The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 28

Disability 3.S 3. family affair MICHAEL BILLINGTON asks whether theatre is the right medium for an exploration of neurological or physical disorder. Peter Brook's new production in Paris provides a convincing answer stops short at his vivid youthful experience of Paris. At one point the doctor confronts him with a mirror and he stares at his own ageing image with a baleful lack of recognition: we are moved to an imaginative a spectacle. But Brook and his actors scrupulously avoid this, partly because they inherit Sacks's own all-embracing Chekhovian sympathy and partly because they constantly take us inside the patient's mind.

Bcnichou, for instance, plays a man suffering Tour-ctte's syndrome which manifests itself in tics, jerks, noises and grimaces: looking at himself on a screen, he both identifies with the disorder and feels appalled by its grotesquerie. And when, later, he listens to a playback of himself reading Alfred de Vigny's The Death Of The Wolf be breaks down in tears at the sound of his own verbal dysfunction. Our reaction, instead of being voyeuristic, is based on a strange kinship with the tic-ridden victim. But this in itself raises all kinds of issues. Why our fascination with neurological disorder? Is it a fit subject for theatre? And how does L'Homme Qui fit into the pattern of Brook's recent work? The answer to the first question came to mo, in part, last year when I heard Oliver Sacks speak at the Adelaide Festival's Literary Week.

The open-air crowd was vast and highly knowledgeable about Sacks's "extended family" of patients. It struck me then that people not only find some affirmation ihe power of theatre is that it gives us a patient's eye-view of the world's mystifying strangeness photograph, marc enguerand PETER BROOK is obviously not the first person to spot the dramatic potential in the casebook studies of Oliver Sacks. They have already yielded a Pinter play, a Michael Nyman opera and the film of Awakenings. But Brook's latest project, L'Homme Qui. based on The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat and currently playing at the Bouffes du Nord in Paris, is not in any sense a conventional play: it is a series of stories about neurological disorders told with a lucid compassion that makes us keenly aware of our common humanity and that graphically extends the possibilities of theatre.

The first thing to say. however, is that Brook avoids any kind of showy theatrical magic: everything is as direct and simple as can be. We are confronted by a rectangular stage dotted with white chairs, tables, a camera and two TV screens. Four of Brook's regular actors Maurice Bcnichou, David Bennent, Sotigui Kouyate and Yoshi Oida who spent a year not just researching Sacks's book but also visiting a neurology clinic, alternate as doctors and patients. An onstage musician provides tactful, stringed accompaniment to moments of piercing sadness and occasional joy.

"To talk of diseases is a sort of Arabian Nights entertainment" runs the epigraph to Sacks's book. But what comes across on stage is not the exotic "otherness" of the patients but their dysfunctional humanity. Echoing the retrograde amnesia of Sacks's Lost Mariner, for instance, Maurice Beni-chou plays a man who has erased the last 27 years of his life spent in a hospital in La Rochelle and whose memory THEATRE Face To Face Man In The Moon Claire Armitstead IT IS the boast of Fecund Theatre that their show, seen and praised at Edinburgh last year, is in a constant state of evolution. It certainly crackles with an energy that explodes in all directions towards poetry, polemic, aural assault and, on occasions, physical battery. With an arrogant catwalk strut, the five female performers introduce themselves striking latterday punkettes in leather and kneepads.

Only, their talk is not of men but of Shakespearean one that out of destruction and disorder comes harmony and peace. And, although L'Homme Qui has nothing so crude and obvious as a message, it is a deeply positive work that looks at the strange manifestations of sickness with love and respect. It is, in many ways, a quiet, cool, low-key show: but it sends you out into the night marvelling at the power of theatre to tell stories and feeling more at one with the human race. empathy that gives a glimpse of what the loss ot self entails. This is the great lesson of the evening.

