The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 81

'He dreams of his liver as a set of subway tunnels' A nightmare for some. Lorna Sage, page 15 Ths Obssrvsr Review 25 January 1998 Donna King, Tyrone Huggins and Gordon Case in the Black Theatre Co-Operative's dramatisation of Ray Shell's novel, Iced. Photograph by Neil Libbert Oh, go on. Just say wwrembMaasamugaam WflBam Snape of The Full Monty. AWARDS By Jane Ferguson Everyone was there -Salman Rushdie, ThoraHird Awards ceremonies: strange occasions.

A lot of glitter and hopefully af ew spats. Last January's South Bank Show awards did not disappoint: an awesome line up of presenters Harold Pinter. Salman Rushdie. Dame Barbara Cartland pd soundbites on the importance of the arts from Tony Blair, then leader of the opposition. This year the SBS repeated the act with Dame Thora Hird, Sandie Shaw.

Michael Flatley and Lesley Garretd as presenters; the audience included Peter Mandelson (who ate the grilled chicken and glazed exotic fruit in a biscuit tulip but missed the prize-giving), and the much-quoted Sir Peter Hall. Anyway, decide for yourself tonight when the event is broadcast on ITV at 10.45pm. On Thursday at the Savoy Hotel. Rushdie's I role was reduced to helping a frail John Mortimer onto the stage: a wonderful honour to be put on stage by Salman Rushdie the barrister admitted before giving the TV prize to This Life (Terdy and a very pregnant Milly were there). Eleven-year-old actor.

William Snape, accepted the plaque for The FuUMomy. In a world suffocating in awards already before January is out jhad Whit-bread. T.S. Eliot and Golden Globes the SBS is wise to get in early. But as a judge maybe I'm biased.

Along', with three other newspaper arts editors, John Boundy from Radio 4, three representatives from the SBS and non-voting chairman Melvyn Bragg, I've spent the past 12 months picking winners in 11 categories. Awards thrive on controversy, and maybe someone behaving badly. Step forward Maureen Lipman! When New Yorker editor TinaBrown, presenting lan McEwan with the literature award, 'commented on his "pleasing locks' Lipman, sirring alongside Miriam Mar-golyes was heard to squeal: "He's not good Political embarrassment was provided by Sir Peter HalL winner of Outstanding Contribution to the arts for his shortlived season at the Old Vic. To an audience that included Culture Secretary Chris Smith and chairman-elect of the Arts Council Gerry Robinson, Hall gave an impassioned plea for the importance of adequate arts funding: "I know that both political parties are excellent supporters of the arts when they are opposition. he noted, i also know that for 20 years the Arts have been starved on a progressive basis.

What's the point Minister0 It won't do. I am a Labour man. but I am a very worried one. Sorry to be passionate, but I think the situation is Joint artistic director of the Almeida, Jonathan Kent, concurred when he picked up the theatre award for his production of Ivanov: "Our actors are paid less each week than it costs to spend a night at the The awards in full: Classical music: James MacMillan lor Raising Sparks Television drama: This Life Theatre: Ivanov at Almeida Pop: The Verve's Urban Hymns Dance: Javier de Frutos Cinema: Anthony Minghella for 772? English Patient Literature: Ian McEwan for Enduring Love Comedy: The Full Monty Visual Arts: Rachel Whiteread Opera: Deborah Warner for The Turn of the Screw for ROH Outstanding Achievement Sir Peter Hall BRIDGE have never been able to pin down precisely what itis that makes an aesthetically attractive bridge hand, although 1 generally know it when I see it. On glancing through the reDarts of the 1997 i i i I iSli Sharif European Championships, I came across a hand which seemed to me to have all the hallmarks of a really beautiful hand.

