The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 10

The Guardian Saturday January 30 1999 Culture-shock comedian Cher's frock fret Jonathan Ross gets mad 'it ftp T-. i'. V'" Wily pragmatist Michael Williams MEiLL tstRi you know, it goes against sthe crain for the Diary to cornerstone of the group, is demanding mega moolah upfront. Which seems unlikely, given that Ryder has just split with Donovan's daughter Oriole, and looks like he is down to his last pair of trainers. benefit for William Hague with a belly dancer called Asmahan? "I'm stupefied," said socialist firebrand Mark Thomas, "but I'll cheer him to the rafters if it's true." But the signs were always there.

Not many peoole know this, but Davi ui in Peter Greenawa And Two Noughts, 1 1 1 1 cineastes among yew in also remember his ul X', neo-expressionist gem, Up The Elephant And "She phone rings. "Hello," I says a chirpy, familiar voice, "it's Jim Davidson here, the well-ltnown racist, rightwing bastard." We was gobsmacked. The Diary had spotted the creator of the Rastafarian "Chalky" at The Colour Of Justice, the superb play about the Stephen Lawrence case, and wondered if we were seeing things. The shock was mutual. "I had to sit down when I heard the Guardian wanted to talk to me," says Davidson, "but don't go getting ideas, I'm not going all namby-pamby.

I went out of respect for the Lawrence family, and because I Ayckbourn captures exactly the play's satiric attitude towards the moneyed classes: Arkadiy, describing a visit to his shopkeeper relatives, claims "It was as if they'd died and nobody had broken the news to them." And Michael Feast and Michael Williams turn the raggedy actors into a classic Beckettian double-act. Feast, whose speech is stuffed with Hamlet and Lear quotations, has a wonderfully dotty fake-grandeur: Williams, with his cropped carroty hair and spitting consonants, is a superb foil, a wily pragmatist wlio regards the rich as a source of plunder. But Page's production seems to have learned nothing from recent British ventures into Russian drama. Declan Donnellan and Richard Jones's versions of Ostrovsky, Kent's Ivanov and Davies's Vassa have all shown that there is a constant thread of demonic, Dickensian satire on the merchant and landowning classes. Their productions have been filled with the hectic vitality of caricature: Page opts, mistakenly, for a sober, post-Stanislavsky naturalism.

You see the consequences in Frances tie la Tour's strangely uncertain performance as Raisa. The character has two clear objectives: mid sex. But unlike Barbara Leigh-Hunt in Adrian N'ible's RSC revival, she makes nothing of attachment to her nionevbux. And even the cemedv of an ageing frump's t'eroeiou-- carnal appetite misse- it1; mark, since De la Tour i-. mie of the sexiest actresses in Britain: you feel every virile Vol mi resident would be after Ivr Page also squanders Ostrovsky's point that the civilians are.

in many ways, more theatrical than the invading iictors. Raisa's lovestricken relative. Aksyusha. is so ovor-the-top that Gennadn wants her to join his company: nothing Niamh Lmehan's performance, however, suggests wild romantic excess. Only Windsor Davies as a deaf ex-cavalryman has the heightened selfhood Ostrovsky demands.

William Dudley's sen. ith their overstuffed interiors and arboreal exactness, share the production's stolid realism Ostrovsky's marvellous work has the exuberant madness the best Russian comedy: here, with the vivid exception of the two Michaels, it gets watered down to the level of Somerset Maugham. In rep at the Lyttelton (0 1 7 1 J52 3000) Michae! Billington The Forest Lyttelton Theatre, London I t's Russian week in the Lon-Sdon theatre. After Gorky's I Vassa (1909) at the Albery we now have Ostrovsky's The Forest (1870) at the National. Both plays offer a vivid portrait of a money-worshipping female autocrat.

But where Howard Davies's Vassa has an ultra-theatrical exuberance, Anthony Page's production of The Forest is weighed down by a dogged naturalism. Page starts with many-advantages. Ostrovsky's play itself, rediscovered by the RSC in 1981 and adapted by Alan Ayckbourn, is a cracker. Gen-nadiy, a romantic tragedian, fetches up at the country estate of his skinflint aunt, Raisa, in the company of Arkadiy. a stubby vaudevil-lian.

Together they expose the false values of the world they have invaded: in particular the widowed Raisa's crazy infatuation with a Volga opportunist and her shrivelled meanness to a lovelorn, dowry-deprived female relative. Round The 1 USSIO. KS! Awards: you just enough of them, already giddy with about the forthcomin I i Rock And Pop Awan Surely there will ha category for the best written in less than 1 2 words about selling secondhand car or appliance. So you have to fea fortheNME, which, il mhi ate to avoid the hum 1 i of last year's Brat Ai id (when the Verve accept their prizes), decided to make a film about Britpop instead. The premiere would be a star-studded affair, we were promised.

