Starring role for TV and film props
By Robert Shrimsley
THE couch cavorted upon by Joanne Whalley-Kilmer in her portrayal of Christine Keeler in the film Scandal and the pulpit used by Peter Sellers in the film Heavens Above are among the items to be sold in an auction of stock from the country's largest supplier of theatrical and television props.
For around 400 the lucky purchaser can harangue members of his family with sermons from the hexagonal pine pulpit or, for 65  80, sit in his favourite armchair beneath a carved and painted royal crest used in the courtroom scenes from Rumpole of the Bailey.
These items, and 1,097 more, belong to the Old Times Furnishing Company and will be auctioned by Phillips at the end of this month inside the company's Putney warehouse.
Mr Jeremy Sparks, Phillips's operations manager, will conduct most of the auction from the hexagonal pine pulpit.
Everything in the sale will have been used in films, television programmes and stage plays.
But Mr Robert Delaney, the company's managing director can scarcely remember in which productions the furniture featured.
' That cabinet would have been used in that Granada programme about India, I think, yes Jewel in the Crown, that's it, ' he said vaguely during a guided tour of the warehouse.
Few of the exhibits, which are expected to fetch around 100,000 in total, come with a guarantee of having been used in any particular film or show.
Cocktail shakers which are believed to have featured in Jeeves and Wooster are currently resting on tables and bookshelves which were probably used in Inspector Morse and Miss Marple.
The Arts: The secret of eternal adolescence
By CHARLES SHAAR MURRAY
MUCH of the advance publicity that surrounded Hook, Steven Spielberg's adaptation of J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan story, concentrated on the ageing directorial wunderkind's affinity for the subject of a boy who never grows up.
Little fuss has been made of the director's original notion of casting Michael Jackson as Peter, but Spielberg has clearly missed the boat in refusing to commission Robert Smith, front man and only constant factor of The Cure, to compose the score.
The Cure are pop's truest Lost Boys, still  14 years after their first professional recording  bravely confronting the desires and dilemmas of sensitive adolescence.
Their latest album, Wish (Fiction/Polydor), not only includes a song called Wendy Time, but it also celebrates the durability of Smith's most precious asset, miraculously unimpaired by the passage of the years: his ability to retain a sense of wonder at each manifestation of the most basic of human emotions.
The joy and pain of love and separation  not to mention a certain degree of despair at the intractability of the world's ills and follies  are a constant backdrop to any adult view of human existence; to teenagers and Robert Smith both exhilaration and horror are perpetually fresh.
Thus Wish veers dizzily from gleeful whimsy to cosmic angst; from unconfident extroversion to manic introspection.
Smith marries these preoccupations to highly effective pop psychedelia  like Syd Barrett-vintage Pink Floyd under contemporary radio discipline  to produce spectacular ear candy like the exultant Friday I 'm In Love as well as woe-is-me epics like the appropriately titled Open and End.
Smith once declared that The Cure would never court pop's mainstream; and that the mainstream would have to expand in order to embrace The Cure.
This has undoubtedly come to pass: Smith's shock-haired, lipsticked moonface is internationally recognisable and The Cure sell massive quantities of records in every market where bright, sensitive adolescents spend money.
' Please stop loving me, ' demands Smith at the album's climax.
Fat chance.
They 'll love him all the more.
The Arts: Looking after the dollars  and cents
By TONY PARSONS
MADONNA's new contract with Warner Brothers is said to be worth a cool $60 million.
The woman who started the craze for wearing underwear on top of your clothes  don't knock it if you haven't tried it  will receive a $3 million advance on her publishing contract, a $5 million advance for each new album and $2 million upon delivery of each finished record.
The Warners deal reportedly also includes a royalty rate of nearly 20 per cent and generous funding for developing Madonna projects on the big and small screen.
But this pop business is not all eight-figure deals and unimaginable riches.
Grace Jones has just declared herself bankrupt in New York.
Jones lists assets of $338,000 against debts of $1.6 million, most of it owed to the tax man.
The good news is that she is back in the studio and discussing a new recording contract with Island.
And then there are some musicians who merely make a living.
Music Week reports that session men are receiving a miserly 30 or 40 for performing on demo records and about 500 a week for going on tour, though the figure rises sharply on big stadium tours.
For backing superstar acts such as Sting and Dire Straits, musicians can command up to 7,000 a week.
