The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 58

58 THE OBSERVER SUNDAY 24 MAY 1992 Tock's sad life on tick Jin li. iiS preserving a sense of reality. The names are neatly ludicrous: Cheetah Bee, Foxtrot Darling, Sherbet Gravel. Cheetah Bee, magnificently performed by Elizabeth Bradley, is a mysterious old lady in a mink coat. In one of the best scenes, she calms Cougar, who has flipped completely (because someone has mentioned age), with a tonic chant about time in which she compares her age unfavourably to his youth.

It's an extraordinary sight to see her bent over her walking frame making her benediction. Foxtrot Darling (Jude Law), object of Cougar's desire, is gauche, dishy perfection in a school uniform that's too small for him. Looking fervent and faintly oriental, he appears absurdly young to be engaged to Sherbet Gravel. Emma Amos is brilliantly irritating as a bossy party guest, destined to become a victim. The evening provokes no pleasurable suspense, just cold dread.

It's clear that Cougar's potential for violence is boundless; his stupidity provides carte blanche for brutality. The problem for me about this expertly-directed, superbly-acted, finely written play is simply its subject. It doesn't go deep because it's obsessed with surface; it's hollow and vain because it's about vanity and emptiness and it's unforgiving. The last ironic line of the play, 'The fastest clock in the universe is love', belongs to some other play. I first saw the RSC's Blue Angel last summer, at a matinee in a school hall in Norwich; Kelly Hunter's Lola in shimmering blue lingerie seemed exotic as a bird of paradise and effortlessly transformed a Norfolk afternoon into Hamburg night.

Since then she has sung 'Falling in love again' again and again. Marlene Dietrich has died and Trevor Nunn's Kate Kellaway sees time fly with the fur at Hampstead. YOU scarcely notice time pass at Hampstead Theatre a suitable compliment to pay Philip Ridley, author, and Matthew Lloyd, director, of The Fastest Clock in the Universe. For this new play is about an attempt to hijack time. Cougar is a violent homosexual who wants to stay 19 forever.

He is 30. He is stupid. He seldom speaks, communicating mainly with his mirror. With dopy voice and lame John Wayne walk, Con O'Neill makes him contemptible but menacing and shows how people destitute of worth can still inspire adoration. Indifference is the aphrodisiac, cruelty oils the works.

Captain Tock (Jonathan Coy) is enslaved. Mournful, middle-aged, ineligible, he's vain also. He talks of his balding as of a bereavement. In Coy's excellent performance he appears somewhere between a stricken valet and a distraught magpie. And with Cougar in the Captain's life it's one for sorrow two for sheer hell.

Philip Ridley is a marvellous writer; he's won awards for his writing for film and television but his talents are perfectly suited to the theatre. The form of The Fastest Clock in the Universe is admirable; Ridley has an exact sense of timing; there is no slack writing. He solders humour and fear. He sets the play above a disused fur factory in a room full of stuffed birds and then poaches images for all he's worth, making a fur-and-feather lining to his drama. He has an astonishingly cool, brazen way of drawing attention to improbability while at the same time against the odds Diana Montague as Iphigenie: 'With her formidable command of line and tonal colour she can vividly depict a woman laden with griefPhotograph by Neil Libbert A spectacular storm in shades of grey production of Pam Gems's play was ailing on the first night at the West End.

Though mostly unchanged, it was unaccountably lustreless. It's part of Kelly Hunter's appeal that she builds fatigue into the part ('I'm tired' is Lola's reason for getting married). Now the tiredness is in danger of seeming real. Everyone in the motley cabaret troupe seems affected: the panther man really has lost his panther. Only the glorious pair of fatties, who wave their sexy feather boas like a couple of lustful muffins, are as delectable as ever.

It was a lesson in the subjectivity of theatregoing: what was magical in Norwich seemed frumpy in the West End. It's hard to be sure that the actors were stale. There are two other possible culprits: the Globe theatre, robbing the play of its immediacy (you cannot feel you are at the Blue Angel). And me, not enjoying it so much second time around. From Hamburg to Patagonia is a long way (take a deep breath).

In Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia, he meets a tedious Welshman who shouts 'Gimme another horse piss' to his daughter every time he wants a beer; he's the son of John D. Evans, a heroic Welsh horseman. John D. Evans reappears in Patagonia (Royal Court). But Chatwin's wonderful, cranky book tells us more about Welsh settlers in Patagonia than Brith Gof, a Welsh performance theatre group, are able to do.

Their show, though polished, is incoherent. Against unhelpful silver scaffolding, the actors strike poses as if they were in museum cases at the A. All that's missing is the label 'Welsh settlers in Patagonia circa 1865'. They have plenty of material, but no form; they seem to be forever arriving, never settling down. They fleetingly describe 'Hyde Park', a settler's house, and you wish that they would move in there instead of dancing about like homeless ants.

Much of the show is in Welsh; it's soothing (though every other word seemed to be Gwy-neth). And the singing was beautiful. Sophocles seems to have an inspiring effect on modern directors Deborah Warner's Electra, Field Day's The Cure at Troy (based oh Philoctetes) and now a French Ajax (Riverside Studios) are all exceptional productions. What's interesting is the kinship between them; the shared boldness, clarity and economy, the, same sense of a story in silhouette. Theatre-mjichine's Ajax (directed by Stephane Braunschweig) differs from its English relations in that the simplicity is chic Odysseus (Cyril Bothorel) wears a fabulous cream vercoat and you feel you might (on a good day) encounter him in the metro.

Braunschweig has a wonderful eye (almost too good for its own good) for stage pictures, classical poses, hieroglyphic gestures. Even shame and humiliation are artfully presented: Gilbert Mar-cantognini's tremendous Ajax, first appears against a painted frieze of headless red figures, totally naked after his sheep-slaughtering binge, pottily elated and covered in blood. (Ajax is part of a celebration of French arts in London, which continues to 6 June.) of taped sound effects (projection by John Whiting). The splashing fountain, the Spanish dance rhythms are more than local colour: they set up resonances that are absorbed into the main texture, which becomes something of a transmitter for conflicting signals. The soprano Christine Whittlesey gave an assured performance, demonstrating her keyboard skills too in the entracte 'Piano Practice'.

Schnittke's Symphony No. 4, heard here in a chamber version, has all the familiar ingredients: Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant chants wafting through the ether, a plonking harpsichord reclaiming the classical heritage, and a pungent sense of irony (including a parody of a Romantic cadenza for the excellent piano soloist, David Home), all engaging the listener's attention from first to last and, at moments of heightened textural activity, making an impact that can only be described as visceral. In lesser hands, such postmodernist junketing could easily seem contrived. But in Schnittke's symphony a spiritual commitment irradiates the score, lending a conviction and a motivation that confirm him as one of the most eloquent articulators of the modern condition. scoring for a small pit band of period instruments, beautifully played, is both varied and subtle, and was directed on this occasion with an admirable sense of pace by Nicholas Kok, who maintained the alternation of recitative and arioso, of single- and multi-voiced declamation, in a purposeful flow.

This was an impressive house debut on the rostrum from an accomplished member of the ENO's music staff. Dominating the show remains the Ulysses of Anthony Rolfe Johnson, whose vocal line as it soars and dips, aches and swoons is gauged to perfection. Jean Rigby's Penelope is regal of bearing and imposing of tone, but by comparison her line is lacking in inner vitality. Most of the rest of the cast is new to the production, with fine contributions from Catherine Wyn-Rogers, Michael Chance, John Hall and, not least, Adrian Thompson as the grotesque glutton, Irus. The third in the current London Sinfonietta series at the QEH offered the London premiere of Alfred Schnittke's Symphony No.

4 alongside Benedict Mason's newly-commissioned Rilke Songs. The later captures six of Rilke's closely observed, richly evocative verbal scenes with the aid often in textbooks than on stage. Surely it can't be long before incoming general director Matthew Epstein acknowledges the need for surtitles in works where text and music interrelate so tellingly. Modern stagecraft techniques are used equally effectively to translate us into the Homeric world of the wandering Ulysses and patient Penelope in Monteverdi's The Return of Ulysses, now revived by English National Opera. Director David Freeman knows just how much to animate his characters, or his grazing flocks, without distracting attention from the central action.

