The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 56

56 THE OBSERVER SUNDAY 21 JUNE 1992 3 Con trick and Entropy in Beuys town treat Photograph by William Feaver. guilty 1 Michael Coveney on New York sizzle and northern highlights. NO PLAY on Broadway recently has created a stir comparable to that of John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation. Seeing it at Lincoln Center was like entering a sauna of guilty approbation for this quirky tale of a young conman, claiming to be the son of Sidney Poitier, inveigling himself into the Manhattan melting pot. Some of that buzz has transferred to Phyllida Lloyd's production at the Royal Court, mainly due to the electrifying presence of the New York star Stockard Channing as Ouisa.

Guare's writing is sideways-on to the audience, smart and very fast. Channing is his ideal interpreter; she embodies, humorously, self-conscious New York liberalism among the monied art-buying classes. Ouisa and Flan (Paul Shelley), a dealer, are Paul's chief victims in their circular carpeted apartment with its two-sided floating Kandinsky and abstract rectangular frames, wonderfully designed by Mark Thompson. They are entertaining a South African colleague (Gary Waldhorn), whose $2 million they need to secure a Cezanne for the Japanese market, when Paul appears claiming to have been mugged. Reciting his stolen thesis on the death of the imagination and the encouragement to assassins found in The Catcher in the Rye, he offers his hosts small parts in the film of Cats which his father is now preparing.

That is the sucker punch, and he stays. In the night, the play turns on the discovery by Ouisa of a male hustler Paul has brought back to his room. 'He might have a gun on she screams, staring at the stark naked pick-up Thereafter, as in New York, the energy level drops, although there is one brilliant sequence in which the deluded parents confront a babble of disaffected children and the play achieves meteoric take-off into sociological analysis. Lloyd has cast admirably, eliciting a particularly outstanding performance from Adrian Lester (Cheek by Jowl's black Rosalind) as the intruder who finally persuades Ouisa that her world is not as secure as she thought. 'Crappity name, in't bellows Mari Hoff, the Boltonian boozer and square-shouldered merry widow in Jim Cart-wright's funny and abrasive a I new play The Rise and Fall of Little Voice in the RNT's Cot-tesloe.

When her husband Frank was alive, the couple were known as Mr and Mrs F. Hoff. Frank bequeathed his record collection to their daughter, christened Little Voice, or LV. She skulks regressively upstairs, perfecting her imitations of Judy Garland, Shirley Bassey, Gracie Fields and Edith Piaf. Downstairs, Mari brings home a sleazy agent with an Elvis hairstyle, Ray Say (Pete Postlethwaite), and unwittingly triggers her daughter's release into showbiz.

Ray's shock of discovery (he is 'into' artiste management) coincides with our spine-tingling realisation that the brilliant Jane Horrocks really is 'doing' Garland and 'The Man That Got Away'. LV is a paradigm of Garland's Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Instead of typhoons and wicked witches, we have faulty wiring, Mari and showbiz sharks. Director Sam Mendes and designer William Dudley create an appropriate atmosphere of danger in the linking drum riffs, collapsing walls, popping fuses and sharp black-outs. The house is finally charred in a fire and Mari throws all the records out the window.

The play wobbles, but Cartwright sticks to his long-term objective of moving the initiative from Alison Steadman's barnstorming Mari to her daughter. The show hinges on an O'Neill-like emotional work-out exactly comparable to a scene between these same actresses in Mike Leigh's Life is Sweet. LV's salvation lies not in cabaret, but in finding her own voice. In this she is assisted by a devoted British Telecom mechanic (Adrian Hood) who, very conveniently, is an electrician on the side. This cowardly lion creates a cathedral of light where LV ecstatically finds her own voice 'Just in Time'.

Steadman's Mari is a hideous creation, vomiting into the sink, prodding the ceiling with a broom handle and letting rip in funky jive over the sofa with her gross neighbour (Annette Badland) to the squeaky strains of the Jackson Five. Lovely stuff. Cartwright brings a rich and steamy vocabulary to the stage. Representing the other side of the Pennines, the actor Barrie Rutter has formed a company, Northern Broadsides, to perform Shakespeare's Richard III in emphatic Yorkshire accents. caught this fast, uncluttered and entertaining show in a boatshed on the Hull Marina; this week it moves to Bradford's Transport Museum, with one Alston, its artistic director, writes in his programme note for the Royalty Theatre season.

