The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 65

Sunday 5 May 1996 the Observer Review 13 the Arts A delightfully diverting Ayckbourn treatment of Wodehouse and a moral tale of female drug smugglers With a dash of Wooster sauce MICHAEL COVENEY i hat-ho. Jeeves, what exactly is all this spiff ing May Day non WfPNejl Spencer Everything But The Girl Walking Wounded (Virgin CDV 2803) Tscey Thorn and Ben Watt, trans-Torrned from plain Jane and John to nip hitmakers. yoke their forlorn ballads to iovrkey drum'n'bass arrangements. The results are inspired, playing Tnorn's wistful vocals against the digital fizz and ratUe to create a new genre: be srtjunglism. The Cure Wild Mood Swings (fiction RXCD277The follow-up to.

1992 coiossally successful Wish, the album which conferred US stadium status on veteran eccentric Robert Smith and his crew, delivers more of the same. Smith's sensurround guitar jangle and strangled vocais are deftfy deployed, and there's as much variety -as the title suggests. Elgar Tne Starlight Express (EMI 7243 5 66008 2 9) The music for TneStariight Express, a play based on Algernon Blackwood's novel A Prisoner in Fairyland, was composed in 1915 but takes up some ideas from Elgar's childhood. Brief episodes intended as background to speech make a scrappy effect; some of the more extended pieces are charming (and are exquisitely scored); and occasionally the great Eigar rings out in deeply sumng bars. The play seems to have been mawkish, but its underlying idea -that chiidren.and Star Dust can unwumble' muddled grown-ups -evidently caught Elgar's imagination.

This is Vernon Handley's 1976 recording with the LPO, the songs sung by Valerie Mastersori and Derek Hammond-Stroud. hunt, though the framing device of Bertie losing his banjo (he only broke a string before) on the eve of a concert is pretty tenuous. More significantly, this modest and beguiling show sits delightfully in the new space, seating 404 on comfortable blue banquettes. The new Stephen Joseph (retaining its name in honour of Ayckboum's mentor) is now housed in a revamped 1 936 Odeon cinema opposite the station. Coloured neon strip lighting I saw the last Saturday matinee of theoriginal production of Jeeves starring David lemmings and have retained some affection for one or two songs, notably a tender love duet, 'Half a Moment', a splendid Gilbertian patter song, arid the title number, which saunters and swaggers with a sense of idle, hands-in-the-pockets well-being.

Lloyd Webber and Ayckbourn have improved even these items and, although the songs tend to pop up unbidden from the narrative, there is a beguiling modesty and stylistic homogeneity that simply did not exist before. The overall flavour, is of the Gershwins' Lady Be Good meets Ben Travers and various patrons of the Drones' Club, including Gussie Fink-Nottle (Simon Day), Bingo Little (Nicholas Haverson) and Cut-glass comic Malcolm Sinclair projects a Jeeves of nostril-flaring assurance sense hoving into view up there in jolly old "Alan Ayckbourn 's new theatre. Sir, opened in his home town on Wednesday with a fairly jaunty revival, 1 am assured, of a musical he penned himself 20 years ago with Andrew Lloyd Webber. The show was formerly known by the name of )eeies, and was what might be termed, if 1 may say so Sir, a fiasco of famous proportions." 'Good Jeeves, sounds a bit too close to 'IndeedSir, bui Scarborough is not close to home, and 1 have therefore been fortunate in both avoiding the amusement and acquiring the services of a jobbing journalist prepared to brave the vagaries of the rail 'Well done, Jeeves! Who's the intrepid Cove in "A Cove by the name of Coveney, Sir. and 1 attach his somewhat lurid, though not entirely unreliable, comments.

Listen, if you will. Sir, and eeies is now called By Jeeves ('a diversionary with an adjusted score and unrecognisably tightened storyline. We now have a Wodehousean knockabout farce of mistaken identities, with pleasant songs, low-budget scenic gags and an ingenious pig 'Stinker' Pinker (Richard Long) JAZZ Dave Gelly proclaims the exterior. Inside: peachy pink walls, art deco friezes, brightly lit bars, a gift shop, elderly audience and a decent restaurant. A combination of local fundrais-ing (Ayckbourn himself has pitched in with 400,000) and lot-ten1 money has created an impressive 5.5miltion facility, with plenty of natural light.excellent backstage conditions and a second 'end-stage' auditorium7cinema seating 165.

