The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 26

26 REVIEWARTS THE GUARDIAN Thursday April 18 1991 Children of a different God Adam Sweeting on a shrieking Ruby Wax at Reading Hexagon Waxing lyrical 4fk AT WHOLE career IV I has been an act of JL JDL revenge," declaims Ruby Wax, during that climactic portion of her one-woman show in which she drags us back with her to her Austrian parents in their middle-European enclave in Chicago. This dread legacy of plastic-covered furniture and unpredictable vowel movements is as much Ruby Wax as any paying punter can take. the TV Wax explodes out of the small screen and stands before us, snorting and pawing the carpet, like a rhi lOBmggp HI tries to lecture South Africa on its treatment of blacks, complained Constable Gibson, but only South Africans know what it's like to live with them. "Blacks abuse alcohol to such an extent that they can't think normally," explained Sgt Johnson. "There are too many welfare organisations in our country, that make it too easy for those who don't want to work to survive." In the same way, one doesn't feed animals in the wild because it makes them lazy.

Change is said to be creeping in slowly. Today, the police permit illegal gatherings at, for instance, funerals which a couple of years ago they would have broken up. Also there was no sign of those long whips you often see descending onto protestors' heads in film of township riots. The police couldn't have hidden them from the cameras out of tact, surely? Closer to home, there are different kinds of pollution. Dispatches (C4) contrasted the lack of information about in Julian Glover: like some stern, unforgiving Old Testament patriarch a marvellous portrait of a frosty spirit incapable of warmth photograph: douglas jeffery A stark choice Adam Sweeting THE South African Police have learned to live with bad publicity and what they regard as distorted public perceptions.

Jokes like "support your local police throw yourself out of a window" would certainly.be considered gravely irresponsible. They believe they have been "called by God to maintain in this country His law and His Hence the title of Inside Story's film about life with the Cape Riot Unit, Children Of God (BBC1). This was billed as "the hrst film inside the South African Police We joined the Unit as it rode into battle against the "kaffirs" in its yellow "Casspirs" (those bug-like armoured cars which ride high off the ground to avoid damage from land mines), and as it rested and played cricket. Nobody tried to dispute that the cops shoot a lot of blacks. Colonel Loedolff, who dreamed up the "Trojan Horse" gambit in which concealed policemen shot three people, expressed regret that children had been killed, but his subsequent application to the Lord for peace of mind was successful.

Sergeant MacMaster is a vet eran of the dreaded Koevoet outfit which fought against Swapo in South West Africa. Quite apart from his border duties, he'd found time to kill 25 or 26 people. It was them or him. The policemen's worst night mare is majority rule and a communist regime, and the idea of working with the ANC is like asking a Rottweiler to eat tofu. "One man one vote?" asked one officer incredulously, as the lads and their wives gathered round the bar becue.

"It hasn't worked in Rhodesia. It hasn't worked in Botswana "You're going to get stuffed up," added MacMaster, pondering the future philosophically. "You were everything the blacks didn't like." While the Lord smiles on the Cape Coloureds to such an extent that they can drink beer with the SAP, there was no effort to feign the slightest respect or affection for the blacks. Even the black Special Constables hired (for a pittance) to back up the regular police are treated like scum. The international community and Glover aside, to stand out are Sylvestra le Touzel's grievingly neglected Lady Percy, who might be described as bra-less in North-umbria, and Philip Voss's double-dealing, suitably saucy Worcester.

Whether Mr Noble can fully encompass the variety of England's national epic will be clearer when we have seen Part Two. At the moment you sense he is struggling to redefine the RSC aesthetic by banishing historical realism. This yields one notable victory in the battle scenes where the back wall rises to reveal a line of Japanese-style percussionists and where soldiers cluster round an ascendant monarch as in a Jericault tableau. But although I welcome the move towards visual simplicity, everything will hinge on the company's ability to match Shakespeare's psychological complexity. At the moment, the Stratford jury is still out.

creation: a bloated porpoise with the strange daintiness of the truly fat, a cawing reprobate who kisses Hal as tenderly as if he were a lost son, a consummate actor who yet cannot disguise a flicker of real pain at Hal's adjectival abuse. But what makes Mr Stephens moving is that he is like some fallen Lucifer with residual memories of a better life: when he finally vouchsafes to "live cleanly as a nobleman should do" you sense a poignant hunger for lost, aristocratic values. The other twin peak of this production is Julian Glover's king: the best since Gielgud's in Welles's Chimes At Midnight. I cannot say that Mr Glover, a massive, stone-grey figure, exactly looks "wan with instead he is like some stern, unforgiv noceros on a hair-trigger, the stage makes different demands. Wax is further away, for one thing, with just a tew props a sofa, a spme-chafing wooden chair, a giant yellow fridge full of Pepsi, a cutaway black coffee-table and a standard lamp.

