The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 24

THE GUARDIAN Thursday June 29 1989 24 ARTS GUARDIAN The Voysey Inheritance, splendidly staged at the Cottesloe, is a landmark in English political drama, writes Michael Billington The money trick A tin band wagon and runs Adam Sweeting reviews David Bowie's latest incarnation as Mr Ordinary dining table. The male clubbi-ness of this world is also shown by the way the women silently withdraw at the beginning of the family scenes. And (following Barker's stage direction) Eyre at the last spotlights the family portrait of the swindling old Voysey implying that it may be another generation before his values are overturned. David Burke as Voysey senior is, in fact, throughout wonderfully wreathed in self- satisfaction seeing himself not as a petty crook but as a buccaneering Napoleon of commerce. Jeremy Northam as Edward, however, misses some of the character's initial hot-headed self righteousness: only if Edward begins as an intemperate prig you get a sense of his moral growth.

But (not before time) the Eyre regime seems at last to be producing an identifiable company that backs all the way down. Michael Bryant as the Voy-seys' head clerk (in on the family secret) is his usual tower of strength offering a mixture of bribing cajolery and wounded pride: I swear you can see his back stiffen as, after an abortive blackmailing attempt, he is told to go about his business. Graham Crowden, as a defrauded family friend, exudes a glittering rapacity. And, amongst the Voyseys, there are two fine vignettes from Robert Swann as a barking.blustering major and from Selina Cadell as a ruthlessly exploited daughter who flaps around the house like a bird with a damaged wing. Barker's play ends a touch tamely with a redemptive marriage: despite the heroic efforts of Stella Gonet the character of Alice Maitland won't, as Max Beerbohm said, do at all.

But the work remains a landmark in English political drama: one that manages simultaneously to be opulent and subversive like some sleak, handsomely furbished ocean-going liner on which is concealed a quietly ticking bomb. HARLEY Granville Barker's The Voysey Inheritance (1905) is one of the great English plays of the century: an Atrean family drama written from a socialist standpoint. My only reservation about Richard Eyre's new production is that he has chosen to stage it in the Cottesloe rather than in one of the National's larger auditoria where it could both breathe more easily and be seen by bigger audiences. Margery Morgan in the programme relates the play to Shaw's Mrs Warren's Profession. Actually I was reminded of Ibsen's Ghosts in that the subject is a poisoned inheritance: this being England, however, the transmitted disease is financial rather than sexual.

The shock revelation comes early on when young Edward Voysey discovers that his solicitor father has been using clients' trust funds for speculation and personal profit. Far from being criminally shamefaced, his father refers to his fraudulent business (which he claims to have inherited from his father in turn) as "a great The question is whether priggish Edward will carry on the family tradition. On one level the play is a voyage of self-discovery. Like a lot of Barker's heroes, Edward is a detached idealist who comes to terms with the world. His initial instinct is to put the firm into bankruptcy and stand trial himself.

But gradually he turns into a Lincolns Inn Robin Hood, fiddling the accounts so as to pay off the smaller clients at the expense of the larger. By the suavest of ironies, Barker shows Edward achieving heroic status by illegal means. But Barker is not merely exploring the individual conscience and (through the teeming Voysey clan seemingly secure in their Chiselhurst fastness) the hypocrisies of middle class life. He is also writing the first Marxist drama in English. His real theme is money and his play offers a sharp, running critique of capitalism.

Challenged about his own grandiose lifestyle, Voysey senior explains it was precisely that which carried him to victory since "business is now a day's run on the lines of the confidence And Alice Mait-Iand, Edward's eventual wife, candidly admits that since she has neither earned nor deserved the 400 a year on which she lives, she has no moral right to her wealth. Barker seems to have written a well, upholstered Edwardian family drama: in fact, he is attacking the foundations on which the whole society rests. Richard Eyre's production, played in the round with minimal revolving flats by William Dudley which whisk us from Lincoln's Inn to Chiselhurst, is both economical and suggestive. What it captures especially well is the ritualised smugness of middle class life. Voysey senior prides himself as much on his celery as his chicanery and, sure enough, the former proudly appears on his through so many cigarettes in a performance).

