The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 17

ARTS GUARDIAN 17 THE GUARDIAN Tuesday August 9 1988 Alan Bennett's comedy of manners in a Harrogate hotel A public function Hugh Hebert Formica foursome Phoebe Cates, Annabeth Gish, Page Hannah and Bridget Fonda in Shag ttlhe soft core hunffle Behind the risque title lies a world of Southern innocence. John Minson previews Shag, the first beach music movie ging shoes on?" and later a memorable piece of graffito on a bathroom wall reads: Shag Till You Gag. In spite of knowing exactly what South Carolinan shagging consists of, it's hard not to smile at the unintended innuen-dos in Shag. "It's an innocent film," says actress Page Hannah (Daryl's younger sister) who plays a rather nerdy senator's daughter in the film. "I think it's a movie to go and laugh and have fun.

And I think kids will be touched by this." Hannah suggested that children today know all about sex, drugs and suicide but that Shag is refreshing because' it studiously avoids the usual portraits of teenage violence and decay. "I don't believe in promoting that kind of image for kids," said Hannah. But the trouble with Shag in the 1980s is whether teenagers today want to see goody-goody by shuffling backwards while they shuffle forwards, but only really good shaggers do that well enough to not look stupid. "I hated the Shag dance at first," says Scott Coffey, who play's Chip in the movie and ends up doing plenty of shagging in the film's final dance competition. "It took me ages before I could get into the steps and rhythm.

But after that it was great," he said. However, if Shag is to win brat-pack appeal, shagging should be a much bigger feature than it is. Indeed, it's hard to understand what the Shag is as it isn't explained until at least a third of the way into the film, and then not very explicitly. And with more dancing would come more music. Only two songs feature prominently, both sung by the excellent Voltage Brothers from Atlanta, but the group was upset that neither the dancing nor music acts as wrap-around for Shag.

Meanwhile, at the Myrtle EVER SINCE the BBC ignorantly banned Ain't Nothing Like Shagging last year, the word shag has been at the root of sniggers and titters from a great many UK cultural bimbos. And the giggles will grow to a belly laugh this week when Palace Pictures (Absolute Beginners and Mona Lisa) release their provocatively titled Shag the first-ever beach music movie, set in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, in the summer of 1963. The Shag is actually a dance that was noDular in the Fifties and Sixties and is still a big cult for? What are you using the gallows for?" Or "I say equally good, back or front." Jonathan Stedall and his crew have caught it all with a fine sense of Bennett's balance between sympathy and satire. Bennett uses it as illumination of his own youthful hang-ups about Proper Behaviour in Public. But he also uses it to lay the ghosts of humiliations imposed, unwittingly, by his parents.

His mother's social observation was keenly categorised. She classed people, not with the brutal ABC1 of the admen, but with infinite gradations: better class, well-off, nicely spoken, refined, educated, genuine, ordinary, and the ultimate condemnation, common. He quotes her. 'Your Dad and me can't mix. We haven't been They didn't see that what disqualified them was temperament: just as, though educated to the hilt, it disqualifies me.

What keeps us in our place is embarassment." There is, behind the humour, the needle-eyed observation, a hint of revenge; against these innocent Harrogate role models of How to Act Proper; perhaps even occasionally against the parents whose social unease he chronicles here with a mixture of affection and guilt. He tells, for instance, how they visited him when he was at university, and when taken to a posh hotel one evening for dinner, said "Do you do a poached egg on toast?" For them, you see, dinner was at noon. I wanted to see the parents Bennett, I wanted very much to see if they were laughing at the memory, and to know if Bennett too was laughing with them and up his sleeve at us, conning us with this beguiling catalogue of social distinctions. But if so, he had his come uppance. On the train back to London from Harrogate, wanting a bit of peace, he decided to pay the 3 supplement and go first clflss.

He tells in his postscript how the guard came round for tickets. "You dont belong in here," said the guard, "these are proper first class people the 3 supplement people are down there. Come on out." And in village after village in the Cotswolds, the property developers and their price spirals are saying to young local people: "Come on out." Power in the Land (Yorkshire) this week traced the way it goes in those parts of the country that have become a commuter dreamland. Weekenders and developers buy up derelict cottages for 40,000 upwards which local first timers can't afford, convert them and sell them to other weekenders for three or four times as much. What were homes become holiday haunts, the village shops can't keep going, the young people move out, there are too few children to keep the school open.