But, even supporting name acts, most musicians receive considerably less.
Music Week cites a bass player who receives about 800 for backing the likes of Paul Young and Julia Fordham.
Still, even session men can hit the big time.
Michael Jackson reportedly paid a backing musician 1 million for playing on his last tour.
But then Michael gets an even bigger royalty rate than Madonna.
DAVID BOWIE, our most underrated actor, is on the cover of the latest issue of the American cinema magazine, Movieline.
After four years, Bowie is back on celluloid.
He will soon be seen as a bartender in the comedy The Linguini Incident and he has a cameo as a FBI agent in David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.
Bowie is currently in production with his own low-budget film, as yet untitled, which he wrote and directed.
Bowie was last seen on the big screen as a diffident Pontius Pilate in Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ.
And he was brilliant.
' For God's sake, ' Bowie's Pilate bristled on that first Good Friday, ' I could have you crucified. '
Bowie is a close enough friend of Scorsese's to have been given a storyboard of a fight scene in the director's Raging Bull (Bowie loves boxing) although he intensely disliked Marty's latest film, the box-office smash Cape Fear.
' I hated Cape Fear, ' Bowie says.
' I was so disappointed.
It felt like he was bored, like he was playing with his camera instead of getting into the thing.
The story is sublimely silly.
It was all making a silk purse out of a sow's ear. '
Although there have been reports of David collaborating with Nile Rodgers, the Chic leader who produced Bowie's classic Let's Dance album, I understand that the next Bowie record on the market will be a live Tin Machine album.
THE Prince tour, which arrives here in June, opened in Tokyo last week.
The show is reportedly a cracker, with a set comprising the Diamonds and Pearls album, a lot of unreleased material yet still leaving room for all Prince's greatest hits.
The stage set features two monumental Greek statues, a belly dancer, two giant balls and a moving ' love symbol '.
Is he insinuating something?
NUMBER ones from around the world: Bruce Springsteen, who with that manly stubble and grubby string vest has always had something of the macho Mediterranean stud about him, is currently top of the pops in Spain and Italy with Human Touch.
Kanashimiwa Yukinoyouni (Fear Like Snow) is number one in Japan, Das Boot (The Boat) is number one in Germany while George Michael and Elton John's Don't Let the Sun Go Down On Me is top in France.
The Americans continue to have little interest in British acts apart from Right Said Fred  Vanessa Williams is number one in the States with Save the Best for Last  but our old mates the Aussies can't get enough of our lads.
The Australian chart is stuffed full of Brits  Big Audio Dynamite, Kate Bush, the KLF, Genesis, Vic Reeves and the Wonder Stuff are all in the top twenty, while the mawkish Saltwater by Julian Lennon is number one down under.
The antipodean market continues to be the friendliest in the world for British pop.
It seems Australian music lovers couldn't give a XXXX for Paul Keating.
The Arts: The curse of having good taste
Joe Boyd has a fatal flaw: he has taste.
Robert Chalmers meets the man who helped Pink Floyd to fame but has never scaled music's financial heights
By ROBERT CHALMERS
AFTER a few minutes in the company of Joe Boyd, I was wondering whether there was anybody in world music he had not heard of.
In a misguided attempt to impress the veteran American producer, I brought up the name of Jaume Sisa: a songwriter I once met by chance in a bar in Barcelona, and a man whose work is considered obscure even in Catalonia.
Boyd has all his albums.
Wild eclecticism has been the hallmark of Boyd's 30-year career as record producer, failed film mogul and quixotic entrepreneur.
As stage manager at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, he was at Bob Dylan's elbow after the singer was first barracked for using electric instruments.
The discoverer and producer of the English folk-rock group Fairport Convention, Boyd also collaborated with Stanley Kubrick on the soundtrack for A Clockwork Orange.
Since 1980, when he founded his own label, Hannibal Records, he has been an enthusiastic supporter of music from Africa and Eastern Europe, but has still found time to produce albums by mainstream American groups such as REM and 10,000 Maniacs.
' The great thing about Joe Boyd, ' says Andy Kershaw, whose Radio 1 show provides one of the rare outlets for the African percussionists and Bulgarian tractor mechanics' choral ensembles currently recording for Hannibal, ' is that he has consistently put his artistic principles before his commercial instincts.