There is nothing complex about it, as you will see, but I think the hand is a jewel. See what you think. East-West vulnerable Dealer West AAQJ9 10 8 7 3 Q843 A 108 752 AK3 V6 9872 AQ65 KJ94 J109 A52: A 64 AKQ10543 2 K76 Since duplicated hands are used in all the matches, this hand was played at many tables simultaneously, but when the hand was originally reported, Jan Jansma of the Netherlands, a young Dutch star, opened Four Hearts in fourth seat, and had to declare that contract on the lead of the jack of clubs. Jansma played low from dummy and played off four rounds" of trumps, while West discarded two spades and a diamond. Now Jansma took the spade finesse, and his Italian opponent won the king of spades, and played back alow diamond.

West won, and pushed the 10 of clubs through, and the defence had four winners now. Notice the elegant symmetry of the position; if JansmaJhad played a second club himself at trick six, raveling West's card, then the defence can still prevail. East takes his king of clubs and plays a diamond to his partner, and now a spade from West does the trick in establishing the defensive winners in time. AH of that makes it appear as if the contract must but the winning solution is as simple as it is elegant; at trick six, play a diamond yourself, to cut the defence's communications, and leave them in a dilemma. Say West wins the diamond, which is best for the defence, and plays a club.

You cover his card, and can establish the fourth round of clubs in dummy, without having to take the spade finesse. And if West plays a spade himself instead of a club, you finesse, and can establish a discard for your club loser on the spades. The defence can only take one club winner. As I say, there is nothing particularly complicated about the hand, but I find it very satisfying that the variations work out in such a way that the correct play leads to success, and all other lines fail. It may not mirror life, but it is pleasant to see a hand where virtue is rewarded.

MINI-INTERVIEW Bv Matt Wolf Aug on in there Before shooting begins on any film he directs, Ang Lee performs 'the ceremony': he lays a table, burns incense, and, with a Buddhist priest in attendance, prays for 'big luck', written out in Chinese characters. The cast and crew follow suit bowing in our directions and sharing a moment's silence. Then comes a mini-banquet from table laden with rice, tea, wine, possibly even, Lee adds, 'some bagels'. The ritual is fitting for the man who elected eating to an art in his 1993 film The Wedding Banquet. Lee, 43, is best known for directing Emma Thompson's adaptation of Sense and Sensibility.

Now the Taiwan-bora director has orsakehthe social strategies of Jane Austenfor an even more encoded milieu, that of affluent New England suburbia during the'early Seventies. Any difficulty pinning down this world may relate to its relative proximity in time as well as the fact that bellbot-toms aren't as audience-friendly as bonnets and corsets. In America, the film. The Ice Storm, failed to catch fire at the bos office, despite acclaim -first at Cannes last May, where James Schamus's adaptation of the Rick Moody novel won best screenplay, and then as the opening film in September's New York Film Festival On a winter afternoon at his production office in Manhattan Lee is sanguine about how The Ice Storm will fare at the Oscars. Two years ago, virtually even-one from Sense and Sensibility was nominated -except him.

'I've been through this quite a bit. Maybe the first time you get excited, then you learn. What are you going to do? You have to be practical about it: if you're nominated, your film sells much better." The point, too. is that Lee enticing elements of the piece are intricately mingled. Watching these scenes of hermetic self -absorption is like seeing a surrealist painting stretch itself and come slowly to life.

It is also like watching a security video of exhausted but conscientious night-workers engaged on an undisclosed project. There is, of course, no discernible plot, nor are there any definable characters in the downbeat, ironically titled Pleasure. And the design is ambiguous, Janus-faced. An elderly record player and a microphone for a disc jockey sit on a table at the front of the stage; towards the back are a blackboard and easel; on the floor, a tangle of twinkling pink and green fairy lights lies near a tumble of beer cans and bottles. All these items can be shielded from the audience by a rust-coloured curtain, which is usually pulled by a figure who wears the head of a pantomime horse.

But behind all this careful disarray is a further row of more formal curtains: it suggests that the performance we are watching is merely a prelude, taking place on the fringes of a hidden, grander show. 'We Tim Etchells has said, 'to make theatre for those of us raised in a house with the TV permanently In Pleasure this means theatre in which a number of dislocated actions take place, rather dreamily, at the same time. A woman in a virginal white gown chalks up lewd directions on the blackboard; the disc jockey reads out, in caressing tones, a batch of headlines announcing bad news, and plays old songs 'Around the World in Eighty Days', 'True Love', 'Goodnight Sweetheart' at the wrong, much too slow speed; the pantomime horse gets tired and emotional and wees on the stage. Occasionally utter lucidity breaks in. A quiz-show contes-tanti knock-kneed in high heels and a bra, with a gun pointed at her head, is challenged to respond to the question 'Why is modern life and provided with a multiple-choice answer.