Representation increases understanding: the acting out of a disorder sharpens our awareness. Sacks's book, for instance, offers several studies of visual agnosia. But it becomes a living reality when we see Sotigui Kouyate as a music professor mistaking a hat-stand for one of his students, when Yoshi Oida gazes at a rose with baffled perplexity or when the two of them, confronted by a TV image of rolling waves, see only a sequence of lines, colours and tones. The power of theatre is that it gives us, however momentarily, a patient's eye-view of the world's mystifying strangeness. The potential danger of an event like L'Homme Qui is obvious: that sickness becomes Brook remains as much of a pathfinder as ever menstruation and motherhood.

Naively and poignantly they debate the disadvantages of grow ing up, oetore yielding centre stage to The Man, a shaven- -skulled pontificator on the nature of art life. With The Man's appearance, the mood changes from questioning to statement, from exploration to opinion a reflection on the sexual politics of performance, and the product as much of male manners of speech and gesture as of what this particular man has to say. Although at times rather relentlessly bumptious and stri dent, at best this ensemble of graduates from Breton Hall provide a strong example of the power that is being generated at the performance end of the theatre circuit. It is influenced by new dance and the pop actors researched the subject thoroughly. But, without discrediting a magnificent production, one remembers less the internal dialectic than the tumultuous Breughelian vividness and violence of the attendant lunatics.

Brook's command of theatrical effect was exhilarating: now he seems more interested in philosophical enquiry. Obviously, he knows as much about staging as anyone alive: you only have to look at the physical clarity of L'Homme Qui or the way the 100-minute evening ends with kaleidoscopic, colour-filled close-ups of A country in the Yoshr Oiua L'Humme Qui heightening as Pomerance's The Elephant Man, Pinter's A Kind Of Alaska and now the group-researched and authored L'Homme Qui. What the last, in particular, proves is that there is something about the locus and intensity of theatre that brings case histories alive: you feel that the Bouffes du Nord team (including Marie-Helene Estienne and Jean-Claude Car-riere) are not out to manipulate us but to usher us into what Brook himself calls "the valley of This leaves unanswered the question of where L'Homme Qui fits into Brook's theatrical the second half, beginning with a semi-tree piece including a long whimsical section devoted to his rather ley Children Songs. Stand-out of the second set was a beautiful series of variations on a slcw, ethereal piece of Alexander Scriabin's. This was a telling revelation.

It didn stop Jorea improvising, but its austere dignity made him edit tightly. Coupled with that melting touch, the effect was briefly hypnotic. COMEDY Curtis Walker Hackney Empire William Cook THE Curtis Walker Comedy Show is a rarity I on the London cabaret cir cuit a weekly residency built around a black compere, introducing a bill consisting mainly of black performers, and presented before a predominantly black audience. This particular Friday night the first of half a dozen represented a vivid example of the vast potential of this brave and innovative venture, and of its acute (though not insurmountable) limitations. Curtis Walker was one half of black double act Curtis and Ish-mael who replaced Arthur Smith as presenters of the BBC 2 stand-up series Paramount City for one ill-fated season.

Curtis's subsequent "divorce" (his description, not mine) from Ishmael seems to have liberated his sense of humour, and he is now fast emerging as a competent and distinctive stand-up comic. waiKer material ranges from Westminster to the West Indies, and he identifies with his audience, instead of talking down to them. Walker's stron- the cerebral cortex. But Brook, while an immensely practical man of the theatre, now seems as much a "philosophe" as a director. Even a work as rich, epic and multi-faceted as The Mahabharata seemed part of a personal quest to discover whether there was some regenerative human instinct that would transcend cosmic chaos.

After exploring what Michael Kustow labelled "The theatre of dissatisfaction" in the sixties and venturing towards political nihilism. Brook now seems to be in a period of affirmative humanism. To me, the lesson of The Mahabharata was the nursery education except by voluntary groups. Yet the most shattering image of a nation slipping passively towards the Third World came in another programme, the return of Citizen 2000 (Channel 4). This series charts the lives of 20 children born in 1982, who will with luck achieve their majority at the turn of the century.

