The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 79

the Observer review Hfl UIUC'J Dtl HOW jfozft Prrv applauds the energetic new approach of the relaunched rambert and its new director Christopher Bruce Michael Coveney on David Edgar's bold new play, Patricia Hodge's prime and ANTHONY HOPKINS' UNCLE VANYA and resemble instead a community of kibbutz members playing formation strip-poker on chairs. The cast of 19 revels in Naharin's hymn to individuality in the midst of conformity; but the good humour has a bitter after-taste once you realise that, for a Jewish-Is raeli choreographer, the sight of a pile of clothes left by people obliged to remove them is no joke. The piece gives an edge to a well-balanced programme that now tours the country, with no dates yet scheduled for London. Dance Umbrella highlighted the difference between new European and American contemporary dance by juxtaposing Stephen Petronio's company from New York and jose Besprosvany's Brussels-based group. Petronio's dancers have an out-going, maximalist energy, even when they are confronting death and disintegration in Petronio's recent piece, The King is Dead.

He starts with his own delicate Gorecki's music is pregnant with ominous, pounding rhythms. Bruce's response can seem overwrought, the dancers' every sinew strained to convey the life-and-death significance of this invented ritual. But the piece is more personal and deeply felt than the recent works Bruce has created for other companies, which should bode well for Rambert's future. Both Kylian's Petite Mort and Naharin's Axioma 7 set extravagant, sometimes brutal movement to sweet-tempered music, by Mozart and Bach respectively. Petite Mort plays perversely with the conventions of classical1 ballet Mill the new, improved, family-size Rambert Dance Company capture the mainstream audiences its publicity material (displaying sleek, barely-clad bodies) is designed to attract? Audiences for RamberFs relaunch at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre last weekend seemed happy with what they got, especially in the more dancey of the two programmes, with works by Jiri Kylian, Ohad Naharin and Christopher Bruce, the company's new director.

Though there are marked similarities between all three choreographers, the varied programme included sardonic humour and wild abandon as well as technical virtuosity. The new Rambert sets out to be hot and sexy where the old one, under Richard Alston's direction, was cool and contained. The enlarged company (25 dancers instead of 16) reaches out beyond the footlights to engage pur emotions and admiration. Whether this direct approach really is an improvement on Alston's more reticent Rambert is a matter of taste. Dance companies are not like football teams, whose goal-scoring rate is supposed to be improved by a change of manager.

Bruce's taste is for emotionally charged works which portray the dancers as a community of 'real' people. His own recent creation, Crossing, to Gorecki's String Quartet No 2, Quasi una Fantasia, is a rite of passage a paradigm, perhaps, for the new Rambert company in which the older generation gives way to the vigorous young one, in a ceremony witnessed by the rest of the group. By making the community a tribal one, Bruce is able to use a wide span of expressive movement. In her opening solo, Jacqueline Jones, alert as an animal entering a forest clearing, is a girl entering womanhood, left alone in a sacred circle to explore her sexuality. Her earth-bound lunges and ecstatic, twisting leaps are later shared by Ted Stoffer as her fellow initiate.

He outjumps his male companions in an impressive display of virility to claim his bride. Their still-to-be-resolvcd relationship is contrasted with a poignant duct for Elizabeth Old and Laurent Cavnnna as the mature pair, who bow out gracefully to their successors. avid Edgar's powerful, urgent land brilliant new play for the RSC in Stratford-upon-Avon, is the first serious response in the British theatre to the tragedy of Sarajevo. Pentecost is set in a ruined Byzantine church border of a south-east European country' where a local museum curator, Gabriella Pecs Qan Ravens), and a British art historian, Oliver Davenport (Charles Kay), consider the possibility that a partially revealed fresco is a lost masterpiece, 'the biggest art find since the unearthing of Pompeii'. Gabrieila's fractured English, with its imperfect grasp of idiom, and Oliver's suavely inflected terms of artistic endowment mark out the wider analogous framework: how we define ourselves in our language, and how works of art (and the possession of them) can either represent or undermine our political aspirations.

Sarajevo, where caravan trails converged, religions mingled, and learning prospered, is today an obscene symbol of the new Europe. Desecration and erasure are as much a legacy of the 1989 'turnaround' and the expiry of Marxism as are the rise of nationalism and the influx of Western materialism. But change also bestows new layers, new cultures. Edgar's play is a wittily sustained attempt to discuss this phenomenon, and to investigate, in Stoppardiah style, the treacheries of language itself. Is restoration, in this case, the same as conservation? Or is it a form of destruction? The debate is joined by an American professor, Leo Katz (Linal Haft), a creation worthy of Edgar's fellow Brummagen David Lodge, whom Oliver describes as an art historian 'in the sense that Pol Pot was an urban developer'.

