The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 82

12 THE WEEK IN REVIEWS ne Osse-ve- Review 21 jne 1998 'Ad breaks have been full of footballers looking under-rehearsed and uncomfortable' I Television THEATRE Eric Cantona and Man Shearer, stars oftheEurostar and McDonald's advertising campaigns World Cup commercials. by Ian Parker Outside on the Street, Elton John's Glasses, Troilus and Cressida by Susannah Clapp Home? I prefer Siberia Vita! International Animation Festival, Cardiff Six days of films, workshops and seminars. Thg festival opens with Warner Bras' The Magic Sword -Quest for Camelot "Highlights include premieres of two new British series, Rex The Runt and Bob Margaret, both to be shown on television later this year. There is also an opportunity for wannabe animators to screen their own films (first come first served). To book, call Cardiff International Arena on 01222 224488 or look up the V'rta! website, for full programme contents and timings Tn a sport that pays millions for speed, anything of significance happens very, very slowly' In the best World Cup-related commercials for beer and boots and soft drinks, football becomes the thing which it always promises to be in real life, but never is: a euphoric spectacle, whose entertainment is lodged in the event itself, rather than in anticipation of the event, or memories of it.

Perhaps a handful of extreme football enthusiasts live the life of the advertisements or at least have invested enough time in the game, over the years, to allow them to watch a different game from everyone else, a parallel game packed with all sorts of private amusements and frus-tratioris. But everyone else has to do their best. There's a great body of people who wish football no ill will, who are drawn to the idea of grand shared passions and delicious athletic manoeuvres and who find themselves getting restless after the first 25 minutes and wondering what's happening in Bramwell on the other side. These people do not exist in the media or in advertising, where you are either fanatically committed (Coca-Cola Fever Pitch, an audience shouting or in fanatical opposition to football as in the silly British Telecom ad. where women learn that the World Cup has been cancelled and rush into the streets in a whooping frenzy of girlie high-fives.

BT. adding insult to stereotype, appeals to female customers by showing women hysterically celebrating their rescue from a shocking fate: having to function without men for a couple of hours. The ordinary, curious viewers, the fairweather fans, are invisible- These are the people willing to take pleasure from the World Cup, but whose minds wander during the games themselves: and they then feel ashamed by this wandering. But they stay in the room, so as to be sociable, or out of embarrassment for having been so excited beforehand or out of fear of missing agoal and therefore failing to take corn- The Gate.Theatre, which flies 'the flag of international drama in west London, has staged a remarkable German play. Outside on the Street, an indictment of postwar Germany and of war in general is a set text in German schools, but is little known here.

It is gruelling, polemical, obsessive and powerful. It has in it something of Georg Buch-ner's Woyzek and something of George Grosz's cartoons. It has now been given a forceful production and an outstanding new translation. Outside on the Street was the only play written by Wolfgang Borchert, who died in 1947, at the age of 26, the day before it was performed in Hamburg. Borchert had been a prisoner of war on the Eastern front, and he drew on this experience when dramatising the tale of a soldier who returns to Germany after three years in Siberia to find a corrupt and inhospitable homeland.

His wife has taken up with someone else; his pro-Nazi parents are dead; work is hard to come by; food is scarce; he is racked with guilt about his responsibility for the death of comrades, and his prosperous commanding, officer spurns him. These short, harsh, realistic scenes are intercut with dreamlike sequences. It may be hard to believe that a drama could successfully include the personification of a river, but, under Gordon Anderson's direction, Borchert pulls it off As the spirit of the Elbe, the versatile Jenny Quayle appears in the middle of a cloud of smoke, half-genie and half -whore, dragging fiercely on a cigarette. Anderson's direction is greatly helped by Jane Singleton's darkly imaginative design. A dank space like a Nissen hut, its corrugated iron walls and cracked concrete penetrated by lovely L'Oreal hair.

Paul Gas-coigne and Romario seem to have had their World Cup hopes dashed by Walker's Crisps, football's unluckiest mid-morning snack. While Nike and Coke suggest the sport that football would like to be and is not, this second tier of ads often awkward and rather less fluent and witty than its participants had imagined risks reminding viewers of football as it actually is. Vauxhall's campaign, for example, which is to be found hanging on to the beginning and end of every ITV World Cup broadcast, overdubs the sound on real footballing footage to give it an auto-related and supposedly comic meaning A footballer scores a goal, then appears to be saying (in a comedy foreign accent): 'We won, that means we get to drive through the streets and beep our horns. Beep beep Or a fan chants: 'You're going home in a Vauxhall This is in tune with football as we know it: laboured, a bit yobby, a bit racist, not particularly funny. Perhaps British advertising has over-committed itself to humour.