Last night it was about Rachael who has cerebral palsy, and had just had the latest of her operations on her hip and legs. This was not in any realistic hope of enabling her to walk, but to make just sitting and standing more comfortable. Leave aside the doggedly cheerful endurance of Ra-chael's parents, and the brilliant heart-stabbing smile that children with severe disabilities can offer as reward. She A A of their own humanity in stories of others' disorders but that, in an age of scepticism about politicians and priests, there is a strong belief in the shamanistic power of the investigative healer. And that carries over into the Paris stage show: it appeals at once to our curiosity, our compassion, our simultaneous hunger for cure and subscription to the Nietz-schean argument that "great pain is the ultimate liberator of the But is theatre the right medium for an exploration of neurological or indeed physical disorder? It all depends on how the subject is treated.

America a decade ago produced a rash of disability plays some ot which came dangerously close to exploitation, nut. against that, one can set experiences as varied and consciousness- video, but their professed contempt for traditional theatre values cloaks a fascination with them. The play-within-a-play, the musical interlude, the monologue aue explored in the act of mocking deconstruction. They also reflect a trend in new performance towards luxuriantly poetic writing. Like Lumiere and Son's David Gale and Forced Entertainment's Tim Etchells, Fecund's writer-director John Keates produces exquisite lyrics, the gentle repetitions of which provide a haven of calm and consideration in a storm of subversion.

JAZZ Chick Corea Royal Festival Hall John Fordham CHICK COREA may have attracted some critical back handers for his dilettantish zig-zags between crass populism and upmarket classicism over the years, but nobody in jazz has a keyboard touch quite like his, even Keith Jarrett. Corea is on the road with an unaccompanied acoustic piano recital of originals, off-beat classical music and jazz standards. The first half featured the standards, though it began with an attractive original. Armando's Rhumba, punctuated by his favourite janEling Latin- jazz chords. He then hid the melody ot Sophisticated Lady amid streams of arpeggios, stride piano patterns and walking bass-lines, allowing it to be briefly glimpsed through a sequence of gently dissonant chords at the end and did much the same to With A Song In My Heart and even the usu ally craggy blues.

Blue Monk. torea got more personal in Rodin New Displays 1993 at the Tate From 3 February Adm(6Slon Froo Information: 071.621 712B Soonsored by British Petroleum TATE GAL I. EHY Oil VI BR AWAR0 NOMINATIONS SARA CROWEi BEST COMEDY PERFORMANCE ANTHONY POWEUt BEST COSTUME DESIGN MSHrarHrBrvMHnininratisMra pilgrimage. In his late sixties, he remains as much of a pathfinder as ever; but he is increasingly fascinated by the process as well as the product and is more concerned with exploring the nature of man than with the flourishes of showmanship. It is tempting, for instance, to compare the new show with Brook's work 30 years ago on The Marat-Sade.

Obviously that was a very different animal: a Peter Weiss play set in an asylum at Charenton that combined polemical debate with a visible display of madness. Once again, Brook and his gest suit is as a compere, and his front-stall banter is second to none. Sadly, the other comedians didn'ijSatch his high stan- aardspfjbth white aotswere hopelessly miscast: Alistair McGowan as a bourgeois wag and Paul Tonkinson as a Yorkshire village idiot Tonkinson died the death of a thousand heckles, though McGowan rescued his act with a courageous impression of Chris Eubank. "It's like black people doing stand-up up north," said Walker. The black guest comics were both damned with faint praise, especially one Colette, whose Asian corner shop material duplicated the racial cliches of so many white working men's club comics.

There are few sights so dispiriting as that of a pertormer an historic bast End theatre bolstering racist stereotypes by mimicking an equally beleaguered minority. Shame on you. CLASSICAL RPOMackerras Barbican David Nice THE juggernaut of authentic performance practice moves onwards into the Edwardian era, and thankfully it has the most sympathetic of advocates in Sir Charles Mack-erras. The Royal Philharmonic's new principal guest conductor issued a letter of warning to a select few before his all-EIgar concert, no bad thing perhaps in the light ot a performance that was wholly faithful to Elgar but needed a rehearsal or two more to come up to Mackerras's rigorous high standards. Even so.

preparation at its best went very deep indeed in the Second Symphony. Macker-ras had evidently listened to the five minutes of Elgar rehearsing the scherzo as well as the white-heat 1927 recording of the symphony nothing new. since Solti did the same nearly 20 years ago but carried whirlwind precision to diz zying heights in Elgar's central vision oi disaster. Its ghostly appearance at the heart of the first movement could hardly have been more insidiously served by the heavy larding of string portamento one of Mackerras's two authentic promises, gloriously controlled in a masterful Larghetto. The other, promising the kind of brilliant, open brass sound of Elgar's time, succumbed to the dangers of Barbican acoustics and undercut any hope of mellow optimism throughout the greater part of the finale.

