The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 26

THE GUARDIAN Thursday April 12 1990 The devolving of the Arts Council's powers has caused much heart searching especially at the Arts Council But will the new system of funding in the regions be any less sclerotic than the old, asks Anne Pierson What about the artists? Better safe than sexy 26 ARTS decision making reduces us to vulnerable and isolated beneficiaries, uncertain how best to make our contribution to the debate, reluctant to challenge Judith Williamson anonymous drawing appeared on Kendal's Brewery Arts Centre notice- oard last week of a potter working at his wheel. Balanced upon his shoulders were row upon row of bureaucrats, arts administrators, accountants, secretaries and officers from regional arts associations. At the top was someone important from the Arts Council who was making out his travelling expenses; at the bottom, the beginnings of a very small pot. Perhaps someone had been reading the Wilding Report, the one that spends 91 pages describing improvements to the structure of arts funding in England and six lines on how those changes might benefit art and the artist? Or the reason behind Luke Rittner's resignation as secretary-general, that handing over the funding of most of the Arts Council's organisations to the regions would be damaging to the Arts Council. Somehow, the proposed improvements to Arts Council A and RAA relationships, the changing boundaries, the shifting of clients to the regions, the power struggles and resignations have become an end in themselves and reinforce our suspicion that over the years a curious inversion has taken place.

If all the arts practitioners crept away into the dark, how long before the policy documents stopped pouring from the photo-copier, the committee meetings trickled to a halt, the fax became silent, the Council of Regional Arts Associations and its 12 robber barons ceased their feud with the Arts Council and all those absorbed in the business of cake-sharing realised we had gone? It might be Government policy, of course. Artists don't starve in garrets any more and subsidy is mopping up the creative juices; carry your funding body and experience the pain and frustration needed to produce "great art" (The "he ain't heavy he's my benefactor" group are the ones getting the serious money). Well, I for one don't begrudge those who give out the grant getting first bite at it and it's petty and spiteful to be jealous of a chandelier. But I am beginning to question the manner of distributing what's left. The Regional Arts Associations' raison d'etre would appear to be the investment of public funds in people and organisations which are likely to produce the best return, both in terms of the quality of the product and its impact on the community.

In reality, some have little choice but to maintain funding patterns which were shaped years ago in quite different circumstances. This can be for a number of reasons: a significant proportion of an RAA budget may be locked into grants which have reached the optimum level; allocations cannot be changed because rewarding excellence by pruning the weak and mediocre is defensible only if backed by lengthy monitoring and assessment which officers rarely have time to carry out; or an RAA is supporting an organisation in partnership with its local authority and there may service we provide is not likely to improve if we must respond to blanket strategies and flavours of the month, calling "Look at me, Daddy!" as we compete for limited funds. Positive intervention from experienced, informed Art-form Officers would be welcome, but it must arise through regular contact which is not confined to times of crisis. A system of monitoring, assessment and support is essential if we are to have confidence in the ability of the RAA to distribute its disposable income effectively. This may mean an increase in staff if there is no possibility of a reduction in paperwork.

It may be that greater personal involvement could be the first step away from the "Officer" role, with its connotation of directing the troops, and a move towards partners of vision, passion and commitment who share our ideals and work with us towards achieving them. That will remain an impossibility whilst the exclusion of signifiant numbers of arts practitioners from all levels of be political reasons for maintaining the status quo. The result is that one of the arts associations' most crucial functions the movement of limited funds for maximum impact is frustrated, the paralysis at the centre disguised by a froth of project funding. One-off grants can stimulate exciting, innovative work. They can also exploit the artist, who lives hand to mouth spending the intervening time raising money for the next project.

They do not provide the time and security needed to develop work of quality. They may finance superficial experiences raising expectations which cannot be fulfilled. Most worrying, they encourage the artist and the administrator to sink their energies into schemes which are likely to be funded, rather than those which are fundamental. Grant applications become attempts to anticipate or comply with the wishes of the paymaster rather than honest assessments of the needs of a particular art form or a community. The quality of work and the bathing suits: there's a childlike liberation in never having to wear clothes (except of a Baby-gro type, like sweat pants) and the fact that everyone's in swimwear has a strangely equalising effect But the childlike aspect of beachclothes has a more complex dimension: the wearers, no matter how sexily presented to us, appear oblivious of their own sexuality.

