The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 60

60 OBSERVER SUNDAY 28 JANUARY 1990 Farmyard fun I When is a door not a door? Sure, the excitement of a performance has to be contrasted with the effort and exhaustion that makes it possible. But if there was no gratification in performing, money alone could not make the daily discipline of classes and rehearsals worth while. It is good news that the Royal Ballet has got its 15 per cent rise and is now co-operating with the management. Let us hope, though, that the knock-on effect does not cripple other ballet companies and reduce repertoires even further. The return of Fille (already dubbed 'La Fille Mai Payee') has brought a mixture of experienced casts and newcomers in the central roles.

Viviana Durante and Enrol Pickford made their debuts as the young lovers on Thursday, dancing all the tricky bits triumphantly, but not yet secure enough to have fun with the choreography. Durante is capable of great sincerity as an actress. She missed, though, the touching moment when Lise is overwhelmed by her love for Colas in their first playful dance with the ribbon; and Pickford is still too inexperienced a partner for the wedding pas de deux to work its magic. He danced his solos with virtuosity and soared above the carousing peasants in the harvest scene; but he's not a charmer like his red-headed predecessor, David Wall. Stuart Cassidy as Colas on Wednesday had the right bucolic strength for the role and an attractive presence.

He made a good foil for Rosalyn Whitten's Lise, a farmyard flirt with a passionate centre. Whitten has the rounded arms and sparkling eyes of a true Ashton heroine, with all the grace notes of wrist and head that Durante has yet to learn. Whitten's feet, however, seem to sink into the stage instead of bouncing off it, as Lesley Collier's still do so well. Collier has returned to the ballet in effervescent form, in spite of her time off to have twins. (She avoids the temptation to indicate a double birth in Lise's mimed day-dream of married life.) Collier and Stephen Jefferies dance the choreography as though they are speaking it, with changes of speed and emphasis that bring out all the nuances of their tender relationship.

Even the ribbons seem an inevitable extension of their feelings. Jann Parry reviews the Royal Ballet's 'La Fille Mai Gardee'. THURSDAY'S storm and traffic jams in London resulted in an unscheduled cast for Lau-rentia, the Soviet showpiece which precedes the Royal Ballets revival of La Fille Mai Gardee at Covent Garden. Enrol Pickford, who had arrived well in time for his debut as the hero, Colas, in Fille, was quickly drafted into the Lauren-tia sextet, along with William Trevitt. Neither they nor Laurent Hilaire, guest star from the Paris Opera Ballet, wore the black hats which go with Nicholas Georgiadis's matador costumes; as a consequence, they looked slightly less like the souvenir dolls that tourists bring home from the Costas.

There seems no point, however, in lumbering Ashton's two-act masterpiece with this pseudo-Spanish suite of dances. If the bravura choreography were more stylishly danced, Ashton's farmyard conceits might seem tame by comparison. As it is, Fille sends everyone home happy, with Lauren-tia no more than an irrelevance. Hilaire provided some much-needed panache but never really dominated the technical demands of his role. Among the women, only Ravenna Tucker caught the right combination of mannered elegance and seductiveness.

It was a relief when Georgiadis's overlit set gave way to Osbert Lancaster's absurd rural setting for Ashton's ballet. The Royal Ballet, veterans and youngsters alike, looks thoroughly at home: every role, from the self-important chickens to the love-struck central couple, is lovingly taken. From the dancers' complaints in support of their pay claim from the Royal Opera House, you might think that a dancer's life was unalloyed pain and misery. It is a tough profession and its members deserve to be properly paid; but dancing brings its own rewards in terms of physical enjoyment. There has been no disguising the pleasure with which the young corps de ballet rushes about the stage in the storm sequence or their laughter at Widow Simone's antics.

Parker's 'Natura Morta', a circular spread of lead fruit dropped like a disastrous wreath down black wires.Pkotograph by SueAdler. Images spring to attention, bursting like memories through wallpaper motifs. Such is Monchaux's intricately zippered and niched appliances could be heavy breathing apparatus. The British Art Show III looks pretty confident, considering. Fit for the age of the bar code.