She has to start small, and expand gradually. Part one is amusing, and sometimes devastating, but is designed as a prelude to part two. "Hello, and thanks for your money," says part one. Part two shrieks Not that Wax's opening 45 minutes can be dismissed lightly. Her "Childbirth" monologue, for which she pulls the chair to the front of the stage and adopts a manner of manic confidentiality, includes all the vile, excruciating stuff they airbrush out of the Johnson Johnson Mother And Baby book.

There's abrasive, possibly pathological commentary on French people, air-crashes, and the Trocadero in Piccadilly, "the Dachau of But it's only later that she gets into nervous breakdowns (hers), California, American soap operas and the great race-war which is the USA. "We opened our arms to spies, wops, gooks, and said COME AND CLEAN OUR HOMES," she raves, like the Statue of Liberty in therapy. Frightful as she finds Austria, her parents' home and dachsunds, it's the Miami Experience which cranks Wax to meltdown. The bikini-clad ul-trabimbos converted "from ethnic to Aryan in the bang of a hammer" are as nothing beside the fantastic spectacle of elderly Jewish people eating themselves into monstrous senility eat for lunch? Did it have an antler in it or was it How do you follow that? With the Oscar-winning Death of Wax, obviously. If you're going to this, take tranquillisers.

dustrial waste available to the public in Britain with the Toxic Release Inventory available to all-comers in the United States (or even abroad) at the tap of a computer keyboard. Dispatches sought out companies operating chemical factories in both countries, like ICI, Harcros and Great Lakes Chemicals, and highlighted the differences. In the States, environmental campaigners can march boldly against the industrial giants, armed with oodles of pertinent facts about carcinogens, toxic leaks and unsafe waste disposal. In Britain, the Environmental Protection Act gives the public access to a small range of documents, such as "consents to discharge" obtained by companies and such monitoring data as UK agencies have bothered to collect, perhaps by leaving a bucket a mile away from a factory to catch the fallout. After weeks of tramping round assorted bureaus and de partments, for instance, Sandra Case ot chemically-deluged Ellesmere Port had amassed a sheaf of documents containing totally incomprehensible technical information.

You might be worried about the disgusting industrial foam burying your favourite beach, but let Stockton South's MP Tim Devlin put you right. He explains that we're safeguarding our national chemical industry by not giving away its secrets to commercial rivals. Isn't that reassuring? Michael Billington at Stratford on Avon THESE are early days. But if one looks to Adrian Noble's Stratford production of Henry IV Part One, his first as the RSC's artistic director, for portents, one discovers a rejection of processional pageantry and a penchant for visual stylisa-tion. This is a radically stark, emblematic production; but, although the concept has much to recommend it, it is still waiting to be fully inhabited by its actors.

Mr Noble and his designer, Bob Crowley, present us with an unequivocal morality play: the story of a young prince torn between two Riverside Mary Clarke Rambert RAMBERT at Riverside has replaced Rambert at the Wells this year because Richard Alston wants his dancers to have the benefit of the space the Riverside studio provides a dancing area 50 feet wide by 30 feet deep compared with a proscenium width of 29 feet at the Wells. I share his and Merce AND Sht Qailn (Telegraph The Merseyside Everyman Theatre and Talawa Theatre Company present UN-NATURAL TRACES CONTEMPORARY ART FROM CANADA fathers, between a cold Heaven and a merry Hell. Henry's court is seen as a bleak, barren place filled, rather like Doctor Arnold's Rugby, with chastisement and the odour of sanctity. The Eastcheap tavern, in contrast, is a scarlet, multi-storeyed stew full of nooks and crannies where people rut up against the wall. We could hardly be reminded more forcibly that Shakespeare's matchless history has its roots in mediaeval drama or that Hal is poised between an angry God in Henry and a ribald Satan in Falstaff.