In plot terms, this obviously isn't because they are children but because they are lifeguards, and swimsuits are simply their work clothes. One key storyline concerned Craig, torn between being a lawyer and a lifeguard: "I always thought when I was grown up I'd have to wear a grey suit," he explained, as he chose lifeguarding and shorts. Yet the business of lifeguarding is no child's play but deadly serious: saving lives. The idea of saving is at the heart of the personal dramas, too, with danger standing not only for surfing accidents but emotional loss and separation. Eddie has been rescued from a foster home and is now able to save Shawnee from a violent relationship.

Father Hasselhoff is constantly saving the other lifeguards. Children are constantly being lost and found. Despite the semi-naked bodies ever-present in its imagery (particularly the montage sequences which punctuate the narrative) Baywatch sagas endlessly reproduce the feeling of being carried to bed in a blanket on a rainy night. "I wish I could stay here for ever and be safe," says Shawnee to Eddie as they shelter from a storm and their friendship tips over the brink into an erotic love. Safety becomes paradoxi Michael Billington stumbles upon a generation gap in Bill Alexander's beguiling Much Ado at Stratford upon Avon Hie odd couole HERE are few socially useful professions which allow grown men to run around in shorts.

Lifeguarding is one of them, and it's the subject of Baywatch, ITV's spring season US import broadcast at tea-time on Saturdays. What most people have noticed about Baywatch is that its characters spend most of their time in bathing suits and this has generally been dismissed as a flimsy excuse for displaying hunky or curvaceous bodies. The series has already spawned a variety of sexily themed ads, notaby the Levi's 501s beach scene where a woman pulls on a man's jeans over her high-cut bikini (an interesting metaphor for the way sexuality in this arena belongs far more to men than to women). David Hasselhoff, Baywatch star and chief lifeguard, was on the cover ot rv Times in a track suit unzipped to the waist, with further wet. bare- torsoed pictures accompanying a feature inside.

But the emphasis on sexual ity apparent in the programme's imagery and publicity is belied by the concerns of the stories themselves. Hassel hoff plays not just a hunk in trunks but a devoted single parent who seems Kramer style to have sole custody of his 12-year-old son Hobey. He also effectively fathers the whole weeuaraing brigade. though his relationship with old friend and fellow-lifeguard Craig is more brotherly. Craig in turn looks after the programme's mixed-up-kid Eddie (played by Tom Cruise look-alike Billy Warlock).

All the relationships are in tensely familial. But the striking thine about Hasselhoff is that he looks far too boyish for his role like the curly-haired father in Little House On The Prairie, who was always wierd-ly unconvincing as pater fami-lias. In Baywatch, however, not only is there a father who looks like a little boy but a son who acts like a for Ho bey is constantly naving dating trouble (i.e, telling little girls he "needs to be And since they're all in shorts, it's almost as if boys are playing every character in the family romance: brothers, lathers and sons running around on the beach in a game where all the roles can switch. Sisters are present though the only one with any resonance is Shawnee, whose babes-in-the-wood relation with young Eddie feels almost incestuous. But crucially this is a world without mothers.

The only ones who ever appear are the feared custody-fighters, and parental bonds are all carried oy men. ivieanwmie, mere a broader sense that while moth er's away, the kids can play: the hleguaru nuts along the beach are like tree-houses or dens and even the big jeeps in primary colours resemble toy trucks. This sense of a play-world gives a different angle to the Free in a John Fordham at the 100 Club THE familiar snags of jazz-rock fusion cramped improvising, trite ensem ble playing, incurable premature ejaculation are imposingly swept aside by the French-Canadian trio Uzeb, who havejust played two nights in London. Uzeb (Michel Cus-son guitars, Alain Caron bass and Paul Brochu drums) are little-known here, but big in their homeland, and currently on a world tour. On this evidence they certainly have then-loyalties, notable to Weather Report and Pat Metheny, but unlike either of those two outfits, Uzeb are primarily a blowing band, encouraging flat-out must be Just study onr clues and write your Solve them all and the letters in the the policies or conduct of those on whom we are financially de pendent.

