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Rip It Up, Issue 125, 1 December 1987, Page 46

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AMIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM Director: Celestino Coronado Shakespeare on film is a fascinating sub-genre. There are the traditional renderings such as the Olivier Hamlet, Othello and Richard 111, and there are a host of less conventional treatments ranging from Zeffirelli’s Taming of the Shrew and Kurosawa’s Ran. Then there are the rather dizzy Hollywood specimens of the 19305, from the spectacle of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks in Taming of the Shrew to the triumphant sepia kitsch of Reinhardt’s Midsummer Night's Dream, with Mickey Rooney of all people as Puck. Lindsay Kemp is known for his outrageous and innovative work in the field of theatrical mime, with shows like Flowers and Salome. David Bowie worked with him briefly in the 60s, and it was Kemp who mounted the singers 1972 Ziggy Stardust concert. He’s also appeared in the occasional film by Ken Russell and Derek Jarman and appears in A Midsummer Night's Dream as a rather lascivious Puck, lusting after the androgynous Changeling (hailed in one British review as the most beautiful boy to hit the screen since Visconti’s Death in Venice). From the opening scene with Hippolyta being abducted by Theseus, the tone is the highest of camp and it works marvellously. The Shakespeare play has been brutally hacked to 77 minutes, and what is left is half mime, half pantomime. The extravagant characters tiptoe through scenes pitched halfway between Richard Dadd and Fuseli. Words, sometimes voiced over, are treated through a synthesiser to give them a spacey, ethereal effect. It’s not Shakespeare for purists, but it’s short and pacey, stylish and fey. Darker sides are hinted at and the spells of the Bard are recast for a mid80s sensitivity. There are so many delights—from Michael Matou’s Oberon, his lightning flash face like that of a villain from the Sunday morning sci-fi cartoons, to Annie Huckle's Hermia, presented as a latter day si-

lent movie heroine. One of Puck’s. more wicked tricks has the lovers turn gay, although this is but a momentary delectation. There may or may not be fairies at the bottom of your garden, but there are some very civilised specimens in Lindsay Kemp’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. William Dart .■ ■ ; GARDENSOFSTONE Director: Francis Coppola ■ Oliver Stone’s Platoon took .us straight to the front line of the conflict, Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket juxtaposed the horrors 'of Vietnam with the tensions and macho mania of a Marine’s training post. Coppola doesn’t cross the Pacific and chooses to set all of his film in the States. Gardens of Stone is a reference to the Arlington National Cemetery, where the Vietnam dead are laid to rest. Nearby at Fort Myer, Virginia, the Old ; Guard make time, burying dead and mounting historical pageants for tourists. James Caan and James Earl Jones are two officers in charge. Caan is frustrated and can see the pointlessness of the Vietnam conflict (“There is no front. It’s not even a war. There’s nothin’ to win and no way to win it.”) James Earl Jones is a little more suave as Caan’s colleague, only too happy to keep clear of the realities of the conflict. Vietnam never comes nearer than the news on the television until a naive recruit (D B Sweeny) enters the college, determined to go to Vietnam because “a soldier in the right place at the right time can change the world.” Although his posting in Vietnam and. eventual death brings about many of, the main conflicts of the film, Gardens: of Stone eloquently points out how the Vietnam War brought about so much suffering back in the States, and the way in which the horror of all permeated the fabric of American society. . Unlike Kubrick, who uses a cool distanced approach in Full Metal Jacket, Coppola presents us with warm, living, human characters—the irascible Caan, the intense warmth of Anjelica Huston, the sheer resonance of James Earl Jones. Coppola is a hum: anist: he can’t resist surges of emotional. music with the final funeral sequence. Gardens of Stone is a powerful movie. Don’t miss it

William Dart