The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 30

THE GUARDIAN Thursday November 2 1989 30 ARTS GUARDIAN Michael Billington on a telling Mamet metaphor at the Haymarket Life in the final stages It was all right on the day There was a hitch at breakfast time, but things perked up behind the screens a year ago one away, Gary," said the producer. There was no doubt that One Day In The Life was an unabashed alliance of the BBC and ITV against the proliferation of cheap channels. Seeing the BBC's Jonathan Powell and LWT's Greg Dyke side by side, you were reminded of Churchill's comment during the war that if the devil came out against Hitler he would find a few friendly words to say about him in the House of Commons. It was quite stirring like the roll call before Agincourt. All the feuding barons together against the foe.

Thames, Yorkshire, Central, Anglia, Granada, Grampian, and our right well beloved cousin, the British Broadcasting Corporation. At the BBC, Jim Moir, Head of Light Entertainment, fighting his financial corner in the Corporation's cabinet, said bluntly, "There is a cost to quality. Quite simply if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys." And One Day cut like a knife to David Hamilton: "Hello there and a very warm welcome to you from me." You drew in your breath sharpish. And so no doubt will David Hamilton who was tempting Lifestyle's satellite viewers with colour-coordinated Charlene Prickett, legendary entertainer Caesar Romero and Nigel B. Hodd, who had written the pocket guide to contact lenses.

Jeremy Paxman, Sir Robin's obvious heir, spoke for England. "If you look at British broadcasting you can find a rmllion things wrong with it. Smug, complacent, not varied enough, it's tired, it's old. All these things are true. There is a real danger though that this system, revered throughout the world for the quality of its programmes, for its independence, its imagination and its innovation is about to be jettisoned in favour of something which we can scarcely imagine.

And we will be doing it firstly because there are certain people who stand to make a great deal of money out of it and secondly we are going to be doing it because it can be done." If One Day In The Life Of Television was not British te-levison's finest hour, it was a damn good two hour try. book example to aspiring dramatists. On the surface, it is a nervous backstage encounter in which Robert is seeking reassurance that his performance went well: underneath it is about a lonely old actor's desire to be asked out to eat. Initially John alone is at the end Robert echoes the word, signifying his grateful acceptance by the younger actor. My sole reservation about Bill Bryden's production is that, by inserting an interval, it punctures the vital rhythm of the piece: surely one of Mamet's points is that a play has the same rise-and-fall curve as life itself.

But there is a first-rate set by Hayden Griffin that contrasts the naked-bulb tackiness of dressing-rooms with the artificial glamour of the stage and even of the auditorium which we see in a receding perspective. Mr Bryden also never lets us forget that, just as much as Glengarry Glen Ross, this is a play about work and the competitive disciplines it imposes. It is also expertly played. Ironically, Denholm Elliott is not an actor who has devoted his life exclusively to the boards, but he brings out all of Robert's passion for theatre and pained insecurity. Paying tribute to "Young people in the theatre tomorrow's Mr Elliott exudes a wrinkly testiness; he hovers around the stage-door like an elderly orphan looking for a home; and in the theatrical parodies he is diabolically funny.

He brings a Gielgud tremolo to the Chekhov scene and in the Rattigan-Coward sequence bats every line out front like a narcissistic matinee-idol. Only the flag-waving scene needs more rhetoric. But Mr Elliott gives us a beautiful piece of acting wreathed in silvery sadness. Sam West as John proves an admirable foil. He plots precisely the character's growth from deferential nervousness to truculent independence to tuxe-doed assurance: even the casual way he borrows twenty quid off the old actor in the final scene tells you everything about their reversed status.

And that, in the end, is one of Mamet's most powerful points in this tight-packed play: that, inside its hierarchical structure, the theatre functions like an instinctive democracy in which talent alone is the ultimate arbiter of success. DAVID Mamet's A Life In The Theatre, first seen in New York twelve years ago, predates both Ronald Harwood's The Dresser and Michael Frayn's Noises Off yet has a great deal in common with both. It is both about the pathos that clings to old actors and the precariousness of theatrical illusion. But it is also, as Bill Bryden's excellent new production at the Haymarket makes clear, a satiric valentine to a medium Mamet palpably loves. Written in 26 cryptic scenes that move easily between backstage and onstage in an English rep, it homes in on the shifting relationship between an old actor (Robert) and a young one (John).

