The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 74

13 THE WEEK IN REVIEWS ttk otserer Riew 31 way ma 'The school of love run by Rosalind as Ganymede has an erotic charge: breathless, dangerous' Leader Hawkins as Old Adam in As You Like It Photograph by Neil Libbert THEATRE tournament began, a floaty, otherworldly woman (Rachel Weisz) came into Morrissey's life. She refused to answer questions. She withheld her surname andi address. She seemed able to predict the future. Morrissey could not have been happier, here was a beautiful woman with looping eyebrows who made no demands, anddrank pints of beer, and cared about the outcome of England Spain.

Their romance followed the exact path of Morrissey's Euro excitement and the nation's excitement. In a defining moment of modern British television, the couple enjoyed a shared sexual climax at the exact moment! of an England goal And when Gareth South-gate missed his, penalty, Weisz floated after having made an accurate prediction of the result of the final. Morrissey bet on the prediction and profited to thejextent that he could, two years later, afford to grow a moustache. On Monday, you could have seen exemplarjj child acting in Channel 4's Soft Sand, Blue Sea, or some live football the Vmd that Coca-Cola ads and all-action quick-edit previews laughably try to suggest is the usual soccer experience in the First Division Play-Off Final (Sky Sports 2). Instead, this.

What did it mean? To the extent that Weisz existed, she was a kind of angelic prostitute with a once-m-a-ffietime offer of sports and sex combined. And as a ghost or holy hooker, she could be-disregarded as a human being. She needed no history, no mind. She was insubstantial by definition. And she could sleep with the useless hero without explanation- The script could neglect the stuff that leads up to a relationship, and the stuff after, and make feel-good TV about only the middle.

Weisz was a football tournament made flesh. She embod-ied Morrissey's pleasure; she was a pun on scoring. The film posed the question; if women were like international football competitions jWouldn't that be extraordinarily great? They would bring intense pleasure into the home, would live entirely in the moment, they would expect no commitment, and they would fade into memory without any door-slamming. Wouldn't that be great? Viewers might have expected My Summer With Des to answer this Question with some hesitation, or perhaps give it a satiric spin. Instead, it answered the question.

Yes. Yes, that would be great. You should be careful about asking for satire, for fear of giving encouragement to a series like In the Red, a lavish drama in which the BBC, risking nothing, aims to show it has the daring to laugh at itself. In the first episode, we saw that a serial killer was targeting bank managers, and leaving notes at the scene ('I am compelled to rescind your facility'). We were introduced to a BBC crime correspondent a boozy hack contemptuous of new, Birtist BBC management techniques.

And a small, centrist political party was employing a sexually frustrated speechwriter. The series will find admirers among those who value Drop the Dead Donkey. There was something that was reminis-cent of humour references to spin doctors, the long lunches of MPs, the undesirabihty of bank managers but no one actually risked humour. In the Red took to the stage, saying: 'New Labour, eh? John Birt, then bowed, and left. In place of wit, someone looked out the window of their Soho office at the peep shows and said: 'Half of London's out there selling it; the other's out on the town looking for said his companion, 'You mean the Big Fine actors spoke stupid lines.

Expensively real places hosted unreal events. The police feigned to be baffled by a crime that would take 30 seconds to solve. And a series hoping to satirise broadcasting ended by embodying all that's slack and dreary in TV drama. In the Red showed itself to be part of the problem, not the solution. Orlando (Paul Hilton) is a wild boy but a touch too jokily romantic.

John McEnery as Jaques looks suitably hangdog, though he bears a distracting resemblance to Robin Cook. Melancholy is delicate: Jaques's world-weariness has to be finely judged so that the world does not weary of him. McEnery was at times too throwaway. But I loved his actual throwing of a blood red apple at the beginning of 'The Seven Ages of Man', as if he were a disillusioned Adam. Before Saturday, And Monday (Chichester) has even started, the audience see a big black cooking pot simmering away on stage.

Eduardo de Filippa's exuberant and affecting comedy is about a middle-aged married couple each stewing in their own juice and about to flip their lids. David Suchet is delicious as Peppino, father of the house. In his dark suit, he resembles the black pot on the hob and is cooking up jealousy. His unlikely target is Luigi, a married accountant, who pays elaborate compliments to Pep-pino's wife, Rosa, even buying her a turquoise cardigan as a tribute. Dearbhla Molloy is marvellous as Rosa, her exhausted looks in contrast to ber inexhaustible indignation.

