The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 26

THE GUARDIAN Monday March 1 1993 THEATRE Gwynne Howell and Angela Gheorghiu in Turandot photograph cuvebaroa provided a fluent, revealingly textured dead end; Wigglesworth has yet to master its subtler mysteries. THEATRE Dont Fool With Love Cambridge Grosvenor Myers The new state of play Continued from page 5 the decline in innovatory stage drama was the intended result of consciously provoked changes in the cultural economy, and its success has been much exaggerated. There was a remarkable increase in the number of prominent women playwrights in the eighties. And many new writers came from UK regions and nations which saw significant entries to the ranks of major playwrights: the north-west had Clare Luckham and Charlotte Keatley as well as Willy Russell and Alan Bleasdale; the renaissance of Scottish and Northern Irish playwriting included Liz Loch-head, Anne Devlin and Sharman Macdonald; as well as Iain Heggie, Chris Hannan and John Byrne. Another eighties phenomenon was the rise in the movement of playwri-terly self-help and education, for example the pioneering North-west Playwrights Workshop, which offers a script-reading service and workshops, and holds an annual festival in which six plays are presented in script-in-hand productions after exploration and rehearsal.

Twenty-five per cent of its graduates have gone on to write professionally; new work production is a third higher in Greater Manchester than in the country as a whole, and increasing. Manchester is not alone. On England's main stages, the amount of new work doubled between 1989 and 1991. And new writing has improved its box-office performance, providing added evidence that the more new work you do, the more people come to it, as well as vice-versa. (The thesis is demonstrated dramatically at the National, where there were a number of weekends last year when you couldn't see an old play, and you couldn't get into the new ones).

How can things be encouraged to look up further? If I was to propose a policy for the Arts Council's new writing committee it would be to expand precisely those imaginative programmes they have been forced to cut. For the best possible reasons to concentrate resources on theatres the Arts Council has reduced the committee's budget by 18 per cent. To concentrate its resources directly on writers, the committee has decided to suspend its support of writers' organisations like the North-west Playwrights' Workshop and also to mothball its scheme to aid second productions of contemporary plays. Support for writers' self-development and training is more important than ever, particularly in view of the crisis in the small-scale sector. In this area, writers and companies need to understand each other's needs and skills better than they do now.

But the people who need convincing most are those who present the plays. I have expressed some heartfelt views about directors. I do not share the actor Simon Callow's view that there was once a golden Arcadia in which merry actors and writers ran naked up and down the greensward tossing flowers at each other, before those wicked directors ruined it all. From 1956 until the early eighties we were blessed with two generations of directors who saw the presentation of new plays as a central part of their business and purpose. It's to be hoped that the new generation of directors, whose work on the classics is so justly admired, will realise that that has been the saving grace of the contemporary theatre.

It does seem to me historically that a theatre without significant new work is a theatre often of sensation; often too of spectacle; almost always a theatre that displays and celebrates performance skill. But, ultimately, a theatre which has forgotten that plays have meaning is a theatre that aspires to the condition of the circus. And watching our great musicals, and seeing great performances threatening to out-Olivier Olivier in the physicality of their display, I wonder if we are not in danger again of forgetting that theatre has a what and a why, as well as a how. ALL great periods of British theatre writing have been in the wake of great national triumphs: Shakespeare after the Armada, Farquhar after the Restoration, Shaw after the great industrial and imperial achievements of Victorian England all of them bit deeply into the souring fruits of victory. The great subjects of the post-1956 British theatre were the consequences, opportunities and limits of the democratisation of British society during the war.

The first wave of new playwrights, from John Osborne and Arnold Wesker to the early Edward Bond, confronted the cultural consequences of the new enfranchisement. For the next generation, forged in the youth revolt of the sixties, the questions were about the political limits of social democracy and the welfare state. In the early eighties, young women playwrights confronted questions of difference and identity which had emerged in the seventies. These conversations also popped up in film, on television and in the novel. But they were addressed most consistently in the theatre, because of the medium's capacity to engage in a live conversation with its audience.

Sometimes this happened literally and alarmingly during the performance. But the metaphorical debate was no less real, as the feminist writers of the eighties took on the socialist playwrights of the seventies, who themselves had challenged what they saw as the liberal humanist perspectives of the fifties and sixties. Now we live in the wake of another victory, of western capitalism over Utopian communism. It seems to me inconceivable that young British playwrights and one or two a little older will not bite into that subject with all the energy and rigour with which their predecessors bit into the discontents of post-war Welfarism, Edwardian prosperity, Stuart trium-phalism and Elizabethan gloriana. with a perfectly formed technique, and a rich, flexible, expressive timbre full of exquisite pain and musical imagination.

A voice with such bloom and so effortless a legato is rare indeed. The revival is worth hearing for her alone. Mark Ermler seemed determined to resist the flashy extroversion that the Serban staging invites, with its now slightly stale clockwork choreographic routines, its circus manoeuvres and courtroom layout The result was rather washy, flabby Puccini that turned into attractive impressionism in the final act. A wobbly-at-the-edges revival, but with enough bits working as they should to give satisfaction. CLASSICAL BBCSOWigglesworth RFHRadio 3 David Nice THE opening of the Britten Festival saw a celebration of one of the great symphonies of the past 25 years, Shostakovich's Fourteenth and, almost incidentally, a fine performance.

