The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 73

'I'm wearing more diamonds than Uncle Sam has marines' Sue Arnold gets fresh, on page 12 THE WEEK IN REVIEWS 11 The Observer Review 16 February 1997 way I go on and on about your legislature and my dog's flea problem? Forgive me if I digress from the subject of your wild beauty. And please forgive me if I stare too directly at you in your nothing, but I have never seen anyone who looks so elegant while wolfing down steamed cod. Please, oh please, be my love or I won't know what to do'. I was now. gibbering like a man caught voting Tory.

But in my panic to escape I hit 'Send' instead of 'Clear form'. So if you come across someone called Hortense do not under any circumstances mention the legislature. Or my name. featuring sparse abstracts from the Miro school and the fissure mirror. Photograph by Gavin Smith THE INTERNET By John Naughton 'I can imagine slathering you all over with steamed cod' John Kenneth Galbraith, in The Affluent Society, wrote: It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of It was in this spirit that your correspondent approached the orgy of idiocy which marked Valentine's Day on the Net.

A veritable blizzard of 'special' Websites had sprung up to exploit this daft anniversary. On closer inspection, most for example, FlowerNet, ChocNet and PerfumeNet (for links see m5m.co.ukhelpvalentiii) -turned out to have straightforward commercial motives. Chadwyck-Healey's love poems on the Internet' (valentme.chadw'ck.co.uk) had a slightly less hucksterish air. The page invited you to pick a wordfromapoem-and specify the name and gender of apoet -and it would then search through a database to find something which matched. Being an awkward cuss, I wanted somethingby Yeats, but the database knew nothing of him.

The motivation behind the site, of course, is to highlight Chadwyck-Healey's literature On Line' service, which gives access to thousands of poems (including presumably Yeats) for a fee. But why be restricted to expressing yourself through boring old out-of-copyright poets? For some reason, an outfit called the Nando Times (www.nando.neti toysicyrano. html) offered the services of Cyrano, its computer-driven scribe. All you had to do was fill in a form which would give Cyrano enough info to compose an elegant card on your behalf. Various types of missive were offered steamy, indecisive, surreal, desperate, intellectual, poetic and regretful.

Cyrano would also add visuals and sound effects (for example, the noise made by a 357 Magnum). Among the "items of information sought by Cyrano were the names of the romantically-linked parries (I did not reveal mine); an adjective describing the relationship said); ditto for the beloved (red-hot); her favourite food (steamed cod)-rher most attractive physical feature (breasts) and the item of clothingl most liked her to wear (nothing). It also asked me to specify a noun (I chose legislature' to be perverse). Cyrano then composed a suitable note. Palpitating with anxiety, I asked for a 'steamy' card.

"Dearest Hortense', came the result, '1 can imagine myself kissing your red-hot body and slathering j-ou with various oils and steamed cod. Your breasts are my anchor in the stormy sea of life; I wonder how I ever made it through a day without you. Please meet me tomorrow dressed in your nothing, bring your legislature, and we will celebrate our wild love together. Yours romantically, Mountstuart' 'Slathering." Shome mish-take here, 1 thought, and requested the 'surreal' version. 'Dear Hortense', it burbled, 'You are a legislature.

Remember the time I saw a seagull fly out of your breasts? You comforted me with your steamed cod until I thought I spied your nothing draped across the equator. But the asphalt still flickers with our wild love'. By this stage I was getting desperate, so 1 clicked on that. My darling I found I had written, 1 am your red hot servant So you don't like the somewhere in the Rhone valley. The atmosphere of stuffy obsequy was overpowering.

At the next table to me a florid man ate every dish he was served with his hands. The menus arrived and we scannedthrough them several times. But somehow the dishes all looked strangely inert on the page. There was cod, there was turbot, there was duck; they were served with this and that; the only lift came from something egregiously titled 'piece' of beef braised with a rich glaze. That and the grilled calf liver steak with foie gras and bitter-sweet onion tart.

Really you couldn't invent a more peculiarly abusive dish, unless someone brought a child to the table and beat it while you ate. Possibly with an eggwhisk. I fetched up having the ter-rine to start, and the rabbit to follow. My companion skipped the starterand ordered the cod, extra spinach and a third variety of water. We piloted the spaceship through a couple of asteroid belts and then my starter duly arrived.

It looked quite shockingly like a pot plant viewed from the air the body of the terrine being the pot, the appropriate garnish the plant and tasted fantastic. reservation but hell! It really didn't matter, this was the night of the England-Italy game, and you could have block-booked an entire Orange lodge into just about any trendy London restaurant. Behind the reception desk there was a large, photographic portrait of Gazza hinv self, staring at us through the filiform struts of an egg whisk. I thought nothing of it at the time. We mounted the spiral staircase, the walls of which were so deliriously rough-textured as to be almost fluffy, and were, met at the top by the maitre d'.

