The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 30

A quiver over Archer Alemonsqu The hatchback and spoiler are they 'the no-nonsense products of function or tradition', or merely parts of Mrs Thatcher's dream machine? The designer kettle it did little for credibility Imagine Michelangelo living in Detroit Design aspired to fine art and high finance but it achieved only trivialisation. What it should do, Deyan Sudjic argues, is shape our everyday lives they shape our everyday lives. At one end, the chances of getting repetitive strain injury from a keyboard are a design issue; at the other, design is a chair which can carry the emotional charge of a work of art. Design is a powerful vehicle for exploring ideas about our relationship with the world; and not just in cynically manipulative ways. Why, for example, should products, normally ghetto-ised for the elderly or the disabled, not be given the charisma of vividly coloured, organically shaped ski equipment? Why can't we give the insipid grey boxes that pass for computers some of the charm of ancient typewriters or Bake-lite telephones? The fact is that design, like no other discipline, now embraces the key issues of our times.

It's about culture and the quality of everyday life. It's about refrigerators that can be taken to bits at the end of their lives without damaging the ozone layer. But it also about wit and style. Remarkably, despite Britain's ambivalence about the subject, it is also something that British designers, given the chance, are rather good at. cil, entrusted with large sums of taxpayers' money by the Department of Trade and Industry in the vain hope that it could do something to save British manufacturers from themselves.

At the other were the designers themselves, a disparate group of cx-art school types bent on making enough money to live the good life, but otherwise not much interested in business. Their activities ranged from worrying about typefaces to turning anonymous pieces of electrical machinery into recognisable products. Designers, then, were amateurs. Back in the early eighties, two phenomena coincided which were to change all that. One was the retail-led boom which gave designers unprecedented opportunities to design batches of shops, 20 at a time, for chains like Next, bringing maple strip floors and etched glass to the nation's high Joanna Coles TO lunch at the Crane Gallery where the enigmatic dealer Andrew Kalman has started a series of arty think-tanks.

Guest of honour is Jeffrey Archer who, my fellow guests sug gest, would make an admira ble arts minister should the Tories be re-elected. Are they serious? Still, as author of two plays, nine bestsellers, and the owner of a delicious private collection including Sis-ley, Miro and Picasso, there could be stranger candidates. More importantly, it would solve Mr Major's tactical dif ficulty of how to repay him for his tireless campaigning, without causing too much embarrassment. THE recession continues to bite, and those in the arts are increasingly frustrated at being told to use their initiative to find more sponsors. You couldn't find a more enterprising or chestra than Simon Rattle's CBSO which has enlivened Birmingham no end, yet it has been unable to find one sponsor, however small, to finance a forthcoming tour of the States.

The initial plan was to perform coast to coast for a month, which was soon abandoned because of costs. Instead, the orchestra has settled for a 14-day tour of the east coast in April. And it is only managing that because Mr Rattle and his soloists have agreed to forgo most of their salaries. READERS quivering to find out who won the Music for Milton Keynes competition can relax. The award went to Ian Hughes, an Hford man, whose winning composition, Panorama, was heard somewhere between Mendels sohn's violin concerto and Beethoven's second symphony at the South Bank last Tuesday.

Still on the quest for respectability, the town is planning yet another cultural addition. The Museum of Milton Keynes to immortalise the town's history, of course. All 25 years of it. THOMAS PAKENHAM, winner of this year's Smith literary award, is just back from South Africa where he was asked to present a copy of his latest work, The Scramble for Africa, to both de Klerk and Nelson Mandela. Arch diplomat, he inscribed both books: "To the one man who can save South Africa." Something tells me the same thought crossed Maureen's mind as well.

Now how about that whip-round? EVEN as German artists go. Otto Dix was a funny one. At the outbreak of the first world war. he volunteered to fight. Nothing unusual about that in 1914.

But one letter home described the sexual thrill he derived from thrusting a bayonet into an enemy soldier's stomach. He was probably the only artist to survive that war with his mind intact perhaps because he was able to see the beauty in the bursting shells and paint the excitement in the horror. In the twenties, his canvases served as anti war banners. But their hyper-realism was fuelled by visits to the morgue, where Dix had staff lay out entrails and organs for his study and delight. For one set of etchings, he worked from blown-up photographs of blown-up people.

