The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 31

ARTS 31 Angel in disguise Mary Clarke reviews Northern Ballet's triple bill of new works Dancing from the brink THE GUARDIAN Thursday November 30 1989 THEATRE: Michael sedate but powerful Billington on a Brecht at the Olivier HERE is nothing like the threat of an Arts Council axe being wielded to win public sympathy for an established company. The outcry that greeted a suggestion, last January, that the Council's funding for Northern Ballet Theatre might be directed elsewhere was based not only on-Man-chester's determination to retain its company but also, and even more so, on the fact that its present artistic director, Christopher Gable, had been in office less than a year. The suggestion seemed to have been based on old shortcomings, not future possibilities. Moreover, the company's acquisition of the Lowry ballet, A Simple Man (in which it was originally involved for television), had given it a work of proven public appeal, not only in the North. The grant was not withdrawn.

On Tuesday, Gable, whose declared intention is to provide a repertory of "narrative ballets which make emotional contact with the unveiled a programme, at the Palace Theatre, Manchester, of no fewer than three new works, specially commissioned for NBT and drawing on collaborators whose tastes and experience were almost certain to appeal to the company's large and loyal audience. And all were danced with an authority new to this company. In Liaisons Amoureuses Ronald Hynd serves up his usual mix of operetta style ballet, elegant turn of the century evening dress, by Patrick Dc-cherty, an Offenbach score and semi-serious intrigues conducted in a Belle Epoque party setting (the Eiffel Tower twinkling in the background) with touches of sophisticated comedy and funny waiters. It's his own Sanguine Fan mixed with Massine's Gaiete Pari-sienne. Totally predictable; well liked.

After these frivolities came a dark, but equally predictable work, Michael Pink's Strange Meeting, based on Wilfred Owen's poems and concerned with the hopelessness of trench warfare. (An earlier Pink ballet was called 1914.) In a barbed wire and dug-out setting by Lez Brotherston and to a score by Philip Feeney for chamber-sized orchestra and prepared tape much noise of battle we see first an English and a German soldier, the similarity of their sufferings underlined by the way they echo each other's movements; then the heat of battle with strobe lighting; finally Let Us Sleep Now when both sides walk out into oblivion. The men of the company perform with vigour and emotion. Theatre it may be; but choreography? The final ballet, Lipizzaner, has been made by the Simple Man team; choreography by Gillian Lynne, design by Tim Goodchild, score by Carl Davis. In a set that is a faint representation of the beautiful Spanish Riding School in Vienna, with Christopher Gable as the Chef d'Equipage, the men as the trainers of the Lipizzaner horses, and the girls (in pony tails, natch) as the lovely creatures they train and love, it turns a great tradition into a rather slick excuse for a thoroughly professional, if relentless, series of encounters between trainers and trained.

Guest dancers Patrick Arm and and Trinidad Sevillano have a tender duet. I might have liked it more if I loved the real Lipiz-zaners less. Northern Ballet Theatre at the Palace, Manchester, until Saturday. PHOTOGRAPH: NEIL LIBBERT A quick drag Fiona Shaw plays Shin Te disguised as her male cousin Shui Ta. Sex in the shadows with Blackeyes and a soldiers' guide to surviving the British army Potter's peepshow ACCORDING to Eric Bentley.

Brecht once said that if world socialism did not come about his works would probably have no future at all. Socialism is apparently in retreat; and yet, on the evidence of Deborah Warner's slow-moving but extremely powerful production of The Good Person of Sichuan at the Olivier, Brecht retains his extraordinary theatrical hold. How does one explain this paradox? Part of the answer is that The Good Person (completed in Finland in 1941 but here presented in the revised Santa Monica version of 1943) is very different from the early didactic pieces: it is an ironic parable about the impossibility of living a good life in an imperfect society. But the real answer is that Brecht, contrary to the popular image of him as a cold-hearted propagandist, was, at his best, an extremely emotional story-teller with a poetic sense of theatre. This play certainly proves the point It begins with the gods descending to earth in search of a good human being.

Widely rebuffed, they are finally given shelter by Shen Te, a penniless prostitute. They reward her with money which her to buy a small tobacconist's shop. But, since she is exploited by all and sundry, she has to protect herself, by assuming the identity of a ruthless male cousin, Shui Ta. If Brecht were simply a Marxist message-peddler, the story could end there. What happens is that he goes on multiplying the ironies.

