The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 36

36 ARTS THE GUARDIAN Friday June 19 1992 Brigadoon with brain damage Nancy Banks-Smith TV and addresses the audience directly, conspiratorially, thus-ly: "Life has meaning. Except for viewers in Scotland, that is." Wee bit of technical know-how there. You can examine him more easily sideways than head on. And that way he can't come at you. Here is Rab as a guest critic at the weekend in Talking Magritte (BBC 2).

The picture was Magritte's The Lovers, a couple with their heads muffled in cloth. Rab was unfazed by this. Govan is surreal. "Of course, some people think this is symbolic but no if you live round my way, boy. God, half of Govan walk aboot wi blankets over their heids.

Mostly when they're getting in and oot of polis motors, I admit. "Some people think wee Maggot was being kinda symbolic in this picture. We're born in the dark. We die in the dark. OW where can I go for IJ a week away from civi- JL usanon? It came to me in a flash, like a bottle on the back of the napper.

Go van. Ever since Rab Nesbitt (BBC 2) burst on us like a speech impediment in a string vest, I have become increas ingly wistful about Govan, a sort ot Brigadoon with brain damage. Now you see it. Now you think you're seeing things. For tourists there is the prob lem ot the patois but I find, after watching a dozen Rab C.

Nesbitts, that I can iollow his flow quite easily. This, for some reason, worries me as though I had started understanding mv dog. Govan speech, or Glesaa as it is sometimes called, is a succession of barks. If you still can't understand, it is permis-sable to say "Whit d'yi mean? Whit yi mean?" in a fuming sort of way. Rab himself often does.

You will find the natives eager to smooth the path of the confused tourist "Canny understand what I'm saying, eh? Clean yir buddy ears oot! Gawn, on yir way! Ignorant bamstick!" There is a general romantic sense ot an undiscov ered country from which no traveller returns. Or, of course, goes to in the first place. you can sately assume that if a word is unknown like malky, keech, glaiket it is offensive. Govan is extraordinarily rich in abuse, though, according to Rab, it has no word for happy. Giro and bloo-tered are the nearest approximation.

Giro means the drinks are on me and blootered means the drinks are in me. The Go- van for wonderful is "Pure brand new" presumably because so few things are pure or brand new in Govan. Govan men are called Shue. Gash and Andra, the sort of names you come across in films where Ra-quel Welsh is legging it lithely from a brontosaurus in a leather bikini. Raquel is in the leather bikini.

The brontosau rus is wearing a string vest. Rab is All Garnet without the social polish. His head is bandaged but unbowed. He holds up his poke of congealing chips to a malign sky like the Statue of Liberty. An unusual thing about him is he knows he's on Vauxhall Cross as conspicuous as an aircraft carrier parked in Trafalgar Square, with all the sobriety of a Busby Berkley set PHOTOGRAPH: OAVID SILLITOE The building of a not so secret service Well, don't expect an argument oota me, boy, but despite it a' there's tenderness there, there's compassion.

See that wee trusting tilt of her heid across his cheek, that wee protective incline of his arm aroun' her waist. Take it from me. That boy there has the right attitude to life. Underneath the blanket there's a smile on his fizzer because tonight, tonight he knows he's on a promise." Rab is, you might say, the smile in the night. Willie Mcsporran And The Gnomes of Zurich (This Week.

Thames TV and Full Moon) was pushed to an unusually late time because Scotland was playing the Co-operative Insurance Society. Willie is getting used to being pushed around. He is the chairman of Gigha, a beautiful island off the coast of Scotland, which has been seized by a Zurich bank. On July 7 Gigha will be knocked down to the highest bidder. It used to be owned by Sir James Horlick of malted milk fame and still has a sweet dreaminess about it like a lamb going alive into the meat grinder.

The islanders were touchingly dignified and polite. As Malcolm Potier, the property speculator who pledged uigna men tied, was unwilling to face the islanders, This Week showed his interview to a packed village hall. Then up spoke bold Willie McSporran: He a liar and let him or any prospective buyer remember this. When they buy tne island, they don't buy the islanders." As a bolthole for spies, MI6's new HQ is ludicrous. But as architecture, it works.

