The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 71

19g3 Rh6 20 Kgl Bg4 21 I(g2 Qe5! White is indeed in terrible trouble' All the smartest moves in Jon Speelman's chess column, on page 12 11 The Observer fteview 20 October 1996 wMte 'Art' is a minimalist comedy. Plenty of gags but only one joke they all dislike each other's wivesfiancees), so they can have The Big Row. A neat visual gag ties things up. Curtain. This quite arbitrary proce dure must account for the weird detachment of the performances.

Courtenay does an un-punctuated sing-song throughout (think of Derek Nimmo in Just a Minute), while Finney enjoys himself heartily with a bluff and burly read-through. Stott, the diffident, appeasing man-in-the middle, corners any comedy that happens to be around. This is heavy casting for a dramatic idea whose ideal home is half an hour of Seinfeld. Mark Thompson's set, by contrast is a noble thing, a soaring off-white interior, very mini-maL very abstract, and deserving much more substantial business. At the Royal Court in Exile, Jez Butterworth's Mojo is revived a year after its premier.

It's a period piece, set in a Soho club at the dawn of rock'n'roll, and concerns a vicious dispute over who controls a rising star. Who, on stage, will turn out the biggest bastard is the crux But story and drama don't win your attention half so much as the formal qualities of this vivid theatrical construction: the way it sticks firmly to realistic rules (no character given a free-standing monologue); the way nobody sits down; the way, above all, it lives on spiel. There's off-stage unpleasantness the club-owner has been cut in half by a rival always threatening to come on stage. There's the nervy, pill-popping, niggling machismo of the club's young staff as they wait for the showdown. But tins air of violence is there chiefly to power Mojo's rattling verbal riffs, motormouthed crescendos of speed and volume, and hysterical ensemble polyphonies.

The dialogue is studded with formal-demotic turns of speech ('Anything that makes polite young ladies come their cocoa in public is worth taking a look at'). Sequences accumulate out of repetition plus elaboration, and build to a punchline. 'Suffering Jesus, they sawed him in 'Poor fucking 'You sweat your life away "Poor fucking man' 'Into a bucket 'Poor fucking 'Fucking mess 'Poor fucking Wake up, have breakfast. They saw you in he just sings the songs, and the odd beauty of his voice Stevie Wonder crossed with Mick Huckoall and a bag of helium shines through. Even the easy-to-mock soul-boy spirituality now seems appealing.

Kay is just as lad-dish as his peers he contributed a song to the Euro 96 compilation album -but, while the Lightning Seeds, Black Grape et al traded on patriotism and thuggishness, Kay sang: 'I am the wind 1 am the sea 1 am the sun 1 can be Use the There is still something a little gauche about his prophesies of impending eco-doom f'Ohnowthereisno sound For we all live underground'), but the noisy self-righteousness has gone. And if his behefs are still half-formed and contradictory Without Moving' is, he says, 'about breaking the ing speed limit cos it's too ing low'), at least he admits it now. And he does have catalytic converters on all of his cars. The only really objectionable thing left about Jamiroquai is Kay's weird and enduring love of the didgeridoo, that point-lessly large Aboriginal instrument which sounds like a dinosaur farting. It is wheeled on twice during this show, and both times the turbo-charged groove slips into neutral.

It can't exactly be easy to carry around, so why on earth do they bother? One can only imagine Kay uses it to smoke dope. THEATRE By Tom Lubbock f1odern art, right? 1 Load of rubbish, 111 ii ris1 Emperor's I II new clotnes' right? I I I Conspiracy of af-J fectation, right? Heard all that before? On and off, since about 1900? So hear it again. Art is a prize-winning new play by Yasmina Reza (on at Wyndham's) translated from the French by Christopher Hampton. In it a respectable bourgeois buys a picture. But here's the thing: if just white.

White on white. With some streaks of off-white. Andhepaid 200,000 francs for it. And he actually claims to like it Thus the fun begins and so it pretty much continues. Tom Courtenay is the earnest buyer and Albert Finney his friend, a man of downright common sense.

Manys the moment they stand before the offending object one in absorbed appreciation, the other in stark disbelief- and wait for the laughs to roll If this sort of painting is, to you, the most risible thing in the world, then Art is your kind of comedy. If, though, you feel the joke has lost some ofits sparkle in the course of the century, then the play's unstinting incitements to guffaw at the pic-ture, and anyone who could admire it make this 90-minute one-acter into a weary while. There are of course things to be said in favour of minimalist abstraction, and things to be said against it. We don't hear either. We never learn why Courtenay' character likes the work.