And he painted himself as a sex murderer. I was amused, then, when the strongest doubts expressed in Arena's biography of the artist (BBC2) were prompted by his chosen subject matter after the Nazis had forced him into seclusion during the thirties. Did these paintings mean he had Nazi tendencies, asked one critic dodgy longings for blood and soil? On the whole he thought not. But he was clearly worried. Dix, you sec, had been doing landscapes.

Nicholas Hytner's camp new production dark glasses blankly in postures new ble telephone culture; a cynical and manipulative business whose chief purpose seemed to be to sell more products. Now, just like estate agents and property developers, those other spectacular casualties of the eighties boom, designers have fallen to earth with sickening speed. Not, it has to be said, to universal regret. In retrospect, it's clear that neither the retail boom nor the official enthusiasm for design had much to do with "design" in a deeper sense: the subject had simply been hijacked. Despite economic hard times, however, the interest in it as an academic subject shows no sign of running out of steam.

The Design Museum in London has had a high turnover among its directors, but it continues to attract more and more visitors. And the established museums the world over have started to collect contemporary design. In Germany a handsome new museum has even been dedicated to the study of the chair. But if design is not the economic weapon its partisans had been promising since the days of the Great Exhibition of 1851, how can continued government expenditure be justified? Its way of avoiding Woolworths for a girl with "the brains but not the application" to stay on at school. Always articulate, independent, and inclined to the dramatic, she views with a cold-eyed realism the slightly larger-than-life, dingily Bohemian characters around her.

An Awfully Big Adventure is an unerringly observed evocation of the drably Utility, battered and exhausted bombsite world of postwar Liverpool, and the passions and pretensions of the volatile misfits who made up its repertory troupe. The title is taken from the line about dying in Peter Pan, and the actors' reluctance to grow up is a recurring theme. Behind, beneath the meticulously authentic detail lurks a darkly oedipal threat of primal violence. Ian Kellgren's production had its longueurs on the first night Demetra Hersey's ingenious set revolves ponderously but the company bring a relish to their portrayal of characters they must all have worked with. The original Liverpool Repertory Company was founded by citizens' sub scription as a reaction to commercialism, lne lay-house again has an executive Bill Kenwright, who bailed out the theatre last year and now has a publicly subsidised base that provides venture capital for his touring operations.

Apart from its extra fris son of actuality, the play has a resonance that should work anywhere. Liverpool Playhouse (051-709 role as an adjunct to the advertising and marketing industries turned out to be a disappointment. Stephen Bayley did a lot of wishful thinking about industrial design being the true art form of our times, but that was before his last incarnation as an adviser to Peter Palumbo and the Arts Foundation. Bay-ley even implied that Michelangelo, were he to exist in the 20th century, would be working as a car stylist in Detroit. Design has not gone away.

It is still a business which, some sources assert, employs 100,000 people in the UK; and it is a subject that the Labour Party considers important enough to include in their manifesto. Clearly it matters. But it comprises so many different, sometimes contradictory, strands that it can become incomprehensible. We are told it is about visual and industrial culture. This sounds fine until it emerges that visual culture can include an unhealthy appetite for stainless steel electric shavers.

It is about philosophical questions, but also the new logo type for British Telecom. The trivialisation of design has concealed the fact that it should be about ideas and how Through POOR soul. What an absolute brick. Let's have a big hand and a whip-round for the anonymous star of Public Eye, The Disappearing Motor Show (BBC2). We'll call her Maureen.

The Disappearing Motor Show might have been a preelection lament for our ailing auto industry. In fact it was about thieves who steal cars in Britain and disguise them for sale abroad. We met some very worried policemen and heard about some very naughty panel beaters who weld the fronts of Escorts to the backs of Orions and sell them as nice little motors. We also met Craig, a self-confessed south-east Londoner who until recently was pinching hundreds of posh cars to order. But in my book, this was Maureen's show Maureen who was driving what she fondly believed to be her red Opel on a Malaga coast road when the police flagged her down.

