The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 38

THE GUARDIAN Monday January 22 1990 The fatarist Noah's Ark 38 ARTS Ralph Erskine has taken an old police car pound and is turning it into a 35 million hi-tech fantasy, says Martin Pawley 2.5 million community centre for Hammersmith, and detailed planning permission was obtained four months later. Larson's own subcontractors were on site before the end of September. By 1991, the 250,000 square foot building should be complete. Erskine's design is remarkable in a number of ways, not all of them obvious from its globular appearance, which contains an almost medieval internal organisation within a copper roof, traditional brick and timber facings, and curtain-walled glass with bronze spandrel An exercise in what Americans call fast-track construction the simultaneous issue of contracts for the different parts of a building, even though the detailed design may not yet have been finalised it also will serve as a demonstration project for Swedish building expertise in an English regulatory environment Highly regarded for their precision construction industry, the Swedes are eager to find a market for it inside the European Community. Fast track contracting has become common in Britain, but it Generally goes with somethine was relatively easy to reach by taxi.

The handy location has attracted Swedish construction managers Ake Larson and a data consultancy called Pronator; by March 1991 the car pound will have been replaced by a remarkable 10-storey building costing 35 million. Erskine is a British-born Royal Gold medallist who has lived in Sweden since 1939 and whose reputation here depends largely on the Byker "Wall" housing estate in Newcastle. At first he refused the commission because of the poor amenity value of the site, but was later won over by the opportunity to create a kind of Noah's Ark insulated from noise and fumes. Little more than a year ago Ake Larson formed a development company to purchase the once GLC-owned car pound site from the London Residuary Body. Erskine was appointed along with nominated architects Lennart Bergstrom in Stockholm and Rock Townsend in London, and outline planning permission was obtained by May 1989.

The developers agreed to provide a Erskine's transformation of the former police car pound an almost Disney-like level of quaintness ANYONE who has ever had a car towed away by the police in west London will be familiar with the site of architect Ralph Erskine's latest British building his first in the capital. The old police car pound, nestling between the Hammersmith flyover and a broad cutting for the Metropolitan line, Tired Erskine won over Hi-tech in Hammersmith: connected in standardised ways. A glance at the shape of the Erskine building shows that issues like these were not allowed to dominate his design. Above the poured-concrete foundations and two-storey basement an eight-storey steel frame will arise, not a continuation of the concrete foundations and basement above will come a compound curved timber roof complete with a large observa slit with the nearby church tower of St Paul's. As illustrated in model form the latest building presents a slicker, more hi-tech appearance than the drawings suggest The bulbous silhouette attains an almost Disney animated-cartoon level of quaintness, an impression enhanced by the rough brick finishes for the ground level buttresses and the absence of changes went in this month.

"Only computer aided design and Fax machines enable us to keep pace with the design consequences of all the changes that have been made," says partner David Rock. Erskine's inspirations for this strange but attractive building range widely: the Ark, an interior like a medieval town, the reception desk at Brown's Hotel. And he has aligned the vertical west-facing Tate finally Pounding the Mersey beat gets the hang of it Art's alive again thanks to Nick Serota. Sacha Craddock reports Deliverance in Dachau: Ian McKellen and Michael Cashman Michael Billington on Bent's revival at the Lyttelton Carrying the called buildability, a rational isation ensuring, for example, that all the floors of an office building are virtually identical and that the maximum use is made of common components on their familiarity to do the work. There are some very distinct propositions.

British art is given a stronger voice. One gallery showing an enormous Stanley Spencer (jokingly called The Religious Experience Room by the people who work there) brings up a strand of British art that could never fit in comfortably with the modem displays of the past. Bloomsbury has a look in this time: there is a wall with a long-forgotten Duncan Grant andr further on, the St Ives School has its own room. But this may change. The galleries empty out as we come up to the present.

Minimal art looks truly minimal and the room that contains two Caros, an early Hoyland and a Turnbull succeeds because of its economy. Serota is cautious about the contemporary, and he is reluctant to buy lots of new stars cheaply in order to collect the gems of tomorrow. Any yawning gaps in the collection are a product of the past. Serota believes that only in exceptional circumstances is it necessary to fill them in for the sake of it. Perhaps the days when being bought by the Tate was the only establishment milestone in an artist's career are over.