Boards and committees dominated by local authority and lay members look naturally to their RAA for expert guidance. The power base is narrowed to a handful of senior staff which creates a sep aration which is both frustrating and unproductive. Artists, promoters and administrators, the people on whom the Arts Council and the RAAs depend utterly for the implementation of their poli cies, must have a stronger hand in shaping them. They have demonstrated endless resource fulness in transforming small investments into outstanding product. They have no expectations that their share of the cake will increase.

But they are waiting to be invited to sit at the table. Anne Pierson is director of the Brewery Arts Centre in KendaL must be beaten into her." Steve Carter's play, which is due to emerge as a Hollywood movie this year, is redolent of Victorian melodrama. Perhaps this is Carter's intention. For Barton, and his family's cowed reaction to his iron will, illustrate a regressive tendency among a section of black immigrants in the America of the 1920s and 1930s. And its expression may well have been outmoded even sixty years ago.

Barton and his family are West Indian immigrants in Harlem. They regard the native blacks as lazy and supine accepters of white power. The play's focus is upon the love-affair between Annetta and the charm-laden, laid back Eustace, who is to New York born. Why cannot the wretched girl understand that her future should lie with a man her father selects. A familiar contest is, therefore being staged, even though its particular form is novel.

But the melodramatic diction and deportment of Barton himself poses great problems. The paterfamilias, as created by Carter, is so extreme in his unyielding implacability and nastiness that he beggars belief. And the author, although he suggests that Barton's own wife is a victim of a fixed, loveless marriage, perversely takes the side of Barton himself. For when the young couple defy him, and he is stricken by mortal illness, all his offspring, and even Annetta, return from the next door wedding feast penitent and grief struck. Yet Carter never justifies that conclusion, which too facilely bolsters Barton's case for keeping away from the natives of Harlem.

Alby James's production is streaked with deflationary humour. The central performances, particularly those of Jaye Griffith's love-lorn Annetta, Lachele Carl and Steven Woodcock, delightfully subvert the governing mood of melodrama. 0 At Riverside Studios, IVB (01-7483354) until 14 April TWO YEARS ago the RSC bombed badly with a vogue-ish Much Ado About Nothing set in some Fifties no-man's-land. They now make amends, at Stratford's Royal Shakespeare Theatre, with a visually seductive, socially consistent Bill Alexander production that aroused the audience to ecstasy but that left me temperately enthusiastic. As always, Mr Alexander takes Shakespeare comedy seriously.

He and designer Kit Surrey eschew Sicily and set the action squarely in an elegantly-hedged English garden that suggests Comp-ton Wyngates or even Glyndebourne. It lights beautifully (Don John's dark plottings all seem to take place in gathering dusk), is comically functional, with the secreted Benedick hiding inside a poplar, and neatly suggests a hierarchical, seventeenth-century world in which everyone knows his or her place. But if we still delight in this absurd comedy, in which gullibility is carried to inordinate lengths, it is largely because of the merry war between Beatrice and Benedick. Watching Susan Fleetwood and Roger Allam, I had the feeling of a marriage made in the casting department rather than in heaven. Individually they are fine but, without wishing to be ungal-lant, they seem to belong to marginally different generations.

That matters crucially because, as the Dench-Sinden pairing forcibly reminded Barbican Tom Sutcliffe St Matthew Passion JUST as Handel's Messiah in Germany is generally translated, so Bach's Passions have become part of the English landscape adapted to the authorised version. Performed here in its original German, the sounds of Bach's devotional masterpiece may seem more important than the sense. But us, Bea and Ben have been badly bruised by a past encounter; here I got no sense of a long-standing relationship so that Beatrice's line about her heart once before he won it of me with false fell into a void. That said, Ms Fleetwood is a very good Beatrice for whom Hero has the right word Like the heroine of Balzac's story, The Dance At Sceaux, she guards against emotional rejection by being mistress of the witty put-down. But what Ms Fleetwood gets well is Beatrice's transformation from self-absorbed wit, dispensing one-liners from a garden swing, to a woman of true feeling: flattened against a hedge, she listens thunderstruck to Hero's analysis of her character and, in the church scene, delivers that deathtrap injunction to Benedick, "Kill Claudlo," with such intensity that not a titter runs through the house.

