The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 38

38 ARTS GUARDIAN THE GUARDIAN Tuesday July 11 1989 Best of British Till girth do us part Martin Pawley applauds the ruthless modernism applied to the first truly hi-tech houses to be built in London for years Hugh Hebert (BBC-2) with as many swipes at Established Britain as at the commercialisation of 1789. The heritage industry, the English retreat from its revolutionary salient, our ability to kill a king and then slip back to royal-licking servility, all get a rough going-over. This is a scries where some of the lesser lights of the Revolution talk to camera about their experiences. Last night it was Simon Callow as Citizen Palloy, who nipped in a couple of days after the fall of the Bastille to secure the rights to demolish and sell off the relics. Stones carved into doorstop-sized Bastillettes, the chains they cut melted down for medals.

"Looting was rampant I immediately got it organised." The line comes out sweet as a slingshot. And Palloy is seen in a mock up of every dismal souvenir shop you have avoided on a dozen expeditions. It looks as though all the budget went on Callow's costume. This is a mischievous Barnes, in his first work for television, undercutting his own commission. Or almost.

He manages to get the basic facts of the events leading up to July 14 in as well. But he presents a Palloy alternating between entrepreneurial greed and a pride in revolutionary fervour. Palloy talks of the aim of creating a society in which all power is done away with because each man has full power over his own life. "We were no longer a mob, but free people fighting for life and liberty." Though Callow manages the huckster in Palloy, you can't believe much in the occasional glint of fire in the eye. The fact that you are not meant to doesn't help.

So in the end it looks an uneasy compromise, a clever script being flogged off the back of a lorry. But don't miss the third monologue tomorrow, Alan Rickman as the rebel priest of the Revolution. all houses have been built with pagoda roofs, patterned brickwork, Georgian windows, fake Georgian doors with fanlights in them, and round windows like giant portholes with dinky square glazing frames. All this vomit-inducing rubbish surging along on a rising tide of property values reached its own mighty orgasm of tat last summer, when suddenly the tap was turned off. Now, just a year later, it is already beginning to look rather silly and it will be expensive to maintain too.

But while all this sub-Heritage hoo-ha was taking over the housing market, a whole new way of building was springing up in the light industrial estates, science parks and workshop units of Britain. There, nifty steel-framed, block-walled, eavesless, pitchless, gasket-glazed, roller-doored ma-chines-for-working-in were springing up on every side. They were cheap, efficient, modern, fast to build, maintain-ance-free, and the powers that be didn't make a fuss about them because they never blocked the view of Saint Paul's. For a long time nobody made any connection between these two different worlds of building. One fiddly, laborious, expensive, tasteless, old fashioned and inflated with delusions of grandeur: the other neat, simple, discreet, modern and cheap.

Then along came Nick Grimshaw, an architect who did some housing 20 years ago but has since made his reputation at the top end of the commercial industrial market. His office knows as much about neoprene-and-brush draught and rain seals and motorised doors as anyone in the country. In 1985 Salisbury's asked Nick Grimshaw to design a super the ten hi tech houses facing the canal in Grand Union Walk IN the US you can have a weight limit in your marriage contract. You cannot rewrite the service, I suppose for better.for fatter but a few pounds over the limit could cripple you with alimony. Still, if you believe surveys quoted in Anne Kelleher's Byline (BBC-1), only one in six of those American contracts specifies union for ever and only one in four specifies sexual exclusivity.

This is being wise before the event. Even in conservative old Britain, surveys tell us seven out often husbands will be unfaithful some time in the marriage, and one in three marriages end in divorce. Kelleher married five years ago in a little old country church thinks we should give up swapped vows expressed in terms we cannot change and use legally enforceable documents, drawn up according to each couple's specifications. You could contract to have children, or not to have children, pets or no pets, bedroom window open or shut, and a maximum length of stay for inlaws. You might specify on-the-spot fines for untidyness, bad temper, talking at breakfast, extended use of the bathroom, or being caught in flagrante: You could, in short, have all your rows before you get to first base.