Good in terms of creative enterprise at a small business level. Julian Opie's 'Construction', installed at the entrance, is a sort of maze for our times, affording Utile privacy. It consists of some 20 aluminium-framed changing cubicles, fitted together to form a defensive square. Large white spots at eye-level provoke instant cognitive response, reducing the risk of bumping into the glass. Opaque panels prevent you from seeing through it immediately.

history. There is much harking back in this show, despite cognitive misgivings. When Vong Phao-phanit projects snapshots of his family, left in Laos 18 years ago, on to massed electric fans, memories flutter. Lea Andrews proposes memorials for the village he grew up in, planning to simulate a past where little, apparently, exists. 'Young Tom and Old Dobbin discover Son-ning Common' is a colour Cibachrome photograph of a dry-mounted black-and-white blow-up of the young artist posing as a Beacon Reader, on horseback, on a plinth, placed William Feaver at the third British Art Show in Glasgow.

THE door that's not a door but plain doorish. The six electric elements mounted on an iron frame to form a glowing fiery grid blocking a dark cul-de-sac. Areas of table-top embedded in plaster moulds passed off as plaster casts. Such things are to be seen in the third British Art Show, in the newly refurbished McLellan Galleries in Glasgow. (Until 11 March, then at Leeds City Art Gallery and, expanded and updated, at the Hayward from June to August.) Gary Hume makes his non-doors, in magnolia gloss on canvas, with more than a smooth finish in mind.

'They are he explains, 'through cognition and in their relation to the synchronic state of art and Mona Hatoum's cornered electric bars radiate heat, light and menace. Rachel Whiteread turns tables into voids, rendering solid the space they stand in. All three cultivate apparent contradictions. Their rather special effects intimations of nullity, torture, sarcophagi are fairly typical of this particular British Art Show. The three selectors (Caroline Collier, Andrew Nairne and David Ward) 'considered, in various they say, 'work by over 1,000 artists', aged 25 to ihirtysomething, throughout the land.

Three-quarters, however, of the 40 or so whose work was chosen happen to live in London. It appears that the team reported back to HQ (the South Bank Centre) with renewed conviction that the think-tank of British Art is Goldsmiths. Nearly a third of the exhibitors are former Goldsmiths students, well-versed in cognitive awareness. Their tendency is to exercise the right to demonstrate, by any means, that they know (and we too should know) that art is actually 'art' and that it is in art's interests to display this for a fact. Much of British Art Show III is therefore standard issue.

Art depends on how it's presented. Therefore what interests the artist-presenter is the whole apparatus of promotion. Caroline Russell introduces herselfher art by means of a trade stand, reasoning that a professional approach, involving primrose and Griff IT a Memonesjlattened: Cornelia lilac toamex panels mounted on microframe system with indi- vidually trained spotlights, is as good a way as any to attract cog nitive attention. Cotton buds are the product she displays, clustered like tiny thoughts or furry models of molecular structures. These may be taken to represent 'idea' or, indeed, 'inspiration'.

Previous British Art Shows (Sheffield 1979, Birmingham 1984) were sprawls intended to provide a taste of everything. This one has the virtue of being much reduced, with fewer artists and less scope. The three selectors have put a lot of effort into achieving a highly proper show, one that more than complies with Equal Opportunities requirements. Mediocrity and unoriginality have not necessarily been grounds for exclusion. Positive discrimination has been exercised in favour of those whose belief is 'artists must be choosers', with the rider 'true artists knowingly falsify'.

Collier, Nairne and Ward have also confounded expectations, in one quarter at least. Who would have thought that a British Art Show in Sauchiehall Street could go ahead without any of those painters whose boasted success helped promote Glasgow into becoming the Cultural Capital of Europe it is today? Instead it's the turn of several caring Scots artists, Cultural Capital of Europe it is today? Instead it's the turn of several caring Scots artists. They care about old timbers, family trees, emotional roots and suchlike. Those from down south, in the Goldsmiths sphere of influence, cultivate hands-off techniques. Besides the trade stand there's the production line.

Ian Davenport has figured out the abstract modes of Morris Louis and the like. Using household paint by the 3 litre canful, he pours forth one 'Untitled' after another, stressing not the aesthetic of happy accident but the repetitive procedures involved. Lisa Milroy paints as though exercising herself over what to buy. Which shoes out of so many, gathered for inspection? Which postage stamp from such a commemorative range? Elizabeth Magill doesn't bother to check things out. She adds layers, going from diagram and scribbled note to full representation (shoals of fish) topping up with a field of fleurs-de-lys suspended like sea horses in a large green murk.