Deyan Sudjic reports the block once tellingly described as like a pair of mating robots, that spans London Wall. And now to complete the trio is the soon-to-be-occupied Vauxhall Cross, perhaps the most ambitious and successful of all three. It has the advantage for the architect of a clear site, leaving his building in full view from all four sides. Farrell has responded to this with a ruthlessly symmetrical design hinged down the middle, with a series of identical wings stepping down towards the river. It has the craggy presence of a rocky outcrop from Monument Valley.

An intricate silhouette comes from the series of terraces he has designed which contrast the green glass of the offices with the yellow stone' structure. If a design which combines high seriousness in its classical composition with a possibly unwitting sense of humour. The building could be interpreted equally plausibly as Mayan temple or a piece of clanking art deco machinery. The parade-ground-neat row of cyprus trees that marches across the river front is little short of hilarious. The trees ing, but Farrell has an innocence that allows him to attempt to tackle the high game of architecture against impossible odds, and make a surprisingly good fist of it.

Farrell is in many ways the quintessential British architect of the eighties, even though he would undoubtedly fail to recognise himself as such. (He has a permanent sense of being an outsider, shunned by that elusive and possibly non-existent group that he would identify as the architectural establishment.) Farrell rode the boom of the eighties, turning himself from a cheap and cheerful architectural entertainer producing such essentially frivolous confections as. TV-am 's studios into a serious urban planner. He went on from designing modest offices in the eity of London, to complete a series of three giant developments which between them have changed the face of the capital permanently and dramatically. The first was the arched office block that sits on top of Char ing cross station, known as Embankment Place, which has the profile of a mantlepiece clock.

Then came Alban Gate, Another 'fl 1 0RGET for a moment I Lj the ludicrous incon-l" gruity of housing an HI. organisation as secretive and self-important as MI6 in a building that is as conspicuous as an aircraft carrier parked in Trafalgar Square and has the sobriety of a Busby Berkley set Consider instead what kind of an epitaph Terry Farrell's new home for Britain's spies provides for the architecture of the eighties. Certainly we will npt.see.any-thing like Vauxhall Cross again, not at least until an upturn in the economy coin--cides with a return to fashion of the architectural tendency which it embodies. But its sense of being beached by the retreating tide of architectural and economic history, is not necessarily a handicap to an evaluation of the more enduring qualities of Vauxhall Cross. Now that post modernism is dead, Vauxhall Cross doesn't Lucy well learn SIiMMgMiliiil' 'r Her only mainstream production was a flop.

But she's operatic history in the making all the same. Gerald Lamer on Lucy Bailey turally agnostic era. That is es pecially so when it is sandwiched between the grim col lection of towers that clutter up mis stretch ot the Embank ment, with the fifties Stalinism of Jeffrey Archer's penthouse on one side and the glowering duik ot tne Nine Elms cold store on the other. This is a site with a history. It was here that the property boom of the eighties really began, with plans to build a high-rise tower of 40 storeys sheathed in reflected green glass of extreme banality, dubbed the Green Giant and vetoed by Michael Heseltine at the end ot his tenure at the Department of the Environment.

The site was sold, and Farrell's current design emerged after a'series of competitions. It's impossible not to look, and impossible not to be impressed even if the architec rural vocabulary is not to our taste. We expect offices to look boring, and ironically we only notice them when they do not That is why, though it is just nine storeys high, Vauxhall Cross is far more imposing than the 40-storey Green Giant would have been. to love years she has been working, the Bailey innocence has never been seriously disabused. How ever, she does concede that the one production she has done for a major British company, Scottish Opera's Threepenny Opera (with designs by Vincenzi) in 1990, was "a brave disaster, actually one of the best things we have done, but we didn't quite pull it off." Progress has been made more by way of the fringes, through a radical Mitndate at wextord, a brilliant production of Paisiel-lo's Don Quixote (in the Henze version) at the Guildhall School, and a remarkably suc cessful solution to the problems offered by Alexander Goehr's thoughtful but not very eventful music-theatre Tryptich at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1990.