And, at the moment when this could have been that pays millions for speed, anything of significance happens very, very slowly, and often. Wise advertisers, knowing this, tell splendid emotional stories using replayed, repeated, suspended, decelerated action, embroidered with music, fancily edited: Nike, MasterCard, Budweiser. The problem for the fair-weather fan, whose football is usually seen in ads and news and previews, is that, in an actual match, he or she gets to see players moving at ordinary human speeds, or even standing still, which is disorientating like watching Benny Hill making leisurely, strolling progress towards young women in bikinis. Out of apparent respect for this discomfort, the live TV pictures that the French are now feeding to the world include occasional mood-setting shots of players and crowd that are in slow-motion but are not replays. These are as close as you can get to the TV paradox of live slow-motion, and surely a glimpse of the future.

But Nike's airport and beach TV advertisements still come dangerously close to wrecking the matches in which they appear. Here, a vast multi exchanged for high drama, the opportunity was mostly missed. British TV commercials do not like to start from scratch. British advertisers want to build on existing foundations to put a jolly, subversive spin on material that is already on file. Vauxhall finds old clips; McDonald's parodies Cantona on Eurostar ('to think to' dream to breathe'); Strongbow hopes Johnny Vaughan will give its ancient campaigns a magical ironic upgrade, and Sure asks exactly the same of Jonathan Ross.

(You've spent decades investing in a stencilled tick on a sweaty back you're not going to throw it all away.) And Renault's campaign for the Clio which, since 1991, has been selling small cars on the vague suggestion of incest -has now made its sad, trendy-vicar attempt at modernisation with Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer. British ads have become addicted to self -mockery and pastiche. Before the end of the summer, Tony Adams and Gary Neville will surely be seen lumbering around on a beach to a salsa soundtrack, wearing handkerchiefs on their heads, looking hot, promoting Do-It-All. plete ownership, as it were, of the replays that will be shown in the days and weeks to follow. (Witnesses to a spectacular TV goal are in the position of someone hearing a perfect new pop single on the day of release, and then feeling somehow involved in its progress up the charts.

To miss the original goal is to cheat yourself out of the full replay pleasure.) But the shame is misplaced because even football's most sincere admirers seem only to half-watch, or three-quarters-watch, the game on television. This is a TV oddity: football matches fill even7 screen, yet no one is paying them quite the attention that is paid to, say, Changing Rooms. Football is often amazingly dull ('Weil come back to that game, only if we must, Gary Lineker said in the middle of Chile Austria last Wednesday), but even when not dull, it is still almost background TV perhaps because viewers can count on rising crowd noise levels to alert them to major impending incidents, and perhaps because such incidents are bound to be replayed. In TV football, the heart of the game is not the action, but the action replayed. In a sport national sports manufacturer has collaborated with the competition favourites, and yet the results carry an extraordinarily sunny, seductive casual-ness.

It seems that advertisers can take their football stars in one of two directions: they can be turned into macho, futuristic automatons Adidas or can become charmingly natural slackers. Nike got this right. And while Adidas talks nonsense 'It's about those who love the game enough to do something about it' Nike needs say nothing. Sports manufacturers can ride quite easily in the World Cup slipstream. And Coke can get busy with global-village imagery for a few heady, festive seconds, the Coke-football connection seems inevitable rather than nonsensical.

But others have to work harder to make the soccer link, and they have not done so well. Ford has chosen to ask the peculiar question: 'If Ka made football boots, what would they look (Answer: like football boots.) And ad breaks have been full of footballers looking under-rehearsed and uncomfortable with their Snickers, their Lucozade, their Persil-clean football shirts, and their xUlrika has more to say about her hair than most people do about their love lives or professional ambitions. It is slightly boring' HaiKfLane onUJriks Relax and let your mind do the work AZED No. 1,361 Plain i Computer games Spice World by Campbell Stevenson Across i Wed boy, hrt freely used to become so9 (9) 11 Dry fruit a pal swallows in running water, knocked back (9) 12 Abuse maybe applied to artist for symbolic gesture (5) 13 Open space in town (Spain), wherein horses are trained (5) 14 Vitamin component, very small amount unfinished in container (6) 15 Old woman's gown once shortened, we hear (6) 18 Veldt encampment subsequently evacuated? (4) 19 A certain tastelessness constant in dirty old man? (7) 20 Laplander heads for South after bomb melts ice (5) 23 Dig a nut out with end of implement (5) 24 Toile embellished in yellow colour (7) 25 Swede maybe two over par at long hole, missing second (4) 28 Playwright bringing power to sequel to Claudius? (6) 29 Burble wildly as clumsy oaf (6) 31 Hard wood, fine in tipped club (5) 32 Sweet, hot one with filling afforded by a luncheon voucher (5) 33 Regiment0 Unserviceable one among those decamping hurriedly (9) 34 Alibi originally protecting crooked welsher in East twice (9) Down 1 Mob roughly clad in fibre fustian (7) 2 Affliction of horses? End of suchlike I found in old malaria medicine (7) 3 Part of pedestal standing apart is put up round one (4) 4 Like e.g. Cromwell, cautious about end of Parliament? (5) 5 Rich one splashed out on flowers for thick-skinned creatures (12) 6 Odd keel (teak) in story showing non-standard dialect (12) 7 Chap with smearing of oils is showing excessive sun-bathing? (8) 8 Wherein Tommy's forte lies beer, strong? (8) 9 Old wild ox, e.g.