Shen Te falls in love with an unemployed mail-pilot who needs $500 to buy himself a job: trying to raise the money in the guise of Shui Ta, the heroine tragically realises that it is her capitalist alter ego to whom her lover truly responds. doned and pregnant, she is forced permanently to revert to the role of Shut Ta to restore her fortunes (by becoming, in this version, a prosperous opium-dealer). At which point she is accused of having murdered Shen Te and is tried before the self-same gods who were vainly seeking virtue. Brecht's general point is clear enough: that, in the world as it is, the good person requires a bad half if he or she is to survive. Psychologically, it also strikes me as an extremely complex play in which Brecht is dramatisting the Jekyll and Hyde nature of his own personality: it was the Shui Ta side of Brecht, for instance, that always behaved as if the rights to Threepenny Opera were exclusively his.

What the play actually says is not just that we must change the world but that good and evil are inextricably mixed up in the human personality: a point made when Shen Te cries (in Michael Hofman's translation) "I am the bad person whose deeds have been described by everyone." The defect of Deborah Warner's production is that every scene is played at the same slow, painstaking tempo: its virtue is that it grasps the point that Brecht was one of the most emotional dramatists of the century. It also gets from Fiona Shaw as the heroine a truly magnificent performance that realises that Shen Te and Shui Ta are not simply class opposites but two sides of the same personality. Ms Shaw's Shen Te is no bouncy whore but a working-girl in a floral frock taken aback by the consequences of her own virtue: "How can I be good," she reasonably enquires, "when everything is so expensive?" Her Shui Ta, with white half-mask, pencil moustache and black trilby, is a louche, sinister figure with the rasping accent of a Chicago hood. But Ms Shaw, with her mane of curly hair, never quite lets us forget the woman underneath; and, in the scene when she realises her lover will abandon her, she conveys an overpowering sense of desolation by the very stillness of her body. Ms Shaw clearly delineates the difference between the angel of the suburbs and the grasping, competitve capitalist But her secret is that (following Brecht) she constantly makes us aware of the emotional cost of her disguise and of the ultimate inseparability of her two selves.

Left to her own devices by the gods, her final cry of "Help" also echoes in one's head as it probably still does in the 01ivrl ler root. Elsewhere the production strikes me as a touch over-emphatic. The parasites and would-be relatives who cling to Shen Te are played as George Grosz caricatures with an astonishing assortment of peg-legs, gap-teeth and prognathous jaws: historically legitimate but missing that element ot pseudo-Orientalism with which Brecht deliberately surrounds his fable. Sue Blane's design, all brutalist concrete, peeling signs and suspended bicycles, is also rather ugly on the eye and misses that element of aesthetic lightness you find in the Berliner Ensemble. But the production handles the gods wittily as interventionist bowler-hatted civil servants (one of them looks so like Robertson Hare 1 half expected him to cry Merthyr Pete Postlethwaite is also admirable as the shiftless airman, Yang Sun, here reduced to floor-crawling desperation in his craving for drugs.

And Bill Paterson brings to the water-seller, Wang, his customary spry wit and a bicycle that seems like an extension of his body. But, despite occasional longueurs, the evening still works: and the reason is that Brecht is not reading us a lecture but dramatising his own divided self and reminding us that Utopia, while worth striving for, is damnably difficult to achieve. rr iv Ireland 18 months how to be a soldier. In Berlin, said one corporal, "All of a sudden there's a different kind of bullshit; it's inspections, it's getting treated like a moron, getting run up and down the parade ground doing stupid little duties which, because they've been going on for 40 years, the British army still believes they've got to do them now." And with the shrewdness of the determined survivor, they made it clear they had been promised they would not be punished for anything they said; but that they had also been told that it would "not be in "our interest" to say anything too bad about the good old British army. By comparison, apart from a few beefs about being undermanned and overstretched, the matching documentary made -under the control of the officers was pure recruitment PR.

Except when it was pure ENSA: "You've got a great big thumb mark right in the middle of your buckle," says the inspecting officer on parade. Then he sniffs "Aftershave? If this was a French parade I'd kiss you." DONALD SINDEN as Wilde PREVIEWS JAN 10 OPENS JAN 16 FOR A STRICTLY LIMITED SEASON PbukousE NorthumbeHand Avenue, London WC2 Hugh Hebert tales and uncles with sticky sweets are not to be trusted. "There's no bonking in lairy tales, uncle Maurice, says his niece Jessica. Oh no? The camera has already roamed all over the silvery nude mannequins that in classy shops used to be draped in tissue paper so as not to offend carriage trade. It has pursued a frightened Blackeyes (BBC-2) into dark corners of the window display, clutching her doll.

