The Observer du lieu suivant : London, Greater London, England • 72

The Observer Review 8 September 1996 SOAP OPERA ByAndyMedhurst 'Becky and Jamie could become a pubescent Percy and Phyllis' lalestf terra anirwdaixmt at the ancient site of EpWaurus. photograph by Allan ntmuss WGIirSGOf jymHoward.was not wmmm to Tfctes. He ftH srote his wrist off tte stage Ten years ago, there was almost no such thing as a credible kid in soaps. The genre was weighted firmly towards characters either deep in mid-life crises or cruising through their twilight years, embalmed in mWk stout Then Neighbours tapped into a hitherto neglected teen market for soaps, and gradually all the British series "began sprouting adolescents of their own. Homegrown soaps have as yet managed to resist the wholesale capitulation to youth of their Australian rivals: mNeighbours anyone over 20 is present only to enact stereotyped heavy parent routines or fill in some time while the technicians inflate another identikit surfer.

Poor Helen Daniels, sole survivor from the beginning of Neighbours and grandmother or great-aunt to what seems like two-thirds of the cast, has been forced to start a degree as a (very) mature student, hanging out with the bronzed crowd at Uni, as if she could find no other way to cadge a few scenes from the youth-crazed producers. Not surprisingly, given its affiliation to the curmudgeonly elderly, Coronation Street has had most difficulty, for far too long its teenage contingent comprised the drab Nicky Tils-ley or the disappointingly infrequent appearances of Tracy Barlow, a diva of the self-pitying flounce but too isolated to make much impact on Weath-erfield's gerontocracy. Tracy's successor has now arrived in the shape of Becky Palmer, daughter of Des Barnes's girlfriend, and she is magnificent a bundle of unresolved hormonal tensions and oedipal angst masked by acerbic Mancunian sourness. Better yet, sparing her the singularity that scuppered Miss BarlowT she has a ready-made foil in Jamie Armstrong, Tricia's son, who has been turning in striking performances of put-on petulance for more than a year. Becky and Jamie have skirmished once or twice already, but the writers must realise their goldmine potential and bring them together more.

With his lugubriousness and her hard-faced cheek they could be a pubescent Percy and Phyllis, and the best new double act the Street's seen in ages. Corrie devotees should not miss Celluloid Icons tonight on Channel 4, where a rum crew (including, it must be said, myself) attempt to explain the Street's appeal to lesbians and gays. The Rovers Return may never look the samp again. here strikes as deep as he has ever done on the unquantifiable value nl numan existence. Although iiit; characters and situations on the whole, skimpily drawn, he does serve up a compelling theatrical brew.

Almost incidentally we are informed that the evidence against Chris's apparent fraud may itself be suspect. Ron Daniels's production is less about what you believe in than whom can you trust. The play, surely one of the year's best, is therefore eminently watchable, eminently enjoyable. Alongside de la four, Douglas Hodge bearded, impulsive, hectically intoned with a Ken Livingstone whine is energetically brilliant as the new broom with insufficient talent to complete his own experimental forays. Odd, after such pure resort to the ancient language of theatre in Epidaurus, to see the Nina-gawa Company's magical, strenuously manufactured Japanese version of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Mermaid (one more week).

Great sensuality and great effects. Great cart: but where's the bloody horse? I'm not all that sorry to say the question is superfluous. actor himself was not immune to the curse of Thebes, falling off the stage at the Greek dress rehearsal and breaking his wrist. (NB Alan, a little more care next time; 'Oidipous' means swollen foot, not broken wrist.) His tenor, trumpet-tongued against adversity, flattened out in the sacred grove, where the platform, and oil drums, were now of shining ornamental steel, the chorus converted from black-garbed, plague-infested citizens to white-robed, gently ululating acolytes and priestesses. Pip Donaghy managed to sustain his line of devious impatience as Creon, while Greg Hicks, his innate cussedness magnificently displayed, came sliding on, thighs tremulous with repentance and as Polynices son of Oedipus.

The battle of these voices was enhanced by the open air, and the scale of relationship between actor and audience created an echo chamber that could absorb the most grotesque delivery and most vivid colouration. The perfect acoustic reverberated with the actor's voice, magically micro-phoned through his mask, an THEATRE Bv Michael Covenev adapt the words of the song by Baddiel and Skinner, theatre's coming home. Or was, last weekend in Epidaurus. the ever astounding stone arena carved on a hillside in the heart of a forest two hours' drive from Athens. The Royal National Theatre opened its production by Peter Hall -his first for the company since 1988 of The Oedipus Plays Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus) by Sophocles in a new translation by Ranjit Bolt; the show joined the RNT repertoire in the Olivier last night Whatever the realities of performance in the ancient theatres, tales of terror and revelation told to a huge audience under the open skies certainly carried a chic connotation unavailable to us today.