But with Teorema coming to London.Tryptich due to go out on a Contemporary Music Net work tour, and Mary Of Egypt at Aldeburgh this week, it looks as though it will not be long before she is at the centre of things, and perhaps even in the mainstream repertoire. Mary Of Egypt is at Snape Concert Hall tonight and on June 24. Teorema is at QEH on Nov 11. flowed freely only after the last, concentrated phrase. The reason, of course, is that the artist served the song without diminishing his own personality.

If there are instances where operatic charisma comes first, Kathleen Battle's handle and Mozart cocktails were not among them; the free and easy voice is inclined to melt luminously away in rapt self-contemplation. A Liszt sequence, finely guided by herself-styled "collaborator" Margo Garrett, suggested a firmer desire to communicate, (in the narrative of "Comment the only hint of pathos and a voluptuousness too often wrapped in ribbon. It was definitely tied in a bow again and decisively squashed for Rachmaninov, Strauss and encores which included a laughing song that brought the house down in spite of archly viewing Viennese style through the wrong end of the telescope. could equally well be searchlights pointing at the sky. The most impressive of Farrell's achievements here is that he has not confined himself to a single idea.

The building grows and develops as you move around it. The side elevations show off green towers held in a stone cradle like a row of Manhattan skyscrapers. Meanwhile the street frontage on the south has something of the sophisticated decor of St Andrew's House, the Scottish office's Edinburgh headquarters. It boasts Frank Lloyd Wright details, and deep-set windows underlining the point that this is not just a stick-on-facade, that the building is made of real stone. Yt MS is an attempt at doing something architecturally difficult, to plan a building in both section and elevation.

And you can't but admire Farrell for trying. He would have a much quieter life if he had simply produced a box. rne architec ture comes across with the passion of religious fundamentalism, a quality that is almost embarrassing in our architec with a kind of innocence allied to a shrewd analytical intelligence and a disarmingly easy manner in conversation. As an undergraduate Bailey asked Samuel Beckett's permission to stage his Lessness for the first time. He said No and then, confronted by the personality when she went to see him in Paris, he said Yes.

On leaving Oxford she wrote to Peter Hall in the hope of being made his assistant. After a short interview, she found he was asking her when she wanted to start. She worked with Hall on several productions, gratefully learned a lot from him, and at the same time began to understand that his text-based kind of theatre was not her kind of theatre. The revelation came when she collaborated with Harrison Birtwistle on A Tale Told Too Often at Dartington in 1985. His genius for matching music and image not only inspired her to devote herself to opera but also helped her develop her own visually orien tated directing style: Design for me is not decoration but a reflection of the internal dynamic of the piece." The extraordinary and en couraging thing is that in the 10 What Fischer-Dieskau compels you to face is a musical truth it is, for once, the only word to which all singers should at least be able to aspire, no matter how lacy their chosen corner of the repertoire or how burnished the God-given instrument It really doesn't matter that full-throated rejoicing ho longer comes easily to him; even though one can't help wishing that the stream consulted over the question of the girl's love in Schubert's fifth song had responded swiftly in the negative, a more modified rapture and, later an inscaped pain and absolutely centred self questioning in finely spun lines stilled all doubt.

Christoph Eschenbach's hard-won poise between major and minor did much the same in working against resistance to necessary transpositions. A testimony stronger than any chronicle of subtle word-pointing is the simple fact that tears seem anything like as threatening as it would have done if it had been built a decade ago. Then it looked as if London was being swamped by an epidemic of half-baked monumentalism, stick-on classicism and jazz moderne facades. In deliberate contrast to the buildings of the sixties too many of which mistake vacuousness for reticence the eighties confused character with vulgarity, a tendency which was only finally killed off by the.property crash. It would be unfair to blame Farrell for the excesses of post modernism.

Set Vauxhall Cross beside a building as crude and ignorant as Marco Polo House, BSB's old HQ, and you see how hard Farrell works at his architecture. He comes out even bet ter when you compare his buildings to the cynical sophistication of such American-designed projects as the Chicago revival blocks of Broadgate. The Americans are more know Cilia and Gracie in the privacy of her bedroom. Ms Steadman meanwhile is her coarse, boozy, widowed mum who is only woken up to her daughter's showbiz potential by her spiwy agent boyfriend. The play is obviously full of echoes: Pygmalion, A Taste Of Honey, Educating Rita all spring to mind.