The contest in which three suitors fail to draw the bow and are upstaged by a beggar (Ulysses himself, in disguise) is enacted with a masterly control of dramatic momentum. And it is a potent idea to have Penelope standing expectantly at one side of the stage while Ulysses is making his way home: when her reunited husband and son embrace, we see her emotional reaction as though something is stirring in the subconscious. All Freeman's stage movements even the memorable human phalanx of Ulysses's cavorting oarsmen echo the sensuous inflections of the score as realised by Paul Daniel. The classical tragedy, paring away all superfluities such as props, and harnessing the vibrant energies of the score to a succession of powerful confrontations. Etienne Couleson's sober grey costumes for the priestesses suggest a timeless relevance in their multiplicity of styles, though a few looked like school uniforms left out in the rain.

Two tremendous central performances carry the day. Diana Montague as Iphigenie has a glorious ripe mezzo that recalls Janet Baker in this music. With her formidable command of line and tonal colour she can vividly depict a woman laden with grief, or a priestess summoning the reserves to carry out the sacrifice. Simon Keenlyside, as Oreste, has a noble delivery and phrases his music with a superb sensitivity to its expressive nuances. Peter Bronder is an eloquent Pylade, while Peter Sidhom's forceful Thoan is sometimes too vigorous for the good of his line and tone.

Vigour is the keynote of Mackerras's reading, however; romantic warmth and sensuality are shunned, and the effect is harsh. But the urgency of his conducting perfectly complements the starkness of the staging, and the result is a triumphant vindication of a masterpiece honoured more I I Barry Millington on Gluck, Monteverdi and Schnittke. FEW operas hurl their characters into the action as precipitously as Gluck's Iphigenie en Tauride. Welsh National Opera's enthralling new production of the work (New Theatre, Cardiff) opens with an electrifying staging of the scene in which Iphigenie and her priestesses implore the gods to calm the storm. One by one these dishevelled, barefoot, grey-clad women rush on to a claustrophobically enclosed grey set, clustering frenziedly round Iphigenie to the accompaniment of lightning flashes.

Charles Mackerras goads his orchestral forces to fury, his strings driving forward relentlessly, his woodwind howling and shrieking implacably. Something of that intensity is sustained throughout the performance. Christian Ratz's sets two huge intersecting slabs change position but afford no visual relief, thus focusing on the essentials of the drama. Similarly, the austere staging, by Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser, concentrates inexorably on the emotional conflicts of the Lonely boy All fuses fizzing Lis Hughes Jones, Eddie Ladd, 'Patagonia'. Photograph: Neil Libbert.

Barry J. Mishon Imperial Cancer Reseach Fund present I HI r-r: wnere ine tine win Meet! The movement is based on circles and cycles. Partners are swung at arms' length, the momentum threatening their precarious balance of weight; Rem Lee's steady pacing, round and round, establishes a metronome beat for the others; later, he hurtles across the stage in vertiginous turns, apparently as out of control as a rogue satellite. His top-knot of hair describes a squiggling spiral while Anne Katrine Haugen's blond plume flails in wide arcs. Outlines vary constantly as the dancers change costumes and hairstyles.

Rhythms shift, either dictated by a group leader or by the introduction of taped music (mostly from East Africa). Sometimes the dancing becomes a trance-inducing ritual; at others, it is a sophisticated playground game. You find yourself smiling, then laughing, at the gravely absurd antics the performers get up to especially Rem Lee, so small and so surprising. He is also a member of The Featherstonehaughs, who appear on BBC2 tonight in Cross Channel. It's Lea Anderson's version of Le Train Bleu drop-dead Chanel chic on a Dover-Calais ferry.