Since Anne Kelleher a philosopher and author of a book on marriage provides examples of couples who have drawn up such documents anyway, there's no real contest. There is, though, a certain proselytising zeal and an intriguing tabloid glimpse of how some people order their marital lives. There was a gathering of Golden Wedding oldies, and a young couple who operate an open marriage but keep their faces hidden for fear of being ostracised. Or fear of running out of partners. Then there was Philip Hod-son, a counsellor and radio and television agony uncle, and Anne Hooper.

They drew up a contractual marriage 14 years ago and are still presumably living by its clauses, together and with their son. Mike and Robert have Uved together for 15 years, and when their solicitor saw the terms of their wills, he proclaimed "This is a form of which presumably they knew already, being homosexuals. But, asked Kelleher, wasn't it important to be able to "ritualise" relationships? Was this the philosopher who had been arguing passionately against the restrictions of existing ritual? "HISTORY is nothing but revolution, and here it's for Peter Barnes manages to pack the first of his four monologues called Revolutionary Witness 'Then along came Grimshaw But along with the canal-side superstore site, Sainsbury's had planning permission for a block of flats. Nick said why not make the same number of rooms into houses instead. Camden (the planners) said OK.

Sainsbury's said yes, and Stick-ley and Kent, their property agents, went further: "Go hightech all the way, like the superstore. No compromise, do the interiors as well, we can sell them!" In eight hours Nick Grimshaw's design team, headed by Nevin Sidor, had roughed out ten modern houses. Their appearance was as unlike the frantic cliche-ridden facades of the then-typical Docklands post-Modern investments-for-hving-in as it was possible to get. Not since the great days of and identical. They all back onto a long, windowless block wall clad in corrugated aluminium, with a small steel door giving onto the Sainsbury's car park, where each house has a parking space reserved for 999 years.

To the front they face the Grand Union Canal with a private waterside walkway for access. Seen from the deck of the ancient narrow boat, Rannoch, with its polished brass portholes and ornate paintwork, moored across the canal, the grey row of houses must look like the side of an aircraft carrier. Each house has what appears to be a vertical section of aircraft wing running from the edge of its flat roof to a pair of cantilevered concrete corbels at first-floor level. This is a you're Bodley Dead I HE lady was enthus- ing to the estate 11 agent: "I love the 1 1 light, the open feel, Iiii. the Japanese line, the cleanliness, the new concept." Her son.

a banker jet-lagged from an overnight flight from Tokyo, agrees blearily. He is the potential buyer; his mother has flown him over to look because there are only three left of the first ten modern houses to be built in London for more than a decade. Unobtrusively, architect Nick Grimshaw presses the button to electrically change the pitch of the double-height living room Venetian blind. Dappled reflections of the water from the Grand Union Canal flood the room. Then he presses another button to raise the entire living room wall and walks out on to the balcony over the water.

He wants to buy one too, for himself. "I could do it. My daughter could live in it," he murmurs. "The only thing we are worried about is what it will look like in ten years time," says the lady with the temporarily zom-boid son. "If you don't like it, don't buy it," is Nick's diplomatic reply.

It is July 4 and a bright sunny day in Camden Town. Estate agent David Tribe says he expects to be shot of all the 260,000 houses on Grand Union Walk that have not been sold by the time you read this. Both Tribe and his superior Nick Tubbs, who volunteered to shoot himself if all the houses were not sold by the day before, are very likely still alive. And the reason is that Nick Grimshaw's uncompromising grey metal and glass structures overlooking the Grand Union Canal between Camden Road and Kentish Town Road may represent the beginning of a watershed in English domestic architecture. For the last 15 years virtually Bang, Jocelyn Targett BEING hyped is about as unpleasant as being libelled.