He is, in the nicest sense, one of life's brilliant failures. '
Boyd, who will be 50 next year, has changed little in appearance since he graduated from Harvard in the early Sixties.
His manner is the epitome of Ivy League rectitude: one of Boyd's friends told me that the producer once ticked him off for breaching etiquette on opening a car door for a lady.
Yet this is the same man who, in the mid-Sixties, ran the UFO club in Tottenham Court Road.
Here Boyd promoted ' free-form art groups' with names like David Medella and the Exploding Galaxy.
It was indicative of the UFO's distinctive ambiance that the lighting was provided by a 50-year-old naturist.
' He was from Watford, ' Boyd explains.
' He was very interested in lighting, but basically he was a nudist.
There were a lot of people like that. '
Joe Boyd's career began in Princeton, New Jersey, when, as an 18-year-old, he discovered that Lonnie Johnson, the legendary blues guitarist, had been reduced to washing dishes in a Philadelphia hotel kitchen.
Boyd borrowed his parents' car, brought Johnson up to the family home in New Jersey, and charged his friends a dollar each to attend the impromptu concert.
The journey from Philadelphia was a fraught one, Boyd says, principally because Johnson  an uncompromisingly direct ladies' man whose prolonged career as a plongeur had left him unused to the excitements of the open road  offered robust salutations to every woman pedestrian they passed en route.
Boyd first came to Britain in the early Sixties as the organiser of one of the first package tours of blues and gospel musicians, featuring artists such as Muddy Waters and the Reverend Gary Davis.
In the mid-Sixties, as a prominent if unlikely member of London's ' underground ', he produced the first single by the Pink Floyd.
Boyd's other proteges from this time included Fairport Convention, whose singer, Sandy Denny, died tragically at the end of the Seventies, and a gifted young songwriter called Nick Drake.
Drake, who served an unusual rock ' n ' roll apprenticeship at Marlborough and Cambridge University, released three LPs of inspired, if doom-laden, songs before taking his own life in 1974.
You can not help noticing that the incidence of fatalities among Boyd's artistes seems remarkably high, even by the alarming standards of the pop business.
Of Denny and Drake, Boyd says that, while he feels their deaths keenly, he does not hold himself personally culpable.
' I think there is a major difference between Nick Drake and Sandy Denny and a ' rock casualty ' like Sid Vicious, ' Boyd says, ' in that there was a direct correlation between their level of fame and their musical talent.
I was not manipulating them or elevating them artificially, so much as attempting to support talent to reach its natural level. '
Boyd's activities in the late Sixties set the pattern for his subsequent enterprises.
Typically, his discoveries receive substantial, sometimes posthumous, critical acclaim, but fail to make him, or themselves, any money.
He had no better luck when he went to Hollywood in the Seventies and attempted (unsuccessfully) to produce a number of intriguing projects, including a cinema version of Ian Gibson's book on the death of Garca Lorca, to have been directed by Francesco Rosi, director of Christ Stopped at Eboli.
' Good ideas, ' Boyd says, ' none of which ever got made. '
Boyd says that Scandal, the film about the Profumo affair (one of his few ideas which did materialise) has' not yet shown any profits'.
On the verge of bankruptcy a couple of years ago, Hannibal was rescued by an American company in a deal which left Boyd in charge as manager of the label.
These days, he is attempting to persuade record-buyers to share his enthusiasm for music from Eastern Europe: the Trio Bulgarka, from Sofia, and the hauntingly beautiful songs of the Hungarian Marta Sebestyen.
If these projects seem likely to enhance Boyd's musical reputation, they are showing no immediate signs of improving his bank balance.
' The trouble with Joe, ' one of his more affluent colleagues in the pop business told me, ' is that he suffers from the fatal curse of taste. '
The Arts: Beating the colour barrier
One rarely sees a black swan in classical ballet.
Why?
Nadine Meisner visits a Royal Ballet project that is encouraging a different sort of child to put on pointed shoes
By NADINE MEISNER
TWENTY more or less innocent little faces looked at the pianist and the two teachers and chanted: ' Thank you Mary, thank you Brenda, thank you Michael. '
Wonderfully neat in their red and black practice clothes, they had gone through the rigours of a simplified ballet barre (with varying degrees of stoicism), a mime sequence (much enthusiasm) and foot-stretching exercises (giggles and pretend moans).