We have only the Finney fellow's blunt certainty that it is 'shit' and his conviction that an old mate has 'let himself be ripped off by modern art' When a third old friend (Ken Stott) gets roped in as uneasy mediator, you begin to wonder why it is such a bone of contention anyway. And will the white canvas jokes never end? About half-way, Art takes stock and suddenly decides that, more than a skit on 'modern art', it's going to get a bit serious and become a play about the death of friendship. It then finds it has established no characters or relationships, and hastily fits out the threesome with some background life (eg to lap up in the coming 233 weeks. Emmerdale has rediscovered its ability to grip after a lame patch A few tiresome characters have been shed (sap-head Sam. bitchy snot Faye, chef-with-a-past Sean) and a climax is brewing about local capitalist Frank Tate's plans to build a new road smack through Emmerdale Farm.

More symbolism here, since the Sugdens at the Farm stand for the last vestiges of the way this soap used to be (gentle, welhe-wear-ing. dull) while the baronial Frank is the figurehead of modernity, his road scheme a threat to kick the village finally into the world of Nineties soap. Frank's family figures centrally in all the tastiest plots -wife Kim presently showing a spiritedly selfish indifference to new baby, daughter Zoe realising she's been taken for a ride by her snotty girlfriend Susie; son Chris a bastard in a wheelchair, proving you don't have to be PC about a disabled character. The backward looking opposite of the Tates are the Dingles, Emmerdale' light-relief yokel underclass who last week acquired a new cousin, Marlon but if you think Marlon Dingle's a silly name, you should check out Neighbours which boasts not only Toadfish Rebec-chi but also Melissa Drenth. Australians.

eh Sophie's Choice. about pitting, but he's game for a ably enough, but it requires an audience much slower on the uptake than any audience is today. We learn that the killer was heard singing a certain song at the time of the crime. We know he's going to sing it again. We don't really expect him to do it within moments of his first appearance.

The Haymarket production has only one point of curiosity: Jason Donovan as the killer, Danny. It is certainly 'a role' -the role that makes the play, this sinister-sweet character who insinuates himself into the affection of the tyrannous Mrs Bramson (Rosemary Leach) with his slimy boyish charm, and you can see distantly what the role might be through Dono intact Louy reveals about modern women is even more riveting. As soon as the story broke, women worldwide wrote in asking if there was any chance they could have some of the Iceman's DNA by return post. They felt a strange rapport with him, they said. They needed to be close to him.

Some went even further. Could they have some of Iceman's sperm so that they could bear his child and produce the nearest the best of Jay Kqy, lead soger of JanrograL POP By Sam Taylor Smoke a spliff and save the planet Jay Kay shows you how The City Hall in Newcastle has many virtues. It is comfortably seated, securely patrolled and conveniently located. It is, however, no place for a gig especially one by skunk-funk band Jamiroquai. As Jay Kay, the band's singer, put it last Tuesday: Ton can't dance, you can't have a drink, you can't have a spliff.

I mean, what's the point of a Jamiroquai gig if you can't do that, eh? No point at all' Well, it's not quite that desperate. Despite the restrictions, the nine Londoners of Jamiroquai bring a vibe not unlike the effect of some decent class-B drugs: the feeling that yeah, the world may be screwed up but hey, we can change it if we alL Eke, dance to the music. We can heal the ozone layer and drive fast cars and shag our cosmic soulmate until smoke comes from our ears. If Jamiroquai sound like a bundle of mad contradictions, that's because Jay Kay, the songwriting and emotional force behind the band, is still trying to work it all out while adjusting to the pressures and temptations of fame. He's a strange cove: a short, skinny white 28-year-old who insists on wearing large, dark, furry hats, giving him the appearance of a mutant mushroom.

He sings like a black man. owns eight cars and donates seven per cent of his merchandising profits to Greenpeace. To his critics, he's just a cosmic comedy act from Ealing: to his fans, he's a kind of pre-miHen-nial messiah. The son of jazz singer Karen Kay. Jason grew up listening to Stevie Wonder and Roy Ayers albums, and decided to form a band in the same jazz-funk -soul mould.