Jann Parry sees a cracker of a show of European unity. DANCE is way ahead of government-sponsored celebrations of European unity. Aliud, at The Place last week, was financed and co-produced by Dutch, Flemish and British theatres and institutions (including The Place). The Dutch choreographer, Angelika Oei, chose her six dancers from auditions in three countries. Aliud turned out to be one of the most engaging works in The Turning World season.

It is endlessly inventive, refreshed by the dancers' quick response to each other's improvisations. They seem primed to explode with energy at any moment, even when they are briefly becalmed in a heap on the floor. The daunting programme note invoking the laws of quantum physics makes a kind of sense in retrospect. These extremely animate bodies are impelled through space, rebounding off the hard surfaces of the set or colliding with each other's yielding mass. The Most Glittering ROYAL CHARITY GALA this Year! in the presence o1 Her Royal Highness, Princess Alexandra and The Honourable Sir Angus Ogilvy k.c.v.o.

Sunday 14 June 1992 The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, WC2 (Courtesy of CAMERON MACKINTOSH STOLL MOSS THEATRES) Production Staged Directed by GILLIAN GREGORY Musical Directors: LARRY BLANK (USA) COLIN FREEMAN (UK) But Bud is the boy who will grow up to make a healing movie about the life of Robert Tucker rather than stay in Liverpool to experience Tucker's isolation. The Long Day Closes is warm and affirmatory; the Trilogy cold and stoical. Davies is a working-class Merseyside Proust whose madeleine is probably a plate of scouse, though his memories are usually triggered by music, (mostly of the cheap, potent kind that reunited Coward's Amanda and Elyot), old movies, embarrassment and rain. The film is not total recall. It is a distillation of experience, a series of epiphanies, a celebration of love and community from the perspective of a perennial if reluctant outsider.

Bud views the world from the linoleum-covered staircase of the family's sparsely furnished terrace house, from its back and front windows, from behind the iron bars over the steps to the coal cellar. Romance he experiences though popular songs and in the picture house after standing alone outside in the rain waiting for some 'mister' to take him into an 'A' Certificate film. He runs errands for his brothers and sisters, buying perfume, lipstick, silk stockings, cigarettes, film magazines and other erotica, but he is excluded from their courting. There are references to the Grafton Rooms dance hall, the Cast-iron Shore, the Forum cinema. But there is none of the bustle of Liverpool life you get in plays by Alun Owen, Willy Russell and Alan Bleasdale.

Nor is there any acknowledgement of the arrival of rock 'n' roll, television or consumerism, though a sweet-tempered black does accidentally stumble into the family home only to be brutally rebuffed. This movie is poetry, not sociology. There is, however, a hilarious scene involving the Davies family's neighbour Curly (Jimmy Wilde) and his wife Edna (Tina Malone). Curly does impressions of Hollywood stars, Edna is as funny as Tommy Handley, and we realise that Davies could have earned a living writing gags for Jimmy Tarbuck. The film's greatest sequence is a succession of overhead, right-to-left tracking shots Philip French on a sublime evocation of a Fifties childhood.

TERENCE DAVIES'S The Long Day Closes (Curzon West End, 12) affords the viewer a sublime cinematic experience and rounds out a body of deeply personal work by taking us back to its beginning. Davies spent 10 years over his trilogy Children (1974), Madonna and Child (1980), Death and Transfiguration (1983) an austere, compressed, monochrome study of the lonely, guilt-burdened Robert Tucker, a Catholic homosexual deeply attached to his mother, oppressed by a drunken father. Shot on unromanticised Liverpool locations, it combines the bleakness of early Brian Moore with the asperity of late Samuel Beckett to trace Tucker's life from seven to 70. Davies then went on to the Technicolor diptych Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), a directly autobiographical account of the same family, drawing on his older brothers' and sisters' memories of times good and bad in the 1940s and Fifties, but altogether more stylised, elliptical and without recognisable location landmarks. The Lang Day Closes overlaps Still Lives, picking up after the death of the overbearing father and focusing entirely on the 1 1-year-old Bud Davies's view of the world around him in the mid-1950s.