Almost face to face, with the man who soid the woi'iti. Bowie lights up, in more ways than one, in front of a crowd, and clearly relishes the audience contact you don't get in Wembley Stadium. He asked people at the front their names. Between songs, he talked about growing up in Beckenham and Penge. He claimed that Crack City, his anti-drugs rant, had originally been about chips.

This was very nearly a joke. The best songs were the ones where the band left a little space between the crashing chords and Reeves Gabrels' tirelessly squitter-ing lead guitar. Heaven's In Here was more feline than the recording, with Kevin Armstrong's guitar floating woozily overhead. In I Can't Read, they assembled a dank broodiness through which Tony Sales' bass popped liked bursting bubbles. There were a couple of surprises too, notably a version of Maggie's Farm using Rex's Jeepster riff as undercarriage, and a fake country western version of Bus Stop sung by Bowie with prime hip-wiggling camp-ness.

A little more of this kind of improvisation could make the world of difference. There's an arsenal of cover versions waiting to be tried, while Bowie could easily refurbish some of his own back catalogue for this hard-rock format. How about Width Of A Circle? Instead, we had makeweights like drummer Hunt Sales' ghastly I'm Sorry, or a drastically dull Prisoner Of Love. After a climax of Crack City (greatly improved by making the words inaudible) and Under The God, they sped into the wings and didn't return. They'd hit and they'd run, which is how Bowie loves to operate.

Don't count on it lasting too long. Tower of strength: Michael Bryant Sprocket holes replace bullet holes as the ultimate threat at Southfork And pigs might fly FOR all the ostensible looseness and rough edges of the Tin Ma-IHI. chine projeci, David Bowie is still obsessed with the unseen mechanisms of stardom. Try as he might, he can't keep the artifice out of his art. If Bowie is, as he claims, an exceedingly sociable person, why can he not cross a crowded room without a phalanx of bodyguards to shoulder the unwanted aside? He even introduced himself on stage at the Town and Country as the joke being that he'd rather die than be ordinary, overlooked and unknown.

Tin Machine risks being dismissed as just another mask from the bottom of Bowie's wardrobe. Having juggled styles for so long and with such prescient panache, Bowie now courts accusations of using image-hopping as a substitute for inspiration. Keep moving so they can't catch up and find you out, and add another patch to this strange quilt of a career. Luckily, Tin Machine live works better than Tin Machine on disc, bearing out the do-it-live, bang-it-down philosophy which evidently underpinned the recording sessions. The biggest hurdle the band face is a shortage of convincing material, since their album has about three strong songs and a lot of other stuff that sounds like cars being crushed.

However much they talk about being "a their unique selling point is Bowie. After the Glass Spider debacle, with its fatuous choreography and great irrelevant lumps of Meccano festooning the stage, it's a treat to be able to get within spitting distance of the Thin White Fellow, close enough to count the hairs in his beard or to see how many Marlboro he has left in a much-consulted packet (rarely has a band got St James's, Piccadilly Tom Sutcliffe Draghi Ode and Dido I FIRST encountered Draghi's Ode for St Cecilia's Day in the Chichester Record Office 27 years ago when I was dabbling with musicology under the influence of David Wulstan (of the Clerks of Oxenford). It was bound up with Purcell's Golden Sonata, and for an embryonic countertenor made a stimulating prospect. There are meaty solos for high and low altos, and Dryden's poem (more famously set by Handel) is a marvellous text. But I'm not sure it was such a good idea to suggest it to Ivor Bolton as a curtain-raiser for Purcell's Dido and Aeneas in the Lufthansa Baroque Festival.

The Draghi is as good as some comparable odes by John Blow, but it couldn't compete in lyrical quality with a masterpiece like Dido especially with the solos performed by choir singers. Even Purcell wouldn't do too well if you could barely hear the words and melodic line of "Tis Na 0 fumed. Start using perfumed soap and you smell like a posy, sir, and you can be smelled for And abominable food. Place contents in a quarter of a pint of water and boil. And boil.