He is able to call on the cream of British contemporary choreographers to work with the company, unlike London Contemporary Dance Theatre, which has just announced the departure of its latest American artistic director, Nancy Duncan. One Alone in the melting pot: Adrian Lester as Paul at the Royal Court.Photograph by Neil Libbert. Giacometti's 'The Nose' (1947). documenta. They test the resourcefulness of the organisers.

How to get hold of the dozens of punchbags specified by Wolfgang Flatz for punters to shoulder their way amongst? Thousands of dangling rulers and defective clocks were needed for Cildo Meireles of Rio. Lorryloads of brushwood had to be brought from Italy for Mario Merz to stack against the longest wall in the documenta-Halle. Curators know that a Merz will fill any given space. The floppy hangings and neon numbers can extend to infinity. No problem.

Hoet is keen on running gags. Jan Fabre of Antwerp is therefore overindulged. He fixes wax casts of his fist holding a tumbler to the wall wherever he sees fit. He even planted one in the room set aside for three clean-cut paintings by Ellsworth Kelly, red, blue and green. But Kelly has clout, and his space wasn't to be mucked about with.

The hand was removed. Kelly's room is one of the few that are uncompromised in any way. It's sublime. Anish Kapoor's concrete blockhouse is similarly wonderful for its pure emptiness: a black disc on the floor proves (not for the first time with Kapoor) to be a hole. The bedrock shows dimly as your eyes see through the apparent infinity within.

Other documenta holes are mainly lavatorial. A typical sordid Moscow toilet block has been built behind the Fridericianum and turned by Ilya Kabakov into a two-room flat filled with touching domestic clutter. Mike Kelley from Los Angeles shows the superior facilities afforded by a more personal-hygiene-conscious culture: portable worksite cabins and chemical disposal apparatus as used, he implies, by serial killers. Painting can't compete with such material. So Hoet thinks.

Evidently he sees no future in it. Not surprisingly, considering the best he can find are multi- pack Belgian landscapes or daubs as thick as waffles or cus-tardy monochromes and other forms of painterly entropy. Hoet has seen fit to include three paintings by Francis Bacon, chosen when he was still alive. Possibly because they, too, look played out. Walls are for wallpaper: that's for sure.

Peter Kogler's ant wallpaper encloses video images of Bruce Nauman yelling his head off as he revolves but gives out before the room where Thannis Totsikas's spinning stainless steel columns generate even more wasted energy. Robert Gober's forest wallpaper goes well on the sloping apse of the documenta-Halle, an acreage of calm after Ulf Rollufs wheezing bellows apparatus, shuddering to a climax every few minutes, and the Antwerpian Panamarenko's 'High Flying Jungle and Mountain Machine', a bug-like vehicle suitable for Antwerp Zoo. Second and third time round, some of the connections and disruptions work better, hole to hole, surface to surface. For example: David Hammon's use of hair collected from Harlem barbershop floors as flocking on brambles and Jonathan Lasker's pink icing and black scribble laconically co-existing. But vacant possession is what counts in this documenta.

Marina Abramovic, from Amsterdam, operates in a side-room as a New Age usherette. 'Sit on the she orders. 'Look at the The screen of her Crystal Cinema is a lump of conglomerated quartz. Nothing happens. Alongside the documenta-Halle Abramovic has mounted mineral samples on tripods, enabling one to peek up into their hollow amethyst interiors.

Down in the Orangerie she further invites us to try on her pairs of chunky mineral footwear. The only feet to fit these will be Jan Hoet's. His dream come true: trampling roughshod through documenta in crystal clogs. William Feaver finds out why Germany's documenta exhibition pulls no punches. 'A RITUALISED cautionary debacle' is a phrase plucked from the verbiage surrounding a road accident installation by Cady Noland in an underground car park in Kassel.

Does it apply? To documenta, I mean. 'Debacle' is too strong a word perhaps. But documenta 9 (to 20 September) is indeed ritualised, cautionary and all over the place. The first 'documenta' exhibition, in 1955, was intended as an historic affirmation of what was good about contemporary art in the West. It was held in Kassel because Arnold Bode, who thought of it, was a Professor there and Kassel was the closest sizeable town to the Iron Curtain, not counting Berlin.

Now that Kassel is in central Germany again, there is a feeling that 'documenta' may have reached the end of its useful history. There's even talk of it being franchised to Frankfurt, which would be the absolute end. Already, commemorative effigies of Prof and Frau Bode have been placed in a window on the Friedrichsplatz. Also Josef Beuys in brand new jeans and poacher's waistcoat, his wax face glistening. Beuys used documenta as a shop window for himself from 1963 onwards.

