The Guardian du lieu suivant : London, Greater London, England • 38

THE GUARDIAN Wednesday January 9 1991 38 ARTS The winner on boints God's not the only one miffed Michael Billington W3EWBtig regulations. If he had not raised his vest to scratch a wood tick, he would have been unscathed. The wood tick seems to have interposed its body nobly be Street boy (to cabby, in a block): 'Look 'ere, are you a goin' on wi this four-wheeler? 'r else me an my friend'll get down Mr Schwartz scores better as a tunesmith and several of his 21 songs fall pleasantly on the ear. What his score lacks is consistency of idiom. Thus we get a thirties tea-dance number from the Snake (In Pursuit Of Excellence), a forties close-harmony, routine from Noah's offspring (Shipshape), a sixties disco swinger from Ham and Company (Generations) and a periodless hot-gospel number from Mama Noah (Ain't It Singly, all these numbers are tuneful and attractive: what one misses is the stylistic unity of a Berstein.

The best features of the evening are, in fact, John Caird's production and John Napier's design concept Mr Napier gives us an elliptical, two-tiered dome that suggests, at different times, a world in creation and a fragmented version of the British Museum Reading Room. Mr Caird also gives us a company spectacle: music is visibly made in the galleries, actors faces peer out from skeletal giraffes and whales and the magic is always tangible. Instead of a star show we also get a racially integrated ensemble musical. Invidiously, I would pick out Kevin Colson who makes Noah a weighty blue-collar Lear dividing his kingdom among his three sons with Japheth taking on the Cordelia-role. But there is also good work from Frances Ruf-felle as Japheth's outcast girlfriend Yonah, from Richard Lloyd-King as an insidious, hoofing Snake and from Ken The honest piper of on the premiere of Children Of Eden at the Prince Edward WI HAT most new musicals lack is a good book.

The creators ot Children Of Eden at the Prince Edward, Stephen Schwartz and John Caird, have therefore taken as then source the Good Book: the first eight chapters of Genesis from tne creation to Noah's Ark. The result is an amiable, weU-directed piece of Biblical story-telling but one that lacks a Big Idea. I thought there might be one in the first half when we see both Eve and Cam driven by what Kipling called "insatiable curiosity" to challenge the frontiers of knowledge. It seemed as if we might be in for an inter esting conflict between free will and the stem, patriarchal God of the Old Testament. But that idea is rather subverted in the second half when Noah fulfils God's injunction to build his ark against the Flood and is duly rewarded with survival on Mount Ararat.

Theological orthodoxy ultimately replaces in tellectual speculation. What one gets in uie ena is a showbiz Bible Class: sober, straightforward, free from God-spell cutesiness but lacking that joy in language that Ares every sentence of the Authorised Version. Compare for instance the majesty of "And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth" with the flatness of Mr Schwartz's lyrics where one of Noah's children announces "Clearly God is miffed, He's left us here adrift." People say that spectacle is undermining the musical: my contention is that it is verbal banality. Tim Hilton on a skilled and sober Victorian draughtsman with an endearing line in eccentricity ITTLE wonder that Michael Broadbent is a jolly sort of chap, for he's the head of the wine department at Christie's and when not taking auctions is often in Bordeaux to see how recent vintages are shaping up. And he's made a pleasant exhibition from his interest in a jolly sort of artist, the Victorian illustrator Charles Keene.

It's nicely displayed in the new rooms at the back of Christie's (formerly the billiards and bar quarters of the Eccentric Club) and since the show coin cides with the 150th anniver sary of Punch, Keene's principal employers, things are rather jolly all round. Except that there's a lot of melancholy in Keene, a wistful-ness, a deliberate lack of ambition. As Broadbent says, and as his co-organiser Simon Houfe claims at greater length, Keene was highly talented. Yet it seems to me that they exaggerate this talent to compensate for Keene's failure to make the most of his abilities. The very occasional oil painting like the 1860 self-portrait, which belongs to the Tate indicate that, had he wished to do so, he mieht have become one of the grandees of Victorian painting.