That is why Hall's love affair with Epidaurus transcends the camp, or antiquarian. Greek drama, he believes, must be contextu-aBsed again within its optimum conditions. As at the new Globe on Bankside, there is a palpable JO sense of communion between the raw elements of actor, text, open air and audience. This regenerates great drama and renews its participants. Thus Alan Howard's majestic, silver-tongued Oedipus, masked and swaying slowly, came out of the distant trees -huge clumps of broccoli transfigured in the violet haze of deepening night along a 50-yard platform extending into the plague-ridden city of Thebes.

Fire burned in 10 oil drums that denned the circle of action. Ten thousand people held their breath. Who killed the king and brought this curse on Thebes? Oedipus learns the worst and, as he does, the fires are gradually extinguished; until, at the point of his own blindness the blood came not drop by drop but in a shower like rain' the final drums are parched and quiet again. The production danced towards this terrible-climax with a compelling, dreadful rhythm. The chorus containing distinctive voices such as those of Jennie Stoller, Jef-fery Kissoon and Peter Gordon heaved and gesticulated in awesome unison, all masked, tongues flickering in the mouth test.

Do this simple JXS -J- lTXS important property in the theatres of Greece and Rome. Howard's vowels became more elongated as Oedipus awaited death and the sky was shattered with the thunder of Zeus, an electric storm typical of the vicinity and acquiring an intensity quite separate from its technological derivation. Suzanne Bertish (a powerful Jocasta in the first play) took the platform as the Messenger recounting the blind arid banished hero's assumption by the gods. The evening closed on a great peaceful exhalation, a sense of wonder and elemental calm of the sort you read about but rarely experience in the living theatre. A triumph.

Most new plays wither in comparison, but Stephen Poli-akoffs latest, Blinded by the Sun, entering the RNT Cottes-loe in repertoire alongside The Oedipus Plays, is a great stab at a really good topic: the price we now put on pure research in science or the arts. We crave soundbites, results, and the suits are moving in to close down laboratories, undermine vocational ingenuity. There have been famous scientific frauds because of these new pressures, most notably (as public curiosity about celebrity couples. 'Judging by his accent, I would say he's from Galway, and judging from the way he sounds, I would say he's upset about Michael O'Malley, the County Mayo postmaster who sold a 2 million-winning lottery ticket to a man who then lost it on Croaghaun mountain. Tm 64.

The fact that I'm still alive is a Elizabeth Taylor. 'It's not as if he was that outrageous. If. he's trying to rebel, it was pathetic. He didn't even say like everyone An MTV vice-president, commenting oh Liam.

Gallagher's performance at the MTV Video Music Awards. 'Up to now, a tlirt was seen as a taboo in business life this is a mistake. Well-aimed flirt behaviour is one of the best tools for communication at work; Brigitte Boesenkopf business psychologist, who is planning a series of seminars on flirting in the office. 'It will need a lot of money but I know it will work. It's a nice boat trip and to visit an island is so romantic' A spokesman for South Africa 's Ministry of Correctional Services, on plans to convert Robben Island -where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned into a tourist attraction.

'I'm surprised no one has accused Asterix and Obelix of being homo-i sexual. Their inti- macy could be seen as not entirely Alberto Udey-zo. creator of Asterix the Gaul. the RNT programme recounts) that of the widely exposed 'cold fusion' experiments in Utah in 1989. As then, Poliakoff innovative chemist, Christopher (superbly played by Duncan Bell), rushes into press statement before print.

Chris's discovery is a sun battery, unfortunately represented by a boffin's test tube bubbling with sci-fi style green liquid and hitched to a Meccano-tike claw. The play does not hinge, cannot possibly do so, on this feeble device. But then Poliakoff is no more really writing about science than he is about my left foot. The luminous performance by Frances de la Tour as Elinor, the resident genius who cannot explain what she's doing, must suffer, you feel, dramatically, from this fact. But her secrecy is a facet of her integrity, and she pleads the dignity of professional silence as though it were the.

Fifth Amendment. This stance becomes deeply admirable as the play moves towards a resolution at an academic ceremony where Elinor is honoured with a Lifetime Achievement award for not having done anything. Poliakoff, as usual, is bending towards poetic metaphor and DANCE ByJann Parry Haydn Scottish Ballet's autumn tour, marketed as 'Sweat, Baroque and Roll', is filling the gap left by Edinburgh's fiftieth festival: the dance programme notably lacked a classical ballet company (San Francisco Ballet having pulled out of its long-standing invitation). Scottish Ballet provides a cornucopia of steps on point crafted by contemporary choreographers for whom ballet is not a first language. Galina Samsova, the Glasgow-based company's artistic director, has- appointed Mark Baldwin (ex-Rambert, now running his own group) as resident choreographer.

Haydn Pieces, his first creation for small-scale theatres in Scotland, is now being given on larger stages, complete with Marian Bruce's set of towering tree trunks. Meeting and parting in the woodland clearing, the dancers exchange smiles on a late summer's night. Although one girl fails to find a partner before the music ends, she'll not face the winter alone. Baldwin plays with balletic conventions, both in his phrasing to music (three Haydn piano sonatas) and in the dancers' etiquette. The men are bold, pronking like stags, the women flirtatious, prinking and preening on tippy toes.

