All is far from true .sx THEATRE .sx John Gross on 'Henry VIII' .sx 'Sailor Beware !sx ' and .sx 'Black Poppies' .sx HENRY VIII was offered to its first audience as a docudrama .sx Its subtitle , boldly underlined in the new production at the Chichester Festival Theatre , is All is True .sx Whatever the private thoughts of spectators at the time , today it is almost impossible not to murmur , " Oh no , it isn't .sx " You do not have to be much of a historian to recognise that the story has been tidied up , and that the king in particular was altogether less amiable a character than he is shown as being .sx To the extent that the play is a documentary , on the other hand , it has the untidiness and discontinuity of life itself .sx True , it also has a recurrent theme in the fall from greatness - exemplified first by the Duke of Buckingham , then by Queen Katherine , then by Wolsey - but it still remains irredeemably episodic .sx Then there is the question of mixed authorship .sx For over a hundred years scholars have assigned whole scenes and chunks of scenes to John Fletcher rather than Shakespeare ( including , disconcertingly , Wolsey's famous farewell speeches after this fall) .sx No one can know for certain whether they are right ; but if they are , it would help to explain why the play is notable for rhetoric rather than true free-flowing poetry .sx Not the most rewarding work in the Shakespeare canon , then ( in so far as it belongs there at all) .sx Yet given even a halfway decent production , it can hold the stage surprisingly well .sx It has plenty of dramatic pace , it offers some fine opportunities to actors , and much of the rhetoric is at any rate rhetoric of a very high order .sx " Halfway decent " just about sums up Ian Judge's Chichester production , although at times it is a good deal better than that .sx The best thing in it is Tony Britton's Wolsey .sx He makes a powerful impression as the proud , impatient politician , and in spite of shouting one or two lines that would be better left unshouted he extracts most of the majestic pathos from the farewell speeches .sx ( Can they really be by Fletcher ?sx ) .sx The other principals are disappointing .sx Dorothy Tutin is good at conveying Katherine's flashes of anger , but not her more important qualities of melancholy and resignation .sx Keith Michell's Henry is much less formidable and four-square than one might have expected .sx Elsewhere Benjamin Whitrow makes a credible Cranmer , and Fiona Fullerton has some eloquent silences as Anne Boleyn .sx But the Tudor pageantry ought to be more full-blooded than it is ( Mr Judge has not been able to resist putting some of the minor characters into modern double-breasted suits ) , and so should the production as a whole .sx The one thing wrong with Sailor , Beware !sx is its title .sx It suggests ( to my mind , at least ) falling trousers , seaside postcards and hastily concealed bimbos .sx But although Philip King and Falkland Cary's 1955 success contains plenty of comic exaggeration , it is far from being a farce .sx You care too much about the characters and their predicaments for that .sx In the right-hand corner , Emma Hornett , an amazing fire-breathing dragon of a wife and mother , about to become a mother-in-law .sx In the left-hand corner , a downtrodden husband , a pretty daughter ( though just occasionally she sounds like a chip off the old block ) , a perky sailor , a sailor's pawky Scottish shipmate , a sexy niece .sx .. just about everyone else , in fact - but will their combined forces prove a match for her ?sx In the end the play comes down on the side of marriage and the family , but it is a close-run thing .sx It is a very funny play - partly because of the author's sheer craftsmanship , but still more because our sympathies are involved .sx Many of the laughs are fuelled not perhaps by pity and terror but by something very close to anger and alarm .sx The new revival at the Lyric Theatre , Hammersmith , directed by Peter James , is a triumph .sx That means , inevitably , that the chief honours have to go to Jane Freeman as Mrs Hornett .sx She is appalling and enraging but you can never quite dislike her .sx There is always just room , as there ought to be , for a change of heart .sx The rest of the cast , from Sheila Steafel as a dotty sister-in-law to Richard Howard as vintage vicar , are excellent , and the whole production spins along with assurance and verve .sx It would surely do well if it transferred to the West End .sx In Black Poppies , at the Theatre Royal , Stratford East , a group of actors take turns at recounting the experiences of blacks in the British armed services from the Second World War until more or less today .sx Their monologues are based on interviews - edited but otherwise unaltered - that were conducted with a group of ex-servicemen in 1987 .sx All is true .sx All is also remarkably interesting .sx The individual narratives are full of character , humour , sharply defined detail ; and you never doubt their authenticity .sx The older men tell a tale of a time when colour differences were submerged - up to a point - on account of the war .sx Only afterwards , when they had to look for jobs and lodgings , did disenchantment set in .sx Since then , many blacks have found more security or opportunity in the forces than they were able to find in civilian life .sx But all of them , even the successful ones , know that racial prejudice is never very far away .sx They have all learned , in the phrase one of them clings to , that they have got to be 'atmosphere-sensitive' if they are going to survive .sx Not that there is anything unduly repetitious about their stories .sx Their motives for joining up varied a good deal ; so did their circumstances once they were in , and their reactions .sx As though to underline the point , one episode interweaves the reflections of a regular who enlisted in the 1950s - pipe-smoking , fond of long words , stolidly respectable - with those of a street-smart young recruit from present-day Brixton .sx It holds the balance very fairly between the two of them .sx We also hear the sad story of a gifted bugler who ran up against the unwritten law of 'thus far and no further' :sx there comes a point beyond which , if you are black , you have very little chance of being promoted .sx There are some unforgettable glimpses of service in Northern Ireland , and a horrifying account ( though it has its exhilarating moments ) of a black military policeman standing up to a pathological brute of a white NCO .sx You are never less than absorbed by these reminiscences , and often transfixed .sx And the actors - all black , of course - are so good that it is hard to realise that you are not listening to the men themselves .sx A threadbare club tie .sx ART .sx John McEwen visits the new Irish Museum for Modern Art .sx THERE is an invigorating sense of civic pride in Dublin , as well there might be in a city which boasts - quite apart from anything else - the richest and most various stucco work of any in Europe ; and nothing could symbolise it more dramatically than the transformation of its finest 17th-century building , the old Royal Hospital at Kilmainham , into the country's first museum of modern art , officially declared open by Mr Charles Haughey , the Taoiseach , yesterday .sx Ever since New York invented the idea of a Museum of Modern Art 60 years ago , this oddly contradictory notion for an institution has taken hold , so that to have one has become a mark of a country's superiority .sx Ireland joins an elite club with the opening of IMMA , something of which Mr Haughey , who has pushed the idea through with the high-handedness of a Mitterrand , is well aware .sx No wonder Declan McGonagle , late of our own ICA and now the museum's first director , regards it as his first task to demonstrate that we can now be part of an international family of museums .sx But will it work ?sx In Dublin where , as one participant put it , " confidentiality is a secret told to one person at a time " , there is plenty of back-chat for and against .sx The choice and conservation of the building are predictably controversial .sx The position of Kilmainham , one and a half miles from the city centre , would seem to be the most reasonable of these complaints .sx This inconvenience is something it has in common with its Scottish counterpart in Edinburgh - but in the case of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art being in the sticks does not seem to have mattered too much .sx If a programme is good enough the public will follow .sx IMMA - a copy of Les Invalides in Paris - is itself an architectural spectacle :sx four noble ranges surrounding a square courtyard , its grass now removed in favour of gravel to give a suitable parade-ground effect , with a continuous internal arcade linking the three residential sides of the building .sx Certainly it has been restored with style .sx The initial job , costing pounds21 million , was finished seven years ago when a new role for the building had yet to be decided ; then in 1990 a further pounds900,000 was granted to turn it into a place more suitable for the varied requirements of a modern art museum .sx Traditionalists may shudder at the creation of a new entrance - particularly of the staircase inside , made of glass and iron girders - but it does declare the change of use .sx Elsewhere the most has been made of a restrictive plan ( again reminiscent of the Edinburgh gallery ) of corridors and small inter-connecting rooms .sx In the broad and continuous corridor of the first floor and the rooms it served ( where the old soldiers once slept two to a bed ) , Declan McGonagle has pieced together an opening show more in the form of a menu than a spectacle .sx An art student in the early 1970s , he remains true to many of the artists and contradictory attitudes of that time .sx Thus he is at pains to be a man of the people - to show " the extent to which an artist merges with a society " - while confronting us for the most part with minimal and conceptual works of an essentially dehumanised and autocratic kind - most of them demanding a king's ransom of space to make their visual point .sx Kingpin of his selection is characteristically the artist who most personified this late Modernist/late Marxist confusion - the late Joseph Beuys .sx He made the fatuous statement that , " Everyone is an artist " ; meanwhile becoming the hottest commercial property in the art world himself by exploiting the credulity of the young and the cynicism of the market .sx His very touch was enough to impose a price on an object , his ( in this instance ) Bits and Pieces , selected during visits to Ireland and now reverentially displayed in a series of cabinets , the secular equivalent of holy relics .sx And yet if , in Beuysian mode , McGonagle is most committed to the gobbledygook of engaging " with artists and non-artists as equal participants in an ongoing cultural process , not as producer and consumer " , he is also understandably anxious to demonstrate that this does not mean that IMMA cannot be all things to all men .sx To placate traditionalists he has secured the loan of some 20th-century masters from Holland ( a token Picasso , Mondrian , Dubuffet , etc sic !sx ) , and a minimalist collection ( Judd Andre , Ellsworth Kelly et al ) from Germany .sx He has found a place for Jack B. Yeats and the collection ( the selection here mostly of Op Art and other 1960s styles ) of a contemporary Irishman , Gordon Lambert .sx He has begged , borrowed and bought a selection of things by a motley of 50 middle-aged artists .sx ( Richard Long and Georg Baselitz among the better known) .sx He has included three young and Irish artists-in-residence ; a video programme ; a community arts project .sx But in his anxiety to please he hides , or exposes ( depending on your view ) the problems he faces .sx Chief of these is lack of cash .sx The State has given IMMA an initial pounds250,000 for purchases , with the promise of an annual purchasing grant of pounds50,000 in future ; so hopes of a permanent collection , particularly in a country which makes no tax concessions to collectors , are unrealistic .sx