Luigi (Fred Ridgeway) and Elena his wife (Ann Penfold) are wonderfully funny. It is impossible not to warm to them and their tainty- itputsTomStoppard's play about quantum physics, Hapgood, in the shade. The latter was intellectually ostentatious but dead on the stage. This is intellectually adventurous, an experiment with time. Heisenberg formulated the uncertainty principle, which states that the more accurately a particle's position can be determined, the less is known about its momentum.

Frayn is interested in what can be explained and in exploring the void of what cannot. As we watch the various speculative versions of this meeting, we see that it may have changed the course of history. Did Heisenberg who was working on the Nazi nuclear weapons programme come to find out from Bohr about the Allies' weapons? Or did he come to ask Bohr if there was any moral defence for what he found himself doing? And if this was the question, what was Bohr's reply? We watch each possibility played with speed and intensity and the effect is like a top which spins to whiteness until at last the pattern is unreadable. The three figures exist in limbo, like living ghosts, in Michael Blakemore's stark but exciting production. David Burke is impressive as Bohr: sombre, passionate, occasionally forgetting himself in laughter.

Matthew Marsh is magnificent as Heisenberg: there is tremendous charge to his pale, tense presence. Sara Kestelman plays Margrethe Bohr with dignity and vigour. She sees things differently from the often catches what they miss. She never loses sight of the personal to pitch against their abstracts. The end is valedictory, dark, terrirying, but there is solace in its uncertain conclusion.

There are times when being at the Globe Theatre is like listening to early music: there is an uncanny sense of what it must have been like to be part of an Elizabethan audience. Lucy Bailey's honest, informal production of As You Like It suits its surroundings. On the chill afternoon when I saw it, the audience had to suffer a little for its pleasures as all those in Arden must. Anastasia Hille is a born Rosalind. She looks like Botticelli's Venus though more stressed.

Her Rosalind is neurotic but inspiring: a compassionate control freak. When she first bids Orlando adieu, her wave comically wishes it were a hello: a trembling flutter. Later, the school of love she runs as Ganymede has an erotic charge: breathless, dangerous. Celia Tonia Chauvet is also excellent. She is outspoken but weaker than her friend.

For her, love is never less than a caper. In their first scene, the two girls are delightful in grey-gold dresses. They look as though they might at any moment become airborne. enthusiasms for squid and cardigans and life. Jude Kelly directs like a good parent, keeping order, restoring domestic harmony.

And Jeremy Sams's new translation uses nothing but the best ingredients. Bob Fosse's classic musical Sweet Charity (Victoria Palace Theatre) with music by Cy Coleman has aged well or, to be more exact, grown old disgracefully. Girls with vertiginous hairdos descend a spiral staircase 'hostesses' at the Fan-Dango Ballroom. Bonnie Langfdrd is irresistible as Charity. Her enjoyment of the role is contagious.

She wears a minuscule black lacy dress and sports a tattoo on one shoulder. The other girls tell her (Neil Simon's book has vim) 'Your big problem is that you run your heart like a hotel. You have guys checking in and out all the The chorus is excellent. They do a carnivorous version of 'Hey Big Spender' men of distinction would be well advised to run a mUe. Vittorio, the film star, is played with dapper assurance by Mark Wynter.

His beloved Ursula (Basienka Blake) looks like a pale blue Afghan hound. Cornell John is great as the weirdo suitor with a sweet voice. And Bonnie Langford gets our hearts beating hard for her as she abanT dons the suitcase with 'almost married' on it and lets Charity revert to Hope. Susannah Clapp is on holiday Copenhagen As You Like It Sweet Charity by Kate Kellaway Lab dancing Science and humanity never part company in Copenhagen, Michael Frayn's galvanising new play (National Theatre, Cottesloe). At first, the notion of a drama built around the question of what took place between two physicists, Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr, when they met in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen in 1941 seems like an academic dead end, something that could not be interesting for more than two hours.

But Frayn (who shows among other things the debased status of 'interesting' as an adjective) earns our absolute attention. Bohr, father of quantum physics, once said: 'Never express yourself more clearly than you can This is a play about uncer PARTICIPATE IN A WORK OF ART The theatre group, Blast Theory, have brought a new dimension to performance art with Kidnap. Matt Adams, the creator, explains: 'You pay 10 and nil out a form. Ten people are randomly chosen and put under surveillance. We then pick two for the kidnap.

A camera will broadcast proceedings live on the For a registration form call 0800 174336. Kidnap web site: wwv.newrrediacentre comAcidnafy Kidnap begins on 15 July. isms MJ 1 a mm gump M1W nRTXfj i a i rrrrmfn nnstn ciii'i'ii.