Those works have usually mouldered downstairs anyway. Serota can make the Tate more accessible to artists by mounting good exhibitions. The building, now stripped back and freshly painted, makes much better sense of the art within it. The new hang is exhilarating because it lets us look again and question our preconceived notions. 5 parallel lines.

many confusions and diversions on the way. Despite that the director Horace Ove imprinted some vivid images on my mind: Simon's ghostly shade suddenly impin-geing on a scene we associate with the comic side of the play; and a face we know to be black pressed through a sheet of white latex, as though a mask is being moulded. Then the throat is cut, and it bleeds. The important achievement, though, is that it opens a different territory for black television drama. THE MEDIA SHOW (C4) i ran a poll suggesting that only just over a third of viewers would mind very much if the BBC and ITV companies could no longer afford "quality" drama like The Jewel In The Crown and The Singing Detective.

The Man from the Pru was "quality" drama, and easy viewing. Moffat's play was probably made for a third of the cost, and is by comparison difficult. But I bet anyone who stuck with it remembers it long after Man from the Pru has faded. However you define it and often it only means loving recreation of period quality is not the only criterion. The very word has a dangerous smugness built in.

The Media Show itself showed its own qualities punchiness, topicality in an investigation on how far the media in Hong Kong have been and are now increasingly manipulated so as not to offend the rulers of Tiananmen Square. Or presumably the rulers of Vietnam whose say-so is needed to ship back the Boat People. Guardian Conversations is a regular series of lundilirm events in which writers and artists talk at the KA Wednesday 24 January Jeremy Reed with Michael March Price of Poetry Madness: The Price of Poetry looks at poets such as Christopher Smart, John Clare, Baudelaire and Rimbaud who suffered unbearable social pressures because of committment to their work. Jeremy Reed discusses his book with Michael March and reads from his new collection The Nineties. Guardian Conversation events are from 1.00 until 2.15pm, ticlts1.80,iCADayPass1.00 Institute of Contemporary Arts The Mali, London SW1 Telephone bookingOl-930 3647 9 BoxOffkeopeji 12.00-9.30daif Wilson.

It has the right feeling without pandering to historical re-creation and fussing over detail. The paintings are hung in a visual way. They balance each other, there are fewer of them; and the work at long last has been elevated to the position of art instead of historical artefact The next room is excellent too, with Constables hung because of what they look like. Hadleigh Castle used to sulk in the gloom on a back wall: it now has enough space and light to grab your attention as you pass by. But this re-hang does not pretend to be a new art story.

There are deliberate gaps. Nobody intends to rewrite history here. The desire to educate naturally follows the need to show art for itself. There is an introductory text by the entrance to each room, but the sum total of these texts would not give a potted history. OF course, the obvious and important pieces from Europe and America are still there, but in different places.

The Rothko Restaurant paintings still have a room to themselves, with more hung than before. Picasso looks different now. There is a section that shows cubist painters but also one that shows their post-cubist paintings. A between-the-walls Leger hangs near Picasso to make a different combination. All of this seems disturbing because you can no longer depend NEW PRODUCTION tion dome, carefully fitted around taller, irregular shaped sculptural projections above the roof line.

So there will be three separate structural systems within the single building. More unusually, the inclined walls and cone-shaped atrium that are the most distinctive features of Erskine's design will mean not only that every floor is a different size, but that none of the large sheets of glass in the curtain walling can be one of the SA top-brass that precipitates the crisis in which he and Rudy are forced to live as outlawed fugitives. Far from being sentimental, Mr Sherman's play amounts to a constant questioning of Max's desire to survive at all costs. En route to Dachau, he is forced to disown and kill his lover. He makes necrophiliac love to a 13-year-old girl in order to be classified not as a homosexual but as a Jew.

And, once in Dachau, he bribes the guards to permit his friend, Horst, to join him in the meaningless task of heaving rocks. But the whole point of the play is that love for Horst transforms Max from a selfish survivor into someone prepared to die for his membership of a persecuted, minority. It is a subtler play than I first realised. It sanely argues that there is no automatic moral distinction between homosexuals and heterosexuals; but it goes on to suggest that, when homosexuals are discriminated against and punished, they should practise the strongest possible collective defiance. In the first act.

Mr Sherman makes his points with great dramatic effect: there is one particularly good scene on a Cologne Dark-bench between Max and his roving-eyed uncle who has learned to live a bisexual double life. But, although there is one brilliant passage of purely verbal love-making, the rock-heavine second act becomes repetitious. In one way, that is the point (the development of human passion through inhuman drudgery) but it takes time to wick, Paul Filipiak and David Gaines give a richly imaginative impression of a full-scale war, using dance and mime set to music from Hoist's The Planets. In the final section the actors, masked once more, go into a cartoon-strip style to show two opposing soldiers on the battlefield who find a harmony of their own. The great thing about these actors is their matchless flair for visual humour The observations on behaviour have a Dickensian vividness delivered with a warmth that many younger performers lack.