At first, Robert is all wise saws and ancient instances: the complete pro. But gradually Mamet reveals his vulnerability and isolation. "We must all have an outside life, John," he sagely counsels; but it is John who gets the letters and the phone-calls while Robert, in his twilit years, comes to see that the theatre both represents life and devours it. Although the action is confined to a theatre, it works as a telling metaphor for all professions in which the experience of age is supplanted by the energy and ambition of youth. But Mamet also provides a blithely witty, kaleidoscopic parody of the kind of plays a working actor encounters.

One or two (such as the American Civil War drama) seem out of place in a British provincial rep but they are all hilarious: the tight-lipped Rattiganesque domestic piece, the autumnal neo-Chekhovian comedy, the flag-brandishing romantic epic (the speech at the barricades might have come out of Les Mis), the two-men-in-a-lifeboat drama. Mamet also anticipates Michael Frayn by showing how the theatre treads a delicate tightrope between manufactured illusion and fragmented chaos: each scene is wickedly bedevilled by non-ringing phones, missed entrances or six pages of dialogue arbitrarily skipped. Mamet simultaneously satirises the fragility of theatre and celebrates its almost masonic rituals. But what motors the play (even in an early piece like this) is the dazzling economy of the language. The first scene alone might serve as a text The misadventures of the salesmen from Windsor Cable alone would have made an entertaining and slightly disturbing 40 Minutes: "Now, Alan, what's the first thing you should do after someone's opened the door? Step back! They feel less threatened." It was not necessarily the customer who felt threatened.

"Good morning!" (Smiles. Steps back) "We are coming into your area." "You are making a fucking mess out there!" "Er, pardon?" The shining star of the show was certainly the small boy, savagely shorn and stuffing sandwiches, who ducked under his sister's arm as she was saying "Me Mum's not in." "She is in 'cos 'er mopeds 'ere," he shouted, spraying crumbs. "She ain't in now," said his sister grimly. The searcher after truth retreated purposefully and his voice came shrill as a whistle. "Mum is in.

'Ere's 'er 'andbag." At Anglia a researcher with hair like a red cloud (how beautiful television's unseen women are) was briefing contestants for Lucky Ladders, a game show. "If you win half a day in Blackpool can you look absolutely thrilled? If you lose a game, you'll be given a wonderful Utile plastic ladder. Please don't take it away because we've only got six." "Don't film my bottom!" said a contestant as the camera followed her upstairs. Vainly. The backside of television is precisely what they were there to film.

On Central's The Time The Place the dreadful cry arose, "Elbow the buskers!" Mike Scott had missed his cue and the buskers' humble strumming went unheard. Time, time, it's all a countdown to cut off. If the Son of Man descended in his glory at 9.30pm he wouldn't get on the BBC news. The man in the pub took a pretty jaundiced view of the news anyway. "You can't let the kids watch the northern news.

It's all about old grannies getting bashed up in Houghton-le-Spring and people being raped all over the place. And' there's always something about the Royal Family, who I don't much like." At Scottish TV they were telling a withered woman at a drug rehabilitation centre that poverty was the problem. "I wasna ri' well off but I wasna a ri' pauper," she said but that wasn't what they wanted to hear. "Remember," said the interviewer, "we are talking about poverty." The sound recordist, Alex McNichol, spoke up like a man: "An unfortunate habit of television crews is to take over events and orchestrate it from there. I don't think it's a genuine thing that's coming across." "Go aiwiy," said the producer.

At Southern TV a Mock Turtle and a Griffon were on their 22nd take. "Keep every Nancy Banks-Smith 7S iU knew it was go ing to be fun from the moment Susan 1 1 Hampshire, booked jyk to discuss her dyslexia on BBC's Breakfast Time, went to rTVs Good Morning Britain by mistake. Having, perhaps, misread the invitation. The picket-beset programme fell on this gift like buzzards on bacon and eggs. "It did keep going through my mother's mind that I might be mentally retarded," Miss Hampshire confided to Anne Diamond.

i Breakfast Time, with a Hampshire-sized hole to fill, flung in a Dr Harwood i is this man whatever-his-name-is?" "Somebody give me a who had been sitting in reception since first light patiently waiting to talk about seals. It is my view that all live programmes should keep a man with a performing seal permanently on tap to leap into the breach when actresses who want to go to Birmingham find themselves at Crewe. One Day In The Life Of Television (Yorkshire TV) was a candid and vivid look at what was going on behind the screen in television on November 1 last year. As with Spitting Image, where sweating puppeteers were holding sheep's heads up to camera, for every head you see on the screen there is an unsung half a dozen supporting him. At a Channel 4 launch Jaci Stephen, who will grow up to be Mae West if no-one strangles her first shed a lively light on the reclusive world of the television critic.