One has one's name Bitchkill" Private Eye), frame passing on a good day for voluptuous" Options) and game will not lightly forgive her" Literary Review) dragged through the press till they're as grubby as yesterday's newspapers. One is used has made Julie look more and more abused a and disabused title of her book was my inspiration but she's welcome to my by former friends (Jon Savage), colleagues (Tony Tyler, NME) and husbands (Tony Parsons, enemy). So it's not surprising that, as with libel, the rewards of hype are filthy rich. Julie Burchill, the scandalising, Cottesloe Nicholas de Jongh The Long Way Round WATCHING Peter Handke's The Long Way Round, a so-called "dramatic is rather like trying to jog through porridge and about as useful. In its 25-year history I doubt whether the National LONDON'S WEEKLY GUIDE SHOP IN HONG KONG Live Report Interview HOW TO GET AHEAD IN ADVERTISING CHEAT LIVING IT UP IN RIO WITH THE ROUGH GUIDES THE GREENS' NEW MR BIG ENTER OUR TRAVEL WRITING COMPETITION tail i store in Camden Town and the result, as they say, ts history.

bang, clever-clever Mail on Sunday hack, has been advanced 175,000 for the UK hardback rights to two novels, and about the same again for paperback rights to the first of them. If that's justice, I'm a banana: still, at those rates, I only wish someone would hype me. Everyone who reads a daily paper will know that the first novel, Ambition, is Burchill's breathless book of bedroom reflections and boardroom erections in which even more names are dropped than underpants. If Burchill was given 1 for every mention of a designer product it wouldn't be enough: 2.78 a word her publishers paid, enabling Burchill to snatch almost 1000 simply by stocking 318 labels in her 263 pages enough to buy a Hamnett dress, a Gaultier suit and still have change for lunch at Langan's. However, by a judicious irony, no sooner had respectable, check-jacketed Bodley Head succumbed to Bur-chill's bonkbustering shop Theatre has ever before presented a piece of work which shakes hands with gibberish; welcomes gibberish as a friend and in the end extols gibberish as something with which you may live contentedly ever after.

Dimly you perceive that Handke is attempting to take up the old, crucial battle against the lures of materialism, and to offer a balm in which old family resentments will be quite dissolved. But the form and the manner in which Handke attempts to grapple with the dilemma is destructive heavily insulated metal wall that encloses part of the living room and one bedroom. Its surface is punctured with round-cornered oblong windows that also look as though they came from an aeroplane. Beneath each "wing" is an all-glass entrance hall with a steel and glass balustraded staircase. Between the "wings" is the piece de resistance, the full-height aluminium-framed glass wall that rises at the touch of a button.

"These finishes are a lot more durable than a skin of brickwork," says Nick to the lady finally. "Believe me, the story that traditional materials don't need maintenance is rubbish. Have you ever seen Westminster Abbey without scaffolding all over it?" Meanwhile the hype machine has had three wonderful stories to work on. It has been reported that Burchill's best friend and a senior executive on a Fleet Street paper, has been considering legal action because the gang-banging bisexual journalist heroine of Ambition too closely resembles her. It has also been reported that the novel is so steamy that a copy posted in a wrapper marked "for adults only" was impounded by the Royal Mail.

And it has further been reported that the novel includes sex-scenes of such out-rageousness that W.H. Smith's insisted on cuts before offering to stock it. Unfortunately because it is such a cracking scam the first story isn't true. Nor is the second. And nor is the third.

Anabolic gossip the steroids of hype has pumped up Ambition till, like Ben Jonson's leg muscles, it has become something it is not. The Bodley Head may have sold its soul, but at least it went out with a bang. The third act was least satisfactory of all. Juliet (Natalia Bessmertnova) who had been something of a cipher throughout, was now just a victim of circumstance and the choreography given to her used, again and again, those elements of Bessmertnova's style which, in other ballets, can be so glorious: the soaring leaps, the tremulous and rapid pas de bourree in which she skims backwards across the stage. After she has taken the potion there is an intrusion of, presumably, pre-wedding celebrations which features insufferable jesters and a most improbable Persian dance.