Jeffrey Dennis's paintings are even denser. Vignettes break out arbitrarily in screeds of fruits or vegetation, inflicting themselves or opening up regardless of pictorial etiquette. Loving men to BBS! in front of the Sonning Common off-licence and dry-cleaners. Dummy memories, memories inflamed. Cornelia Parker's 'Natura Morta' is a circular spread of lead fruit dropped like a disastrous wreath from ceiling to floor down black wires.

Memories flattened. Melanie Counsell has shoved lengths of soggy floral stair-carpet into the bottom drawers of a dozen filing cabinets. Memories marinaded. Much of the knowing falsification is to do with rendering glamorous. Eric Bainbridge's fake furred giant spoons and his jewel box the size of a a Porta-kabin are big come-ons.

Gren-ville Davey's immense, doubly false teeth could be mistaken for hat boxes. Cathy de on the prison wire after openly clasping Horst's corpse, the first time he has embraced the man he loves. The raw, brute force of the message is theatrically irresistible, and McKellen once again pulls off brilliantly the difficult feat of making Max both despicable and pitiable. But Sherman's writing is still best in the early scenes of domestic cat and mouse between McKellen's promiscuous Max and Paul Rhys's beautifully hurt live-in lover, and in the park bench meeting with Robert Eddison's gravely regretful, impeccably dressed Uncle Freddie, who arranges alibis and travel documents while sneakily eyeing a distant policeman ('We're not allowed to be fluffs anymore'). Direction and design, neat and powerful, are by Sean Mathias and Michael Vale.

Another life, too, for Stephen Jeffreys's Valued Friends, revived at Hampstead Theatre a year after its premiere on the same stage, and suddenlv a oe riod piece. A flatful of friends in Earls Court are stretched apart by market forces. Jeffreys has written a real humdinger of a social comedy, and Sue Plum- mer design, the communal clutter of a rented apartment yielding to the chic white classicism of a desirable property, compounds the Chekhovian dimension. This play which, along with Doug Lucie's double thrust of Progress and Fashion, is among the best of the last decade, deserves commercial success; Robin Lefevre's production does not promise any by casting the technically deficient but trendily 'alternative' comedians Josie Lawrence and Jimmy Mulville in the key roles of daffy actress and pop journalist still stuck on The Searchers. Louisa Rix and Michael Angelis are gratingly recognisable, though, as rising businesswoman and sinking historical economist.

Best of all is Martin Clunes, sole survivor from the first production, as a smooth property mogul, oily and slick, advocating routes and boulevards through a jungle of mo if death problems related to vacant possession and full ownership. Elsewhere on the London fringe, nearly all available novels have been dramatised. By my reckoning, there's only Flaubert's Parrot, Huysmans' A Rebours and a couple of Jilly Coopers still to go. Inventive theatre companies are therefore wisely retreating to cartoon classics. At the Bush Theatre, Hogarth's six narrative engravings of A Harlot's Progress, as loosely animated by Babel Theatre under the title of Streetwalker, offer no serious competition to Stravinsky's Rake.

Warren Wills has composed a beautiful sub-Sondheim vocal quintet that tops and tails too much indifferent, bittily 'atmospheric' musicalisation. Christina Jones sings Moll Hacka-bout, and escapes the boredom of whoredom through song, not Hogarth's coffin. Popeye in Exile at The Place marks the debut of David Glass's new mime ensemble (on a short national tour from this week) and transports us way beyond the TV cartoon to the wonderful, wittily drawn conjunction of mythic pantomime adventurism and Depression hardship in E. C. Segar's imperishable comic strips.

Mime is so much more bearable now that it backs into proper theatre with words, songs and sound effects. Segar's 'thimble theatre' is evoked in shadow play, curtains, chases and underwater rescues, as the Sea Hag pursues the lost moon child and restores Popeye to the Saps' soup kitchen in Tonsylania. With half an hour cut, and a few more narrative sign-posts, this will be a superbly lurid entertainment. Gary Barber's spinach consumption is delayed until the last heroic intervention ('I yam what I yam and thass all I yam'), and he has the character's lovable marine pugnacity down to a tee: pipe, clenched jaw, closed right eye, and bulging tattooed arms. But the star turn here is Mary Roscoe's squeaky bright Olive Oyl, blissfully funny and arch, like a bendy toy with half a mind, and a gouged mouth, of its own.