This individual combined impeccable manners with educated sangfroid so well, that it was difficult to imagine how he'd been trained. Seminars given by Jeeves at the Ecole normale superieure -perhaps. The bridge of the Enterprise lay before us; an expanse of blue carpet, bounded to the right by a futuristic bar area -the bar itself studded with blue roundels, creating a dalek effect; and to the left by meticulously laid, white-coped tables stretching to the far wall. This was laterally bisected by a fissure of mirror, above which hung a selection of sparse THEATRE By Michael Coveney Tough Taffs 'I never felt Welsh' till I went to Thus Marge, a resolute biddy in Peter Gill's Cardiff East (Cottesloe, Royal National Theatre), a stirring new drama of everyday working class folk that tackles nationalism, deprivation, do-mestic violence and loss of nerve and faith, over 24 hours. Cardiff EastEnders, indeed.

Less lyrical and eloquently structured than Under Milk Wood, Gill's play nonetheless shares with Dylan Thomas's radio poem a relish of quirky, individual voices blending under the same darkling sky. But whereas a recent RNT Milk Wood revival edly overdosed on theatrical trimmings in Llareggub, Gill provides bugger-all stage setting: Alison Chatty's elegant, water-colourist backdrop of. houses and open scrubland marks off a bare, square acting area. Paradoxically, this mini-malist, puritanical approach typical of Gill's best years at the Royal Court in the Seventies carries considerable theatrical charge. His actors, as ever, are hand-picked and, although unevenly served by his text (Karl Johnson, Elizabeth Estensen and Windsor Davies, all front-line players, have a lean time of it), are locked in the organic unity of his production.

You can reach out and touch the dedicated ensemble atmosphere, a rare commodity these days. The piece is a sequel to, and expansion of, Gill's Small Change (1976), a much tighter Cardiff idyll for two mothers, two sons and four chairs. That delicate masterpiece contained an elegy for lost love between the boys. Here, the two boys are teenagers and starting out. They get their kit off in bed together.

A mother mourns the loss of a small son. Another, older son, lopes frantically around town in thrall to a single mother and her baby. An old woman takes the Catholic Times and the betting orders. The pointillism of the first act yields two concerted ensemble episodes in the second: a company babble of foreign languages and Welsh, indicating the ethnic mix; and a busy night of mimed bingo, snooker, skittles and karaoke down the club. A litany of answers to quiz questions includes Keir Hardie, Barry John and Tessie O'Shea.

As the details, history and character of the place are filled in, the boiling face-down between the squabbling couple (Melanie Hill and Mark Lewis Jones, prowling like a pent-up zombie, both superb), and the nature of the boys' conspiracy, intensify. And coming through the middle like a burst geyser is the ex-priest Michael's resume of religious zeal, disillusion and anger. Kenneth Cranham delivers this extraordinary and personal (to Gill?) confession with a disturbing and irresistible power. As an actor, Ayub Khan-Din appeared in small parts in the Hanif Kureishi films, My Beautiful Launderette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. As a writer, his slice of Seventies Salford life in a mixed I don't think I've ever had such creamy liver before, or toothsome strips of bacon.

I stuck on beer to drink. The wine list was all right, but my companion wasn't drinking and with the exception of something called II Fiasco 1995 Solo Bonny Doon, the wines were all too sensible to drink alone. My Dos Equis had just arrived when the main courses hove into view, ported by one of the ochre-shirted waiters I kid you not. My companion's cod was straightforward enough, but my rabbit was out there: slices of the beast fanned out on the plate, with a single leg poised upright, as if it had been arrested in the act of diving into the plate. I did my best with it.

The meat was beautifully cooked, as was the accompanying spinach and a side order of mashed potato saturated with butter, but the terrine had done for me already. My companion absorbed his cod in silence, only pausing once, to observe in connection with another establishment how absurd it was to serve bottled mineral water with ice cubes made from tap water. What a guy. There was no debate about ward, Agnes (Gillian Kearney), is wooed by a young blade, Horace (Daniel Betts), who delivers a blow-by-blow account of his campaign to Arnolphe, thereby stoking the fires of unbridled lust and fervour in the smugly moralising cuckold. The psychological plotting is a marvel in Moliere's first hit, but Bowles is not sufficiently lunatic or driven to make his situation terrifying or hilarious.

As You Like It at the Notr tingham Playhouse, directed by David POuntney, is strikingly set by Opera designer Marie-Jeanne Lecca in a curvilinear white tundra. Photographic projections of rutted lanes and agricultural vistas imply the journey to Arden, where the banished Duke and his band of New Age travellers mix with industrial farm workers in white coats and yellow wellies against a changing colour scheme of purples, lemons and limes. desert it had to be the 'Jaffa Cake' pudding. This didn't disappoint it looked exactly like an enormous Jaffa Cake. Although the orange goo in the middle was more on the pureed side, than the gelatinous.

Not only that, the maitre d' also informed us that they did one exactly like a giant Bourbon biscuit reason enough to go back to City Rhodes, I'd say. The bill came to 67.11. Not too bad, considering it included 12.5 per cent deserved service -they even come and shave the crumbs off your table between courses. I'm well aware that recognising me coming into your restaurant must put a crimp on any maitre d's evening, which was why; in the circs, I didn't mind a bit of flimflam from him about how busy the joint had been the night before, especially since he dobbed me remarkable old grappa into the bargain. In truth I wish England-Italy fixtures were scheduled for every night of the week.

