The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 34

Arts ROCKFOLK CLASSICAL Suml Jo Wigmore Hall Tom Sutcliffe i Born to ache in Ayckbourn: Brenda Blethyn and Barry McCarthy Not much fun in Ayckboum's Wildest Dreams Laugh -1 nearly cried The Saw Doctors Forum, London John Mulholland THE SAW DOCTORS are an odd species. They're difficult to grasp, not least because they're so ordinary; the rock 'n' roll stars you can take home to meet your parents. On Monday night at the Forum in north London the second of three consecutive sold-out dates they made for an odd sight. In place of the usual mannered pretension there was infectious boister-ousness. Dressed (apparently without irony) in an assortment of deeply unfashionable clothes (in one case, lime green trousers matched with a yellow shirt), their knockabout antics were, at times, embarrassing, only to be rescued by their formidable sense of humour and self-parody.

Their's is a peculiar, even unique, kind of Irish country-rock, a kind of rural antidote to the urban rawness of the Pogues. The Doctors don't sing about crack, but about the crate. When they first broke in Ireland their lack of cool prompted the so-called critical establishment to dismiss the Doctors as "designer But their critics have long since been routed and the Doctors are, probably, the most popular band in Ireland. The songs all played at a blistering tempo are determinedly parochial, betraying their West of Ireland roots. Their debut single N17 was about a road, albeit a very nice road, which skirts the Galway coast.

More often than not they sing about football, adolescent heartache, and the countryside. The Saw Doctors are quintessen-tially Irish, which is why they may never make a significant breakthrough here in much the same way that Runrig are adored in Scotland but travel none too well. And adored The Saw Doctors certainly are. On Monday night the timbers fairly shifted when they hit N17, That's What She Said, Hay Wrap, or, during a stirring finale, All The Way From Tuam. This was less of a concert, more of a celebration a coming together to toast (even boast) shared cultures, nostalgia, language, nuances, jokes.

The audience, sashaying energetically or yelling the lyrics, are as integral as the band. This was an almighty hooley. It's difficult to recall a capacity crowd at this venue sweating such collective exuberance. The Doctors reciprocated: "You were easy to play for, you were brilliant." As they'd say in Galway: "That was A CHARMING Korean, Sumi Jo is perfect for overhearing, more questionable if you want to listen to music. Her coloratura technique is immaculate.

She can do all the tricks of the vocal trade with apparent ease, managing the "messa di voce" like a bel canto instruction manual, swelling and then diminishing the tone with unforced, even richness, trilling perfectly, separating high scale runs and arpeggios on the breath with elegance and energy, phrasing with flexibility and fluency. The timbre is always attractive once she has warmed to her task, and conquered a certain dryness and strain. To start with it was all very gratifying. Her Rossini salon numbers were warm and refined, the triplets of the Florence flowergirl twirled with relish and style. She takes risks too, with such assurance.

There's an infectious generosity about her vocal physique. She throws herself into the task with relish. Yet in time this display comes to seem too calculated, the singer barely identifying with the text. Extravagant Debussy like Pierrot, Pantomime, and Clair De Lune were ideal showing what serious musical stuff her brilliant accompanist Malcolm Martineau is made of. The poetry, increasingly, was not the point.

A phrase like "tiraient de mourantes violes" (drew from dying viols) might luxuriate in atmospheric timbre, but she had no natural affinity with its sense. All her heavenly fluting and scooping in dell'Acqua's Villanelle and Arditi's Bacio wasn't real singing, but a kind of "sweet-note" striptease. The problem is cultural identity. Her French and Italian vowels were only occasionally distorted at the top for vocal convenience. Her German in Richard Strauss was precisely moulded (An Die Nacht) though she was blank to the idea of "Eine Rose In dem Schosse Dunkler Luster niedertaucht" (dips a rose in the womb of dark desires) tastefully presented, but uninvolving.

The confessional Ich Wollt Ein Strausslein Binden (I would have bound a nosegay) was, in fact, the best item of the evening probably because it was the least extrovert and wonderfully accompanied by Martineau. Sumi Jo has gifts any singer would kill for. But too often she seems to lack soul. needs from those of the rest of the country). There's also an argument to be made for orchestral provision not being considered in vacuo; that the slab of musuem culture the symphony orchestras sustain needs to be viewed together with period-instrument performances and contemporary music.