This is real acting. Roger Allam's Benedick is good but erratically directed. As a languid military bachelor, coughing up lungfuls of cigar-smoke from inside the poplar or reasoning himself into passion, Mr Allam is very funny. But, since everyone harps on Benedick's sadness and melancholy when he comes out as a lover, it seems absurd for Mr Alexander to turn him suddenly into a Restoration popinjay tottering about in high heels. Mr Allam gradually recovers his drama, metaphysics and any personal religious inspiration are remote and objective.

The difference is that between stumbling and fluency in a language. And it's hard to find the right meditative intensity in the Barbican's unlovely dry acoustic. Soil, Richard Hickox's City of London Sinfonia played with refinement and good baroque style. His Richard Hickox Singers are competent if lacking in personality. The six soloists, especially Nancy Argenta's penetrating treble and Michael Chance's poised, mellifluous alto, chimed with the tastefully authenticist approach, in tim- composure, but it is odd how one wilfully misdirected scene can upset the balance of a production.

The most complete performance of the evening comes from John Carlisle as Don Pedro. This is no princely cipher but an ageing Cavalier shrouded in solitude and hungry for emotional contact. Mr Carlisle enters into the proxy wooing of Hero with suspicious enthusiasm and proposes to Beatrice with direct urgency. He creates a character where on the page one barely exists, so that even a tiny line like "The old man's daughter told us after Hero's assumed death, causes a sudden pang of remorse. That is the good side of Mr Alexander's production attention to detail.

And, among the supporting roles, there is a mercifully sober Dogberry from George Rais trick, more interested in gazing lovingly at himself in mirrors than in advertising his malaprop-isms, and an impassioned Friar Francis from Mike Dowling, notably short on balsam. Mr Alexander's production is elegant, pleasing, well-ordered: it captures the progress of the comedy by starting with Beatrice dangerously fencing and ending with her softly kissing in the rural twilight. But if I was beguiled rather than transported, it was because I never quite felt this Beatrice and Benedick were one of nature's inevitable partnerships. breifnot numbers. The trouble in the first part was that Hickox's homogenised but hurried interpretation was too much a case of the Matthew Passionless by P.D.Q.

Bach. The chorales, in particular, were treated like anglican hymns where the choirmaster has his eye on opening time. Bach's work is not best in a comfortable concert-hall. Moreover a lot of the work is better with no conductor to come between audience and performers. Nigel Robson's characterisation of the evangelist was brave, individual if too rough on some high notes with odd Making amends Susan Fleetwood as Beatrice and Alex Kingston as Hero in Much Ado About Nothing at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre photograph: douglas jeffehy cally a dynamic with almost ubldinal torce; wnue guilt is banished because what the characters are doing is so invet- erately good.

There is a kind of purity of purpose about saving lives. At the same time, the Baywatch theme song, sung over the opening credits, is "Why don't you save me, I'm burning with desire." Freud says that tenderness the kind of poignant caring one feels, for example, for children is sublimated desire. Baywatch, with its playoff of imagery and plot, manages to present both: the subli mation tne passionate concern which is the rationale of lifeguarding and the sexuality that's being sublimated, with streams of wet, mobile bodies apparently unconscious" of their desirability pre cisely because they are rushing around guarding lives. In the drama of saving, relations between buddies, lovers, parents and children, are condensed, fleshed over the bones of the same action in a way that welds together the underlying connections between them. I used to wonder why the end titles of Baywatch were in negative; they have an almost apocalyptic feel, slightly resembling the way nuclear explosions are often pictured.