Add oxtail It probably helps if you have been to a public school in a very cold place. Though, as we know, not necessarily. Town Country PHOTOGRAPH. OOUGLAS JEFFERY its bony finger on him. He had taken, like all the rest, the mockery about his clothes: "Mr Jackson, that shirt is something else.

It is a corker. What does this tie mean? Is that the Barbadian Beach Boys' Club, you know?" Dean rolled in mud at five o'clock in the morning with the others as some sort of initiation rite. sort of beauty treatment society ladies pay through the nose for," said Ian Wooldridge, narrating. He knows better than that). He had been ordered to shave.

"I don't shave, actually, sergeant." "What do you use, sir, a dela-pitory cream?" "Pardon, sergeant?" "There's a hair. You will shave in future sir." When his deep frozen fingers could no longer feel, the others helped him with his buckles but he left the course, heartbroken, as one in three will. Deprived of every civilised comfort, they fell back on the instincts of our eternal ancestors, the apes. "It's very like Hamadryad baboons playing with each other," said one. "Picking nits out of each other's backs and, in the same way baboons go in troops, we move in troops.

What a marvellous analogy." His fellow baboons whooped their amusement. It was remarkably like pubUc schools. The stress on the right sort of clothes. for a new sports jacket. Properly tailored.

With And cleanliness. your hair every day, under your arms, your crotch and your feet. Now, we'll have a demo from Mr Clean but not sweet. Leather is per- "I'll get back to you soon." You do feel that Lewis and Lakin, the producerwriters, have not been into much wooing recently. Mark you, we are not as young as we were.

The afternoon re-run of an earlier Dallas reminds you what a lot of hair they had in those days. You can't go around perforating elderly gentlemen indefinitely. Nevertheless I have a fondness for the old folk based on the feeling that, for all their big talk, they are not really very well off. The way none of them can afford a house of their own, Miss Ellie's simple sacks, Lucy's sadly stunted growth, Sue Ellen's terrible dingey tin earings. "Hurrah, they're back!" cried the secretaries at Ewing Oil as JR and Bobby return from Russia.

And they threw two small paper streamers. IT HAS strengthened me in my decision not to become a commando. My lasting recollection of How To Make A Royal Marines Officer: part 1 (BBC 1) will be poor old Michael Jack-man on Dartmoor in November shuddering with such a delicate, dreadful, trembling motion that you could have tuned a piano with him. "Keep still, sir, keep still," ordered Sergeant Mick Eccles, a Falklands veteran. Jackman heard but the shivering was deaf.

This was, I think, after they had swung across a lake naked, pushing their kit in front of them. not cold at all, sir. It's The sleet came down like a whip. The faces of the young men taking the officers' training course looked blue, leaden and deathly, like figures on a war memorial. Jackman, the only black man in the group, was on detachment from Barbados and from the beginning the cold had laid All lit up: David Bowie at the cert performance since the composer's death.

The single alto (Jonathan Kenny) who had to tackle the glut of countertenor opportunities was over-parted. Probably listeners not already sold on Restoration music were put off exploring Draghi further. But the simplicity of the initial musical idea, plain chords leading to fugal process, was nicely enough handled to suggest that with a bass like John Tomlinson showing his paces, and a treble summoning the ear blithely in "Arise ye more than dead" the work would justify a reprive. The choir sounded much stronger in Purcell's Dido, but then the choruses are a crucial element in that work's genius. More questionable was Bolton's decision (on grounds of matching, possibly, the original performance) to use a single string instrument per line.

The instrumental playing was superb, but balance with the singers (not least with Delia Jones's starring and forceful Dido) was impossible to sustain. In the context of period instruments, Miss Jones sounds hyper-dramatic in this good role for her. Bolton's direction, conducting as required while simultaneously playing the harpsichord, was intelligent, lively and well balanced. The speeds and attack were as I remember Nancy Banks-Smith THE good news is that the worst film in the history of the motion picture industry, "JR Is A Pig, So is not to go on public release. Sue Ellen Ewing, who used to fall down in gutters a good deal, you remember, has recently triumphed as a tycoon.

First she was very big in knickers, then she bought a film studio. "JR Is A Pig, So There!" is a searing expose of life at Southfork in which she accuses JR of sleeping with tramps. And I must say I'm surprised. I didn't know they had tramps in Texas. The bad news is that she might release it any day.