Style always serves content and the observations on human behaviour have a Dickensian vividness. Trestle Theatre has struck out in a new direction, tack ling an early opera, L'AmO- truly rectangular, so precision is essential. Neither interior details nor the unruly shape of the curving copper roof and upper parts have been finalised, even though work is about to start on the steel frame. Erskine also has a reputation for refining his buildings until the last possible moment. Even now, Rock Townsend have staff in Stockholm working and a third planning application covering many detailed design PHOTOGRAPH: DOUGLAS JEFFERY torch get to the crunch.

In the light of iosnua soooi's unetto, am also inclined to think there is a better case to be made for the survival tactics than Mr Sherman admits. But it remains a good play partly because it opens up a neglected aspect of the Nazi nightmare and partly because it stresses the political importance of coming out. Sean Mathias's production. spare and lean, also contains a tine penormance from Ian McKellen which charts the distinct stages of Max's moral growth. He moves from being a roguish flirt and vain hustler to a man horrifyingly aware of the cost of survival: McKellen seems to dredge up from the very depths of his soul the phrases describing how he acquired the yellow star.

And in the Dachau scenes his hobbling gait and mechanical movement implies that the chosen toil is Max's way of stilling his own consicence. Michael Cashman as Horst misses some of the flinty sto icism Tom Bell initially brought to the part but handles extremely well the crucial dec laration that homosexuals are. first and foremost, people. Paul Rhys as the innocently fey Rudy and Robert Eddison as Max's hypocritical, camel- coated uncle also lend strong support. A demanding, fascinatine play; but the important thing about Bent is that it reaches beyond the specialist appeal of gay drama to offer a sane and timely warning about the bru tality of sexual intolerance.

parnaso, by the 16th century composer Orazzio Vecchi. Where Vecchi incorporates improvisations by Commedia dell 'Arte actors, Trestle has substituted modern characters in full masks. However, compelled to be silent, they become two-dimensional and the storyline is left unclear. But the idea of setting the whole thing on a giant restaurant table does give a visual boldness to Toby Wilsher's production. When it comes to Commedia Dell 'Arte, nothing touches the Venetian company, Tag Teatro.

The Madness of Isabella, directed by Carlo Boso, has grown even stronger since its premier last year. The slapstick fights and gags are played with breathtaking precision and the exhausting pace of the play keeps the audience in constant fits of laughter. Seldom do you see such joy and exuberance on stage. The London Mime Festival continues until Sunday. ANY change at the Tate Gallery has to be a good thing.

It had become such a dull place to visit Instead of the excitement that should surround our important collections of English, modem and contemporary art, it had become at best a cosy resting place for a few old familiar friends. The Tate was clogged by decade after decade of inferior partition and rationale which made it impossible to see clearly into the stagnant pond of accumulated theory and trophies. Sixteen months after Nicholas Serota became director we can finally see the changes he has brought to one of our most important institutions. He has not just stirred the pond with a stick, he has drained it. The art is alive again, the building makes sense and debate can recommence.

You are no longer forced to choose between turning left for fusty early English or right for the international, local and the new. There is now one complete exhibition. Apart from Turner who stays in his own Clore Gallery, there is a loose line that can be followed if you wish; having passed through the impressive Duveen Sculpture Gallery, now emptied of lumpen Moores, and restored to its proper use, you come to a room of Elizabethan portraits. Probably the most touching victory for Serota is the way he has hung the earlier work. There is a grand style room with Gainsborough, Stubbs and hsDesieners tSf Translation I 1 lhJUHLSsg5' Feb 2, Hugh Hebert ET'S not advocate head-to-head violence in police series.

But JtL you have to say there is something perverse about a cop anuw ill vYim.il me urauiaui; ar rests are filmed in landscape format from a range of 200 yards. In Phil Redmond's new series Waterfront Beat BBCl) the nearest we have come so far to the sharp end of police work is when greenhorn PC Ronnie Barker just so gets soaked apprehending a tearaway joyriding a water scooter in a Liverpool dock. I thought we might be in for some excitement when they caught up with the sheep rustlers and sent in a posse of mounted police. But the cameraman seemed to have got his boots stuck in the mud and his zoom lens locked in the extreme wide angle position. A few ant-like creatures that might have been rustlers were seen distantly wrestling with tne vans tauDoara.

