The Observer du lieu suivant : London, Greater London, England • 43

OBSERVER SUNDAY 1 6 APRIL 1 989 43 i am CHRIS NASH SIMON FRITH wmtnusic ADRIAN GOLDBERG finds echoes of Shocked's powerful Steinbeck in Michelle performance at the IN A week which witnessed a further Top 40 surge by 'Americanos' (Holly Johnson's glib hymn to the US), London audiences were treated to a coruscating alternative view of lite in the States, courtesy of the feisty Texan exile, Michelle Shocked. Appearing in the second of four consecutive benefit shows at Hackney magnificent Empire Theatre, Shocked was revealed as a kind of singing, swinging Steinbeck. Her barbed neo-folk narratives depict a land of curdled milk and poisoned honey, where the seeds of hope and trust have yielded only a dustbowl crop of bitterness and despair. 'Graffiti Limbo', for instance, is a tale of casual sav agery relating the death in police custody of a young, black street artist. 'VFD' depicts the destruction of farmland acres through the persona of an estranged child arsonist.

Yet disaffection has rarely sounded so sweet or inspiring, not least because Shocked's normally sparse, blues-tinged arrangements were supplemented for much of this set by a powerful and uplifting brass section, together with clarinet and evocative Dixieland banjo. Thus 'Streetcomer Ambassador', which parallels begging in New York with Third I Benjamin Lamarche and Valerie Soullard's tormented duet from 'Texane': 'She clings to him as though she were Spring in the step TEN French companies are visiting Britain this month to show what their Ministry of Culture's investment in dance has produced over the past decade. The dance budget was quadrupled between 1981 and 1986: this year it has gone up by 47 per cent (while the Arts Council's allocation for dance in this country is virtually at a standstill). The money has gone into choreographic centres and companies 'implanted' in the regions, as well as to independent creators. The companies appearing in the April in Paris season at The Place (with Odile Duboc at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on 29-30 April) are a cross-section of what is available in France, with other groups coming later for the Dance Umbrella festival.

April in Paris started last Monday at the French Institute's Artaud Theatre, which from Le Spectre de la Rose and inspecting his hands as if they might be petals or Petrushka's mittens. In the second half he escapes from the coat to reveal a rose-chintz outfit, which he then peels off in a camp strip-tease to Prince's song, International Lover. He ends in the androgynous pose familiar from Nijinsky photographs, arms curled gently about his head. One laughs uneasily, unsure whose fantasies are being paraded for whose entertainment. Benjamin Lamarche, a coiled spring of a dancer, performed a solo which served as a preview for Claude Brumachon's Texane later in the week.

Lamarche moves with such speed and intensity that the 'April in Paris' lands spectacularly in London JANN PARRY going on, who needed choreography? Mark Tompkins, whose company will appear at The Place on 24-25 April, gave an avant premiere of his solo, La Valse de Vaslav, commissioned for this year's hundredth anniversary of Nijinsky's birth. It is an unsettling piece, starting with Tompkins buttoned into an overcoat, like Nijinsky encased in his madness. He stumbles about, humming the waltz Hackney Empire World poverty, was performed with the style and panache of a New Orleans wake, making a musical mockery of the refrain, 'Brother, can you spare some And her classic anthem of sexual dissatisfaction, 'If Love was a Train', paraded a glorious cacophony of brass, bass and bluegrass harmonica. Shocked herself was a revelation black clothes and gawky physique belying a performance which was relaxed, confident and positive. Jokes were cracked, banter exchanged.

And when she invited her father on stage to sing a gesture which in most other circumstances would have reeked of showbiz sentimentality here it was nothing less than a joyous affirmation of Shocked's original 'songs around the campfire' idiom. Their duet was a cover of Leadbelly's glorious song about boxer Jack Johnson, refused a trip on the Titanic because he was black, but ultimately able to enjoy the last laugh at the captain who shunned him. Its gleeful celebration of poetic justice, and mockery of the self-destructive rich, set the tone for an evening when Shocked's always affecting but sometimes world-weary drawl was enhanced by warmth. NICHOLAS KENY0N on the reincarnation of the D'Oyly Carte 'Pirates' Pirates. Keith Warner's inventive production catches that energy but remains firmly faithful to the spirit of the original as the music remains faithful to its letter, with Sullivan's orchestrations intact.

Warner does not pretend you can do without stylised groupings and chorus-line antics in for you can't; but he devises delicious new routines the pirates served with sherry by footmen, the girls dancing onto the beach with huge rocks, and, funniest of all, the policemen in a droll tea-cup routine to illustrate their unhappy lot. Characterisations are quirky and neat: Philip Creasy's bespectacled toy-boy Frederic, all winsome ardour; Patricia Tin I. Stir plot until a bit thick UOMUS: Tha Hairstyle of the Devil (Creation CRE63T) DEACON BLUE: When the World Knows Your Name (CBS 463321) Tho great Momus goes efeciro for his latest tale ot revenge. Satan and hairdrossing Deacon Blue sound comparatively normal, but they remain the most convincing ol the Glasgow soul bands, it only because Ricky Ross can help lacing his sweetly melodic songs with lyrical dismay. KAFALA BROTHERS: Ngola (AA Enterprises AAER001) TRIO AKA: Mama Cristina (AA Enterprises AAER002) Political and pleasurable music Irom embattled Angola.