The second day, the matter of the Shostakovich symphony in question, the Fifth, came second to the manner of the presentation further proof that Mark Wigglesworth stands firmly at the centre of his conducting generation. Every line was crafted and stamped by experience. Colour contrasts, if only between jet black and slate grey, with the most lurid of post-Mahler scherzos for solitary contrast, were vividly emphasised. One only hoped that Rostropovich was tuning in; he would have been astonished. Messiaen's Oiseaux Exotiques, on the other hand, is all dressed up focus with nowhere to go, though the dressing could be no one else's.

Mes-siaen may have learnt a great deal from Debussy, but not in this work. So La Mer at the start of the concert The Artifice Orange Tree, Richmond Claire Armitstead SUSANNAH CENTLTVRE married a strolling player, an army officer and Queen Anne's cook. She sneaked into Cambridge lectures dressed as a boy, possibly had an affair with George Farquhar, and got so far up Pope's nose as to earn a dishonourable mention in The Dun-ciad. She also wrote plays, the last of which premiered in 1722, a year before her death was condemned as "a scurrilous, impious, monstrous It's not hard to see why. The Artifice, latest in a line of Orange Tree rediscoveries, presents a society that is amoral almost to a fault In a comedy of adultery, double-crossing and opportunism, the only people to lose out are a cuckolded husband (a Bunterish David Timson), for whom innocence of his wife's intentions is the only possible bliss, and a disobeyed father (Frank Moorey), who actually gains by being disobeyed.

The rest of the characters have their crumpet and eat it in a play whose single principle seems to be that the female heart is wiser than the male head: thus, for instance, despite cheating his elder brother out of his inheritance and abandoning the mother of his illegitimate baby, the dastardly Ned (Timothy Watson) finds himself the wealthy husband of the Dutch heiress he ran out on, with his prospects of a little extra-marital nooky undiminished. Director Sam Walters emphasises the fecklessness of this outcome by avoiding the temptation to land Ned with a Flemish doughball: Janine Wood pursues him through the play in a sparkly gold trouser suit, like Jean Shrimpton at a cocktail party. The costuming is brightly anachronistic to match a slightly mad directorial style which energetically conceals the occasional hiatus in Centlivre's wit. OPERA Turandot Covent Garden Tom Sutcliffe PEOPLE expect more of Calaf than Vladimir Popov can provide. At the end of Nessun dorma he came to the front, raised his arms and smiled expecting the applause to wash over the orchestra.

And nothing happened. Actually, Mr Popov is not the worst of many Covent Garden Calafs who have tried their luck for favours. He is sturdy and determined, and ratchets up some fierce, hard top notes that you can't ignore. But it's not a lovely sound and lovely is how people want their Nessun dormas, now wo all know how it should go. Grace Bumbry is certainly a lot lovelier, less ferocious, more musically phrased than Dame Gwyneth Jones's Principessa.

With such creamy legato, one was just a tad prepared for her naming of Calaf as Amor. A pity that, in her first shouting match, the top note required had simply taken French leave. Bumbry opened her mouth very wide, and her eyes even wider. But nothing came. Still, as old hands know, if you look as if you're doing your best, the audience may not be able to tell whether it's really there or not.

When everybody's straining against the orchestra, somebody's bound to get drowned. It's not the irresistible, frigid majesty of the Jones Turandot, but it does make a change. The real musical joy was Angela Gheorghiu's fabulous Liu: a waif ONE thing which impresses about so many of Declan Don-nellan's productions for Cheek By Jowl is his skill in judging just the right dramatic idiom for each of the eclectic selection of classics he chooses for the company. For the high Romantic of Alfred de Mus-set's Don't Fool With Love, touring to the Cambridge Arts, he has emphasised the schematic aspects. There is passion, in Maria Miles's projection of the young girl just out of her convent schoolroom, tormenting her amused and indulgent noble young suiter (Michael Sheen) as she tries for size the alternative battles between sacred and profane love, and between love and pride; and there is humour, in the melodramatically conceived eye-rolling, teeth-grinding hatred between the rival priests of David Foxxe and Brian Pettifer.

But they are a controlled passion and a controlled humour, subsumed in a formalised, highly patterned, almost balletic elegance. This concept in its turn is climacti-cally, brilliantly subordinated to a final, mould-breaking irony. An opening revolutionary chorus by the company before adopting their respective roles, and reproduction in the programme of Delacroix's Liberty Leading The People, have reminded us that the play's background is the Paris barricades of 1830 which overthrew the tyranny of Charles X. Ultimate disaster is nevertheless the lot of the hapless peasant girl (a charming, wistful performance by Pooky Qucsnel) who gets caught up in the machinations of her HBBBMS FINAL WEEK by Marguerite Duras "THE ACTING IS FIRST RATE" Guardian "the best kind British acting" Sunday Times "SUPERBLY PLAYED by LARRY LAMB HARRIET WALTER" Independent on Suiday "an evening of mesmerising power" The Herald Men Eves All Seals 6 C5 standby (coics) bookoblo by phone on the day This is an edited version ot a talk at the Royal Society (or the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce on February 24, to be published in full in the RSA's journal. David Edgar's Destiny and Saigon Rose are being revived at Birmingham's Library Theatre and the Orange Tree, Richmond later this month..