Mules rush in: Abi Ebiola in Winsome Pinnock's moral play Photograph by Neil Llbbert Ayckbourn the director has pulled off near-perfect casting, especially on the distaff side Diana Morrison is a gorgeously squeaky Madeline Bassett, Cathy Sara melodic ously spot-on as Sniffy Byng. Steven Pacey is enchanting without being tiresome as Wooster, and tliat cut-glass comedian Malcolm Sinclair projects a Jeeves of such blistering, nostril-flaring assurance that even a false start in his big number only underlined his authority. Bertie would have a lit in Birmingham, where Peter Whelan's Divine Right posits a plausible anatomy of Britain in the year 2000. The (unseen) Prince of Wales is on the verge of renouncing his succession. Republicans are uniting in the House.

The next heir, like Shakespeare's Prince Hal, dives under the wire to find out how the other half lives. The Labour government finally passes its Constitutional Reform Bill; the young prince is considering a political career and might be persuaded to stand for president. Bill. Alexander's production betrays his usual qualities of astute detail and scrupulous playing, but the accumulation is long and rambling. The audience, however, remains gripped by lookalike approximations of Tony Blair, Kate Hoey, Michael Portillo (now Opposition-leader), Betty Boothroyd, Teodross Avery My Generation (impulse IMP 11812) The 21-year-old saxophonist's second album reveals even greater technical mastery than the first, and that was impressive enough.

It also shows a broadening of his whole musical conception, although he is still well vithin'the magnetic field of John Coltrane. The three guest guitarists John Scbofieid. Mark Whitfield and Peter Bemsteia air play brilliantly. Mick Hanson Do You Have A Name? (SpoMe SPMZD 555) After 25 years as a professional guitarist, most of it spent working some very fast company, Hanson finally has an album under his own name. In addition to great technique and boundless invention, he has a rare mastery of diverse styles.

In order to accommodate them, he is featured here in four separate contexts 3 quartet, two trios and a due by adults including the cherishable Steve Coogan, pltimpish Gerard Horan, brilliant Debra Gillettand amazing (though not here) Ger-aldine Somerville, is no exception. Potter's forest of Dean is skittishly realised by designer Richard Hudson with plastic sheep and cows and a dramatically sloping greensward. Patrick Marber directs a dumb schedule-filler whose 90 minutes seem stretched to eternity: It is much better titan Karaoke, but what isn't? By Jeeves Stephen Joseph, Scarborough (01 723 370541), Divine Right Birmingham Rep (0121-2123333); Mules Theatre Upstairs, London SWi -(0171-730 2554); Blue Remembered Hills RNTLvitelton. London SE1 (0171-3282252) shuttling between Jamaica and London, buying a few months of freedom, sometimes endingup in jail, never meeting the 'top people', dreaming of a new life. Pinnock is always good, on exiles in transit, the pull of the homeland.

Her urgent, enjoyable, sharply moral play, co-presented by the prison-touring company Clean Break. is brilliantly performed by Sheila Whitfield, Abi Lniola and Clare Perkins as a mind-boggling collection of dossers, bad girls, political refugees, underwear saleswomen, agricultural workers and vicious vixens. Dennis Potter's reputation is a mystery to me. 1 Us television plays never stand up well in die theatre; Blue Remembered Hills (1979), with seven seven-year-olds played Trevor McDonald and the young princes. The elder, the hero, is played with startling finesse by William Mannering, who exudes natural charm even while tugging at his right ear-lobe.

Whelan is an interesting dramatist you can never quite pin down, and this distinctly low-cal text is not always fully compensated for by the urgency of the issuesand the deftness with which they are aired. Some of. the personal scenes are desperately feeble. But how refreshing to have a genuinely contemporary public play Kit Surrey's split-level design is set within a huge metallic crown on a big public.stage. Winsome Pinnock has devised in Mules a fascinating, kaleidoscopic look at black female drug smugglers The new Stephen Joseph theatre Photograph by Don McPhee JOHN NAUGHTON Veggies get their pound of flesh The ramifications of BSE include sales of theatre tickets and leather sofas in Germany If you think this is fanny.

SE BLAMED FOR WEST 'Bi END SLUMP' screams the from page of TJie Staee. political reflex which dictates that one should never say anything which will frighten the horses. The assurances were also entirely worthless, episte-mologically speaking. Gummer, Major, Hogg and co. had no objective knowledge about the safety or otherwise of British beef.

They were. totally dependent on what their The Yanks are also very concerned about letting British beef into the country asDamien Hirst, the controversial artist who specialises in exhibiting deceased animals, recently discovered. His new masterpiece, entitled Some Comfort Gained from the Acceptance of Inherent Lives in Everything, consists of 12 cut-up parts of two dead cows in tanks of formaldehyde. What could scientific advisers when it was shipped possibly have been lold ulem- yen me IN- rm to the US for an-exhi advisers changed in those 'meat pies' costing 49p? bition of the artist's work in New York however. Customs their tune (slightly), Hogg told Parliament.