Any sense of doom is entirely dissipated. At the end Juliet wakes after Romeo has taken poison but before he dies, so there can be a final pas de deux. In this dance, Mukhamedov had a moment of genius; his eyes suddenly glazed as he felt the imminence of death. It was uncanny, spine-chilling. Bessmertnova, we have to acknowledge, is a mature dancer for Juliet and she was not helped by elaborate and sophisticated costuming of the long tutu ballgown variety while her appearance after Tybalt's death in a white Sylphide tutu was a shock.

The love duets are not Grigorovich at his best; they cannot compare with the marvellous ones he wrote for Bessmertnova and Mukhamedov in The Golden Age. I found the ballet, after the first act, long and tedious. The audience adored it. A Ttnmetn nnrt Jf danced again at the Coliseum maay ana tomorrow. Camden Architects department and Alexandra Road had such ruthless modern thinking been allowed to work unhindered.

But where Alexandra Road was heavy concrete, the Grimshaw houses on the canal were designed and built using the state of the art technology of light industrial units on a trading estate. It is poetic justice that they should have arrived on the market in the middle of an interest rate boom and an exchange rate crisis and between two rail and bus strikes. These are the houses of the new age. They are buildings with a job to do, and they look like it. The first thing you notice about these houses, and the only Georgian thing about them, is that they are terraced is Tranny Saul the androgynous fashion plate, who'd started life as a busboy in a quiet bar but now, as the perfect size 12, earns a brioche by wearing women's clothes for couture illustrators." The Burchill: "She slept with him because she had quickly learned that a teenage country girl with the legs of a dancer, the behind of a boy and the lips of a Port Said suck artist was a sitting danish pastry for every disease-carrying flyboy in the shop-window, not to mention the streets, offices and subways of the big city." Both Davis and Burchill write with their elbows out, nudging the reader with an insistent of every clause.

If anything, the Davis has more going for it a coherent rhythm at any rate but Davis's publisher didn't bother bringing it out in hardback. It costs 4.99. The Burchill? 11.95. The advantage Burchill's novel has over Davis's and almost anyone else's is that it has had a devoted pub- artist, soothes the family into harmony is the nadir of Handke's method. "A tree-top is the true weapon of liberation," Nova offers.

Well perhaps, you think as the porridge threatens your eyes and mine, but how and why? Or the tautological "Illusion is vision and vision is true." Or the climactic "The quivering of your eyelids is the quivering of the truth." Truth, whatever it may be in the territory of porridge, leads to the reverent placing of a toy gold crown upon the head of Hans's son, a gesture replete with the phoney grandeur and porten-tousness that characterises the three and a half hour purgatory. Paul Unwin's production is staged on a series of handsome and evocative sets by Bunny Christie a white backcloth is rolled up to reveal first the con-strucion site and then the village to which the artist returns. A passionate lucid gravity characterises the delivery of Tilda Swinton's Nova and Andrew Rattenbury's Gregor, while Deirdre Halligan's old woman has a wry Irish piquancy about her. Sadly David Bamber's Hans, however confident and fluent, is no manual worker. But then this was no play.

Coliseum Mary Clarke Romeo and Juliet THE programme note in the lavish and expensive souvenir book for the Bolshoi Ballet's If You Care about Runaway Children, Stay at Home tonight. TOMORROW 7:4.5 MOSCOW SOLOISTS YURI BASHMET dirviola Schoenberg Verkarte Nacht Britten Lachrymae Tchaikovsky Serenade for Strings Seat 4- 15 0 WORTH LIVING ot Enel.ind the Cliunlt in V.t: ping list than, hey presto, the publishing house was itself turned into a designer label. The Bodley Head, erstwhile publishers of Graham Greene, Primo Levi and Julie Burchill, is suddenly no more; now it is just an im-print in the stable of Random Century (UK) Ltd. Watch out, Chatto. Burchill's reviewers have tended to sneer clear of providing her with constructive criticism.