The third and final exhibit in this curious waxworks is the selector of 'documenta 9': Jan Hoet of the Museum van Hed-endaagse Kunst in Ghent, accompanied by a mascot swan. He comes across as the sort of heavy who, in tales by the Brothers Grimm of Kassel, goes fee-fi-fo-fum without provocation. In reality, Hoet has neither theme nor slogan. He talks of 'total honesty' in his selection, but anyone can say that. His is 'an adventure', he says, 'one with unbelievable charisma'.

Being an ex-boxer, Hoet can claim to be unusually charismatic for a curator. He came out fighting at the documenta press conference, denying that he had ever asked Mike Tyson to attend. And he brings the good news from Ghent to Kassel that Belgian art is hot stuff. Determined not to be thought narrow-minded, Hoet has arranged a programme of his favourite baseball and boxing films (Raging Bull) to go with the art; and jazz concerts, starting with Lawrence 'Butch' Morris and the documenta ensemble, in a marquee in the Karlsaue park. 'Who's Afraid of Jan T-shirts are on sale.

Even without 'Butch' and the boys, this documenta would still be the largest ever. The 200 exhibitors occupy several new buildings, among them the spectacular but unaccommodating documenta-Halle, which proceeds in giant steps down a slope, and a suite of elevated pavilions in the Karlsaue. The Grimm-Museum and the Neue Galerie have been commandeered, and a vacant shop in which Michelangelo Pistoletto has built a short Roman road and put his daughter to work reading newspapers, forking pasta into her mouth and bursting into song. Under the ramps in the new Friedrichsplatz underground car park, Matthew Barney's videos focus unsparingly on prosthesis abuse. On another level, Cady Noland has developed her 'Metalanguage of Evil' thesis: a cumbersomely illustrated lecture for joyriders involving placards, a cut-out head of Jack Nicholson with skittles for brains and teeth, photos of wayside corpses and a write-off Ford Transit.

The main exhibition space is the Museum Fridericianum. Its tower houses a small 'Collective Memory' section involving the Louvre's copy of David's 'La Mort de Marat' (the original is in Brussels), shelves stocked by Beuys with provisions, an Ensor self-portrait (Ensor was Belgian of course, which reminds us: Belgium is the cockpit of Europe) and Giacometti's 'Nose', 1947, bobbing when jolted. This stands for the average onlooker, poking into ostensibly private concerns, bumping into the furniture. Installations are the stuff of 0 0 Cp0 sound like the RSC or the old Home Service. But any expert would tell them that Shakespeare sounded much more like this in his own day.

Rutter's production is not an exercise in provincial gimmickry; it continues the mainstream Yorkshire traditions of the Royal Court, Bill Bryden's company at the National and Tony Harrison's dramatic poetry. The Battle of Bosworth is staged as an industrial ballet in boiler suits and clogs, with the protagonists gliding around the perimeter on porters' trolleys. A full moon appeared in the darkling summer sky as Rutter was spiked to a cloakroom of death alongside the coats of his victims. Murderously magical. Deft warp and weft ph m.

Jann Parry enjoys the thrill of the new from Rambert. EVER since 1926, the Rambert company's raison d'etre has been to act as a hotbed for creative work as Richard In Leeds, the West Yorkshire Playhouse is presenting John McGrath's A Wicked Old Man, a curious and moralistic satire in which a 72-year-old widower (Edward Jewesbury) kickstarts some half-forgotten homosexual proclivites and starts sleeping with black boys, partly to spite his rapacious and morally dubious daughters. It continues in the Playhouse's Courtyard auditorium. Next door in the Quarry, an ill-attended revival of Calde-ron's classical masterpiece, Life Is A Dream, directed by Matthew Warchus and designed by Neil Warmington (two names of the future), closed last night. I am sorry if you missed it, but very glad I didn't.

ferociously on hinged wooden pattens. Graeme Miller's score charges the atmosphere for a contest that is part courtship, part power struggle. Because there is no way out, the obsessive routines pall before the hour is up, in spite of the dramatic players Snaith herself, Jo Chandler and Jamie Watton. performance next Sunday in the Halifax Piece Hall. The shorter vowels contribute to the speed and the muscularity of the playing.

Richard spies his shadder in the sun, the fading Edward is frozzen to death, Richmond predicts a goodly sun tomorrer. Rutter is a cheeky, glinting Richard in bomber jacket and medical clog, Brian Glover a gleaming pink Buckingham. Ishia Bennison (Elizabeth), Anita Carey (Duchess of York) and Polly Hemingway (Margaret) give powerful expression to royal torments undreamt of by Princess Diana. There has been the usual outcry from local stuffed shirts who would prefer their actors to of the LCDT choreographers that got away, Siobhan Davies, now works with Rambert as well as running her own group of dancers. Davies's latest piece for Rambert, Winnsboro Cotton Mills Blues, made a stirring finish to the first programme.