It is a clear, Christian reading of the play given some much-needed human complexity by its two best actors. Robert Stephens's Falstaff is a magnificently paradoxical Cunningham's belief that dancing is movement in time and space, but on the evidence of the first programme there are going to be losses as well as gains. The evening began with a beautiful Cunningham work, Doubles, in Mark Lancaster's simple, attractive costumes, against his backcloth and under his lighting. The girls look lovely especially Alexandra Dyer, she of peerless line but the men have adopted fussy hair-styles, much plaiting and curling and pigtails, which destroy the shape of their movements. The audience at Riverside is very close to the dancers and the mixture of messy hair and heavy sweat makes the men look scruffy the last word in the world to apply to anything by fastidious Cunningham.

Siobhan Davies' Plain Song, made for her own company in 1981 and now in the Rambert repertory, is danced to early Satie music and stems from a period when Davies was writing in a cool dance language in which the solo dancer, Sara Matthews, explores a world of her own as well as relating to her companions. It is plainly dressed, wonderfully lit by Peter Mumford, and altogether one of her best, most satisfying works. Alston's new Roughcut is not, alas, one of his best. I am prepared to believe that Tim Hat-ley's set of suspended perspex poles, which can not be hung at Riverside, contributed greatly to the piece (even if his costumes for the men distract hor ribly) but what we see at Riverside is a helter-skelter of jolly dance in various styles (to rjM not HUM wmmm wmmm on I I 1 dl CI I V) ill I MM ei i PKtil.NUD or 'AirCanada ing Old Testament patriarch who provokes rebellion by his curt dismissal of the Percys and who alienates his son by treating him as a recalcitrant hooligan. It is a marvellous portrait of a frosty spirit incapable of warmth: at one key moment Hal, having earned his father's praise, rushes impetuously towards him only to be met by Mr Glover's implacable, basilisk stare.

But although Mr Noble plausibly sees the play as a mixture of mediaeval morality and modern Bildungsro-man about the education of a prince, his production lacks a compelling centre: Michael Maloney's Hal, to date, remains a curiously undefined figure who seems more like one of Barrie's Lost Boys than Shakespeare's watchful observer. And although Owen Teale makes a strapping virile Hotspur, there is little hint of the reckless, chivalric wild animal. The only figures, Stephens arrangements by David Cullen only depart significantly from Bizet when they go ape for sax- aphones and smooch. The relo cation in the dialogue fits cosily and produces laughs. But there's little evidence of disciplined theatrical direction in the way the company play off each other.

Simon Callow's effort seems mostly to have been sustaining the company's enthusiasm and sense of tun. The acting is broad, operatic and up front, not least from Ms Benson though few divas could match the way she lowers her butt Sharon Benson as Carmen suggestively on to a stool. The thrill of Mr Austin's well-developed characterisation and singing is something a bit classy and different. Ms Benson is almost as good an actress as her inspiration, Joan Collins. The voice is dangerously weak above the violent break in its middle.

But her earthy low notes, and sheer cheek and ego tistic effrontery combine to make the denouement a proper thrill. The best singing and some of the sharpest slinking comes from Carolyn Sebron's Frankie, leading the song and dance number that really wakes For Two Performances Only FOR 55EEB PRESENT Talking Heads BY AlanBennett WITH Stephanie Cole Sheila Hancock Ian McKellen Imelda Staunton DIRECTED VI Sean Mathias Sunday 28 April Sunday 5 May Theatre Royal, Haymarket wow mow- Motooima rat FIRST CALL VWWVA 071-4979977 tm caw cap mvici Steve Reich) not sufficiently interesting to please the eye unadorned. Amanda Britton and Mark Baldwin, stalwarts of the company, led the action and a newcomer, Mihalis Nalbantis, brought a bright, mercurial presence to the closing section. Prejudice on my part, no doubt, but worth remarking that both he and Baldwin possess handsome heads of hair. Rambert at Riverside until April 27.

Old Vic Tom Sutcliffe Carmen Jones ANOTHER pair of" stars, another show. Carmen yanked up at the Old Vic has got two sets of lead actors to lighten the load for what is intended as a long run. This time the perm is a better tenor Joe (Michael Austin, a serious American operatic talent well known in Europe) with a less vocal but sexier Miss Jones (Sharon Benson). Austin had a virus on Monday, but still managed to sing with intensity and tragic obsessiveness, while making himself an utterly credible victim for Ms Benson's hardhearted, sex-pot Carmen: a real looker. The truth is that this version of the Hammerstein adaptation is pretty operatic.

