yesterday’s invasion is likely to produce prolonged recriminations in both countries. President Saddam Hussein’s military might is formidable, however.It appears that Mrs Thatcher argued – and President Bush did not take much persuading – that unilateral military action by the US would be unhelpful at this point. When asked whether the US would consider military action, he said: “We are not ruling any options in but we are not ruling any options out.” He said “several possibilities” were open to the US, if it did decide to use force, and there has been speculation that the US might strike against an Iraqi oil terminal.

In this unlikely location, Mr Bush took calls from King Hussein of Jordan and President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt but failed to get through to King Fahd of Saudi Arabia.President Bush condemned the “naked aggression” of Iraq. But she did not want to be trapped into a situation where a few western countries damaged their own economics by enforcing sanctions while others did nothing.The President and Prime Minister were speaking at a windswept open-air press conference after a previously scheduled informal summit 11,000 feet up in the Rocky Mountains. British officials said last night that both leaders had agreed that Iraq should be given no more than 48 hours to withdraw troops or face punitive action.Although this appeared to contradict the Prime Minister’s well-known opposition to economic sanctions, British sources said that Mrs Thatcher thought the Iraqi invasion merited a strong international response. They said, however that Mrs Thatcher was concerned that any sanctions must be agreed by the vast majority of UN members – not just Security Council members – and must be rigorously applied.She said: “The fundamental question is this: will the members of the United Nations have the collective will to see that a Security Council resolution is enforced?”She said the Security Council should meet again shortly to discuss action under Chapter Seven of the UN charter, which deals with aggression against member states. Earlier, on Baghdad radio, a Revolution Command Council statement warned that Kuwait would be turned into a “graveyard” if anyone tried “to commit aggression or is moved by the lust of invasion”.In Colorado both Western leaders refused to specify what the worldwide action might be, but British officials said the only sensible sanction would be an embargo on Iraqi oil exports.