And then all ignorance. Regulators and ministerial advisory' committees stumble along behind, discovering by trial and error the implicit pitfalls, seeking to contain and Which of course is what British Agriculture Ministers have been doing for years in relation to BSE. If there arc any villains in the story they are the animal feedstuff companies and it says something about the journalistic coverage of '-the crisis that we have heard disgraqefully little about these resourceful outfits. But the BSE hysteria has made a lot of other people look very foolish indeed, chief among them the supposedly innocent British consumer, blithely ambling into Tesco or Sains-burys every Saturday and coming away with atrolley loaded with meat and 'meat products' at prices which were so low as to he unreal. If she or he purchased 1 0 beefburgers on spe-.

cial offer at 1.95, what did; they imagine they were made otV What could possibly have, been inside those 'meat pies' costing 49p? Or in those sausages, those 'cartridges containing the sweepings of 'the abattoir floor' (Mencken's phrase), at 99p per pound? In truth.the only people who come out of this smelling of roses are the militant vegetarians who have long warned about the crazy unsustain- ability of industrialised farming methods and the profligate ways in whic we subsidise this In that sense, there is something deeply ironic about those fast-food chains boasting that their, hamburgers are now made with Dutch beef. Holland may he certified BSE-free, hut its agricultural practices make.Bernard Matthews look like a medieval pas-toralist. lome to think of it, he probably manufactured that chic ken you are about to have lor. lunch. Apparently the chief executive of the Society of London Theatre blames mad cow disease for a slump in West End ticket sales.

We are adjusting our forme number of tourists cbmingin this qooth ha Terrorism is a factor in the short term and so are health scares which are affecting people from mainland'Europe. With BSE, they are wondering -whether it is safeto eat British food Rainy crowd, foreigners. Take the Germans, tfiose stolid, impassive burghers who are the backbone of Europe. Before the export ban, less than 0.1 per cent of their beef came from British herds. Yet German butchers now report a 50 to 65 per cent drop in sales of domestic beef as a result of the BSE scare.

Things are so bad that even sales of bratwurst sausage are down by 70 per cent in some areas. among German consumers is much more widespread than elsewhere in Europe, even compared with reports Die Well. One anguished hausfrau phoned a consumer organisation to ask whether it was sale to sit on her Jeather sofa. And then there are the Americans, most of whom seem pathologically gung-ho about the right to bear amis. Their governments are penodically gripped by powerful desires to send marines to faraway places or bomb the heD out of the natives, or both.

But the minute the IRA lets off a firecracker in London these macho, gun-toting warnors cancel their long-planned vacations in Britain and head for Miami or Los Angeles or some otherbellholewneretliey area thousand times more likely to be of trying one of the telephone sex lines I U-heard so-, much about lately htit where would I get a number from? The Yellow Pages weren't any. use, and I hardly thought I could consult Director)- Enquiries. Then I remembered that there, was an old listing magazine in the magazine rack, and sure enough 1 found columns of ads for phone sex in the back pages. I chose a number that promised "Fast hishint Sex Reiki Hr Smutty liilk" with a footnote explaining that "due to new UliC ivyddtioiis wc am now. 'lmw you Uuropcdn-hvuyli iUliou." I listened for about minutes to a girl describing with much sighing and groaning the process' of peeling and swallowing a banana, and began to wonder whether it was EEC agricultural regulations that wvrc 'being.

invoked. It was a total con. and so ere the other two 'lines 1. tried- officials refused' to allow the thing in on the grounds that doing so would contravene the worldwide ban on the export of British beef. hate to say it and the urge to do so may of course be an early indication of the onset of CJD but this BSE business is almost enough to make one feel sympathy for the Government.

Granted they are floundering about in a pit of their own digging, the foundations of which were laid long ago in a series of fatuous ministerial assurances about the of Bntish beef. One thinks, for example, of John Sefwyn Gummer lorcing a beefburger down his daughter's throat; or of the Prime Minister declaring to a television interviewer that he regularly ate Briush beef and had come to no harm as aresult. But these "bromides were probably issued in good faith, and in any event were the product of that venerable hell broke loose and German women began to fret and the British (and European) beef industry' Went phut. Ml of which demonstrates how difficult it is to deal rationally with the risks which are an inescapable part of industrial society. What happened in the BSE case was that a heavily industrialised fanning system came up with the idea of feeding cows with animal protein.

That this was a daft and unnatural thing to do must have been obvious, but on the other hand it was manifestly cost-effective and there was no 'scientific' evidence that it was deleterious to health. I here was no such evidence' for the simple reason that at the time nobody was looking tor it, but this is par for the ourse: in science you have to seek before you an find. Or. as Professor Robin li'uve-VYhile puts it. 'Industrial innovation plunges ahead in areas of lekitive scientific or murdered, raped, mugged abused..