-It woulcLmake all of us fans or otherwise very happy, and sooner or later England would be bound to win. City Rhodes, 1 New Street Square, London EC4A 3JB; Tel: 0171.5831313, Fax: 0171 3531662 The court itself is a capitalist stronghold, where Orlando (Stephen Mangan) has been 'trained like a peasant' in a gym. Mark Payton is a notable Oliver, finally lovestruck and rolling nude ('clubs cannot part them') with Trilby James's brusque little Celia. Cate Hauler's Rosalind, transformed not' only as Ganymede in bike leathers, but also as Hymen in green ribbons at the end, comes alive when seized with the erotic rush of the 'marriage' scene, and when planning the multiple resolution; the chanting of vows really is screamed like the howling of Irish wolves against the moon. Otherwise, she hides too much from the audience, speaks too much to the wings, disallows our participation! Shaun Prendergast plays Touchstone, wearisomely, as Eric Morecambe.

The songs by Thomas Gray are lovely. abstracts which reminded me of Miros, with all the interesting bits taken out. We were seated on. the banquette that ran along this wall. It was rather beautifully covered with dog-tooth check fabric, engendering the bizarre sensation that you were sitting on the crotch of some gargantuan suit.

From here, I had a Kirk's-eye view of a number of nodulous protrusions in the ceiling, housings for extractor fans. The same sort of lumps had pissed me off no end when 1 ate at Coast, but here they didn't obtrude, possibly because the rest of the space was lightly tenanted, with just the few David Mellor look-alikes florid face, combination tie and shirts dotted about. The maitre d' materialised, and in tones reminiscent of a superior pet mortician asked not what we would like to drink, but could he arrange an aperitif for us. I ordered a dry martini and my companion two types of water, Looking around the room and contemplating the relationship between server and served, the only occasion I've ever dined in a Michelm three-star restaurant came to mind. This over-upholstered hostelry was Backpay by Tamantha Ham-merschlag, neatly directed by Mary Peate, is a series of contrived encounters between a white girl and the family of Captain KirtcVeye view of City Rhodes RESTAURANTS JT pparently Gary Rhodes has been having some II kind of.

a brouhaha II over the lease for his new outlet uity iRhodes. There's a problem as to a restaurant occupying this ziggurat of concrete in the very core of Hol-born. Really it's pretty unfair, because City Rhodes isn't a restaurant per se; rather, it's what. a restaurant might be like if it had to do service occasionally as the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. From outside, it looks as if the vertical, textured louvres have been removed and the workers forced to share desks, so heavily corporate is the facade.

Lower-case signage dominates, as does a dolmen with the menu stuck in its side. Once inside the de rigueur outward-opening plate-glass door, we were confronted with one of those pseudo-reception desks to heaven. The black-suited angel had no record of our marriage, East is East (Theatre Royal, Stratford East), has justly made his reputation as someone opening up new territory for the British stage with the verve and delight of his Salfordian predecessors, Shelagh Delaney and Mike Leigh. The play, produced by Tamasha and the Birmingham Rep, enjoyed a sold-out run at the Theatre Upstairs (Ambassadors) last year and returns to the Royal Court's temporary main stage (Duke of York's) in June. But it will never find a more engaged, animated or wonderfully responsive audience than at Stratford.

The audience yelps first with pleasure, then with shocked sympathy, as seven grown-up children in the terraced house lay mutiny, in different ways, against the violent tyranny of their Muslim father (Nasser Memarzia), a chip-shop owner who came to this country from Pakistan in 1935. Their white mother (Linda Bassett) is treated as a doormat and a punchbag. Not unreasonably, as he lays down the law over the arranged marriage of his eldest sons a process culminating in a scene of high farce and disaster she asks him: 'if Pakistani women are so great, why didn't you marry begins with mJ? Wil1 ifl her black nurse in the new post-apartheid dispensation. Cockroach, Who? by Jess Walters, directed by Caroline Hall and notably well designed by Tom Piper, counterpoints three girlie teenagers smoking and spitting on a south London estate with three old bags drinking tea in their hideous launderette. This work is jejune and bumpy.

But at least blood courses through its veins, which is more than can be said for Peter Hall's polite revival of Moliere's The School for Wives (Piccadilly), prettily designed by John Gunter and newly translated by Ranjit Bolt in vulgar rhyming couplets. Peter Bowles plays the obsessive Arnolphe with considerable reactive skill but a complete lack of convulsion. Eric Sykes potters around deliciously as a servant, staggering belatedly as he steps off the stage revolve, losing his own fingers in his jacket buttonholes and gloriously translating himself, for no apparent reason, into a headless chicken. Even more mysteriously, he plucks at his pants from behind and coughs twice, explaining as he does so that he has no choice; Moliere made everything rhyme. Arnolphe's imprisoned Miriam Karlin in Cockroach, Who? Photograph by Neil Libbert Meanwhile, the Royal Court is over-generously giving housQ room at the Ambassadors to prentice plays from its Young Writers Festival.

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