A launch is a preview of a new programme. Imaginative publicity officers tend to stage them at amusing venues like the snake house at London Zoo. The venue to avoid is any variety of boat because you can't get off. Unless you are Miss Stephen. She was inspecting the turn-out with her head on one side like a sparrow awaiting a worthwhile worm.

"I've only managed to pick up one person at a Channel 4 launch, two at LWT, none at Thames. It's a problem when you get to my age and my status. Nobody earns as much as I do. Why are you taking the camera off me?" With which she flung a chicken drumstick over her shoulder and only just sobered up from a launch at took an abstemious swig from a bottle of Chateau de Channel 4. There is, of course, a deeply serious side to criticism and, if I had not been resting on the floor recovering from a launch of Cambodia Land of Song, I would have mentioned this.

piece of acting wreathed in silvery sadness photograph oouglas jeffebv DE GN foil The Delightful Comedy by Noel Coward 26 October 18 November 1989 CRUCIBLE THEATRE-SHEFFIELD BOX OFFICE 769922 Sadler's Wells Mary Clarke Merce Cunningham THE heart of the first programme being given by the Merce Cunningham company at Sadler's Wells is Fabrications, of 1987. It is a marvellously constructed, marvellously danced piece, to a score by Emanuel de Melo Pimenta, performed against an abstract, unobtrusive cloth by Dove Bradshaw, which seems, to me, to be 'about' Cunningham's faith in the beauty of dance and also the beauty of his dancers. He moves among them, still, sometimes touching an arm or lending gentle, physical support and then wanders off as if to give the stage back, time and again, to youth. There is one extraordinary passage in which, from a kneeling position, he demonstrates how powerful yet is the upper part of his body, how expressive the strong torso, how eloquent the arms and fluttering hands. It is a statement about the torment of age for a dancer, when knees and feet will no longer respond to dictates of the mind.

At its conclusion Cunningham rises awkwardly and lets the young things resume their dancing, by now totally joyous. Fabrications is also about love, for the love is reciprocal; he creates for his dancers, they dance for him. The commitment is total; the performance ravishing. The evening began with Rainforest of 1968, celebrated chiefly for its Andy Warhol Silver Clouds setting. His huge, helium-filled pillows float above the stage or he upon it.

The dancers move in this magical world, in flesh-coloured, slightly tattered body tights, with quiet intensity. Finally, a new piece, Cargo made this year, which involves the dancers with a free-standing metal ladder, adorned, now and then, with yellow chrysanthemums. It's one of Cunningham's whimsical pieces and a happy ending to an evening full of delights and promise for the three programmes ahead. Sadler's Wells to Nov 11. "I know what I like Here's the perfect resource for people who enjoy fine art but would like to pass beyond a nodding acquaintance.

A multi-media study pack which brings paintings to life with a 3 hour video, expert narrative, beautiful art reproductions, linked audio commentaries, practical guidance on where to go and how to look at works of art. Denholm Elliott a beautiful Almeida Cripplegate Gerald Larner Kurtag Portrait THERE have been Kurtag Portraits in Amsterdam, Berlin, and Vienna and, inevitably, Adrienne Csengery has been the major artist in all of them. She is in London this week for another Kurtag Portrait a series of five concerts enterprisingly appended to the Bar-bican's Magyarok festival and is singing with a fervour uncUminished by familiarity. Of course, if you don't perform Gyorgy Kurtag's music with total commitment there is no point in doing it at all, even though few of his works strive for the expressionist intensity of the Messages of the Late R.V. Troussova the work which made the composer's reputation in this country when it was first heard here in 1981.

Written originally to exploit the extraordinary histrionic and vocal talents of Mary Thomas (who never actually performed it), it is clearly influenced by the Fires of London Music Theatre of the 1970s and does not shrink from a vivid musical reflection of the aggressive eroticism which features so prominently in the subject's posthumous memories. It was Adrienne Csengery who, after six weeks intensive preparation with Kurtag himself, gave the first performance of that excessively difficult work. Since then he has composed more than a hundred songs for her, many of them to "LEO McKERN IS MAGNIFICENT" In SmriiyMttnr for The Defence "SPLENDID JNTEMAINMENF lanky flam A TRIUMPH JOYOUSLY COMIC BOSwELL texts of her own choice, and has continued to exploit her three- octave range and her expressive ability while writing more melodiously and avoiding the mannered extremes. The Attila Jozsef Fragments for voice alone is a particularly beautiful example. Miss Csengery performed the cycle at both of the first two concerts in the Kurtag Portrait.