Now they were in the end-of-class ritual of thanks, part of ballet's insistence on grace not only of body but also of spirit.
Hundreds of ballet classes exist up and down the country, but this one, in Shepherd's Bush, west London, is special: many of the children are black.
It is part of a Royal Ballet project called A Chance to Dance, designed to stimulate an interest in ballet, principally but not exclusively among black children, in deprived areas.
Over two years the children get free weekly training and dancewear.
The scheme was launched last autumn by the company's education officer, Darryl Jaffray, for absolute beginners aged between seven and nine.
With the help of two London boroughs, Hammersmith and Fulham and Lambeth, 2,000 children from 16 schools auditioned for approximately 25 places in each borough.
But why the scheme?
' I had been aware, ' Jaffray says, ' that there were more people with potential for ballet than ever considered entering a ballet class. '
Ballet is essentially a middle-class interest, the domain of white little girls whose parents can afford the fees.
A Chance to Dance aims to encourage children of all ethnic groups and social backgrounds.
Jaffray started by targeting boroughs with a high black population (although the children were subsequently selected purely on merit).
The classes certainly do not mirror what you see on the British ballet stage, especially at the Royal Ballet.
In the total absence of black dancers, Covent Garden lags behind other ballet companies in the West.
It admits that remarkably few black students have passed through its school.
Yet the modern-dance stage presents a different picture.
Look at a troupe like London Contemporary Dance Theatre: its numbers are tiny by ballet standards, but they have always included black dancers.
None too soon, the Royal Ballet has decided to take notice.
A Chance to Dance is a step towards producing students trained to the company's standards and style.
Children usually have a strong ballet grounding long before they apply to enter the Royal Ballet School from the age of 11.
So the group at Shepherd's Bush has a way to go before some of them might be deemed fit to audition there or at other vocational schools.
But they have made startling progress since they started last November.
Tummies have flattened, shoulders have straightened.
' To point your right foot to the side, transfer your weight to the left, ' their teacher Brenda Garratt-Glassman tells them.
' And don't look at your feet, it distorts your posture. '
Their other teacher, Michael Moore, walks round adjusting bodies, whispering reminders.
Both teachers are black, former members of Dance Theatre of Harlem, the American black ballet company.
They are also English.
They are living evidence of the past lack of opportunity for black classical dancers in this country.
The barrier has held back both sides.
Not only have ballet companies tended to overlook black dancers, but black dancers, observing the prevailing whiteness, have discarded ballet ambitions.
The Royal Opera House elicits the greatest suspicion.
' It does scare people off, ' admits the Royal Ballet's director, Anthony Dowell.
' Even a lot of white people sometimes feel it is a no-go area.
But I hope that we will widen the net with this project so that people won't be scared to come forward. '
But there has been a gradual shift in attitudes within this bastion of British ballet.
The dancer Evan Williams joined the Royal Ballet's sister company, the Birmingham Royal Ballet, two years ago, the third in a succession of black recruits to that troupe.
Having started dancing on the advice of a PE teacher, he was accepted at 16 into the Royal Ballet Upper School, the only black student there.
He had auditioned on his own stubborn initiative, although people had warned him that because of his colour he was wasting his time.
So why did he succeed?
' I think the timing has a lot to do with it.
Probably doors were closed in the past.
People said black dancers don't have the right body, the right feet.
And black dancers had gone in for contemporary or modern dance because they had felt ballet to be a white art form to be watched by white people. '
It goes even deeper than that.
Ballet simply does not figure in black or working-class lives; such children tend to go into dance through rock music, reggae, discos  and that means modern dance.
For that reason Jaffray considered it important to provide concrete images of ballet performances.
' It struck us that these children hadn't really had a chance to see what ballet was. '
Parents have been invited to an open day at the Royal Opera House which includes a back-stage tour, as well as dance and make-up sessions.
In July, the children will be taken to watch a performance of La Fille mal gardee, judiciously chosen for its humour.
' We want their first performance to be a real knock-out, ' Jaffray says.
She is equally keen that they should have black role-models.
So it is no accident that the teachers are black; or that she enlisted the active help of Dance Theatre of Harlem.
Two of their members, alongside Jaffray and the Covent Garden ballerina Fiona Chadwick, presented lecture-demonstrations to children and families before the auditions last October.
And over recent months, Dance Theatre of Harlem principals have been guesting at Covent Garden; one of these, Virginia Johnson, took part in a Shepherd's Bush class.