DlNSDALE LANDEN Rhys Jones "is quite perfect" Daily Jelegraph Ian McKellen with lover Paul Rkys.Photograph by Richard Mildenhall. "A fIRTUOSO PERFORMANCE" Michael Coveney applauds a grim but timely revival. PUBLIC attitudes towards homosexuality, complicated by the tragedy of the Aids epidemic and apparently hostile Government legislation, have taken such a turn for the worse that Martin Sherman's Bent, revived for just 30 performances by the National Theatre in the Lyttelton 11 years after its Royal Court premiere, seems a necessary play where once it was merely mawkish and sensational. Ian McKellen, reinventing his original role of Max, a Berlin homosexual who survives in society, and Dachau, by denying his true nature in public, movingly analogises his own prog- ress trom discreet, non-public say. to doughtily eloquent 'out gay' campaigner.

Bent's rallying cry, however better to be out and dead than furtive and alive is both cruel and harsh. The Nazi persecution of homosexuals, as of Jews, thrived on public statements of vilification, itself a result of the grumbling intolerance to which Section 28 of the Local Government Finance Act in 1988 so scandalously pandered. What are we to make, for instance, of a columnist like George Gale who, in the Daily Mail last August, suggested that all homosexuals were likely to spread the disease of Aids and were therefore incipient murderers? The leap still to be made is the full acknowledgement by a predominantly straight society of such a thing as homosexual love. On the merely visceral level, this is now the challenge of Bent, and the audience's response at the performance I attended was of a shattering intensity. We squirmed in revulsion and disbelief as Max kicked his Berlin boyfriend to death on the Dachau-bound train and then recounted how he violated a dead adolescent girl in order to demonstrate heterosexual virility and save his skin.

Max barters his pink triangle for a yellow star: Jews are given meat in their soup. With fellow prisoner Horst (Michael Cashman), Max is assigned to the futile, interminable task of lugging heavy stones from one side of the stage to the other. In the rest breaks, still heavily guarded, the couple, standing several feet apart among the rubble, make physical love by auto-erotic suggestion. This is known as getting your rocks off while keeping your socks on, and it constitutes the safest safe-sex routine yet devised under fear of death. The audience was electrified, and so, too, was Max, who 'comes out' by impaling himself GO sponsored by The I 1 Sunday Times Lighting by Mick Hughes by Ben Travers Hugh Lloyd Directed by Peter James Designed by Carl Toms Revolutionary gesture British Petroleum Company p.l.c.

LJ A fiesta of British and International Student Films; First Feature Films; Diverse Discussions and an exciting line up of well known personalities from the film and television industry. 90 the second british and international festival of student film and video 2-lOfebruary 1990 studios 563 0331 Box Office 01-748 3354 "British farce at its FUNNIEST BEST" Times Educational Supplement "I haven't had such A GOOD TIME IN AGES" John Peter, Sunday Times "A BRILLIANTLY gauged EXERCISE IN TOP-GRADE TOMFOOLERY" "Exhilarating and hilarious" Michael Coveney, Observer "Theatre art of the highest order" mat On "Brilliantly acted, wonderfully staged, worth travelling MILES TO SEE" Times Educational Supplement expo FOR one night only, Bolek Bo-livka treated London to his extraordinary The Jester and the Queen as a finishing touch to this year's Mime Festival. Bolek found it easy to amuse his audience but hard to cope with his wife, the Queen. She sat on a rough-hewn, blood-stained throne (the nasty suspicion was that these were the traces of a squashed King) with a scowl that looked massacre-proof. 'Je she thundered.

Bolek Polivka, a handsome Czech threatened by limbs that tend to tangle, behaved as though he had found himself a host at a huge party he never intended to throw. He translated nervously: 'The Queen says she is The Queen promptly turned Bolek into her jester and what followed was an evening of hilarity, charm and oddity. The show was not about the struggle between the sexes, but about the supremacy of Queen over fool. Bolek regained power by making his audience into playthings. He hijacked two unfortunates who avenged themselves by taking him to prison.

He disappeared protesting: 'I'm an Given the new order in Czechoslovakia, this could be used in reverse as a starting point for his next show. Kate Kellaway Peter Kemp. Independent BP H3D3B riverside Crisp Road Hammersmith W6 9RL cc pipnMiBiiinninR.