That matters not a jot: more worrying is the way the story sometimes veers out of control as in a clumsy finale where both the mum and the agent get their come-up-pance. But what keeps the play alive is the theatricality of the concept the dormouse heroine with the freak talent and the counterpoint between the fairy-tale structure and Mr Cartwright's lewd, salty, sa-voursome language. Sam Mendes's production needs to be faster and snappier: one scene should dissolve into the next instead of being punctuated by breaks for jazz-drum- I Lucy Bailey thrives under pressure photograph: Henrietta butler WHATEVER else Lucy Bailey achieves in her career as an opera director and it's only just beginning she has already made history at the Mag-gio Musicale in Florence. It's apparently all right for women to take their clothes off on the stage of the Teatro Com-munale but not for men to do the same. However, Bailey put forward such a convincing case for undressing two of the actors in her production of Teorema that the authorities relented.

Teorema is a music-theatre version of Pasolini's film in which a stranger enters a middle-class household and regardless of gender seduces each one of them in turn, destroying the "deceptive security" of their bourgeois existence. At the end of the film the father sheds his clothes at Milan Central Station and walks off into a desert. So Bailey had a precedent for one of her naked images, though not ming. But William Dudley's angled, wallpapered, split-level set is a triumph of bad taste and the two leads are impeccable. Jane Horrocks is like a frail, tiny vessel inhabited by some daemon she doesn't begin to understand: when she turns into Bassey warbling Gold-finger or Gracie Fields yodelling Sing As We Go, she doesn't glow with showbiz unction but simply looks like a naive girl frighteningly possessed.

Ms Steadman's also subtly avoids turning the situation into a reprise of Life Is Sweet where Ms Horrocks was again her daughter. This mum is no good-natured scatterbrain but a wicked witch of the North-West without an ounce of maternal feeling. And there is sterling support from Pete Postleth-waite as the small-time agent, Annette Badland as an illiterate neighbour and George Rais-trick as a tatty club-owner in a dust-mop wig. for the physical distortion which her actor goes through at the end of a production you can't take your eyes off. Progress up to that point is so disciplined that it comes as a surprise to hear Bailey confess that both she and designer Simon Vincenzi were baffled as to how to present Teorema until a late stage in preparations for the first performance.

But Bailey seems to thrive on what in a less confident person might be described as panic and what in her case is probably a way of pressurising herself into isolating the essential problem and finding the inspired solution. Well into rehearsals of John Tavener's Aldeburgh Festival opera, Mary Of Egypt, long after she had decided to relegate the chorus to the sidelines bring in a team of dancers instead, she was still inviting ideas from everyone involved. This confidence is nothing to do with arrogance but rather BarbicanROH David Nice Fischer- Dieskau Battle TO GLIDE smoothly from a Sunday afternoon with the most magisterial of Lieder-sing-crs to the most aristocratic of pianists in the evening would have been asking too much. Alas, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Sviatoslav Richter were competing for attention when they might so easily have been Schubertian partnership, and moving on instead from Fishcer-Dieskau's perfected vision of Schubert's Die Schone Mullerin to Kathleen Battle's songs forced comparisons that did the soprano no favours. Cottesloe Michael Billington The Rise And Fall Of Little Voice JIM Cartwright's new Cottesloe play, The Rise And Fall Of Little Voice, is his cheeriest yet.

It's a Bolton showbi2 fairytale, a back-street Cinderella-story with a built-in kick. You can forgive its stop-go rhythm and its odd, overwrought passages because of its natural warmth and because it affords such generous opportunities to Jane Horrocks and Alison Steadman. Ms Horrocks is the Little Voice of the title: a painfully shy, waif-like agoraphobe with a hidden talent for doing impressions of Garland and Piaf, TOTTENHAM COURT ROAD LONDON Wl REDUCED PRICE PREVIEWS FROM NEXT MONDAY Students OAP's Discount 10, Mon-Thurs Eves 8pm, Mats Thurs Sat 2. 30pm Grand Opening July 6 at 7pm c.07l 413 1411 I24h) Information 071 580 88459562 Croups. 071 636 0875, Big Croup Discounts Applause 07 1 831 2771 Special Luxury HolclThcairc Break from only (49.00 incl call CcntrcstaRC 071 383 0038.