He had a neaa start, oeing well educated and well connected (his father was an old Etonian solicitor). But Keene preferred to go his own quiet way into graphics, and inevita bly this led him to a lot of drudgery and journeyman work. The life of a 19th-century illustrator could be pretty hard, and the rewards weren't high even for the best of them until the end of the century. He died well-off, but that was Farce forfeit Charles Keene in 1873 place at the Punch table. As suited his paper's ethos, he envisaged the contemporary world as a gentle domestic farce.

He was not fond of abroad and disliked some early tasks at the Illustrated London News, where he had been required to work up sketches by foreign correspondents from, for instance, Sebastopol. Keene's reassuring vision belongs to the long peace between the Crimean and Boer wars. His society consisted of cabmen, urchins, swells, boulevar-diers, costermongers, aunts, bagpipers, gardeners, lawyers, theatregoers, farmers and squires and the occasional pretty girl. Only occasional and seldom more than pretty, these girls; real beauty sent Keene back to his club, or to his pipes. HEREIN lay Keene's excellence? Surely in his obedience to a self-imposed rule, which was that everything he drew had to be observed from nature.

A man who spent a lifetime producing thousands of amusing drawings against deadlines might be forgiven for falling back on stock shapes and man-erisms. Present-day cartoonists do nothing else. But Keene was a comic artist with an aesthetic conscience, no doubt because Nancy Banks-Smith HILE Agent Cooper is tying perforated on the floor ol the Great Northern Hotel in Twin Peaks (BBC 2), he is visited by a long, thin giant who, with his head bobbing among the light fittings, addresses him ob scurely in idiosyncratic English "Without the chemicals he Without the chemicals he what? But for an accident of geography, this could be Jimmy Nail. Nail has a striking physical presence: 6ft 4ins and, apparently, sopping wet. The effect is spectral and lugubrious like a lamp post that refuses to look on the bright side.

The idea of Spender (BBC I) is that Nail speak the bloody should work under wraps as a detective in Newcastle. You might as weU try to wrap a wet umbrella. To avoid drawing attention to himself, the local sergeant advises him to stop ordering bloody Perrier water. Far be it from me to criticize but I wonder if this will be enough. Perhaps if he stood in a bloody big hole? It is rather rough luck on Spender to be in direct opposition to Twin Peaks.

It is shot on location, all moody blue and snooker. The first episode was written by Ian La Frenais and the comedy was laconic: "Where's your Ma?" "In the kitchen with the Ajax" or "Why did you leave in the first place?" "The usual reasons, y'knaw, the theatre, the galleries, the ballet" The jokes were part of the product as the taste of smoke is part of the kipper. The town signwriter to Twin Peaks. Population must be the busiest man in Twin Peaks. As Agent Cooper said, summing up the current state of play, "Laura Palmer is dead.

Jacques Renaud is dead. Ronette Po-laski and Leo Johnson are in comas. Waldo the bird is dead." The scoreboard, therefore, should more properly read "Welcome to Twin Peaks. Population 20,698. Two of these are comatose.

The rest just don't believe in rushing around." Agent Cooper himself survived assassination by wearing a bullet proof vest per bureau Sounds of luxury Edward Greenfield at Covent Garden all the operas that I shouldn't work but triumphantly do. Strauss's Capriccio must be top ot the list. How odd that this ultra-civilised discussion on the rival claims of words and music in opera should have stemmed from Nazi Germany during the second world war clear artistic proof at least, of the compos er alienation from the society of his time. What, one wonders, did Goebbels make of it at the first performance in Munich in 1942? In Britain this 'conversation piece for music' has found its natural home at Glyndebourne. The composer himself felt that it "is not a piece for the general public, or at least not for an audience of 1800 people per evening.

Perhaps a delicacy for epicures." Yet against all expectation, Capriccio has become by far the best-loved of all Strauss's later operas, thanks above all to the radiant inspiration of the score, transcending in its sheer beauty everything he had done before. The latest Glyndebourne revival came only last summer, with John Cox's production set intimately in a country house that you could imagine was Glyndebourne itself. Amazingly, the chance was missed of using surtitles, but now Covent Garden in its first production, mindful of its audience of 1800-plus has by the simple stroke of having surtitles, transformed the experience. The conversation comes alive. As at Glyndebourne John Cox is the stage director, and once again the setting is updated from 1775 and the period of Gluck's Reform operas, to the Twenties.