Bruno Santi- ni sets are impressively detailed: his Chicago party scene in silver and black and white could easily be a recycle of a Figaro Act 4. The orchestral illisfiisii: ail ii i Also Showing. The True North: Canadian Landscape Painting 1 896 -1939 LEVEL 8. BAR8ICAN CENTRE. SILK STREET, LONDON EC 2 Recorded Information 071-588 9023 Please note: We are closed Wednesday 8 May.

things up at the start of Act 2 (Stuart Hopps's breathtakingly energetic choreography). I hope the management took out insurance I was fearful for some of the larger ladies. The best thing about Jose Garcia's Sergeant (as those who saw Opera North Jerusalem or GTO's Magic Flute know) is that he doesn't sing. Karen Parks's Cindy Lou makes a meal of the torch numbers Bizet provided, Clive Rowe's Rum is friendly fun, and Gregg Baker's Husky Miller does the toreador's song to a T. Not brill, but it's good to see a cast trying hard.

This review appeared in later editions yesterday. RFHRadio 3 Edward Greenfield Dresden Staatskapelle Haitink TO HEAR the Dresden Staatskapelle playing Bruckner is to be transported back a generation and more. This is the authentic German tradition, before Herbert von Karajan laid hands on it or not far off. That is, of course, to simplify, but this greatest of the East German orchestras (pace Ma- sur and Leipzig) still represents central standards unalloyed, and no conductor is better equipped to draw them out than Bernard Haitink. The Dresden string-playing is a wonder, and there Haitink, creator of the modern Concert- gebouw Orchestra with its simi larly lustrous string-section, was totally in his element.

Where with British orchestras Haitink regularly uses a score, here with an orchestra rehearsed and drilled to the last degree, he dispensed with one, moulding each symphony, Mozart's Haffner as well as Bruckner's Seventh, face to face, presenting himself as first among equals. Like the Concerteebouw string section, Dresden's has a dark, nutty quality, consistent in every section, sounding even more characterful live than on record. To hear the second violins on their own in a Bruckner melody, while the firsts provide the descant, is to appreciate just how keen that consistency is, and no symphony was better geared than the Seventh to bringing out the richness of violas and cellos. Perhaps inevitably, we this country have less to learn from the Dresden woodwind and brass, the latter ripe but not always perfectly blended. But here too the teamwork was superb.

With Haitink at his most rapt in concentration, here was an orchestra which combined high polish with total commitment, and very satisfying it was. In an age when period perfor mance is daily gaining ground, it was less welcome that the Mozart performance also harked back to an earlier generation. Without resorting to Karajan smoothness, this was Mozart made sweet and well-mannered, poised and moulded, exquisitely played but with some of the bite missing. Nowadays we need the robustness of Mozart. nnrrinn I 1 1 I 1 If I I I MM nil II Peter Hall pcompanyb Playhouse TBI arcays New Stages is-pleased to 1 1 announce the independent theatre jf companies receiving awards in the 1 1 second year of Barclays Bank's MJ sponsorship programme for fringe theatre.

They are: ADZIDO PAN AFRICAN DANCE ENSEMBLE BRITH GOF CAROUSEL THE CHOLMONDELEYS AND THE FEATHERSTONEHAUGHS GEESE THEATRE COMPANY MACLENNAN DANCE AND COMPANY MAYHEWAND EDMUNDS PLAIN CLOTHES PRODUCTIONS SOHO THEATRE COMPANY STATION HOUSE OPERA Barclays New Stages is an innovative three-year sponsorship programme devised by Barclays Bank to encourage and promote Britain's independent theatre sector. The scheme operates in two phases; the first offers sponsorship to original productions, the second supports a festival at Britain's leading venue for new writing the Royal Court Theatre. In its first year Barclays New Stages has enabled ten fringe theatre companies to create, perform and tour new works nationwide. Some of these companies will be invited to perform at the first Barclays New Stages season at the Royal Court-Theatre from 17 June 1991. Barclays New Stages details, Kallaway Ltd 071 221 7883 Festival details, Royal Court Theatre box oflice 071 730 1745.