Short-sighted, since a second novel is already bought and paid for. They could start by indicating that Burchill's thoughts playful and robust in much of her journalism are belittled by the scope of a novel, and that, too often the notorious Burchillian rhetoric gives way to a prose style of risible ineptitude. Compare a sentence from her 250,000 novel with a couple written by Caris Davis, a no-money nobody who also has a first novel out. The Davis: "They amble into the circular bar, already filled to rapacity with seen-. esters and celebutantes.

Here to his grand ambition. Handke proceeds in the wake of T.S. Eliot, particularly the ritual ceremonials of Murder In The Cathedral and The Family Reunion (a chorus of construction workers announces "Victory is only a and Eliot's extended, elegiac paragraphs of poetic monologue. A series of dramatic contrasts and oppositions are anticipated. Gregor, a bespectacled and successful writer, like Handke himself, is set to return to the provincial place where he was born and reared, there to face appeals from his brother to waive his share in the parental inheritance so his sister can set up her own business.

Whether Gregor is visiting his constuction worker brother on the site where he labours, or reaching home where his brother, sister and a comfortable old peasant woman live, Handke fails to range the characters against each other. The poem is composed as a series of rhetorical declamations and injunctions, romantic aspirations, surreal visions and mystical or stoic assurances. The language in which Handke expreses himself may have undergone some dilution or transformation in Ralph Manheim's translation. Only a man with a tin ear could allow: "You whole history offers no consolation that holds Often it sounds as if Manheim is on distant terms with the English language. But the governing sense is of meaning discarded or gone awry.

The final long poem of peace and consolation with which Nova, both a goddess and domestic helpmeet to the Burchifl elbows out licity department primping and preening it for its appearance in the public arena. The Bodley Head press officers called on Thereza, a top French model bearing an uncanny resemblance to Ms Burchill, to pose leggily for the dust jacket, and employed a top fashion photographer to aim his wide-angle at her inner-thigh. They had journalists' note-pads printed with Thereza sprawled, and Ambition scrawled, all over them. They're giving away Ambition posters and have dispatched life-size Thereza cutouts to Britain's bookshops. 1989 tour of the UK and Ireland, and the same note on the cast sheet (which you should be able to pick up for free) are misleading.

They tell you that Grigoro-vich, in making this new version of Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet in 1979, condensed the entire action into two acts. Believing this was what we were going to see, I surrendered almost totally to his first act. The action is very swift, concentrated, almost devoid of realistic scenery, brimfull of dancing. In his favourite fashion Gri-gorovich contrasts intimate scenes or expressive solos with wonderful bursts of massed forces as the rival factions erupt on to the stage. Romeo (the incomparable Irek Mukhamedov) is established as a young man in love with life at the beginning and then as a young man so helplessly in love with Juliet that tragedy must loom.

Mercutio (Mikhail Sharkov), young and ebullient, dances his way into that character. Tybalt (Alex-andr Vetrov) burns up the stage with furious dancing, the kind of dancing and characterisation that for most people epitomises Bolshoi style. So far, so good. Came the interval and there were smiles all round: "Of course they should have opened with' this." What proved to be the second act became slower and repetitious. Dancing and choreography were hard put to sustain interest or clarify the story.

When the curtain fell after the death Of Tybalt, we knew the worst. Programme error was admitted; there would be another interval. Every year, more than 75,000 children and young people run away from home. Some end up living rough, vulnerable to exploitation, drugs and sexual abuse. "Somewhere to run" on ITV, tonight at 8.30, is a drama which highlights the problems faced by two desperately unhappy young people.

In real lite The Children's Society runs London's only safe house for young runaways. We urge you to stay in and watch the programme. If you would like to know more about the plight of young runaways in this country, we are publishing the first comprehensive British research on the subject in September. For more details, write to The Children's Society, Department PI, Edward Rudolf House, Margery Street, London WC1X0JL. "Somewhere to run" ITV 8.30 tonight.

i The Children's Society MAKING I IVES A Voluntjrv Society the t'hurth.