But quite why the farmers sell up escaped me. Except for the obvious reason that they can get large sums from a developer who wants to build houses and a car park where the cows used to come for milking. the wry preci sion that hallmarks his writing, Alan Bennett works out that he was con ceived on an August Bank Holiday, in a strange boarding house bedroom in Morecambe, perhaps, or Flamborough. Dinner at Noon (Byline, BBC1) begins with that reflection as he sits in a much grander bedroom of the Crown Hotel in Harrogate, the setting he has chosen for this most personal of documentary debuts. He spent a fortnight there, a tall bespectacled wraith moving as on castors along its carpeted corridors, half-hiding or pretending to half-hide in deep armchairs or behind drapes as he snoops on couples taking tea in the lounge, or on private functions in the Grosvenor Room.

People trying to behave, he says, are always more interesting than people just behaving, and for him a traditional English hotel is the theatre of humiliation. "Theatre" says it all: the sense of being in the spotlight, the centre of attention, required to know your cues and make the right responses; above all, not to ad lib. And conversely of being part of an audience: an unguarded cough, a dropped spoon, a Yorkshire Post rustled too loudly, and that spotlight will come beaming down the stalls to isolate you in a glare of disapproval. Though as Bennett sees it, the new young businessmen have knocked a lot of that little drama on the head. They dine in shirt sleeves, they strike deals over tea.

They come to conferences, about explosives, or environmental health; there is even a meeting at which some of them learn about meetings. A wonderful litany of the enterprise culture floats up from all the chapels the Melbourne Room, the Bronte Room. The newly installed chairman of sanitary inspectors gives emotional thanks for this double privilege bestowed by his elevation and the presence, with chain, of the mayor of Harrogate. Elsewhere a consultant advises that in the end their business is "just keep taking pound notes from people, and keep them smiling as you do it. It's as simple as There were the road hauliers' wives tucking in with more obvious pleasure than most; there was the reception for the delegation from Harrogate's French twin-town.

Its mayor was observed in a lengthy monologue addressed in Franglais to his nodding hostess. "I'm glad," she said in regal tones, when it was clear he had stopped. "I'm very glad you came." There were the snatched, broken remarks sticking out of hubbubs like shards in a shag carpet "What are you using it rrnu TffTH vv Hugh Canning praises a thoroughly French performance at the Proms Debussy with a Lyon heart movies or wnetner tney ae- Buxton Jeremy Moore Songmakers' Almanac BUXTON was quite the hive of activity on Sunday evening as this year's Festival drew to a close. Unfortunately, at least for the Songmakers' Almanac, the multitude outside the Opera House had gathered for the final festivities of the Festival fringe, leaving a rather nominal minority within. Nothing daunted, Graham Johnson and his troupe presented their bicentenary homage to Lord Byron with customary panache, aided and abetted by the acting skills of Gabriel Woolf.

Whether portraying the poet as a womanizer of great humour if few scruples, or drawing upon his darker, more troubling vein, Woolf relished his role not to mention a few others, including a hysterically awful American poetess and almost threatened to steal the limelight. That would never do, and the company responded gamely, in words, and more expertly in song. Too much initially of Isaac Nathan, Byron's contemporary and collaborator, gave proceedings a slow start musically but a little Mendelssohn, Wolf and Gounod raised the temperature before the interval. Returning to the earnest matter of Byron on music and death, Woolf marvellously sympathetic portrayal of Isaac Nathan, a canny if not unduly gifted composer, gave his music a more sympathetic touch and we can be grateful that he coaxed the Hebrew Melodies out of Byron. Sets by Loewe, Schumann and Wolf they made a gripping climax.