Bud (Leigh McCor-rnack, an impressive newcomer) is another version of the young Robert Tucker, a lonely working-class latent homosexual, devoted to his mother (Marjorie Yates giving a luminous performance). In a remarkable scene, Bud drops a net curtain down on to the head of his mother in the back yard. It transforms her into a bride and Madonna at just the moment Bud catches the eye of a bricklayer stripped to the waist. The labourer winks in acknowledgement of the erotic gaze and the same actor turns up as the crucified Christ in Bud's fervent imagination as he prays in church. STARRING FRIENDS OF SAMMY DAVIS JR.

(in alphabetical order, subject to availability) iMgh McCormack as Bud in 'The Ijong Day Closes'. linking the crucial aspects of Bud's life: the front of his home; a packed cinema scanned from projection box to screen; a full Catholic church traversed from porch to altar; a classroom in a grim Catholic secondary modern school. On the soundtrack throughout, Debbie Reynolds sings the title song from her 1957 movie Tammy, and any suggestion of sentimentality is undercut by a couple of dryly sardonic lines from the chapel scene in Kind Hearts and Coronets as the camera reaches the kneeling priest, and Terry-Thomas's Private's Progress outburst about his troops being 'an absolute shower' at the point where the schoolboys are let out. The movie ends with Bud contemplating the mysteries of the universe while clouds pass the moon to the accompaniment of Sullivan's plangent Victorian choral work that provides Davies with his title. Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead (Cannon Hay-market, 12) is one of those so-called 'high concept' productions that manage to pitch the whole movie to potential backers in less than 25 words by getting everything into the title.

It's not bad, but hardly what you put down money in a cinema to see. Wayne's World (Empire, 12) is a phenomenon: one of the most profitable comedies of all time. It's a cheaply made, full-length movie inspired by a series of cult Saturday Night Live sketches featuring Mike Myers and Dana Carvey as two moronic teenage heavy metal enthusiasts hosting a public access TV chat show from a basement near Chicago. The jokes about moviemaking are crude, the plot non-existent, the satirical thrust obscure. Wayne's World has the capacity to puzzle, but not to offend.

CtofflittMl COMPANY Si A If a LIONEL BLAIR JOSEPHINE BLAKE NICHOLAS BROTHERS GEORGIA BROWN SAMMY CAHN CY COLEMAN SACHA DISTEL BILLY ECKSTINE JOSE FELICIANO TIM FLAVIN ANTHONY FRANCIOSA FIONA FULLERTON LOU GOSSETT JR. SIMON GREEN ROBERT GUILLAUME ADELAIDE HALL MARVIN HAMLISCH GEORGE HEARN JACK JONES PEGGY LEE TONY MARTIN PAUL MEDFORD ELAINE PAIGE CLARKE PETERS JOHN RAITT LON SATTON GEORGE SHEARING CHARLES STROUSE FRANKIE VAUGHAN ELISABETH WELCH CAST MEMBERS OF "CARMEN JONES" CHOIR OF ST. MARTIN-IN-THE-FIELDS SINGERS DANCERS from WEST END SHOWS 'THE INK SPOTS' THE JIVING LINDY HOPPERS THE SIXTIES TILLER GIRLS Band of the Royal Artillery "THE YOUNG VIC HAS A SMASH ON ITS HANDS" Dally Telegraph "SCOOT ALONG. TO THIS" Times 1 "AN EMOTIONAL AND 1 MUSICAL FEAST" Time out i "A GENUINE PLEASURE TO HEAR SO MANY 60 CLASSICS PUT ACROSS i WITH SUCH PANACHE" The Guardian INTHEMIDNIGHT i fxCkUl B0X 071 928 6363 07i 379 4444 66 The Cut. London SE1 Waterloo Devised Produced by BARRY MISHON THE "MR.

WONDERFUL" ORCHESTRA Doors open 30)in Performance Commences 7 30pm fJo- Avaiiai.1.- to the (iwwal Public 15 20 25 35 50 75 100 150 and a limited number 200 from iplephnw! i)7H -I'M r0f0 2-t hrs per day. 7 days per and s. Booking tee IN AID OF IMPERIAL CANCER RESEARCH FUND.