Both of London's major centres, the Barbican and the South Bank, would need to view them as a continuum that begins in the 17th-century, before the symphony orchestra had been invented and comes right up to the present day, when composers constantly rethink and reorient the instruments they need. But such a global view seems a long way off at the moment. Even on the narrow premise of the Hoffmann Committee's original brief, though, it seems as if the cards had been carefully stacked by the Arts Council's music panel from the start. The whole point of the original decision to focus the funding more tightly on a single orchestra had been to a create a London a band to rival the stature of the Vienna or Berlin Philharmonics or the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, all of which receive state subsidy far larger than that of all London's orchestras put together. (The implication that the LSO is either already of that standard or will naturally attain it is just left to follow its own destiny at the Barbican is a hard one to grasp).

By concentrating all the available monies on one orchestra, so the argument ran, there was a greater chance of hitting the jackpot. Whether a city as large and diverse as London is the right environment for a super-glossy orchestra of that kind is another matter altogether. In any case the sums just don't add up. The total amount given to the three orchestras in the current financial year was 2.4 million, yet Priti Paintal's high-profile resignation from the music panel two weeks ago, when the idea of reverting to funding for all three orchestras was first mooted, was on the grounds that the extra funds that had been promised to other musical mediums outside the symphonic mainstream as a result of the savings on the orchestras would no longer be forthcoming. Paintal had expected 900,000 to be made available; if that was correct (and nothing in the Arts Council original annoucement of the Hoffmann review hinted at that) then the maximum the successful orchestra would have received would have 1.5 million, hardly an enormous improvement over the LPO's current grant.

At the South Bank at least there will be much relief all round. By earmarking 400,000 specifically for the operation of the LPO's residency on the South Bank, the Arts Council appears at last to have recognised the fact of the residency, which contractually binds the orchestra and the SBC until 1997. Having supported the director Nicholas Snowman in setting up the scheme, the Arts Council went a long way to undermine it totally after just one year's operation. Now the Council even goes so far as to affirm that its "strategic decisions will take account of the timing of decisions to be made by the South Bank Centre on the future of the That, at least, is progress. For any further advance the BBC's own look at orchestral provision in London promises more substance; it will now be resumed, and one can only pray it can be conducted with more intelligence and resolution than the Arts Council has managed up to now.

It would be nice to think that tomorrow the resignations will begin, but that really would be hope triumphing over experience. Stanley may be shattered to discover that his romantic dreams about Marcie are one-sided; on the other hand, love gives him the courage to stand up to his bullying brother-in-law. And what are we to make of Rick who starts out a recluse and by the end has acquired a stable companion in Marcie? Ibsen offered contradictory arguments in different plays. Ayckbourn gives you clashing viewpoints within the same play which is what makes Wildest Dreams both fascinating and a bit unwieldy. Some scenes, such as that in which self-hating Hazel cries that she's wasted her body, are full of vintage Ayckbournian hilarious sadness.

At other moments you feel he's working overtime to match board-game illusions to reality. But Ayckboum's own production, ingeniously designed by Roger Glossop to interweave three acting areas, fits snugly into The Pit the sound effects are particularly fine. And the cast is a judicious mix of old and new. Barry McCarthy as the harassed Stanley, Peter Laird as the hideous taxman and Gary Whi taker as the inter-galactic Warren happily survive from Scarborough. And, amongst the newcomers, Brenda Blethyn as the regressing Hazel, Jenna Russell as the confused Rick and Sophie Thompson as meddling Marcie are unimpeachable.

The Pit (071-638-8891) until March 12. ivra orrem i Michael Billington OUTSIDER arrives to shatter a world of cosy illusion: a standard dramatic theme since Ibsen's The Wild Duck. And Alan Ayckbourn, not for the first time, deploys it in Wildest Dreams which arrives at The Pit two years after its Scarborough debut. But what makes this such a disturbing and arresting comedy is that Ayckbourn suggests there are no rules about human behaviour: some people need fantasy, others can survive reality. Ayckbourn presents us with a group of suburbanites united only by a passion for role-playing board games.

Stanley is a nervously nice teacher married to fretful, childless Hazel. Rick (nee Alice) is a butch loner haunted by memories of childhood abuse while Warren is an adolescent wizard who's convinced himself he's an alien. Into their weekly world of Dungeons and Dragons-type games erupts the gushing Mar-cie: a runaway wife who camps out with Rick, gives Stanley and Warren romantic delusions, and throws the settled pattern of relationships into disarray. If this were a neat, formulaic comedy, the point would be clear: a group of enclosed fantasists would be destroyed by contact with reality. But late Ayckbourn suggests that life is never that easy or simple.

Shy nrrr. rr. i rerra irn ra THEATRE ROYAL London's famous (xtdjm1Mj29th iiilHgiifiF STRATFORD EAST East End Theatre January BOX OFFICE 081 534 0310 Only 2 minutes from Stratford Eaat Tube and BR.