bull after docking messily (5) 10 A Middle East Queen or Prince (5) 16 Puritanical guy, beak going after what's obscene (8) 17 New beginner must be surrounded by everything that aids stability (8) 21 Fur, me? Perish the thought! (7) 22 Viper confined to jar (7) 25 Smart youngster abandoning rig if loud (5) 26 What can corrupt PC, causing endless sorrow in force? (5) 27 Down with hospital? Shame (5) 30 The ocean waste (4) The Chambers Dictionary (1993) is recommended. AZED No. 1359 Solution notes Prize rules 20 for the first three correct solutions opened. Solutions postmarked no later than Saturday to AZED No. 1,361, The Observer, 119 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3ER.

Sicily's Aeolian Islands Departs 15th September 8 days from just 649 Tfte Seven AeoSlan Islands off the coast of Sicily are one of the "most traditional areas of Italy with a pace and way of life little altered for centuries the charming him 'if PostJno" was filmed here. One of these, Siromboli, Is one of the most active volcanoes In the world offering an almost-dairy spectacular show of lava cascading down into the sea. Our base for 7 nights on dinner, bed and breakfast basis Is me 3-star Arcipelagoj Hotel on the Island of Vuicano. Facilities here include pool, bar, -restaurant, terrace and comfortable rooms with private facilities. The price, from 649, includes; return charter flights from Gatwick, 7 nights half board accommodation, full excursion Itinerary including a sunset visit to seekhe eruption of Strombofl and tour manager throughout; HoStSsrys are organised by Travel Editions lid, 140 Tabernacle Street, LcnSon EC2A 4SD axS are offered subject to availability.

Single rooms available at a supplement Optional insurance is an additional 24. ATOL 3525 A3TA V3120. We all know how footballers relax when they're not in nightclubs or kebab shops -they have to play endless rounds of golf. At this World Cup, it's different. Craig Brown has revealed that his Scottish midfielders spent much of their spare time on the bank of PlayStations the team has taken to France.

While Sony will be pleased with this confirmation that they have the market for burly and indeed Burley blokes sewn up, the company is also pitching for the attention of one group that has, so far, resisted the lure of the console. With the release of Spice World (Sony Computer Entertainment) at the low price of 19.99, it's clearly aiming for pre-teenage girls. And it's likely to succeed. Players can choose a cartoon version of their favourite Spice (including Geri) to guide them through the game's four stages. First, you can remix one of the singles, then rehearse a dance routine for one Spice, choreograph it with the others and, finally, choose the camera angles for a TV show where song and dance come together.

What's fun is that the 'special move' combinations that are so familiar from fighting games where they are used to dismember bad guys can make Posh twirl round, point and kick (more than she does in real life). Like the England team, this game is effective, does its job and doesn't include David Beckham. f's U-L lA; 0 J'B 1 iT jT: 1 0 TT 0 Al rc Tjc 0 fSH HnT Ixj i 'k 'b 1a.I1 I 1L I I jEJ 0 NGrjl A A 1 JO ti 1 1 Is Ft iaImIo ePs I lRJ 0 NA 0 a 1 i Va rLjE I I fp I I For store tietaSs please complete the coupon betow or I JT it 14 15 xin: 19 p0 21 22 23 24 zdr Dzhjjz 28 2 30 5 zzr jl eaH 7ravai BBtionj 0870 73 73 706 TRrag-EPmOKS OBSAEOL To: Travel Editions, 69-85 Tabernacle Street London, EC2A 4BA. Fax: 0171 566 9839. Email: toorstravrfedtkna.eo.uk Piease send ms full details of: Name Across 1.

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Ashworth, Manchester 2 G. Hobbs, Woodford Green, Essex 3 P. R. Nolan, Booterstown, Dublin Address 3 Sicily's Aeolian Islands 3 Hd tmes a rrontr. 05 you dj) trie Oaservsr Ho mad) a wee oo yx tw tne Gsty- 3 Ptes Xi if o.

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