Could they inspect the vehicle? Would she open the bonnet? (Could she see through those sunglasses?) Then Barry got involved (poor Maureen). Barry was a British car recovery agent. He wore a bow tie and talked into a mobile phone both at the same time! Like those men who talk into mobile phones at the David Newnham coincided with the birth of the Late Show, and the media studies and popular culture boom. Design became a vehicle for deconstructing images and personalities. If you had a mind to, you could deduce almost anything about anyone from the cut of their suit or taste in cars.

This might have been fun for a while but it did little for the long-term credibility of the subject; nor did the designer kettle phenomenon, although it was preferable to what had been done on the high streets. Designers unleashed the rampant logo and a three-year life cycle for shop interiors. They became experts at creating artificial realities, settings for products that could suggest Jermyn Street clubbishness in Tyneside shopping malls; or tinkering with deliberately crude printing techniques to give own-brand vodka labels a spurious hint of the old USSR. In the process they destroyed the tradition of anonymous design and that sense of authenticity which some objects still seemed to carry; the sense that they were the no-nonsense products of function or tradition. Design became a synonym for all the excesses of the porta Liverpool Robin Thornber An Awfully Big Adventure THE PROGRAMME for this show is a precise pastiche of its fifties-style counterparts, down to the typography, the lightweight art paper, and the little seal to prove the management aren't recycling one that's been thrown away.

The justification for this trompe I'oeil in-joke is that An Awfully Big Adventure is Beryl Bainbridge's stage adaptation of her 1989 Booker short-listed novel, based on the Liverpudlian writer's experiences as a 17-year-old student (ie, unpaid) assistant stage manager at the Liverpool Playhouse. Beryl Bainbridge had a walk-on role as a lady-in-waiting in the Playhouse's 1950 production of Richard II (the company's producer, Gerald Cross, played the king); in the same season, at traditionally short notice, she understudied an 11-year- old boy in another world premiere, The Sun And by A.R. Whatmore; and, wait for it, this stagestruck ingenue who had already worked for the BBC Home Service Children's Hour, after being abandoned by her golden- voiced but mgnty mother, is played with unnerving persuasion by Rudi Davies, Beryl Bainbridge's daughter. Perhaps stagestruck inge nue isn't quite the way to describe our heroine, Stella Bradshaw. The theatre was a streets and turning tiny design studios into multinationals.

The other was the monetarist revolution whose slaughter of economic sacred cows left Mrs Thatcher scouring the survivors to run sunrise service industries. She, or at least her advisers, discovered design; they saw it as the means of rescuing tired old industries from decay, of giving seedy, time-expired British-made products go-faster stripes. There was even a minister for design for a while, a man named John Butcher, who travelled the world as an ambassador for British design. Surprisingly perhaps, the message he tried to put across was sensible: good design meant worrying about not just how a tyre looked (though in a country that produced the Morris Marina, that was important) but also how much it cost to make, and how visible the control panel was behind the steering wheel. The trouble was that the kind of people who ran car manufacturing companies, and their designers, seemed able to grasp only one of these issues at a time.

The wider interest in design performer that the audience chuckle with delight at the first sight of his gargantuan posturing; and there is something undeniably hilarious about him attempting to seduce Melinda by edging his embonpoint along the back of a park-bench. But Farquhar's Brazen is not just a boorish braggart, he is also an opportunist adventurer who has come to Shrewsbury to recruit, and of that there is little hint in Barrit's fantastical fop. Two performances, however, explore character rather than trade on personality. Sally Dex-ter's Silvia, who adopts male attire in order to pursue Plume, is a wonderfully spirited hoyden whose instinctive reaction to Melinda's gibes is to land her one on the jaw: Dexter gives us a county girl who you feel will fit snugly into Plume's masculine world. Ken Stott is also a first-rate Sergeant Kite: a swart Gypsy long used to acting as foil to his captain at whom he shoots an unforgettably woeful look when mock-rebuked for his recruiting zeal.