From time to time, there is a whiff of solemn artiness: people doing perfectly ordinary things suddenly take it on themselves to balance glasses of wine on their heads; anyone who does anything sexy looks glum. But there are also some detailed and poised satirical moments such as the exquisitely droopy hula dance executed by two young women in grass skirts, both of them white, both with scruffy hair; One of them wearing spectacles. It is for such snapshots of comic dishevelment that Pleasure is worth watching. have made more of the music which drifts between its scenes: in fact, there is a case for saying it should have been a blues musical. What it is is a cautionary tale of an academically gifted boy bullied by his father and driven by his crack addiction to misery and to murder.

The intermittent but considerable power of this production, under the direction of Felix Cross, who also composed the music, comes from the graphic immediacy of its short scenes and from some forceful acting particularly by Cecilia Noble, who dex-trously doubles as a sullen, submissive wife and a sexually voracious acid-dropper. Nothing is gained by the occasional attempts to spell out the moral or underline the agony: fewer words would be better. Forced Entertainment, the Sheffield-based theatre company, is an odd and an interesting case. In some stretches of its new touring show, now at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, this group of five actors -who are performing in a work devised in collaboration with the director Tim Etchells -seems bent on demonstrating the aptness of its name, on declaring itself the quintessence of gruelling obscurity. At other points, it is flighty and funny.

But for most of the evening, the forbidding and the being tipped for a supporting actress Oscar nomination a notebook of information about the period, complete with several pages of typewritten questions that he wanted them to ask about the characters. 'I'd never had a director do says Joan Allen. 'Ang doesn't want anything remotely close to artificial or over the top. He would say, "I don't see thoughts behind your he wants a very present, almost documentary-like Lee's next project is a war film. Entitled To Live On, it concerns the Missouri-Kansas border clashes during the Civil War.

The eclectic cast includes the singer Jewel, Tony award-winner Geoffrey Wright (from Basquiat), Skeet Ulrich, and The Ice Storm's promising young co-star, Tobey Maguire. After that, he will make a Chinese-language samurai movie set in 1850, to be shot in and near Beijing. Wherever his chosen terrain, says Lee, 'I'm making a movie about aspects of the human condition that I hope everyone can relate to. People think of me having this outsider's mentality to justify why it's all right for me to do a movie like The Ice Storm. But the reason I make any movie is to show my loyalty to the authenticity of the material.

After that, you just hope it's universal; you want everybody in the world to appreciate the 'The Ice Storm opens in London on 6 February. Kevin Kline Interview, Life Magazine main character, the unfairly named Horace, who is first seen as a young adult, then as a teenager and finally in frowsty maturity. Horace, played as a youth by Callum Dixon and as an adult by Adrian Scarborough and in both performances given a nice owhshness appears in cliff erent stages of mild hopelessness. As an adolescent in the Seventies, he can't dance and doesn't see the point of The Hobbit. As a young man, he pays for sex which he doesn't get.

As a mature adult, he spends evenings drinking, with his dressing-gown worn over his trousers. The tender heart of The Day I Stood Still. reveals that this hopelessness became entrenched as a result of Horace's unrequited love for a school-friend, the charismatic Jerry, acted with attractive exuberance by Oliver Milbura. Horace's most attractive quality is also his handicap. But this revelation becomes completely clear only at the end of the piece, in a flashback which shows Horace declaring his love, being rebuffed by the realisation that Jerry prefers girls to boys, receiving a keepsake and getting into a fight with a local tough.