The Kalala Brothers are the more 'folky' an acoustic duo whose appeal lies in the beauty of their voices. Trio Aka are an urban dance band, drawing irresistibly on the rhumba. I 33 DAVE GELLY STAN TRACEY: We Still Love You Madly (Mote 13) Ellington compositions featured on the recent Arts Council tour by Tracey's big band. Bold arrangements and characteristic solos by some of Britain's leading players make this an excellent set. TOOT THIELMANS: Only Trust Your Heart (Concord CJ 355) Veteran jazz harmonica virtuoso returns with 10 poised and adventurous pieces from Thelonious Monk to Rodgers and Hammerstein.

In his hands the tiny instrument has a biting, authoritative sound and marvellous fluidity. TOMMY SMITH: Step By Step (Blue Note BLT 1001) The young Scottish saxophonist's debut recording for a major label reveals his maturing musical personality. The American accompanists include drummer Jack OeJohnette and guitarist John Schofield. version O'Neill's very knowing, cradle-snatching Mabel; and, most original, Susan Gorton's Dick Deadeye-like Ruth, a grisly hunchback with a heart of gold. 'I don't like the said a crusty voice in the interval, 'he hasn't got his plumes But Eric Roberts obliged in Act Two, and crisply delivered his patter in the best D'Oyly Carte manner.

Vocally there are few weak links. Branwell Tovey is the musical director of the show (he might consider writing a new overture to get things going more sparkily); but the performance I saw was conducted by Gareth Jones with spick-and-span rhythms. themselves appear pictorially in the first finale, aptly blessing the hymn to their own poetry; and Queen Victoria comes to life in the second certainly amused, as who could fail to be? This one will run and run. -vjffj Pulsating pirate eye can scarcely follow the flail of his arm or leg; yet he can focus attention on the flicker of a finger. In Texane, his solo develops into a duet with a woman who clings to him as though she were drowning.

Their caresses are indistinguishable from blows, their moments of tenderness full of menace. Three small girls and another man suggest a family at the mercy of Christophe Zurfluh's savage rhythms and thier own compulsions. They graduate from childish rituals to frantic 'trust' games, hurling themselves blindly off tables. At one still point, the girls dreamily remove then-bodies from their dresses like crabs from their carapaces. Once they creep back into their clothes, they get caught up in a fresh cycle of violence, as self-imposed as the torments of the couple at the start.

sparks from the dying flames Singers and Scottish Chamber Opera Ensemble (conductor Philippe Nahon) were not always in perfect accord on Tuesday night, but that should be corrected by now. Loretta Bybee and Ruben Broitman lead the alternative cast. At 45 minutes, Pushkin's Mozart and Salieri (Almeida) is barely half the length of Carriere Carmen and Chur chill's Icecream. In a co-production between the Almeida, the Vienna Burgtheater and the Hebbel Theatre in Berlin, Manfred Karge stages it as a piece about buddy-envy per formed by two women. Lore Brunner plays Salieri as a humourless classicist with a passion for music, who believes that all creation can be kept in order with a reliable metronome.

He adores Mozart, but uncontrolled genius disturbs the precarious order of things, so Mozart (Tilda swinton) has to go. Swinton is Mozart as Cheru bino, androgynous man-child and mutant fledgling, hunched over his keyboard in disbelief at the sounds that are coming out: at one point, boogie seems about to emerge, it is a clean, witty and brilliantly inventive performance, whose sweet sharpness is perfectly matched by Brunner's melancholy and pedantic accompaniment. ra fifijM'Sii a -xiJHl April 1989 showed the work of three choreographers in the season, with a cabaret finale by Anglo-French dancers and musicians. The most ingenious use of the theatre space was made by Brigitte Farges who presented a trio from her Ballet du Fargistan: it will be given in full at The Place on 18-19 April. Farges collaborates with a young sculptor called Skall; they reorganise bodies, shapes and spaces to create surreal tableaux.

Batons of fabric descended to conceal legs or torsos; seemingly armless men paraded past, their profiles outlined against medallion-shaped head-pieces; blinds in the auditorium raised themselves silently to let in a flood of light. With all this Americans solemn Lance (Philip Jackson) and prattling Vera (Carole Hayman) motor through Britain in search of their ancestors and distant, living kin. After roving across an Ireland, Scotland and Devon whose hills are idyllically, and identically, quilted like the covers of a pre-war. Batsford guide (designer, Peter Hartwell), they fetch up in the scruffy East End of London with Phil (David Thewlis) and his sister Jaq (Saskia Reeves). Phil is unemployable; Jaq has had 36 jobs.