Graham Johnson, needless to say, provided impeccable accompaniments throughout and, of the youthful vocal trio, James Meek impressed most, mand entertainment that's much more raunchy, such as the hot and steamy Dirty Dancing that has cleaned out the record books among teenagers. Dirty Dancing's disco is a good deal more sexually explicit when compared with the rather tame shuffling shag which, sadly, doesn't get much of a look in during the movie. Kenny Ortega, responsible for the bopping in Dirty Dancing, also choreographed Shag, but his impact in the latter is poles apart from the funky Dirty Dancing. At first, the actors had a very hard time learning how to do the shag. The dance is a variation of the Fifties rock 'n' roll Twister Jitterbug, and starts off by the partners grabbing both hands and hanging on right the way through the dance.

You shuffle your feet around plenty, but they don't (or shouldn't) leave the ground. A variation is to pretend to throw your partner off the floor more relaxed than when heard the previous weekend and allowing his baritone to bloom much more in Wolf than in Monteverdi. Jamie MacDou-gall's clean and fresh tenor gave notice of much promise although the soprano, Olivia Blackburn, was more problematic; her distorted vowel sounds suggested several technical difficulties. Still, her performance of Maude Valerie White's "So we'll go no more a-roving" made a touching valediction before we ventured out into the night air. Almeida Nicholas de Jongh Hello and Goodbye FOR all its delving into boxes which team yesterday's memories and its sudden spurts of physical action, Athol Fugard's Hello and Goodbye is really a still life play.

It presents the life picture of Johnnie, a young near-derelict in his Port Elizabeth hovel, whose mind is stranded in the past. As an invitation to luxuriate in pathos it cannot be faulted, even though Fugard fails to show or explain reasons for which Johnnie has reached such an unpretty pass. Admittedly Fugard in this play, the first in an RSC season at the Almeida, does organise a kind of close encounter at 57a Valley Road when Hester arrives home after a 15-year absence to find Johnnie, her unwelcoming brother, living so deeply in the past that he can scarcely be persuaded anywhere close to the here and now. The reason for her late return is financially motivated: somewhere deep in the room where their one-leeeed daddy supposedly sleeps the sleep of the chronically invalid is the compensation he received when one of his legs was ior- Houldey: exhilarated -out and researched the background to the news story and developed the fictional romance. He managed to find Ruth Caleb, the BBC producer, who showed as much enthusiasm as him for the theme.

Houldey is full of praise for Tom Clarke who wrote the "marvellously economical screenplay which gave full range to the Houldey, slim, imposing, along the south-east coastboard of America, where beach music is in and surf music is definitely out. Shag, the movie, is a softcore, shallow story about four young southern belles who go off for a "naughty" weekend in the shag Mecca of the Caroli-nas, Myrtle Beach, and get up to mischief and do plenty of innocent and some less-than-in-hocent things along the way. It sounds simple enough. And it is. But the film has some unintentionally amusing touches that leap up to startle the British viewer for all the wrong reasons.

For example, early in the script we hear: Why don't you put your snag- To compound the pleasure, Gardiner has brought with him that rarity of rarities, a Francophone cast, which I have not heard equalled for articulate and expressive declamation of the beautiful text. It was a happy vindication for those who have challenged Covent Garden's claims that outstanding French and Belgian singers no longer exist in sufficient numbers to cast the French repertoire with native speakers. I hope Jeremy Isaacs was there to hear that it isn't true, nor has been for years. Just to hear a great singer such as the Belgian baritone Jose van Dam utter a line such as est vrai que ce chateau est tres vieux et tres sombre. il est tresfroid et tris profond without a mangled vowel or misplaced emphasis is an experience denied to Pelleas connoisseurs at Covent Garden for decades.

He is a superb Go-laud in every way, suggesting with the utmost economy of vocal and physical means the pent-up frustrations of a man who loves his mysterious wife, the foundling Melisande, but as he says, knows her no better after six months than on the day they met. Francoix le Roux's Pelleas also recalls the great French interpreters of the past with his eager manner, francheur and forward diction, even if he is taxed at the top of the role: this is not quite the ideal voice for the part, not the typically French baryton-martin of old, but at least the timbre has the quiet, tender virility which the role calls for but only few tenors can supply. His biography says he is due to sing the role under Colin Davis at Covent Garden next season, but the opera has changed and he will now do Papageno in Die Zauberfldte there's creative casting for you. Jocelyne Taillon's warm maternal Genevieve, Pierre Thau's grizzled Arkel and Francoise Golfler's convincingly boyish Yniold all share the same concern for expressive use of their language and its unique alliance to Debussy's fragmented melody. Only our own Diana Montague's Melisande is not the real McCoy, but she is such a skilled linguist that you scarcely notice.