But this is a far grander setting, with the late Mauro Pagano's designs involving not so much a country house as a private palace, where the trompe l'oeil sets have us escapists all soaking in the luxury of unimaginable riches, with servants by the dozen. So far, so good. Under Jeffrey Tate's loving direction, the music itself expands to the big house, even the tracery of the string sextet of the prelude done here by players on stage. What is less certain is how well the subtly drawn characters project in the larger house. One follows the detailed pro- tween the slug and the man, cushioning the impact.

Or as much as a wood tick can. This creature worries me. Shouldn't a wood tick be, well, on wood? What was it doing on Agent Cooper, who admittedly has an unusually clean cut look as if he were scissored out of cardboard. Is this tick by any chance a critic? The Calhoun Memorial Hospital is a large establishment for a small town where little is heard but the creaking of leather jackets and the occasional thud of a redwood driving a lumberjack into the ground like a nail. But yesterday Calhoun Memorial was jam packed as a doughnut.

Agent Cooper was rising from his bed of pain give me a couple of hours to get Jacques Renaud, strangled by Leland Palmer, was being removed in a body bag. Ronette, Nadine and Leo were less ot a nuisance tnan usual being comatose. Pete and Shelly, asphixiated when the mill burned down, were cough ing like old sheep in a fog. Dr. Jacoby, who had eaten a hospital meal, was suffering from food poisoning.

Those patients capable of rational thought were passionately ordering chocolate peanut butter pie from the Double Diner. As Hank, the hash slinger there, is a contract killer this may or may not be an improvement. A contusing new arrival is the one armed shoe salesman. Like the one legged tap dancer in music hall whose wooden leg tended to catch in knotholes on the stage and bring his performance to a juddering hilt, this choice of profession indicates a man of more spirit than sense. I mean, what about the shoe laces, then? The trained eye notes that Cooper was shot by a right handed man and the shoe salesman is right handed.

Well, necessarily. And, of course, new shoes were found with the cache of cocaine at Leo Johnson's but this may mean nothing as there are more clues in Twin Peaks than episodes. There are 21 more of those to come. Think, it will be June before we know who killed Laura Palmer. I should live so long.

Kiri Te Kanawa: charming gress of the conversation better than ever before, but only Thomas Allen as the Count, brother of the Countess around whom the opera revolves, emerges as fully three-dimensional: the singer gives so personal a slant on this show-off of a man, making him an amiably boastful bully and philanderer. Dame Kiri Te Kanawa as the Countess produces ravishing sounds, and is predictably charming which makes the long final monologue a dream of a conclusion but as yet she lacks the animation of a Schwarzkopf, a Soderstrom or, the latest Countess at Glyndebourne, Felicity Lott. Her lovers, the tenor composer, Fla-mand, and the baritone poet, Olivier, are sharply contrasted, with David Rendall bright and pompous, and William Shimeli a more mysterious, dashing fig ure, whom one readily believes has had his fling with the visiting actress, Clairon. Anne Howeus may not have the over-the-top dominance of Brigitte Fassbaender, a spellbinding Clairon at Glynde bourne, but she makes her delightfully French in a sharp way. Franz Ferdinand Nentwig as the impresario, La Roche, rather fails to dominate his big scenes, but Bonaventura Bot- tone (as at Glyndebourne) does a splendid send-up as the Ital ian tenor, well-partnered by Lillian Watson as the soprano.

Gianni Versace costumes. rather indeterminately dated, are glittery and very Italian, with crimson upholstery everywhere, calling in question the refined taste of these super-aes thetes. But above all this is an entertainment to enjoy as a luxury, and I imagine Strauss who above all wanted words to be taken in would have approved the surtitles. Remaining performances on January 11, 15, 19, 23 and 26 Look to the company logo it's time for that human touch. Tim Kirby on a Punch he came of age in the 1840s and therefore felt that the probity of art lay in truthful observation.