In front of Lance, Vera and Jaq, Phil shoots the landlord who has been exploiting them. MURDO MacLEOD sense of sex as a joke on men. THE PHOENIX has risen from the ashes and the New D'Oyly Carte Opera Company is now into its second season, with a mammoth national tour, London to come later in the year, and America beckoning next year. Judging from a wet Wednesday in the King's Theatre, Southsea, the audience is very much the same as that for the old D'Oyly Carte but they must have had a shock, for the company and the show are quite different. An Alber-ich from the Coliseum (Malcolm Rivers) sings the Pirate King to perfection, and the designer who trendified Falstaff for ENO (Marie-Jeanne Lecca) provides a witty box of tricks and a collapsible toy boat from which The Pirates of Penzance emerges bubbling arid fresh.

The comparison here is less likely to be with dowdy old D'Oyly Carte accounts than with the pulsating energy of Joseph Papp's Broadway passing Don Jose Qames Hob-ack) and casts a swift prediction on the ground with feathers, rope, ash and bone (superstition is powerful throughout). As Micaela (Veronique Dietschy) and Jose sing, the crone throws off the sackcloth and becomes Carmen (Cynthia Clarey), slim, beautiful, black, and rolling a cigar on her calves. There is a sense throughout of sex as a joke on men, as Jose and Zuniga (Jean-Paul Denizon) slip helplessly into Carmen's net. It is not a joke to Jose, a nervous smirker and tough little Wozzeck-squaddie who throttles his officer with his bare hands. After the death of Escamillo (John Rath) at the end, Carmen follows Jose obediently into the countryside for her own ritual death, scuffing the earth for the predestined spot.

Together they kneel as in prayer and Jose stabs her, deep and clean in the back, as drums thud out her life softly to the Habanera beat. Most magical of all is the tender eroticism of the mountain scene as the lovers break bread at dusk and lie in each other's arms within a triangle of blazing fires and a circle of terracotta dust. It is a kind of wedding night. Left alone, Carmen sings the card song to the muffled snap of bright Opens 20 with MOST of the events in Caryl Churchill's Icecream (Royal Court) take place before the play begins or between the scenes, like the plot of Trovatore. They include two killings, one fatal road accident, and the improbable admission into the United States of a pair of English waifs with no return air tickets and one duffle bag between them.

Much is left to the imagination: that is the point. What the imagination supplies, of course, depends on the quality of clues and data available, and the writing of this 75-minute diptych is surprisingly uneven, even careless at times. Two middle-aged Cynthia Clarey as Carmen: A 'Icecream', 'Carmen' 'Mozart and Salieri' MICHAEL RATCLIFFE Each couple approaches the other's country in a state of ecstatic ignorance embellished by tireless cliche: rude awakenings ensue. Lance and Vera look for history in Britain and find only the provincialism and deprivation of today. In the States (Act Two, no interval) Phil and Jaq look for the American culture they affect to despise on television, but find instead a fearful adult world quite as anarchic as their own, which offers sudden death, and confirms the need to murder in self-defence.

Churchill's moral critique is far from even-handed: the Americans are merely presented and come close to caricature; the British are explained. The cool tone snaps once, as Vera weeps to her shrink who rattles off an all-purpose interpretation of her dreams like a High Street checkout till: another cliche. There is fine comic energy and poetic spareness to the most successful scenes, but for all its impacted story-telling, lucid performances and bold technical leaps precisely and musically directed by Max Stafford-Clark Icecream's brevity is frustrating because it rests on uncertain detail and familiar concerns. More compacting in as Peter Brook's La tragedie de Carmen (Tramway, until 30 April) compresses Bizet into 90 minutes and arrives in Britain eight years after its premiere in Paris at the Bouffes du Nord: so much for our hospitality. Jean-Claude Carriere adapts the book, Marius Constant the score.

Some of the rough edges have been smoothed out in middle age passion is surprisingly subdued in what is, above all, a pure, cool, and ironic view of Merimee's characters, and some of the singing is dramatically slight but it contains scenes of thrilling simplicity and tenderness hard to forget. This Carmen begins with an old crone hidden beneath sackcloth at the centre of a red earth floor. Suddenly, a hand whips out a card for the Monteverdi's The Return of Ulysses Musical Director John Toll Producer Thomas Hemsley Ulysses NeilJenkins Penelope Sarah Walker The Orchard Theatre Dartford 0322 343333 Tour Information call: 023 376 558 Xf. WWW msi -V T' Mkm Carole KingCity Streets LP 5.99, Cassette 5.99, CD 10.99 Our 'Album of the Week' is City Streets by Carole King. This highly acclaimed singer songwriter returns with a superb album featuring the latest single 'City Prices correct at lime of going Co Press.

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