The church has served as a museum, a torture chamber, a stable, a storehouse. Just when Katz's accusation that Oliver is motivated by sponsors' finances boils into a row over whether Giotto, or his imitator, could have painted in ultramarine at the date of the fresco, Edgar springs his biggest surprise: the scene is invaded by a modey crew of asylum-seekers led by a stateless Palestinian guerrilla, Yasmin (Katharine Rogers). Michael Attenborough's vivid, compelling production now changes gear as the hostages are regaled with stories and jokes that define the cultural backgrounds of the disenfranchised. But Edgar works hard to keep the plot going with some well disguised twists and a climactic sequence of riddle-solving as the police operation comes to a head outside. The denouement is both bitter and shocking, but all the questions have been answered, the final one hingeing on the etymological detail of 'rock' in one language and 'star' in another.

Rock stars rule OK. There has been no more ambitious or rewarding play in the British theatre all year, and this, Edgar's companion piece to The Shape of the Table (1989), his backroom ballad on the Velvet Revolution, confirms that he is entering a new phase of post-ideological creativity. For a personal, satirical playwright like Doug Lucie, the problems are different: inGaucho (Hampstead), he is still talking about his generation of Oxford dope-heads; but their prospects are untouched and unimproved by the outside world. On a Greek island Declan Moss (Tim Mclhnerny), an international drugs dealer, is on the lookout for the Drugs Enforcement Agency. Old chums arrive, including an ex-girlfriend, Stephanie (Phyllis Logan), a journalist to whom he is entmsting his story.

Things have merely gone from bad to worse for this lot Declan's chinless chum Spencer Taplow (Dominic Jephcott) prospered briefly in the 1980s but has become a Tory Party reject and hopeless alcoholic; Spencer's wife, Louise (Kate Fahy), is a soft-centred therapist writing a self-help handbook for other victims of loveless, embittered marriages. Lucie's first act is stilted and attenuated, and this rather exposes the nastiness and unpleasantness of what is being said and going on. But, like Edgar, he hangs on to a good plot A treacherous photographer (Grant Masters) becomes embroiled in a Death and the Maiden-like torture scene at the hands of Declan and his Romanian girlfriend, Yana (Julia Lane). In spite of a more gripping second act, and a magnificent polemical rant by Declan in the style of John Osborne, the play still feels like a first draft, and the theatre was surely unwise to allow Lucie to direct it himself. The same applies to Anthony Hopkins in Mold, where the task of both playing Uncle Vanya and directing August, Julian Mitchell's new version of Chekhov's play, proves self-defeating.

The project has been filmed by Granada TV. Mitchell has placed the action in Caemavonshirein the 1890s, claiming some neat parrallels but failing, really, to liberate Chekhov from what he describes as a false British 'Russianness'. Instead, we have a false Welsh 'Russianness', almost the same thing. No samovars, but teapots; no vodka, but whiskey. The old ruined landowner, Telegin, becomes a solo to Elvis Presley's Love Me Tender before David Linton's high-impact score and a cast of revenants take oyer.

Dressed as unravelling mummies, with Cindy Sherman's charnel-house images projected above them, they fling themselves into an orgy of tightly organised, explosive dancing. The women, tough -and triumphant, could be maenads or wilis. Their power as bringers of life as well as death is also celebrated in the other two pieces, Full HalfWrong (Petronio's electrifying version of The Rite of Spring) and She Says, toYokoOno's eldritch screeches. Petronio emphasises the pelvic thrusts, arched spines and splayed legs that signal the act of birth and sex, or which could be seen on male bodies simply as formal shape-making. Inventive though Petronio is, his fast-forward choreography lacks sculptural beauty.

Besprosvany's Cuarteto for two dancers, narrator and cellist is an inward-looking reverie on love-as-death, based on a Marguerite Duras story. As spectators and listeners, we are drawn into a private hell, in which the rhythms of speech and music, the shapes of the cello and the woman become indistinguishable. Daniela Luca as the quicksilver creature who possesses the man is extraordinary, her intensity white-hot. It is a haunting piece of theatre, in which the performers seem to be figments of our, or Duras's, imagination, Rambert Dance Company Tues-Sat, Grand Theatre, Swansea, (0792 475715). Stephon Petronio Company Tues, Newcastle Playhouse, (091-230 5151) Mummy's boy: A dancer in the King is Dead.

Photograph by Sue Adler 1 partnering by drawing attention to the intimate placing of hands, the phallic thrusts of feet and of fencing foils while th participants pretend nothing rude is happening. freed of their courtly costumes (the women's crinolines conveniently on castors), the dancers' semi-naked bodies are athletic and glamorous. For Axioma 7, they are required to stop looking like a disciplined ballet company.