It would be churlish to deny that Hytner's production gives the audience a good time. But in endorsing Farquhar's innate Irish geniality, it forfeits much of his social and psychological realism. It comes dangerously close to being a romp instead of a revelation of the eternal ruth-lessness of the recruiting business. Box office: 071-928-2252. TEN YEARS ago nobody but a fantasist with the most overheated of imaginations would have predicted the extraordinary rise and fall of design.

How could any one have foreseen that what started out as a cottage industry would make such a disastrous rush for the stock market? Or that the Reithian moral superiority which launched the Design Council crusade to free the world from net curtains would one day become the Thatcher government's instrument in their fight against imports from Japan? Who, for that matter, would have foreseen that design would become a big subject for the glossy magazines? Until the eighties, design was a Boy Scout affair, run by two species of zealots in suede shoes. At one end was the by then rudderless Design Coun Michael Billington on Farquhar FARQUHAR'S The Recruiting Officer occupies a special place in the National Theatre's history: back in 1963 it was the company's first, home-grown triumph. But where William Gas-kill's production, like Max Stafford-Clark's recent one at the Royal Court, anchored the play in a detailed provincial realism, Nicholas Hytner's new version at the Olivier treats it, by and large, as a colourful and cheerful charade: it is great fun but it puts the camp back into Restoration Comedy. Farquhar's 1706 play admittedly requires a delicate moral balancing act. In its portrait of Captain Plume and Sergeant Kite descending on Shrewsbury to muster men, it combines an acid critique of contemporary recruiting tactics with a humane tolerance of soldierly sexual exploits.

It is a naturalistic social document and a hymn to male cameraderie. But the key point, as Roy Porter notes in the programme, is that instead of seeing Shrewsbury through the Redcoats' eyes, "we see the outside world through stout Salopian common Something of that comes across in Hytner's production. Mutinous shaven-headed locals raise two fingers to the military on arrival, and the rich scene where Kite and Plume deviously enlist two local lads by playing on their greed and chauvinism builds to a superb climax in which the Grena same time as they're overtaking you on the inside lane at ninety. Only we could hear what Barry was saying. Barry was saying something with a lot of Echos and Bravos in it.

That was his end of the conversation. One presumes the other end sounded similar. Maybe with another Tango or two. Suddenly Barry was striding towards the red Opel and its unsuspecting driver. "Good afternoon," he began.

"This vehicle: the registration on it, er, it doesn't relate to this car." Maureen looked through her dark glasses blankly. Barry pressed on. "This car is more than likely a stolen car from another country." "Never," said Maureen. "It's been checked," said Barry. "The chassis number's completely different.

This registration comes down to a silver Vauxhall." "Which means what?" "Which means this is a stolen car." Seeing Maureen's face as her Opel was confiscated without compensation, I became suspi cious, in a hopeful sort of a way. Perhaps the TV people had borrowed an idea from the car ringers welded the front of a scrapped Beadle's About on to the rear end of an old World In Action report? At any moment the whole programme would split apart at the seams. Barry's bow tie would begin to twirl and the prankster Jeremy would ap pear and tell Maureen it was just a joke. A bit of a giggle. diers' band clinch the trick with a stirring rendering of Over The Hills And Far Away: a moment as powerful as anything in Oh What A Lovely War! What this production lacks, however, is any real sense of place.

Ashley Martin-Davis's sets consist of mobile russet and ochre towers whose blanked-out facades suggest a rustic De Chirico: no hint here of the topographical precision of Farquhar's text with its references to St Mary's and St Chad's clocks. We also get jokey cut-out cows and sheep which imply less an agricultural country town than Hulme Beaman's Toytown. This is Shrewsbury viewed with urban irony rather than on its own terms. Hytner's approach to characterisation is also somewhat patchy. Alex Jennings lends Captain Plume an insouciant, hand-on-hip swagger while all the time suggesting a deep-down decency: when he announces, "I'm not that rake that the world imagines," you realise he is a role-playing young bucko.

But it is typical of the way this production skates over the text that where in the Royal Court version Plume arrived exhausted and begrimed from a 30-hour ride, here he enters as spruce and trim as a bridegroom. Desmond Barrit's Captain Brazen also exemplifies the production's resort to camp comedy. Barrit is such a loved 8363) until April 4..