Prejudices take time to crumble.
(None is more rock-like than the attitude to men in ballet; several of the boys in the Shepherd's Bush class have left because of teasing.)
But when Covent Garden does put black dancers on its payroll, what then?
Will they feature as the attendants and train-bearers of the classics or in ' special ' roles, such as the Moor in Petrushka?
Or shall we see black faces among a row of white swans?
Dowell is adamant it will be the second option: ' As young dancers they would start and be used in the corps like everybody else. '
The old uniformity is no more and we will be all the richer for it.
The Arts: In the name of charity
By LEWIS JONES
CHARITY is a divine attribute, but we are enjoined to give forgetfully lest we fall into the absurd error of mistaking ourselves for gods.
The perils of ignoring this advice were well illustrated by Angel of Bengal (C4), the True Stories documentary by Anna Raphael which was by turns hilarious and enraging.
The ' angel ' in question was an American woman who calls herself Rytasha.
Apart from a particularly vicious-looking nose-job and alarming turquoise-coloured contact lenses, Rytasha is rather beautiful, and in the 1970s, when she went by the name of Ricki, she was a successful model (she began life as Maxine Shenkman).
An earlier film by Raphael, The Persuaders (1986), charted the transformation of Ricki into Rytasha, which occurred at the Hare Krishna Temple in London, and her uneasy relationship with her guru there.
It would have been interesting to have seen the two films together.
Since 1986 Rytasha has broken away from her guru and set up on her own with a charity called Food Relief International, which raises money from the fiercely competitive matrons of Palm Beach and distributes it to the starving people of Bangladesh.
' She adaws Bangladesh, ' gushed Rytasha's mother  the fiercest matron of them all, rejoicing in the improbable title of Baroness Thea von Theilheimer Shenkman.
She went on to list her daughter's achievements: ' She put in an irritation system...
' With no trace of a smile or a blush the baroness quickly corrected herself  ' an irrigation system '  but the slip was a telling one, and I 'm sure they would have appreciated it in Bangladesh.
The villagers of Ramsala, recipients of the Palm Beach dollars, explained to the cameras that they desperately needed a clinic.
' We told her that a mud hut would do, but she said no, she'd build something pukka. '
A pukka building was duly erected, but its medical function has somehow been indefinitely postponed.
It is devoted instead to the worship of the charitable Rytasha, who is not content simply to hand over the cash but insists, in an unfortunate hangover from her Hare Krishna days, on posturing as' a spiritual master '.
The villagers seemed unimpressed, but were given no choice in the matter.
Nor could the vaunted irrigation scheme be described as an unqualified success.
The money ran out before the scheme's completion, and the villagers found themselves obliged to borrow the rest.
They begged Rytasha for reimbursement, but none was forthcoming, and for the want of a few hundred pounds the village lost its crop for the year.
' Now what are we supposed to do? ' asked one of them.
' Are we to sell our cattle or our land? '
The most irritating thing about Rytasha  and there were many  was that, though she does not speak their language, she presumes to teach them a spurious form of their own religion.
' One thing we don't need in this subcontinent, ' Professor Rokeya Kabeer observed, ' is spiritual guidance  we have gurus a dime a dozen. '
They are far too civilised for that sort of thing in Bangladesh, but I kept thinking wistfully of T. S. Eliot's lines in Sweeney Agonistes about ' a nice little white little missionary stew '.
THEATRE
An embarrassingly awful playwriting debut by actress Sarah Miles and two RSC productions in London
Transsexual travesty
SARAH MILES's first stage play, Charlemagne, offers more than two hours of toe-curling, buttock-clenching embarrassment.
As if that weren't discomfort enough, you also have to make heroic efforts to stifle your giggles at the Old Fire Station, Oxford, for Miss Miles has a way of coming up with lines that are almost sublime in their ridiculousness.
The action is set in the kind of country house, all wood panelling and flickering firelight, that normally provides the setting for a creaky stage thriller.
It is the home of Harry Hardcastle (Greg Hicks) and his wife, Clara St Clare Hardcastle (Miss Miles herself), impoverished gentry who must produce an heir before they can get their hands on a mysterious trust fund.
They are a lovey-dovey couple, much given, for reasons that remain obscure, to roguishly gagging each other with bits of masking tape, but tension sets in with the arrival of Clara's best friend Lillibet from America.