Broadbent and Houfe rightly say the first stage in his career allied mm with Fre-Raphaelitism. Some interesting sheets at Christie's are in fact portraits of Pre-Raphaelite brothers. There are two sketches of Mil-lais, a rather sinister observation of Rossetti and a rare drawing of William Morris. Finer by far is an etching of Marie Zambaco, Burne-Jones's temrae tataie. But these drawings point to an occasional rather than a temperamental connection with more serious artists.

Unlike his friend Ten-niel, Keene had no interest in what we might call high Pre-Raphaelitism the culture of naturalism, early Renaissance art, gothic revival architecture and dreams of social regenera tion. He was too much a Punch man for that sort of thing. Remarkably, he won much praise from Pissarro, and his last Punch cartoon of alllooks as much French as English. Elsewhere in Christie's, the exhibition Patronage Preserved is an anthology ot old master Daintines. plus some furniture and a sculpture, that have been "saved" by various manoeu vres and interventions and will hang in various country houses with which they have had a previous connection.

Noteable among them are Millais' por trait of Cardinal Newman, Guil- lem Scrots portrait of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and Daniel Mystens' of Thomas Howard. 2nd Earl of Arundel, and his wife. All these pictures will return to Arundel Castle. I also liked the Vernet seascapes, the Bernardo Strozzi and the Delaroche, but I didn't like them much. I understand why the art market persists in calling practically all 17th-century paintings but it's not true.

corporate identity crisis whose book on corporate identity appears in the autumn, has been a close ob server of the syndrome: "The reaction of design companies to the brief to 'humanise' a corporation or an institution has become entirely predictable: get out the brushes. "It started in a big way with Wolff Olin's Prudential identity in 86. That was, I think, a genuine attempt to break away from the functional, hard-edged logotypes that we'd seen in the Seventies. Since then, though, it has become an epidemic." Contrasting the current crop of over-researched Ma- tisse-o-likes with the identity that a genuine artist, Joan Miro, produced for the Spanish Tourist Board. Jenkins adds: "The worst thing about these symbols is that they are so badly drawn.

They completely fail to engage the emotions of the public." Engaging the emotions of the public is, of course, the Big Idea in the commercial arts these days. From corporate identity to product design, from advertising to architecture, form (to quote Apple Mac designer Hartmut Essiinger) iouows not amotion but emotion. This is grave news for those who had hoped that the end of the Style Decade heralded a revival of rigorous functionality. With consumer research groups registering wide-scale eco-angst, pre-war pessimism and general fin-de-siecle gloom, Emotionalism rather than Modernism is the smart strategy for the Nineties. Avoid spe cifics.

Promise nothing. Seek only to empathise. Emotionalism explains why a global, high-tech corporation like BT should choose to project an image that denies the technology on which its pre-eminece is based. Like the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz, the corpo ration only wants a heart, but it's prepared to settle for the symbolic representation of a heart in the hope that we'll love it just the same. Michael Billington at the Cottesloe DISGUISE-Ioving mani Aac XAHe ac achieves normality.

thereby exposes the insanity of the sensible. That is the thrust of Dario Fo's Accidental Death Of An Anarchist; and watching Tim Supple's production at the Cottesloe, it sud denly struck me that Fo is a pop Pirandello. He takes the classic reversal of the great Sicilian's Enrico and turns it into pungent political farce. The occasion for this surprisingly durable play was the death of Giuseppe Pinelli: an anarchist Milanese railwayman who in 1969 was picked up by the police.accused of a bank nomb-expiosion ana wno subse quently "fell" out of a fourth-floor window during interrogation. Writing shortly after the event, Fo audaciously showed a certified madman infiltrating Milan's police HQ, posing as a lawyer who has come to re open the judicial enquiry into the anarchist's death and exposing the lies, contradictions and aDsuraiues ot tne ponce evidence.

