The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 71

12 the Observer Review Sunday 17 March 1996 the Arts MICHAEL COVENEY SAM TAYLOR lptransplan Desert island discourse Everything But The Girl confuse their fans by going jungle Beguiling castaways from Complicity while the Donmar hosts a season of regional plays A news feature in last Sunday's Observer divided the nation neatly into two opposing camps: the under-30s, who go to see Trainspotting, read the Daily Star and listen to Blur; and the over-30s, who see Sense and Sensibility, read the Observer and listen to Everything But The Girl. Which just goes to show how much news editors know about popular culture. Blur are now passe, darling, and Everything But The Girl are deeply hip. It is, to be fair, one of the most miraculous transformations of recent times. Just two years ago, Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn were dropped by their record label, bianco negro, after 10 years of sweetiy melancholic albums and occasional hit singles, because they were seen as an uncommercial anachronism.

Their image at the time was still of a shy couple who made gentle, romantic music; acoustic love songs tinged with Brazilian rhythms. Their last album, Amplified Heart (1994), hinted at the changes to come -a cover photograph of Ben smoking with his shirt hanging open; the throbbing, modern bass beat on 'Missing' -but it was not enough to rescue them from the indignity of being dropped. 'Missing' proved their salvation, how-even remixed by Todd Terry, it became a huge international hit. Meanwhile, Tracey Thorn guested on Massive Attack's Protecti on album, showcasing her tender, wounded croon for a new generation of listeners. Now signed to Virgin, the duo have wisely decided to develop their electronic sound; their forthcoming album, Walking Wounded (not released until May), eschews warm acoustic strumming for the skeletal, atmospheric beats of drum and bass, which Watt describes as 'a sort of twenty-first-century bossa nova'.

The brave new EBTG was unveiled last Wednesday at Bristol's Anson Rooms to a crowd who were clearly rather fond of the old, cardigans-at-30- paces EBTG. Their new songs' were" politely applauded, but anything familiar was greeted with cheers of heartfelt relief. It is tempting to say that everything's new but the girl (and the boy) but in many ways the pair are as they always have been: terribly nice, slightly morose, highly unlikely ever to punch the air and whoop 'Hello Ben Watt looks cool in a wasted way, like an emaciated Jesus, but Tracey Thorn could still be mistaken for an overgrown child; her hair chopped by a blindfold drunk; her ears filled with what look like bulbous hearing aids. Her gawky looks sit oddly with that dark-honeyed voice, which is mixed far too low to begin with, as technical problems mute the affecting sweep of 'Big Deal'. When the sound clears up, we are treated to the minimalist glory of the new sound: Watt plays thin, spectral chords on a keyboard, while drummer Martin Ditcham controls sampled atmospherics and busy, electronic percussion patterns.

As with the drum and bass of someone like Goldie, the faster beats are so high-pitched and fluttery that they function as texture rather than beat; the songs' anchor is Danny Thompson's mournful double-bass. The new single, 'Walking Wounded', Methodism, and exchanges with French prisoners in the aftermath of the revolution. The incipient picturesqueness of Kneehigh's touring production there's always a danger here of a 'history radio play for schools' atmosphere was offset by the vigour and brilliance of the performance on a slatted, sloping set dominated by a huge all-in-one metal gunwale, guillotine, fishing boat and howitzer. Darke's play successfully retrieved an important and defining era of Cornish history, while the second Four Corners play, Paul Mercier's Buddleia, produced by the Dublin-based Passion Machine, animated the history of one particular Dublin house in the present economic and political crises surrounding a road-building plan. Buddleia structure, both ambitious and unusual, wras that of a consecutive, seemingly disparate, series of playlets depicting an entire community of squabbling families, small-time porn-peddlers, estate agents, builders, tieroin addicts and local politicians all passing through the rented rooms.

In the first scene, an old man dies-of shock after being surprised by adolescent burglars. One of the boys knows' the old man and, like buddleia, clings to the house which, after a rave and a fire, is demolished. A cast of 30 count 'em distinguished Irish actors, old and new, set about this extraordinary task with relish. Mercier's production was a thrilling event, teeming with passion and sharp character detail. Nigel Chamock's Watch My Lips (Drill Hall to 7 April, then touring abroad, returning in May to Manchester, Cardiff, New-casde and Brighton) is something else, a raunchy 'physical theatre' piece in which four flat-out performers Di Sherlock, Victoria Harwood, Adrian Howells and Christian Flint bare their souls and their bottoms in a sexual revue that makes Oh! look like a vicar's tea-party.

