They compete in little more than G-strings – a kind of egg-and-moon race

They compete in little more than G-strings – a kind of egg-and-moon race.Cinema details: Review, page 82.. IN 1990 David Edgar joined in the revisionist stampede of left-wing playwrights and produced The Shape of the Table, a premature and unconvincing conversation-piece on post-Communist Europe. Major League II (15) has long baseball sequences which are worth sitting through for the spiralling gags and tightening, last-to-first plot. There are problems of pacing, too, but they are tiny set against the movie’s virtues. In a gleaming new print, it makes a worthy centrepiece to an imaginatively programmed season of ‘Shakespeare on Film’, spanning 1908 to 1994, which runs at the Barbican Centre until 17 November.The rest of the week’s releases are a rum lot.

And James Cagney’s Bottom asses about with fiery, madcap energy. Only the pairs of lovers from the court seem to have missed the magic fairy-dust, though Olivia de Havilland’s Hermia enchants. Here Mickey Rooney’s Puck awakes on a bed of damp leaves, rubbing his eyes and hammering his fists against a tree trunk. Directed with misty, expressionist verve by Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle, this is a Dream that is best in its glittery, gossamer fairyland of cloud-scraping trees and limpid pools.

The Browning Version is not only a very bad film, it desecrates a considerable work of art.A world away is Warner Brothers’ 1935 A Midsummer Night’s Dream (U).Respectful of the text, exquisitely designed and lustily played, it is a model Shakespeare adaptation. Suffice it to say that the film-makers have no feel for the world they are depicting or the play they are adapting. They will argue that the play needed bringing up to date and opening out. This should be a woman losing her man and her charms, who will do anything to hang on.She is reaching the beginning of middle age and the end of pride.To list the countless other absurdities in casting, direction and mise-en-scene which turn the creepy solemnity of an English public school into a raucous garden party (and the play’s suave diplomat of a headmaster into Michael Gambon’s cringing buffoon) would be to invite accusations of Crocker-Harris-style pedantry.

He is still outstandingly attractive, a magnificent physical specimen – a real problem since Crocker-Harris is supposed to have failed his wife in physical love.To know that the part was written for Gielgud is to realise how wrong Finney is. They are both great actors, but as different as air and earth.Matters aren’t helped by casting Greta Scacchi as Crocker-Harris’s wife.Scacchi gives the right startling venom to the part, but try as she and the make-up department may, there is nothing faded about her beauty. Think of Finney – of his fondness for wine, women and race-horses – and you think of a bon viveur, rather than a corpse. Finney’s voice lacks the correct pedantic whine – it is important that he should be a character who boys like to impersonate – and he seems too posed in his stiffness. A roll-call of actors who have played Crocker-Harris on stage and screen indicates the quality of the part: Eric Portman (in the original), John Gielgud (in an American television version), Michael Redgrave (in the 1951 film, whose ludicrous ending is retained here), Nigel Stock (in the fine 1976 King’s Head stage production). The moment when Finney’s face flushes with emotion, as the light of a generous deed floods into his pinched world, almost redeems the rest of the film.And yet I also feel Finney is badly miscast.

A nice line, but jarringly close to a steal from Sunset Boulevard – a film that in the movie’s new modern setting would hardly be current.What dignity this farrago possesses is provided by Albert Finney. He’s dead.’ But in the movie, nonsensically, a version of this speech is given to one of the boys, who, near the beginning, explains to a friend that Crocker-Harris wouldn’t be capable of having a heart attack, because he ‘has no heart’. And on and on it goes, padding out Rattigan’s lean masterpiece with needless flab and fluff. ‘What happened to him?’ Modine asks Scacchi of Crocker-Harris ‘I did,’ she replies. Now and then we catch a snatch of the original, a line or a phrase -glimmers of greatness in the void.Harwood has added a new, irrelevant story line, in which a bully taunts Taplow about his parents’ divorce. The tormentor’s lines are of a banality that is suggestive more of the jaded playwright than any schoolboy.Elsewhere, lines and motifs from the original are hideously mangled.