Mv chief memory of the origi nal Belt and Braces production back in 1979 is of a breakneck farce with Alfred Molina as the protagonist looking like Tommy Cooper on speed: this new version by Alan humming and Tim Supple is far less funny but politically more potent. It treats the play as moral satire rather than grotesque farce. It turns the Milanese fuzz into corrupt boobies rather than Mafioso monsters. And it constantly heightens the play's local relevance with references to the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six, with allusions Brushing up the public image because, unlike most artists, he saved. Reading Houfe's account of his regular, celibate and moderate life I kept thinking of an old Victorian catch-phrase: "A clean shirt, a merry heart and a guinea!" Three little needs to start the jocund day, and never mind the morrow.

Many nineteenth-century minor artists lived by such rules, and just as they made their own luck in life, so also their art could get lucky. I want a bit more dash and profligacy from Keene. He did only one thing that was peculiar. For hours on end and years on end he played the bagpipes, alone at night on the Suffolk coast, like some haunted creature in an Edward Lear poem. Keene was a better comic draughtsman than Lear but lacked his imagination.

An observer rather than an inventor, there is little surprise in his humour. Indeed, at the height of his career he relied on a collaborator to provde him with amusing material. This was Joseph Crawhall, a Tyneside businessman and amateur artist who regularly supplied bits of humourous conversation and anecdote, drawings too, things he had heard and seen as he went through the day, for Keene to smarten, transform or reject These bits of conversation seem to have been utterly dire, hut as was the way with mid-century Punch humour, lumbering jocosity in the letterpress was redeemed by vivacity in the drawing. Sprightly detail, an eye for types, a feeling that other people lives make the eye twinkle, a highly serviceable but never flashy technique: these things gave Keene his press to say "the police are thugs and design companies are fairies." Olins, in bis otherwise authoritative book on corporate identity (called boldly Corporate Identity) is distinctly nervy about that moment when a new identity is unveiled. As he observes, the publicity generated by such an event, if unchannelled, can be dangerous.

Therefore the company "must do everything it can to explain the real significance of what it is doing and avoid focusing on the new symbol, if there is one, for that simply invites ignorant, superficial and misleading comment." Advice to a bald man unveiling a new toupee: avoid focusing attention on the new hairpiece. Try instead to explain the real significance of what you are doing. Fat chance, baldy. The whole point about symbols the reason why they exist is that they are so much more compelling than staff retraining programmes or putting-the-cus-tomer-ftrst initiatives. Their rationale may be commercial and their design cold-bloodedly logical, but they perform in the realms of art and the imagination where intentions count for little.

Page as a God the Father. It is all harmlessly bland. But I feel a Biblical musical should be infinitely more. It should tackle, rather than evade, the opposition between divine in junction and human aspiration and it should echo the linguistic richness of the original. This, you might say, is Genesis without tears.

to the police's role in ransacking TV cutting-rooms and guarding nuclear bases and by showing, somewhat tenden-tiously, a portrait of James An-derton adorning the Milanese cop-shop. "It can happen here," we were told in the original production: the moral of this version is that it all too frequently does. I have mixed feelings about the result. It highlights Fo's classicism: Gogol's The Government Inspector comes to mind as well as Pirandello. It builds to a pitch of delirium instead of starting with it.

And it brings out the seriousness of Fo's argument that in social democracies like ours "Most people are happy for abuse to exist as long as they get a scandal now and again." Yet the quality that makes Fo uniquely powerful, the ability to wring wild laughter out of insidious corruption, is here deliberately muted: instead of guilty ecstasy we get careful point-scoring. This is not to deny the genuine artistry of the young Scottish actor, Alan Cumming, as the Madman. He has the sharp, angular features of a sadistic cherub. His investigating lawyer is a mischievous Machiavel in a grey flannel-suit. And his penultimate disguise as a one-eyed, one-armed, one-legged police captain has a farouche singularity.

He is a naturally fastidious comic actor and he is well supported by Trevor Cooper as a beefily nervous Super and by Lorcan Cranitch as a thuggish Inspector. Mr Supple also directs with scrupulous intelligence. But I felt I was seeing the collision of two rational worlds instead of a confrontation between individual sanity and State madness. This is Fo shrewdly updated but without his carnivalesque danger. in vogue following the success of Five Guys Named Moe, Witherspoon should pack them in.