In the event, only Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy andtwoex-members of Kenicke Sunderland's premier geezer bird band, since you ask showed up. Hats off then to Shaun Ryder, formerly of the Happy Mondays, who entertained the bored multitude with a display of top-drawer pop star antics, culminating in a hands-on homage to the embonpoint of a hapless PR. "It's an honour to be mauled by such a professional," said the lucky lady. "Beats sharing a bedroom with a Boyzone any day." By the way, rumours of the Mondays reforming, like those of Ryder's rehabilitation, may be a little premature. We hear that Bez, the dancer, whose manic routines and Herculean drug-taking were of course the artistic stoop to showbiz gossip, but we can't help but warm to Jonathan Woss after his outburst against Anthea Turner and her love-crossed paramour, Grant Bovey.

"How could that man leave his wife and two kids for that broomstick with a doll's head on top makes me shamed to he part of the same species," he lisped on radio the other day. Woss went on to compare Anthea to a Barbie A pair of Anthea and Barbie doll: "She doesn't have parts i like other women, I think she's solid like Barbie. I'm mad as hell, 1 want to bang their heads together in time to the new Fat Boy Slim single What prompted this and how it went down with Ross's Virgin FM boss Chris Evans, a bossom buddy of Bovey and Turner's is anyone's guess. Talking of Fat Boy Slim, we hear Norman Cook, the king of the samplers, has just bought himself a beachfront pad next door to Derek Jameson in Hove. "We were very worried about the noise," says Del, "but so far we haven't heard a pip out of Fat Norman." At last some white smoke at the Arts Council, where the great and good have been locked in combat over who will be the next Poet Laureate.

Downing Street will be asked to choose between three poets next week, we're told, although our source refused to reveal any names. "Both sexes will be represented," was all he'd give away. Hope then still for our tip, A Fanthorpe, whose name is an anagram of A FUN POET, HAR. A celestial sign, we'd say. A big week in the Hare Krishna calendar beckons.

Kula Shaker, the mystic rockers led by Crispin Mills, are to take over the 100 Club in Oxford Street in March and have promised "special Could these include Crispin's grandpa Sir John Mills, who despite being nearly 91 and half blind, made his comeback as a crooner last week? Sir John's agent is coy, but Kula Shaker's spokeswoman is "tickled by the So, we feel sure, will the public at the thought of our most distinguished thesp singing in Sanskrit. been inter- SjTS? estedby issues 01 (jr race 1 mean, blacks and whites and all that because people are always calling me a racist bigot and Gawd, does that get on my wick." We fear we may have misjudged Jim (we're on first-name terms now). "Only last night I was discussing the case down my Masonic Lodge. I used to agree with Norman Tebbit about the cricket test that black people should support England when they play the West Indies but now I see that as a load of old bollocks. I'm Scottish, but I'm still British.

I pity the poor Welsh though, baaaaah! "I'm much more sensitive now about the offence I can cause. I try to make fun of bigotry. I know my audience, so I make them laugh at their prejudices. "It's all about who the joke is on. You know the one about the black guy being eaten by a crocodile? Well, an Afrikaner is passing by and he shouts, 'Oi, you kaf-fir! Where did you get that Lacoste sleeping Now is that a racist joke?" Staggered by the swiftness of his conversion to the liberal cause, we sought answers from his fellow comedians.Was this the same Jim Davidson who only six weeks ago was topping the bill at a showbiz Not Jim Davidson FIXED-RATE I I I i 1 archetypes, the comedy band Or, as their surprisingly numerous supporters would prefer it, a party band.

Either way. their act is based on the old-fashioned precept of bonding with an audience through jokes and anecdotes. They're on the road 200 days a year, which has paid off in a number-one US single and 2.. million sales of their current (and fifth) album. Stunt.

They're almost unknown here, but most of Canadian London turned out in a show of lagery camaraderie. Knowing he was among friends, singer Steven Page lengthily pondered the provenance of British place names Bee? Ly-sess-ter Square? Like, ending with a leanwhile, we're I thrilled to learn that lier has been persuaded to sing her hit Believe at the reviled Brit Awards next month. The only hitch is her Dutfit. "I've nothing to wear, the star frets. That'll be fine.

Why change the habit of a 3 1 CTorget fleeting 1 i photographs of Camilla and Charles, i Princess Margaret's ittle secret which is rock-j mg the House of Windsor. ee Hall, of Spoontace Steinberg fame, is finish- 1 S.ng a Hollywood script about Peter Sellers, and nakes great play of a tryst the princess. The affair itself is beyond dispute, first coming to light in Roger Lewis's biography of the Goon. It is the choice of actress to play the princess which is causing consternation. For Martine McCutcheon, we hear yes, our Tiff from EastEnders is in the running.

The question is, can one who has ruled the Queen Vic lower herself to play a princess? The news illicits a prim "no comment" from the palace. This reminds the Diary of a story, apocryphal we're sure, of a distinguished dancer who was once invited to the palace after a stirring royal performance at the ballet. As supper drew to a close Princess Margaret retired and our friend was asked by a footman if he would like to linger for "a brandy and Although not that way inclined, the dancer stayed and, we are assured, did his patriotic duty. 4 YEAR MORTGAGE IK LOAN SECURED ON IT u.ollur CM; irrorliyKC nithinthc lirst tne jcjrs, Year tear 51 i mi- 1 iK.Xi must he K-pnd nllif cnJ tne moi 1 he cli.rcc ni.n-l.tonJjWc ADVERTISEMENT inc. Yves St.

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