Meanwhile. Chief Sunt. Don Henderson you have to watch these code names is desperately fighting to get Division's new headauarters finished so they can leave their fortaxaDin. They spend a lot of tune tne corridors ot Impo tence swapping lines like "We missed the last planning meeting before the and "I'll reactivate my interpersonal skills." Though that, like much else in the series, is spoken tongue in cheek. It sets out to prove that police work is 90 per cent hum-drum, 10 per cent run-run.

Ambulancemen should cite it in evidence. THERE is rather more blood in the other Liverpool crime of the weekend, in Robert Smith's The Man from the Pru (BBC2); a rather nasty pool of it round the battered head of Julia Wallace, (Anna Massey) tne victim in a famous unsolved murder of the Thirties. There are two men from the Pru. Julia's husband William has come down in the world through ill health. Gordon Parry (Gary Mavers) has come up in the world and emoys a small car, many women possibly including Julia and embezzling the premiums he collects.

If you ever doubt, from the moment Parry appears, that he really dunnit, you were either second guessing wrongly or not attending. It was done sumptuously, directed by Rob Rohrer. Jonathan Pryce in gran'pa specs and moustache always implied the stoic rectitude of William, who suspects but does not' accuse Parry, yet left the ambiguities intact. NIGEL MOFFAT'S When Love Dies (C4) took its own many ambiguities a stage further, into a fantasy where Richard (Brian Bovell), beaten up and dying, relives his disastrous marriage to Annabel (Josette Simon). The uneasy mix of Caribbean family humour and the fatal mismarriage never really worked for me, but the fantasy eventually did.

Josette Simon's early line "I used to work in a hospital. Now I live in one" established a tragic dimension she and Bovell kept open to the end, as she moves through unwanted pregnancy to mental illness and suicide. But there were too MARTIN Sherman's Bent was first seen at the Royal Court on May 3 1979, coinciding with Election Night. Now it reappears at the Lyttelton in a Britain in which many freedoms have been eroded and in which the level of sexual intolerance is once again rising: "Pulpit Poofs" screams The Sun, while The Times magisterially decreed on Friday that it is not advisaoie tor senior judicial appointments to be of- terea to practising homosexuals." In such a climate, the revival of Bent takes on an extra importance. Eleven vears aeo I described it as "a work of considerable dignity and I still feel that its virtue is that, Dy laiung Nazi uermany as its setting, it shows where the vicious persecution of people for their sexuality mav ultimately lead.

It is not a flawless play, but it is a refreshingly human ist one that armies that homo sexuals are "no better, no worse" than anyone else: not a separate species, simply members of the human race. More than I first realised, the play is also about the moral education of its hero, Max. When we first meet him in 1934 Berlin, he is a well-bom hustler who haunts the clubs, deals in coke and lives in an apolitical world. Mr Sherman is critical of a ghetto-ised gay culture that cuts itself off from political reality: to Rudy, Max's dancer boy-friend, Ernst Rohm is simply a fat queen who runs around with a lot of beautiful boys. And it is Max's own na ivete in picking up the lover of Ken Rea on London Mime THE first half of the London Mime Festi- vil confirms a vienr- EL ous state-of-the-art with capacity audiences suggesting that visual theatre is no longer of minor concern.

KeturnlnE alter an absence of four years. Moving Picture Mime Show has lost none of its customary precision in a new programme of first rate comedy. The main piece, Generalissimo, mixes full masks and choreoeranhed action to great effect. Two senerals an Ameri can and a Russian are seen reviewing their troops in a Joint march oast. The ensuing disarmament talks begin in a spirit of jollity the Russian offers a rolled-up draft treaty that turns out to be a Christmas cracker.

But despite the party hats, everythincendsin aggression. At this point, Toby Sedg- Opens Thursday then Jan 27, 31 6, 9, 19, 22, 26 Mar 1 at 7.30pm Conductor Mark ElderLionel Friend Producer Tim Albery Tom Cairns and Antony McDonald Lighting Wolfgang Gobbel Amanda Holden and Marty Cruickshank Cast includes Ann Murray Ethna Robinson, Philip Langiidge, Anne Dawson, Jean Rigby, Christopher Booth-Jones, Stafford Dean, Eric Shilling, Ronald Hines Seats from 3-33 English National Opera London Coliseum St Martin's Lane WC2 Box Office 01-836 3161 Credit Card 01-240 525 lit IgliSCQCt II 113 Cj mm aTwJ 1 1 i.