It is a work dance, set to the recorded thumps and hums of a textile mill and the (live) piano blues of Frederic Rzewski. The 10 dancers are factory hands and the machines they operate at the same time, shuttling and weaving across the stage, picking up and passing on the rhythmic thread or slumping, bone-weary, at the end of a shift. Catherine Quinn is a curiously jaunty spirit of the blues, irrepressible in the midst of industrial drudgery. Davies knits together movement that is subtle and slippery, resolute and buoyant. This is one of her most viscerally appealing pieces, energising the dancers more overtly than Alston's sculptural choreography in the other two works in the programme, a revival of Wildlife (1984) and the new Cat's Eye.

Wildlife is a response to Richard Smith's mobile structures and Nigel Osborne's sonorous score of bird and animal alarm calls. Alert creatures inhabit a changing landscape as Smith's luminous kites lift and swing apart. Their angles are echoed by the dancers' limbs below, sometimes too contrivedly drawing our attention to the correspondence between abstract and corporeal shapes. Wildlife is less intricate than Cat's Eye, its movement more often in unison or simple counterpoint. Car's Eye contrasts different ways of dancing, juxtaposing long, sinuous phrases for a soloist, Gary Lambert, with short, end-stopped ones for the dancers around him.

The work celebrates Lambert's feral quality, as he prowls among Paul Huxley's building-block set, shaking a leg or shimmying his pelvis to the jazzy inflections of David Sawer's music. He is the cat that dances by himself, although he serves as master of ceremonies for the rest of the cast. The unusual duet for Jaqueline Jones and John Kilroy emphasises their differences instead of merging them into one being, as Alston often does: Kilroy is chunky, decisive, Jones creamy. Lambert's imminent departure to pursue his own career as a choreographer will be a loss (iMmicJhtwal Friday June 26th 7.45pm LONDON BAROQUE SPONSORED BY POWERGEN PLC at Duncombe Park Helmsley, North Yorks. Presents music by Biber, Vivaldi, Bach, Handel, Boccherini, Fritz and I.

eclair Tickets previously 25, now 15 inclusive of Champagne Thursday July 2nd 8.00pm TRIO ZINGARA at Leighton House Holland Park, London WI4 Present music by Haydn, Dvorak and Schubert Tickets previously 25, now 15 inclusive of Champagne Saturday July 4th 8.00pm ANTHONY GOLDSTONE and CAROLINE CLEMMOW, pianoforte at EASTNOR CASTLE Ledbury, Herefordshire Present music Rossini, Haydn, Weber, Ries, Hiller, Schubert, Mozart, Beethoven, Moscheles and Wagner. Tickets previously 25, now 15 inclusive of Champagne Deluxe Festival hampers are available at 35 for 2 Dress: Black Tie preferred For Bookings: (071) 413 3323 (24 hours) Feral quality: Gary LambertPhotograph by Richard Mildenhall. to the company. One of the successes on the difficult independent circuit is Yolande Snaith, whose No Respite was given at the ICA last week. It fuses movement and metaphor, turning the stage into a jousting yard for three combatants.

They make their own rhythms, slapping down cards on to a baize table or clacking cyrisk OOQ0 "A SONG FOR LIFE" Produced by Mario Frangoulis The Stars of Opera and Musical Theatre with the Music of: LES MISERABLES DON GIOVANNI THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA TOSCA MISS SAIGON LA BOHEME and others SPECIAL GUEST STARS: KIM CRISWELL'RAUL GIMENEZ. JOCHEN KOWALSKLANNA VISS1 Hosted by: Nickolas Grace also featuring: Rosemary AsheMario FrangoulisPeter Karrie Peter PolycarpouFrances Ruffelle, and others including 12 dancers from Cats THE BRITISH YOUTH OPERA ORCHESTRA Conducted by: Tony Castro and Timothy Dean in uid of the Michael Polemis Foundation for underprivileged Greek children in need of hospitalisation SUNDAY 21st JUNE at 7.30pm THEATRE ROYAL, DRURY LANE Box office 071 494 5060 Ticket Prices 15-60 HALF PRICK TICKKTS WITH THIS ADVKKTLSKMKNT ONLY! (Please contact Marilcna Panayutopoulos on 071 377-0066).