He is at the Jazz Cafe until Friday with a backing group led by the superb Richard "Groove" Holmes. Of the Hammond organists I've heard in the flesh, Holmes has the best feel for what makes the organ trio work. He sets ideal tempos, lets the music breathe by leaving space for guitar and drum-sto filter through and never overplays his solos. The trio opened with a blues of their own that made the point: telepathic interweaving between Holmes and guitarist Henry Lee Taylor, while Daryl Washington at the drums provided the slither of a back beat. Hammond purists might worry about the DX7 keyboard perched on top of the organ, but Holmes seemed to adapt well enough.

On most numbers, he laid the perfect sonic carpet under Witherspoon's voice, while Taylor proved his own versatility with an expansive solo in the T-Bone Walker manner when the singer offered him the spotlight. Still jumping I TAKES just six and a half minutes to walk from my front door to the nearest tube station. En route the other day, I spotted no fewer than four British Telecom vehicles, barnstorming zebra crossings, blockading pavements, doing whatever it is they do in their unmistakable yellow and blue livery. With a fleet and more than 90,000 telephone boxes, BT is as much a part of the street scene as dog-do. So no matter how indifferent you feel about BT's new red-and-blue "Fan with trumpet" identity, ripped untimely from the womb by the Sun newspaper, be sure that when it's officially launched in April the street will never look the same again.

The inevitable tiff about BT's Pan has thus far conformed to the pattern established when certain contemporary artworks go for millions at auction. In the "a child of three could do that" corner is the press, incensed by the predicted cost of this exercise in corporate egotism (50 million, 75 million, 100 million there's a price-tag for every degree of outrage) and underwhelmed by the footling insignificance of what appears to be its final product: a stubby logotype and a few sketches of a horn-blowing demi-god. In the "there's actually more to this than meets the eye and if you've got half an hour I'd be happy to explain" corner is BT itself, backed up by corporate identity specialists Wolff Olins. Wolff Olins has been here many times before. After 25 years in the business of what has been described as "giving plastic surgery to men on the it expects the worst when its handiwork goes on show.

In 1987, its overhaul of ICI's roundel was derided as an exorbitantly expensive exercise in visual tinkering. Its work with the Metropolitan Police a year later was, in the words of chairman Wally Olins, a chance for the Form follows emotion as BT's horn-blowing demi-god (top left) ousts the corporation's more appropriate hi-tech symbol (above). The Liberal Democrats' 'bird of freedom' (left) has been compared to a funeral service logo Whatever its commercial motives, a symbol has to satisfy essentially aesthetic criteria. Unfortunately, whichever mode of analysis you favour Jungian, Baudril-lardian, Peter Yorkian, Clap-ham Omnibusian the BT logo is unlikely to fare well. It makes you smirk and squirm at the same time It belongs to a recognisable, if recent, tradition of corprate symbols which attempt to express human, humane, even humanistic values that a company embodies, aspires to or hopes to hide behind.

In visual terms this often translates into the "Matisse a usu- jally clumsy attempt to ren der in Drusnstroxe tne exuberant simplicity of a Matisse cut-out. HE Liberal Democrats' "dead narrot" shows the syndrome at work in the political arena. According to its designers. Fitch RS, the stylised "bird of freedom" symbolises a party that is "alive, soaring and And, as a Sunday newspaper rather cruelly pointed out, it also bears a passing resemblance to the corporate, symbol of Co-op Funeral Services. Designer Nick Jenkins, Ron Atkins on Jimmy Witherspoon Ji IMMY Witherspoon is a survivor from the great days of jump bands and blues shouters.

He made his name in Jay McShann's group after the war and has kept faith with the same mix ture of blues and ballads ever since. Now well into his sixties, he can still whoon up the fal setto cries when the beat becomes slow and slinky on a number like Ain't Nobody's Business. In place of the raw power of a Joe Turner, the husky texture iof Witherspoon's voice invested a ballad like Gee Baby Ain't I Good To You with a degree of intimacy you rarely find in this most extrovert of contexts. It crept even into the livelier corners of the standard blues repertory, to which he further added variety by changing the beat around, sometimes bor rowing a snappy 68 rhythm from gospel music. With the jumping blues now.