On each occasion she gave a wonderful display of controlled colouring, melodic phrasing, and a rare ability to capture the essence of an abstract thought within the few notes of a dozen or so unaccompanied bars. The new works in which she has been involved this week are not very significant. There was a witty and touching 40th wedding anniversary present to the composer's wife, Three Old Inscriptions, and four Rimma Da-los settings assembled under the title Requiem for the Beloved the earliest of them (already recorded as Farewell), with its distantly echoing belllike piano sounds, being much the most effective. As far as new work is concerned, Kurtag's other favourite musician, Zoltan Kocsis, has had the more rewarding time. He is still far from securing the concerto he was promised years ago but he does now have an intriguing piano part in-.

quasi una fantasia Op.27. Judging by his stunning performances of the Eight Piano Pieces, Op.3, in both the first two concerts, it is a dedication which he thoroughly deserves. Even though it was not possible at the Almeida to distribute the London Sinfonietta round the audience as the score requires, the first British performance of quasi una fantasia demonstrated what an inspired work it is. Conducting what must be the biggest instrumental ensemble Kurtag has used in 30 years, Sian Edwards achieved a finely detailed realisation of the two very quiet outer movements, both of them incorporating weirdly whispered harmonies from a group of mouth organs, and enchantingly offset the virtuoso bad-dream scherzo and the massively emphatic recitative in the middle. A Kurtag Portrait continues today, Saturday and Sunday at the Almeida Theatre.

Islington NATIONAL TOMORROW SAT MONAT7.00. THEN NOV 10,11,13. tamiiiBa STEANS INSTITUTE for YOUNG ARTISTS at the RAVINIA FESTIVAL looking into Paintings' is a complete Fine Arts course in a box. And it's produced by the Open University, world leaders in Open Learning. Which means you can develop your taste in Art at your own pace, in your own home, without the pressures of exams and assessments.

There's a whole new world of pleasure in visiting art galleries and museums and looking at paintings with a fresh and informed eye. Explore landscape, still life, portraits and history painting, looking into Paintings' could be your key to unlocking the world of art. Order now for Christmas. Send the coupon with your remittance to: LMSO, The Open University, PO Box 188, Milton Keynes MK7 6DH. 34 A COMPLETE FINE nr-ART COURSE yo IN A BOX now I know why JUNE 24-JULY 28, 1990 John Harca Building Hike it: LOOKING pmmSngs 3 hour video of six specially made Channel 4 television programmes 300 page course book 'Looking into lavishly illustrated in colour Three audio cassettes, linking with: Twenty fine art reproductions on cards Guide to UK galleries and museums To: LMSO, The Open University, PO Box 188, Milton Keynes MK7 6DH.

Please send me copies of your study pack 'Looking into Painttngs' at 34.95 per pack included). I enclose chequepostal order for payable to The Open University or debit my credit card Access ESQ I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I Visa 3S expiry date Please send details of other Open University Leisure Series packs Signature Name Home address PIANO VIOLIN VIOLA CELLO CHAMBER ENSEMBLES Young Artists Preview Concerts Young Artists Late Night Concerts Performance Seminars Private Coaching Sessions Faculty: Chairman: Walter Levin, violin Hatto Beyerle. viola Robert Levin, piano Toshiya Eto, violin Robert Martin, cello Eberhard Feltz, violin Sylvia Rosenberg, violin Guest Faculty: Leon Flelsher, piano Menahem Pressler, piano Heinrich Schiff, cello For brochure application, please call or write Steans Institute for Young Artists RAVINIA Festival, 1575 Oakwood Avenue Highland Park. IL 60035 USA (70B) 433-8800 APPLICATION MUST REACH US BY JANUARY 31. 1990 Application requires a performance tape or cassette.

RAVINIA FESTIVAL (Est. 1936) James Levlne, Music Director Edward Gordon, Executive Director Orders must be received by 8 December Dl TheOpen university Postcode to ensure delivery before Christmas ffi TELEPHONE YOUR ORDER Credil card holderi wve time and trouble by phoning 0908655955 giving your name. dddre, credit card no. and ref RD48 01-240 7200.