That had to wait for a coda as moving as Elgar could ever have hoped to hear: promise of a golden age for Mackerras and the KPU, and sense of cumulative dedication to match the Philharmonia's two extraordinary concerts with Slatkin last week. Until early May at the Bouttes du Nord, Paris. Box office: (010 33 1) 46 07 34 50. red was taken to Sheffield Children's Hospital to have the plaster taken off her legs. There the waiting children and parents were like a bus queue pressed into a corridor.

On a shiny notice board a man wrote the odds in thick black felt-tip: "Number patients booked: New 27. Old 72. One-hour delay." Either because tlicy were lucky, or because other people had been kind to them, some had seats. The camera lingered for a moment on two mothers sitting next to one another, one brown, one white, with their small children clutched on their laps in what looked like the abject immobility of exhaustion. The lines of patients and parents pressed against the walls seemed as though they knew their dignity in front of this electronic witness was what kept squalor at bay.

i at I X7JLX rHOUSEF I Cut'rnt (lnntt Dully Tefejnfh "A company of high comedy specialists Aitken conducts a master class in comic tfaningkimiaiMSrW' ''WONDERFULLY WmY DiiJy Express Hugh Hebert SO THE Big Bang finally blew the Stock Exchange apart, Comrade Boris is deep in bear turds, and in a Casualty spin-off, Charlie the charge nurse is just about coping with a stabbing, a gas explosion, a Tomorrow's World presenter impaled on a model of a molecule, and much else: "Contact the council building work department to arrange a review of local services funding." A nurse hands him the phone: "John? OK. Right. Right. Here's what you do: get Lamont to remove mortgage renet ana put the money into new housing, start a public works programme and, er, cut VAT in half." Meanwhile in Gloucestershire, the hung council is opt ing to swing for a lamb, and the kids may go on to a tour-anu-a half day school week. With so many red faces, how would you know whose red nose is plastic? Kussia gets me retcrenaum, Hong Kong gets democracy, we get rate-capped.

Where's the Comic Relief? Public Eye (BBC2) dubbed Gloucestershire "Crisis Labour councillors have gone into a huddle with the Tories to agree a cap-busting budget which leaves them with cuts of 10 million to find. Even for the statistically naive, it would have been useful to explain this in percentage and historical terms before the Tory MP slammed in his supposed backbreaker about the profligacy of earlier years; but never mind. The cuts mean grazing the bone of the social services, which is the kind of thing the good electors of the shires may shrug off. But here comes the chief constable to tell them that he is short of AO policemen and 70 civilian staff because the local authority doesn't have the cash to fund them. A primary school has to make two of its eight teachers redundant, and the overall staff cut will be 10 per cent.

Teachers talk about the increased class sizes and reduced teaching time that will mean. They debate whether decent education four-and-a-half days a week is better than worse education over five days. Parents ponder what happens in the delirious teenage free dom of that half-day, constitu tionalists wonder whether it contravenes education law anyway. The wry truth is that every thing else has been cut, education remains the biggest call on the budget and will have to find 8 million savings in an area where we're told there is no "Alan Strachaa's wflr inventive revival SUCCEEDS BMJJUANTLY cast of impeccable pedigree! "An evening of continuous pleasure ONE OF THE FINEST OEJBE YEAR" PRODUCTIONS MARIA JOHN AiTKEN if. NOEL COWARD'S H1BEKI inBHIRE 1 ST MARTINS IANE LONDON WC2 .1 i wi iiiveei ittt 071 344 4444 (No Big Fee) BOX OFFICE: nti 1 An rt hi USX AU XWV I.