But they're appropriate. This bikini beach is a world of impacted fantasies which, if split apart, would certainly prove explosive in the family living rooms where it's watched. row improvisation from three musicians whose imaginations for once more than justify the length of their solos. The most startling member is guitarist Michel Cusson, a remarkably agile performer whose speed intensifies the melodic substance of his work by compression rather than camouflaging the absence of ideas. Throughout, Cusson's perfect foil was bassist Alain Caron, who frequently played his six-string in the range of a regular guitar (often using it to produce synth effects like the Metheny Band's Pan-pipe sound) but played a bebop solo on the upright instrument.

Only the band's home-grown themes approached the ordinary, but the soloing was so rich and hypnotic that it really didn't matter. 100 won TODAY! answers in the space alongside. right hand column should spell 500 151 lac WIT. Bcudsyf '-mm. tion.

Just as this work marked a return to a more ingratiating and popular idiom, so Max of late has shed the provocative expressionism that typified his work in the '70s. This reading of a concerto by Janina Fialkowska and the RPO demonstrated the classic clarity of Bartok's design and the personal flavour in the score: the dreamy night music built out of thematic fragments in the slow movement and the alternation of Hungarian dance tunes with fugal episodes were breathtaking in ways no other composer emulates. Whereas in much of his earlier music, Max came across as essentially an alienated artist, his latest compositions manifest a more integrated temperament, seemingly at one with the world and nature. Now more Brucknerian than Mahlerian, his attempt, in his symphony number three, to write something approaching Mahler (at least in the finale, which was imbued with forebodings of his parents' imminent death) did not quite come off. The thematic invention in a Mahler symphony burns itself into the memory straight away, its architecture being appreciated later: quite the opposite tends to be the case with Bruckner and the same applied here with Max's massive symphony.

Max's new integrative manner still demands virtuosity from his interpreters and the RPO fled by Dennis Simons of the BBC Philharmonic) made a very good shot at it all. Riverside Studios Nicholas de Jongh "Get me my rope," snarls Joseph Barton, as, Annetta, his love-struck daughter, in her late teens or early twenties, who has fallen for the no-good boy next door cringes pathetically in front of him. "Maturity lapses in the German vowels. Gwynne Howell's Christus sounded sugary and a bit sleepy. Stephen Varcoe's light baritone worked best in his comforting final recitative and aria, but lacked iron in the soul, volume and depth.

The expressive vocal star of the Matthew Passion, though, is the alto and Michael Chance was on spectacularly elegant form. Bach invites the most impassioned statements from his alto; it's extraordinary that such a vital role was allotted to a boy. Chance's singing is always immaculately contained and rhythmically alive. Thanks largely to his sensitivity, justice was finally done to Bach's vast scheme. Festival Hall Meirion Bowen RPODownes SIR Peter Maxwell Davies's choice of repertory for the final concert in the South Bank's celebration of his work reflected aspects of his own development Like Stravinsky in his later years, he has been greatly stimulated by the methods used in medieval and Renaissance music.

I suspect, though, that Max would have been a bit more daring and subversive than Stravinsky was in his Mo-numentum pro Gesualdo di Venosa ad CD Annum three madrigals by Gesualdo "recom-posed for instruments" in 1960. While in the first madrigal, Stravinsky treated the music quite freely, in the others he was content with idiosyncratic instrumental lay out. The result was rather dry a non-piece to which the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Edward Downes, could only react with respectful literalness. A late work of Bartok's his piano concerto number three again prefigured Max's own recent approach to composi HOMHBWlHllaHMllpaillMlBinMnHHni f-mi out, from top to bottom, a well-known phrase. Picture palace, movie theatre or flea pit Happiness, Joy or nirvana Firm, narrow ox tipsy Beachwear, two-piece or atoll Excavation, mine or bed Semi-circle, curve or horse race Decolorise, whiten or peroxide Small, car or skirt Chelsea, Bath or chignon Stake, job ox mail IncompJato, half oar house Vapour, emission at poach Bag, carry or betting pool 0898 Dial CtvathaKEYTHRUsvayoiununttVidaddicu.TodaywiiinerwlUtMpiclctd at randon fromallcorrtct entilci received and notified direct by peal.

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