Jamiroquai exploded on to the scene in 1993 their debut album. Emergency On Planet Earth, was an instant No 1. and Kay's peculiar little face and figure became ubiquitous. Then Britpop happened, and suddenly Jamiroquai were on their own: everyone else was either bashing out Beatles runes on guitars or making repetitive noises with synthesisers and samplers, while they were still jamming on a Seventies groove. Jarniroquai went out of fashion and their second album.

The Return of the Space Cowboy, was a relative flop. Jason Kay seemed to become paranoid and stopped talking to the press. That they're back now. atop the charts with their best album to date. Travelling Without Moving, is testament to Kay's indestructible self-belief.

He thinks he's fantastic. You can see it in the funny little dance moves he makes on stage, like a sprite with ants in his pants. You can hear it in his berween-song jokes. Above all, you can feel it in the effortless swank of new songs like 'Alright" and Insanity''. Prior to this album, there was always something a little strained about Jamiroquai; they were trying too hard to be authentic.

Now they sound sleeker, more modern, more sure of themselves, and the feeling is infectious. Kay's voice has settled down, too. He used to be a bit of a showboater. scatting and octave-leaping just to prove that he could. Once in a while, this was OK.

but it became a kind of nervous tic. The last time I saw Jamiroquai play, in Brixton two years ago, Kay seemed to treat the songs as blank canvases upon which he could spray his expressiomstic notes. It was horrible, like watching someone drown in their own talent. At Newcastle. RADIO For one thing it's an indictment, not a trial.

The criminals do not appear, nor are there any famous faces to impersonate. The witnesses are people we don't know: a UN observer, a colonel, a conscript. Their stories are everything. This makes the form even more puzzling. What exactly is added by those 'authentic' touches-headphones that don't work, the stumbling over words? Why shouldn't the events themselves be dramatised? Is it just the stage's love of trials, the chance to play forensic formality against the massacres described? Or is the stage's self-denial an attempt to honour the legal fiction that only in court can the truth be established? in traditional music.

We heard terrifyingly deep tantric chants sung by Tibetan Buddhist monks. There was also a man from Tuva, a small republic south-west of Siberia, who claims to have the world's lowest voice. The other was Classic FM's Russian Revelation series which had the first ever recording of Richter's musical debut in Moscow in 1946. Scoop or what? Hear RbcokIs Arnold laugh, photograph by Neil Libbert van's portrayal. But from his Act I entrance, preposterous in a bellhop's uniform, there is nothing but confusion.

It's like Buttons, stoned. Other characters remark with suspicion that Danny seems always to be acting. Nice idea. But Donovan's Welsh accent will, I hope, be preserved for scholarship in the National Sound Archive. Tricycle Theatre does a speciality in trials and atrocities.

It's done the Scott inquiry and Nuremberg. Now there's Srebrenica (until next Saturday), extracts of the Bosnian war crimes tribunal in The Hague. It runs just over an hour. If one can judge these edited reconstructions as drama, this is a far more low-key affair. thing, presumably, to the Abominable Snowman.

No, thank God, they couldn't. The fellow's vital organs were all intact but after 5,000 years in a glacier, the sperm weren't exactly fresh. So that's drama and documentary covered. There's just time to mention two outstanding music programmes on radio last week. Sounds From Within (Radio 3) explored the unusual voice techniques used at Albert Finney: He may not know much The technique sometimes becomes'too transparent.

Any speech can be punctuated with a jabbing antiphonal refrain to make a ding-dong rhythm. But the cast keep everything on its pins. There is no end of high-spirited savagery one character, shot point-blank in the head, struts around crossly for two minutes, then drops. Paul Reynolds's budding psychopath is memorably alarming. Natty stagecraft: now it looks like Mojo, but once it looked like Night Must Fall, Emlyn Williams's old thriller, Both plays have a severed-head-in-box tease, and both have a baby-faced psycho; otherwise the comparison is cruel.

The 1935 machinery clunks along agree shorthand symbols like the Michelin Guide: crossed exclamation marks for humour, crossed spades for plots etc. Radio drama doesn't have to be in play form, you know. The most dramatic series for ages finished last week, but there's still a chance to hear the repeat this afternoon. Bodies of Evidence (Radio 4), presented by Tony Robinson, has been examining a pair of perfectly preserved corpses to find out more about their lifestyles. The first was a found in a Cheshire peat bog the second a man trapped in an Alpine glacier.