Frank, funny and aggressive, the show manages to advocate gender-blind rumpy pumpy while suggesting that no one who pursues genital gratification without some spiritual commitment ends up happy. To that extent, this delightfully filthy fandango has a moral purpose. The text is trite, but heartfelt, and the 'movement' a cheerful blend of disco dancing, spasms, jerks and karaoke camp. More sober, and indeed sobering, is John Misto's The Shoe Horn Sonata, which recounts the horrors endured by women prisoners, many of them Australian nurses, at the hands of the Japanese on Sumatra during the last war. The evidence is untheatrically presented in the form of a TV interview with Australian Bridie (Maggie Kirkpatrick, the Freak in Prisoner Cell Block H) and English Sheila (the delicately translucent Susannah York).

Simultaneously, they try and retrieve their friendship in Melbourne 50 years on. A poor play, but you learn a lot and see two fine actresses. Foe West Yorkshire Playlwuse, Leeds (0113-244 211 until 30 March, then Oxford, Blackpool Brighton and the Young Vic SE1; 'Four Corners' Donmar Warehouse, London WC2 (0171-369 1732); WatchMyLips Drill Hall London WCl (0171-637 8270); The Shoe Horn Sonata King's Head, London Nl (0171-2261916) Foe may-nbi be vintage Theatre de Complicate, but this adaptation by Mark Wheatley of J. M. Coetzee's 1986 cxiunter-fiction to Robinson Crusoe, co-produced with theWest Yorkshire Playhouse, exerts an insidious and beguiling spelL "Whose life is it anyway? Or rather, whose story? Complicite give visual statement to the unsayable in Coetzee's novel.

The sound of silence wTashes over his narrative like a thin, clear tide. His heroine, Susan Barton, cast away iri a storm while travelling from Bahia, recounts her days on a desert island where the taciturn Cruso (sic -and his dumb servant Friday are locked into dull routines of survival and antipathy. Cruso dies en route to London, where Susan, with Friday in tow, sells her story to the author-Daniel Foe. She herself chooses to remains silent on the topic of pre-cast-away moans. As played by Kathryn Hunter small, sensuous, dark, inventive Susan becomes an urgent seeker after contact, speech, sex, being.

Thereis abeautiful Tempetf-like quality in the production by Annie Castledine and Marceflo Magni (who also appears as a pipe-smoking, 12-year-old accomplice to Foe): the play opens with a great storm and Hunter materialises on a stage of slabs and boulders gutted. with rivulets. A fire burns, and the island apathy is disrupted by her fiery presence, her defiance of Cruso'smdifference to the possibility of London study is represented by a tall iron contraption, a desk at one end of it, a tall-backed chair at the other, which looms over the island like a giant stork of literary extrapolation and distortion. When the mute, black Friday (Patrice Naiambana gives a performance of glorious dignity and non-expressiveness) dons Foe's guild robes the author has done a runner to avoid creditors he twirls ecstatically like Caliban and Co crying freedom and liberty on Prospero's patch. The performance faithfully reproduces Coetzee's idea of a life redefined in a story without really improving on it; the imaginative world is not as fully elaborated as you would expect from Complicite.

Rob Pickavance stalks the action as an tmfriendfy Foe and Hannes Flaschberger seems at sea as Cruso. The mystery of Susan's 'daughter' (SelmaAlispahic) is researched and projected. While Sam Mendes oversees the West End transfer of the Donmar Warehouse revival of Sondheim's Company, his Donmar base is hosting, with sponsorship from Carrton Television, a most valuable season of -new writing from the Four Corners of our islands: this week, Cwrnni bring Edward Thomas's Song from a Forgotten City from Wales; finally; from the Traverse in Edinburgh, comes Sue Glover's Bondagers (2-7 March-6 April), an unmissable piece of lyrical, poetic staging by lan Brown of life "among Scottish female agricultural wrorkers in the 1860s. The trouble with "commiinity theatre' is that it sounds so off-puttfngly worthy and old-fashioned. But Nick Darke's The King of Prussia, which opened the season, was a real gem, a classic of the genre: brandy smuggling on the Cornish coast, romance, government corruption, the rise of Tracey Thorn: Her tender, wounded croon is reaching a new generation Photograph by Simon Ritter cussion is muffled.

The playing is not sparkling even the majestic, heartbreaking Tvlissing' ('I niissyou like the deserts miss the rain') sounds slightly weary. But as a taster for the new EBTG, the gig is largely successful. The new sound works because it gives the group's quiet soutfulness a sense of disquiet. The machine-like atmosphere contrasts with and emphasises thehumanness of Thorn's voice. The older songs sound fine, but are obviously played as a gesture of conciliation for the crowd, several of whom are heard to mutter comments like 'I'm not sure about all this funky stuff.