Everything which precedes it springs from this scene, which brings together previously scattered elements and weaves them into a design. With this new film, he sought to move away from Sense and Sensibility. 'Working on Austen was totally educational for me in terms of doing a period piece. It's funny that 1973 has just about become costume drama, but the texture here is totally the opposite of Sense and Sensibility, where your heart goes out to Marianne at what could be called the dawn of romanticism. This is the opposite: it's the beginning of the Seventies, the hangover from the Sixties: politics and passion have been exhausted.

These people are finished, Lee could have filmed his dissection of the decade in the style of an echt Seventies film, and he indeed looked at such templates from the period as the The Harrad Experiment Much of the pleasure of the play lies in recogrrising its elaborate echoes, triggers and recurrences. The accident which finally befalls Jerry is prefigured in his youth: in both instances, his admirer is implicated. Jerry himself disappears, but seems to come back in the shape of his son. The son expresses a passion for a schoolfriend which is very like Horace's passion. A mishap with a piece of antique furniture takes place in the first two scenes, and is accounted for in the third.

Horace's craving for Mars bars is eventually explained. The point of these variations is scrutinised by Horace in a speech which talks of no two things not even worms ever being the same. But the effect of watching them in the theatre where Mark Thompson's midnight-blue oval design skilfully evokes a sense of entrapment is to suggest that circumstances endlessly repeat themselves. The funniest scene in The Day I Stood Still shows Horace snorting a line of cocaine provided by his godson. The subject of drugs is afforded no comparable lightness of treatment in Iced, a dramatic treatment of Ray Shell's novel about crack addiction, presented at the Tricycle by Black Theatre Co-Operative and the Nottingham Playhouse.

Iced should from 1973, about sexual liberation at an experimental co-ed college. Instead, he thinks of the movie as 'Paul Mazursky plus Greek tragedy' and regards it as a formal achievement: The Ice Storm isn't about real storytelling or even character development. It's more pure cinema, like cubist painting: almost a design It's also about navigating a specific tone so that its unhappy characters remain empathic as they swap partners and surrender their children to the wintry onslaught of the title. 'People have less tolerance about what they see on screen than what they read. It's the nature of audiences; they just can't take Hence the.

casting of Kevin Kline as the antihero of sorts, Ben Hood, a well-meaning but emotionally blocked commuter-father whose sexual confusions are mirrored by those of his adolescent children. 'Kevin has such a boyish quality, he actually can serve as a role And as for Joan Allen as his quietly neurotic wife, Elena, who is not above her petty thievery? 'I think she's a genius, though she has to be very careful about her hair: give her a wig, and that helps a Lee is very much an actor's director, and speaks of himself as 'a tailor of actors: they have to come to my movie, and my movie goes to them'. On The Ice Storm, he gave each of the principals including Sigourney Weaver, in a performance THEATRE By Susannah Clapp charms and the lim itations of Kevin Elyot's new play at the Cottesloe Theatre are suggested in its title. The Day I Stood Still scrutinises the defining moment in the life of a disappointed homosexual man, a moment whose chief components, constantly revisited in memory, recur in varied forms in his early and late middle age. It is an idea which offers the opportunity of making an infinite number of fine mscrimina-tions and distinctions, an opportunity that is ably fulfilled in Elyot's delicate writing and in Ian Rickson's lucid direction.

But its clever, careful arrangement also imposes restrictions: this is an evening full of small, beautifully delivered surprises, but in which nothing is really startling. Because of this, it is a less arresting play than Elyot's hugely successful My Night with Reg. The controlled, elegiac tone of the piece is in keeping with the general demeanour of its Ang Lee, 'a tailor of actors'. really likes The Ice Storm and doesn't want it to be submerged by the likes of Titanic. 'This fulfilled my dream of making something cinematic instead of earning over drama from the stage.

With Sense and Sensibility, there were parts I was proud of and others I couldn't watch. This movie I found 1 could watch over and over Lee came to 20 years ago to study theatre directing at the University of Illinois, only later going on to study film at New York University. He iews his work from a double perspective: first, as a linguistic outsider who still speaks rapid if not always accurate English: and. second, as a filmmaker rooted in theatre, who had directed lonesco's The Chairs on stage long before he ever held a camera. Ch.