Grace notes in the music are decorated by handshakes, nods of the head, flicks of the foot. This feyness is the downside of ballet, a relic from an earlier age which doesn't need perpetuating. The upside is the freshness of Baldwin's response to Haydn: seek pieces, each 'persona' (the meaning of mask) still struck with his own curious and appalled identity. Greg Hicks's crustaceous blind prophet Tiresias, led on a chain by a tiny duplicate of himself ground out his bad news with a pelvic undulation, a crown of thorns clamped to his cow's skull mask. Two tiny daughters Ismene and Antigone would lead their desperate father away to Colonus, and we reassembled, after a decent interval, in distant Attica to witness the apotheosis.

Bolt's translation is a fair and decent piece of work, a mix of iambic pentameters (mainly) and hexameters, with some crushing banalities but the compensating virtues of clarity and pace. This is not a text to savour as was Tony Harrison's for Hall's great Oresteia by Aeschylus at the National in 1981, his previous epic in this comparable vein but it does do justice to the Sophoclean sweep and direct poetics. Howard's voice soared and cleaved the night air with a thrilling virtuosity that will have to be tuned down, alas, in the Olivier (a theatre conceived in the spirit of Epidaurus). The SOUNDBITES 'Mr Harding probably paid more for Viahi's left foot than he did to sign Liberal Democrat MP Nick Harvey on co-owner of Chelsea Football Club Matthew Harding's lm donation to Labour. 'I have made it clear from the outset that I think he Clinton took the right decision -not an easy decision, a rather brave John Major on US strikes against Saddam.

'It proves once again the only alliance you can count on is the Anglo-American Lady Thatcher, condemning the EU's lack of support for President Clinton. 'She started initially with floats and one of those boards and then got into the water wings. She let a little bit of air out each day then eventually she cracked Linda Lolly on teaching Norma Major to swim. 'I think it's a shame. People say: "Who's Muffin the Mule?" Just a fool.

And Sooty is a bit tooty. But mention Bill and Ben and everyone says: Bill Wright, 78- who along with his late brother, Ben, inspired the characters on the Royal Mail 's decision not to choose the famous duo for their new series of stamps celebrating five decades of chil-dren 's television. 'I am a stickler for smells, having been cursed with a wretchedly sensitive nose, yet I cannot remember Steven smelling of anything. He never sweated either. It was as if he was pure You should be pleased with your addition.

and innocent both inside and Adtress Sarah Miles on film director Steven Spielberg. 'I am extremely bitter that I have got to leave Scotland to do this. If is my country and it will be extremely hard to Gary Stronach, one of Scotland's 25 professional bagpipe teachers, on moving to America after allegations of noise pollution. Tm sure John Major's a half-decent bloke, but if he wants a clean campaign he's got to enforce Tony Blair. 'Fortunately, I was raised in such a way that I know that family and friends and dogs and flowers and walks are what's important about life, not movies and Gwyneth Paltrow, actress and girlfriend of Brad Pitt, on the unusual, step combination, leaps at angles, wildly wind-! milling arms, phrases that end; with a dancer seemingly su pended in midair.

Many of the lifts, though, were clumsily done urider-rehearsed or impossibly awkward to execute. The piece lacks a heart, probably because Baldwin had not yet got to grips with pas de deux partnering. (His later ballet for the company, Ae Fond Kiss, is more successful.) Robert Cohan's new work. Four Seasons, to Vivaldi's well-known music, marks the phases in a relationship, in a life, through differently shaded duets: the delirium of spring, with pea-green girl and boy side by side; heady summer, with an apres-midi nymph (Anne Christie) distracting a satyr. (Campbell McKenzie) from his self-absorption; an autumnal pair, yoked by a silver pole; and a mature couple (Linda Packer and Robert Hampton), who trust each other in daring swoops and descents across an apparently frozen surface.

Each couple has its own suite of attendants, matching the orchestral colouring behind the solo instruments. Cohan follows the music closely, avoiding such easy devices as movements in canon. The sexes are used in blocks: the men are bounders, leaping in Graham-shapes; the women's pointwork is precipitous, often dizzyingly off-balance as they twist and turn. By the end, the proliferation of steps, following Baldwin's ballet, strains the stamina of audience and dancers alike The piece is made even longer by two acrobats, who herald each season while the stage picture changes behind them. Nor-berto Chiesa's mobile sculpture garden is spare and elegant, his colours and Cohan's lighting ravishing.

The overloaded programme ends with Robert North's mock-macho Troy Gome the sweat'n'roll bit ol the tour, which continues this month to Norwich, Stirling and Aberdeen. TES -J- TES HIES i Do your sums right and you could win this smart new Rover Knightsbridge SE in our free prize draw. Entering is easy. All you need to do is collect four special tokens from The TES, and send them to us with your name and address. You 11 find the first token in the issue dated Friday 13 September, with a further token appearing in each of the following three issues.

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