"If I hear you are coming after me, or if you cross me for any reason, or if I get up on the wrong side of the bed one morning, then I'll release the movie and you, JR, will be the laughing stock of Texas." And, snarling enigmatically, she flounced off. This is the last of the present series of Dallas (BBC 1). but it's not a cliff hanger in the grand old tradition which invariably has one of the Ewings, perforated in several places, forgiving their enemies always a lengthy procedure in a private room at Dallas Memorial Hospital. The script, I see, was written by the producers and producers do tend to take films and their release more seriously than the rest of us. Ian McShane, proposing to Sue Ellen, had to say as fervently as the line allowed "We'll form our own production company," and she replied: ture's Voice: the number that, above all else, launched the countertenor in modern times (Alfred DeUer).

Giovanni Battista Draghi, known to Restoration circles as Signor or Mr Baptist, was a very successful harpsichordist, librettist and composer, almost 20 years older than Purcell, who made a freelance living in London and eventually secured a court sinecure as organist to Catherine of Braganza. This Ode is always pleasing, and it's notable how closely Draghi adjusted to English musical taste. The word-setting is not inferior to Purcell's own, and Bolton's players got the requisite fun from such ideas as "The double double double beatOf the thund'ring Drum" with its rash of semiquavers. With period instruments, of course, the flutes really are soft and complaining. And one can rely on Draghi's melodic rise and fall to match the literary idea.

Bolton used Nigel North's lute very well, here and especially in Dido, and Jane Coe's cello was beautifully played. But Draghi expects his soloists to be able to sustain long lines, with flutes (Lisa Bezno-siuk and Neil McLaren) rolling in imitation, and to have virtu-osic colour and flexibility on show. There was too little of the latter in Bolton's St James's Baroque Singers for this first con fMU SBW IS8B833fft8 wtmsmmr from our school performance in the 1950s. Bolton's pacing is never exaggerated, and he has a naturally expressive sense of melodic articulation, full of emotion and responsiveness. If this Dido was not quite as grand as Purcell's inspiration invites, that reflects the difficulty of using small authentic forces in an impure acoustic.

Dominion Mary Clarke Maximova THE London ballet audience is a loyal one and does not forget favourite dancers. Ekaterina Maximova won all hearts when she first appeared here with the Bolshoi Ballet in 1963 and will be remembered for ever for her dazzling Kitri in Don Quixote, her tragic Phrygia in Sparta-cus, her exquisite Giselle. On Monday night she returned to dance, just once and for the first time, Tatiana in Cranko's Onegin with English National Ballet. Her admirers were out in force, and she must have made new conquests with a performance of delicate sensibility and dancing of rare beauty. Maximova was coached at the beginning of her career, most carefully, by Galina Ula-nova and in her dancing can be seen qualities associated with her illustrious predecessor.

I was reminded, again and again, in the high lifts, in which she so expressively used her eloquent back, hands and arms to heighten the climax of an arc of movement, of the way Ulanova made lifts poetic. Maximova is now a woman of 50, as any reference book will tell, but she has the body of a girl. Small, perfectly proportioned, her legs and feet lovely and strong, she defies the passing years. The little heart-shaped face and sweet mouth are still those of a girl and in the early scenes of the ballet she was not only credible as sister to Trinidad Sevillano's Olga, she might have been her younger sister but for the greater authority of her playing. She made the transition from lovesick maiden to mature, brave woman most convincing and was at her very best in the last act pas de deux which Tatiana dances with her husband, Prince Gremin.

She was helped here by the strong and tender partnering of Alexander Sombart in whose arms she was obviously safe and at ease. Sombart usually dances Onegin (a role in which he is unsurpassed) but was replaced on Monday by Martin James who, alas, has neither the proud bearing, clean technique or strength in partnering which the role demands. He was totally outshone by Sombart and by Patrick Ar-mand, who displays just the right romantic mien and quick temper for Lenski. The quarrel scene was powerfully, passionately acted and Lenski's sad moat stylishly done. WHS rMlti 0 DOMINION THEATRE AUGUST Mon.

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