Old Harry can't stand Lillibet and it's not hard to see why.
She's already provided the couple with a tape of tribal fertility dances to ' release endorphins in the pelvic region ' and before long she's going on about the healing properties of dolphins.
It is the dreadful Lillibet who discovers Harry's secret when she finds him raiding the fridge one night wearing his wife's underwear.
And when Clara finally cottons on to her husband's transvestite tendencies she suffers a bad attack of the Lady Bracknells.
' Well, what does all this mean, pray? ' she inquires in best grande dame mode, and, worse still, what will ' the county ' make of it all?
But Harry's not finished yet.
After rhapsodising about his wife's ' pert, piquant, oh so pliable private parts', he casually inquires what she would think of him if he had breasts.
Hormone replacement pills are discovered in the bathroom cabinet, and Clara starts going bonkers as she realises that her husband wants a sex change.
I suppose we ought to take all this seriously, as a searing analysis of the plight of trans-sexuals, but the play's mixture of pretentiousness, bathos and screaming melodrama becomes increasingly hard to stomach.
It will be some time before I forget the sight of Greg Hicks in a mini-skirt, fishnet tights and Rod Stewart wig, first furiously threatening Lillibet with a knife and then chewing up a wine glass in his torment.
But don't worry, there's a glutinous happy ending.
Sarah Miles has a fine old time as the wife, alternating that disconcertingly seraphic smile with lots of mad laughter and howls of outrage, while Greg Hicks suggests a bitter soul in torment as Harry, all cold sarcasm and inner pain.
Lindy Alexander is authentically ghastly as the New Age Californian and director Lisa Forrell just about keeps this rocky horror show on the road.
In Robert Chalmers's recent profile of Sarah Miles on this page, the actress said she always came out of interviews sounding either sordid or bananas.
In Charlemagne she manages the double.
It's both sordid and bananas.
CHARLES SPENCER
The Arts: Comic study of gold fever
By ROBERT GORE-LANGTON
TWO new RSC shows that have just transferred from Stratford to the Barbican could not be more different.
In the main house there is The Alchemist in a fast, hilarious production.
The play comes over as both an astute social comedy and a door-slamming farce.
Ben Jonson's plot milks the greedy Jacobean obsession with the transmutation of base metal into gold, the deluded quest for cure-alls, and the lure of easy money.
Though set vaguely in period it is surprising just how contemporary it all seems.
The playwright's scornful eyebrow seems equally arched over today's bunch of New Agers, TV evangelists, pyramid-selling reps and complimentary quacks.
Jonson's notorious prolixity seems absent from this crisply funny production by Sam Mendes, which is performed in a bare brick room beneath a panorama of a metropolis mad with gold fever.
Duping everyone who comes to their absent master's door, Jonathan Hyde and David Bradley (as Face and Subtle) act wonderfully as partners in crime abetted by Joanne Pearce as Doll Common, their tarty sidekick.
Meanwhile, upstairs, above the sulphurous glow of the conmen's laboratory, Philip Voss's splendid Sir Epicure Mammon fantasises about the luxuries, fabulous meals, wealth and women that his alchemist's gold will bring him.
A steady stream of mad priests, gullible clerks and city gadabouts supply the prey for this story of entrapment.
Littered with well-played character parts, the show leaves a lasting comic impression and the dazzling vocabulary of alchemical mumbo-jumbo is in itself a feast.
Down in the Barbican's Pit, Thomas Heywood's censorious rural drama, A Woman Killed with Kindness, offers much less in the way of entertainment.
Set somewhere in the puritanical North Country early this century, it is performed on a stage covered in a lorry-load of Fison's border compost.
The play's pleasures are largely connoisseurial (it hasn't been seen for 20 years), though one suspects its absence from the stage is a case of understandable neglect.
Feuding factions pile on the agony as one shire knight is ruined by another and an honoured guest seduces his host's new bride.
The evening takes wing in the touching performances of Michael Maloney and Saskia Reeves as her betrayal eventually leads to a fine deathbed reconciliation scene.
Katie Mitchell's revival sets this strictly moral tale of wrongdoing in a very Christian context in which everyone behaves with an irritating and folksy religiosity.
As an early domestic melodrama it is not without interest, but this sermonising evening is, frankly, a slog with only fitful rewards along the way.