Her bright, voluptuous mezzo too infrequently heard in her own country these past few years has no problems with the soprano range, even if she cannot easily suggest innocence and ingin-uite with so lustrous a sound. But in this bare staging, based on Pierre Strosser's Lyon production which strips the opera of its pseudo-medieval background and plays it as a pychological drama, the beauty of her singing and person touched me as no other Melisande of my experience has done. I could say the same of the entire performance. Shag director Zelda Barron Beach preview last month, parents complained about the "foul a ridiculous accusation that only goes to prove how uptight and conservative America's south remains today. It seems that shagging is the only thing South Carolinian kids can do these days.

Harrogate Gerald Larner Endymion Ensemble There was a composer called Swayne Whose work was not written in vain: A festival incautiously bought it, The Harrogate audience caught it But neither will do so again. GILES Swayne's Harmonies of Hell begins with a limerick which, though no better than the above, is actually not the clumsiest part of his text. The original idea, which was to write the music for that frus-tratingly silent band of infernal musicians in Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, was a good one. But, in the end, the painting seems to have stimulated the composer's political rather than his musical reactions. Sadly, whatever one's attitude to Swayne's point of view which is one not normally associated with places like Harrogate the work itself must seem messily self-indulgent if not completely silly.

The imaginative instrumental score we might have heard is hidden under a heap of familiar slogans and banalities of the composer's own creation. As though to emphasise the musical opportunity he is throwing away, Swayne asks his thirteen instrumentalists to do the talking and, as they process around the platform in symbolic circles, the walking. The Endymion Ensemble did it all very seriously which, having commissioned the work in the first place, was the least they could do and flattered it by association with Birtwistle's Tragoedia at the beginning of the concert and Messiaen's Quatuor at the end. place in which we were making the film." Houldey began his career as an actor in Paris, before turning to making films for television. Since his acting days he's always wanted to work with actors, knowing the other side of the fence so intimately.

Although he wants to continue making documentaries which he considers must be socially relevant, he's planning to make more dramatic films both for television and feature. "As an independent film maker, the gestation period for a new idea from its inception to getting it on the screen is about three years," he says. "At any moment I have seven or eight projects which I believe in and desperately want to make. I nurture them all like a father his children, hoping one of them will graduate sooner or later." IT'S BRILLIANT! BREATHTAKING! IT'S BACK! THE ENTERTAINMENT CORPORATION PRESENTS DIRECT FROM THE ISSR JJOSOTJ STATU QE2SQD feited in an explosion. Her return therefore inspires the revelatory and fragrant pathos in which a series of cardboard boxes are ransacked for money and reveal nothing but nostalgic family relics and litter a pair of crutches, their mother's sweet smelling dress and ancient newspapers from the 1930s.

Hester's materialism is thus contrasted with her brother's lack of interest in anything material. This scene proves the emotional high peak of a play which otherwise shrinks from exposures or explanations while it revels compassionately in the hermetic manners of Johnnie, a furtive self-absorbed fantasist whose life is confined to his imagination. Hester scarcely seems aware of her brother's state or responds to it. Extended nostalgia afforded by the old boxes and the long-anticipated revelation that daddy is in fact long dead strike few sparks and fail to provide the play with the momentum it requires. The focus is simply upon an example of pathetic withdrawal and all-embracing impoverishment (Johnnie) and a co-relative, a girl who has escaped from here to find nothing much (Hester).