Everything But The Girl are undoubtedly going to shed a few fans, but by the end of 1996 they will at least be listened to by trainspotters rather than trainspotters. Everything But The Girl play Sheffield Leadmill (0114 275 4500) tonight; Worcester Northwich Theatre (01905 755141) tomorrow night; Norwich UFA (01603 505401), Tuesday; Portsmouth Pyramids Centre (01705 799977), Thursday; Shepherds Bush Empire (0181 740 7474), Friday is low-key but engaging, reminiscent of Portishead in its mix of alienistic clatter and warm vocals. It is an odd choice of single, though; less immediate and melodic than other new tracks like 'Before Today' and 'Single', which are structurally no great departure from Amplified Heart- rounded, yearning, tuneful. In performance terms, the group are as unspectacular as ever. The stage is barely lit, no one moves; there is no dry ice, no video backdrop, no naked dancing girls in cages.

And inevitably the delicate precision of the layered per JANH PARRY in the Dancing 0 0 0 an audience applauding from the stage as role reversal is taken to the extreme Skills 'A! re they an ensemble or a group of Wendv Hnnrmm looking at the audience at the An alternative drama was played out in the aisles, as Emma Gladstone erupted in crimson, flounces, escorted by three Featherstone-haughs. A silent-movie massacre took place against a screen at the back of the auditorium. When it was all over, the Victims of Death band gave both their audi- for one, will never be able to sit in the Queen Elizabeth Hall again without wanting to surf down the rows of padded seats or throw a tantrum in the aisles. And from now on, I'll hope for a free bottle of mineral water after each stint as a spectator though as Houstoun said critically of our performance, 'It's not going anywhere. I mean, is it Anderson's piece for 200 or so performers, An Audience with the Victims of Death, bubbled with refreshing ideas.

Just like us, though better dressed, the participants headed noisily for their seats and clapped politely as Steve Blake introduced his 'rock' music, each number more enjoyably ghasdy than the last. The auditorium was transformed into an arena for formation manoeuvres: at one point the massed performers seemed to be passengers on the Titanic, dashing for the gangways; then surged into a human tidal wave, before subsiding into a coral reef of shipwrecked sailors' bones. We were the passive performers on stage, ushered into the hall through the artists' entrance ever, once the strings give way to voices Ml rules are relaxed when a Slovenian Eddie the Eagle singer gives his own version of Basin Street Blues, displacing a mock-aerobics routine, instructed in an unintelligible language whose meaning is absolutely clear. The En-Knap ensemble is made up of funny, likeable individuals, whose sense of theatre is as evident as their enjoyment of dancing. I was puzzled by the tone of Ben Craft's programme for the Spring Loaded festival in London.

He is an intense, internalised performer, who has introduced clog-dancing an extrovert activity into his recent work. He seems to be using the hard shoes and a set of juggling blocks as emotive symbols of his inner conflict, without a trace of humour, leaving his audience nonplussed. New. Moves Tramway, Glasgow (0141-227 5511) to 26 March; Spring Loaded The Place Theatre, London WCl (0171-387 0031) to 1 1 May sometimes body) hidden below the seat backs. His slithery solo was hypnotic, but the five ballet dancers who preened after him looked awkward and ungainly, trying to emulate Sylvie Guillem's experiments with contemporary dance.

Imposing random movements on classically trained bodies requires a carefully considered rationale: what's the point of pointwork that can't be seen? When Slovenian choreographer Iztok Kovac first visited Britain in 1992, his solo, How 1 Caught a Falcon, set his arms whirling in a blur of movement that almost lifted him into vertical.take off. His latest work, Sting and String, for his En-Knap company, is more grounded, its rhythmic rolling and pacing closely linked to Boris Kovac's commissioned music for string quartet. (The British premiere was in Glasgow's New Moves festival: the company perform in London at the end of May). The dancers improvise, how yueen cnzaDetfl Hall last weekend. She was an isolated figure in the auditorium's sea of black leather seats: we were the passive performers on stage, ushered into the concert hall through the artists' entrance.

Houstoun reviewed us for The Reverse Effect showcase, pan of the Now You See It season 'a chance for audiences to experiment, in the knowledge that what theyTi see and hear won't happen again in the same way'. The Reverse Effect came about after choreographer Lea Anderson had mentioned the auditorium's possibilities as an adventure playground to impresario Michael Morris: he promptly commissioned her, Houston and Wayne McGregor to exploit its potential. The precedent is a dangerous one: in Houstoun's words: 'Is this a trend or the shape of things to ences a prepared encore, and everybody applauded each other for being marvellous which we all were. Least successful of the three commissions was Wayne McGregor's Vulture, which started the evening. He waded along the flight path of the central aisle, legs (and PRINCE EDWARD THEATRE 0171 447 5400.