We have listened in on heavy breathing, on supplications like "Spit on me! Spit on me!" and the first song is Gettin' Sentimental Over You. Where could you be but in a Dennis Potter fantasy? The visible mechanics of his latest machine for goosing the bourgeoisie are Potter patents. Blackeyes (Gina Bellman) is a beautiful, exploited model in a novel written by Kingsley (Michael Gough). Kingsley is the quintessential dirty old man, all grubby long-johns, farts, sex fantasies, and maudlin self-pity. He draws on the modelling life of Jessica (Carol Royle).

In the first episode, Blackeyes enthrals a bunch of marketing men looking for a model to promote their new body lotion. "Use it! Use it!" they chant, and off comes her top, several times. She enthrals the detective investigating her death (John Shrapnel), fluttering her eyelashes at him in the morgue. She has also left a list of her lovers wrapped in a condom, secreted in the part of her they have used most copiously. The detective doesn't sing, but he -does intone a small psalm of love.

"Oh boy, this man is really unhinged!" says Potter i off screen. This is his directo- I rial debut and he narrates it too. If you haven't seen it, you are by now as far adrift as you would be if you had seen it. You can't deny that it's about, the abuse, sexual, cultural and 1 moral of women, with heavy hints of how it all starts with the abuse of children. The drowned girl theme keeps turning up like a Tarot card remember her key role in Singing Detective? Blackeyes is Blackeyes that Kingsley suddenly spots there in the street as he wakes from a lustful dream induced by cuddling his teddy bear? Are they all invented by the Bear? THE first of the two films in Paul Pierrot's fine Inside Out (BBC-2) offered the frankest squaddies' views of the army I can recall.

Their complaints were deeply felt and sharply expressed. They had spent two years in Northern Ireland, and were now in Berlin on what they saw as silly ceremonial duties even then, in the summer, before the city became the great peace conduit between East and West. In Ireland they had suffered an appalling blow theirs was the unit that lost eight men when the IRA blew up a coach in October last year. Afterwards the survivors were sent straight to the trenches of South Armagh's border, and some were bitter about the lack of chance to grieve their friends or attend their funerals in England. They were scornful about officers straight from Sandhurst telling men who had been in ATM Theatre's productiw SI fished out of a lake.

The writer character conundrum runs through lots of Potter's work, his obsessive connection between sex and death is as electric as ever. But so far, this time he has played it close to farce. Shrapnel as the detective Blake is a serious comic conspiracy. With three episodes to come you have to suspend not just disbelief but judgment. As director, his erotic fore-play fumbles a bit He shoots the phallic bottle of body lotion, which stands on a table, centred on Blackeye's crotch.

This won't be the only reason for feminist displeasure, and it won't be the last. Unless you believe you can expose exploitation without being an exploiter. So here we are again in Potter's land of shadows. "Do we invent ourselves or have other people done it for us?" Dennis the Narrator asks, "Do we think, or are we thought?" Do we know for sure that Jessica hasn't invented her uncle and his book and, within that, her alter ego Blackeyes? Is her anger just exasperation at the cliches inherent in fantasy? And what about the "real" Tin PIED PIPER THEATRE COMPANY In FATHER CHRISTMAS LOSTTj tTlWfeH OS LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA 85th anniversary season SUNDAY 3 DECEMBER 7.30PM the acclaimed Russian Pianist Dmitri Alexeev plays the poetic and evocative Schumann Piano Concerto Bin Heldenleben Strauss' masterpiece completes the evening in typically brilliant style Walter Wetter Conductor Please note change of soloist SEAT PRICES 20 16.5013 10.50 7.50 4.50 BARBICAN HALL 01-638 8891 (9am-pm daily) QUEENS THEATRE A STOtl MOSS THEATRE SHATTUIUKV AVI. W1 BOX OFFICE 734 1 166 24 HRS 379 4444 741 9999 240 7200 (NO BKG Few) Group SAits yju oiu MI TDflE I CORNEILLES COMEDY ADAPTED RANJIT BOLT I csv theoldvIc 1 At 01-928 7616 SI J7 from 7 December from 7 December Press night tonight 8pm Not To Be Missed Time Out GARRICK THEATRE Box Office (inc.

cc): 01-379 6107 Mats daily from 21st Dec Book or ask for leaflet FORTUNE THEATRE COVENT GARDEN WC2 BOX OfHCE 01-838 2238 flg IBs.