I suppose you could argue that it would have been better on television with all its full frontal sensationalism. It was certainly sensational stuff. Bogman, as it turned out, was stripped, drugged, flogged, knifed and garotted before he ended up in his peat coffin. How do we know this? From among other things, a new scientific technique called electron spin resonance spectroscopy which can determine, for instance, whether the remains of cereal found in Bogman's intestines was Swiss muesli or rich Dundee fruitcake. It is this sort of serious scientific discussion from resonance spectrosco-pists, archaeolobotanists and paleontologists that radio without the distraction of melodramatic pictures does so well.

For the record, it was cake inside Bogman's stomach and, what's more, the sort of cake given to people about to be sacrificed. There were also traces of mistletoe pollen in there. Mistletoe was used by Druids in much the same way as magic mushrooms, suggesting that he was also drugged before they put the boot in. What the bits and pieces inside Iceman's pockets revealed about life in the mountains 5,000 years ago is fascinating. He had pretty much everything on him in the way of Boy Scout gadgets, apart from a Swiss army knife.

But what the discovery of the perfectly runRig SOAP OPERA By Andy Medhurst Beaieson wheels It's east to spot when a soap feels cocky about a storyline it jettisons the interplay of multiple plots upon which the genre usually depends and gives us a whole episode of just one. So last Wednesday. Brook-side delivered a steamy four-hander featuring only the Simpsons, a shoot-out of snarling recriminations as the parents squared up to their incestuous kids: and a day later EastEnders brought its Cindy versus lan saga to an end by giving it the full half-hour These were 30 minutes of delectably flagrant melodrama, as Cindy raced to snatch her children before Ian. limping wounded from his hospital bed and aided by both his sour-faced mother and the sadistic Mitchell brothers, could get tc them first. She took her mo sons but reaching her daughter meant risking her own safety, a Cockney Sophie's Choice which she tearfully resolved in favour of self-preservation Those attuned to soap symbolism will know it couldn't have been otherwise, since the abandoned daughter is Lucy Beale.

named after her great -grandmother Lou Beale. the original linchpin matriarch of the soap, and Albert Square without some trace of Lou is unthinkable. Cindy fled away under the Channel the Eurostar making its soap debut leaving us a juicy aftermath Sndy and laic Embroiled in a Cockney Long Distance This is a thankless job. Short of reducing the print to the size they use on sauce bottles, there's absolutely no way I can do justice to all the programmes I heard last week which deserve laurels. Bear this in mind please, Bert Coules.

Yes, I got your angry e-mail the other day and you're absolutely right: I do neglect radio drama not because I dislike hstening to plays but because if I don't listen to all twelve-and-a-half hours' worth of single dramas, series, serials and children's stuff put out every week on Radio 3 and Radio 4 (and that's the minimum), then I'm not being fair. I should be selective of course, but how can you tell just from the listings that, say, Angry Old Men by David Ren-wick was going to be so good and Women In Love such a drag. You can't. You have to listen to the beginning at least and here's my problem. It's a personal one.

If I start something reading a book, watch-inga film, knitting a sock no matter how awful it is, I have to get to the end This has to get better, I think, as yet another wooden, cliche-ridden play about life in an immigrant community or life in a student squat or life with a moody policeman unfolds usually in the weekday afternoon drama slot. Chances are, it doesn't. And then again even if I did listen to them all and they proved as hilarious as Tales from the Bog End Road by-Jenny McDade last Sunday, or as delightful as The Mysteries of Udolpho the same afternoon, or as funny and touching and original as Angry Old Men the following evening, I'd run into the old problem space. I see I'm going to have to invent Bert of Runri all our stores long distance Beverley Bfaefcfcsra Began 4Hy Edmunds ftuMge Casnocfc Cfceimsfcrtf Cofcitsster Dwteaster Mmbf Halifax Ml Ipswich Kings Lynn Lancaster LletifleW Lincoln Lobhofaagtt Uwfcstoft Mansfield Homm OWram fttertawgl Long Distance The Best of Runrig 17 tracks including the new hit single 'Rhythm of My Heart' on cassette and CD. Also available as a limited edition CD including a bonus CD of 7 rare tracks.

Runrig on tour in November and December. ill YEAR 9394 95 WakelieW Wardiro Wtoaater Wis.