Janice Honeyman's production is meticulous in its detailed evocation of shabby tenement existence enacted on a stage set designed by Louise Belson with a melancholic array of bric-a-brac. And Antony Sher gives another of his arresting and flamboyant demonstrations or how far he can conceal and alter his own personality. With hair close cropped around the temples, a gutteral rasping voice, he darts furtively about the stage like some small bird, talking to himself, keeping his eyes down when his sister arrives and lapsing into a kind of chattering tearfulness. It is a performance which may be a little too showy and spectacular but is riveting to observe. And Estelle Kohler handsomely struts and storms into his life with a parallel kind of greedy self-absorption.

bearded, has made films ranging from the musical biography of Edith Piaf and the drama of a 13-year-old truant schoolgirl, Belinda, to the double Bafta award nomination films, Follies and The Bolshoi Ballet, and the trilogy Only In America. "Directing Juliet Stevenson and Dafydd Hywel and Emrys James was one of the most exhilarating experiences in my life," Houldey says. "They are three totally different characters In real life with fundamentally different approaches towards acting who came together and gelled. I was fortunate to be given the time to getting the right performances. Television is often so rushed.

"Juliet and Dafydd were a casting marriage made in' Equity. I knew and admired both of them separately and had great Joy to find they loved the screenplay and the BATTERSEA PARK 17-29 AUGUST 01-836 3464 (24HRS) BOX OFFICE ON SITE EBUSSY'S elusive opera, Pelleas et Melisande, is ideally experienced in the kind of surroundings for which was conceived the intimate auditorium of the Opera-Comique in Paris where it had its first performance in 1902. Glyndebourne used to regard it as one of its special operas, along with the Mozart's, Rossini's, Strauss's and Verdi's Falstaff, but of late, I suspect, they have come to the conclusion that it is a connoisseurs piece and connoisseurs no longer go to Glyndebourne because they can't afford it. But the last time they did it, in 1976 1 think, they took it to the Royal Albert Hall for their annual semi-staged visit to the Proms where the glory of Debussy's impressionistic scoring could be heard to full advantage. Or was it? For Sunday night's semi-staged performance of the opera, John Drummond has turned, praise be, to French forces: the same Opera de Lyon company which he invited to one of his never-to-be-forgotten Edinburgh Festivals.

It was a controversial event, for John Eliot Gardiner the Lyon Opera's francophile principal conductor challenged accepted notions of the work by proposing an Ur-Pelleas, shorn of the emendations Debussy was com" pelled to make before and after the poorly received premiere. Not content with reducing the famous interludes which are perhaps the most highly prized of the opera's original features, Gardiner claimed to have identified no fewer than 470 errors of detail in the Dur-and edition of the printed score: wrong notes, imprecise dynamic and expression marks and even misreadings of the instrumentation in Debussy's autograph. In one fell swoop, it seemed, the classic interpretations of Ingelbrecht, Desor-mieres, Ansermet, Monteux and Boulez not to mention the quasi-Wagnerian reading of von Karajan were put out of court. At Sunday's semi-staged Prom performance, the new transparency of orchestral sound achieved through all of this research allowed far more of the words to penetrate the elaborate instrumental fabric of the score. Gardiner obeys Debussy's usually ignored instruction to distribute the woodwinds among the strings of comparable compass so that 'the solos arise as if by magic out of the shimmering auras of his brilliant orchestral palette.

The Lyon Opera Orchestra may not be one of the world's elite bands but, meticulously hand-picked and trained by Gardiner, they seemed to be the most stylish Debussyians. In orchestral terms alone this is a most subtle and absorbing account of a hideously difficult score. T.N. Murari on director Michael Houldey who premieres BBC2's new Screenplay season Nurturing fact for love of fiction mm, ai A ROMANTIC tragedy, reported in the Guard-ian three years ago, caught the eye of film director Michael Houldey. From such a small fact, fiction grew and the tragedy became the basis for the dramatic film, Out Of Love, to be shown on BBC-TV's Screenplay series tomorrow.

"The reason why I was attracted by that small item was that it was about two people who stepped ont of line drawn by society, their conditioning and their environment," Houldey says. "Out Of Love is a love story about two people who cross a divide and it's about whether or not the love affair can succeed, given the traditions and expectations of the community in which it's set" Despite his impressive credentials as a film maker, it wasn't easy to torn that obscure Item into film. He went.