The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 26

14 At 78, Arthur Miller has wrttten a fine period play with resonances act to follow argues MICHAEL BILL3NGTON Putting tHe pieces together Anne Karpf like a psychological detective story: a mode that has always worked well from Oedipus to Equus. But what gives the play weight and resonance is that the characters exist naturally on both the domestic and symbolic level. Sylvia, for instance, is a woman tormented by a sense of emotional and professional unfulfilment- looking back at her life she says, in a typical Miller phrase full of humdrum poetry, "I took better care of my shoes." On another level, she represents an intuitive concern with distant horrors far more remarkable in 1938 with its exclusive reliance on newspapers and radio than in our own image-satu-. rated age. But all Miller's main characters are individual and repre- sentative.

Sylvia's husband, Philip, is an uptight go-getter who elevates the firm over the family and who rages with the violence of the impotent: at the same time, he stands for the identity-plagued Jew who craves acceptance by the goyim. Most intriguing of all, perhaps, is the doctor who seems comfortable with his life, his work, his marriage to a shiksa but who also embodies the myopic optimism of 1930s liberalism: "These Nazis can't PLAYWPITING, for all the tenacity of Goethe, Ibsen and Shaw, tends to be a young man's game. But Arthur Miller at 78 not only keeps going. In Broken Glass, getting Its British premiere at the Lyttelton, he has written a wise, humane and moving play that is a perfect companion piece to The Last Yankee: where that attacked the shoddi-ness of American materialism this is about the need to combine self-understanding with an awareness of the wider world. As in the previous play, it is women who suffer most The setting is Brooklyn 1938.

The heroine, Sylvia Gellburg, is afflicted by a mysterious paralysis of the legs. Her husband, Philip, entreats a sympathetic local doctor, Harry Hyman, to investigate the cause. Is it, as Philip suspects, connected with his wife's obsession with the current horrors of Berlin's Kristallnacht? Or is it, as he is made to realise, involved with his ambivalent attitude to his own Jewishness? Or is it perhaps the mysterious combination of Nazi evil and her husband's self-loathing that has turned the middle-aged Sylvia into a paralysed wreck? Miller structures the play PHOTOGRAPH; HENRIETTA BUTLER Insecure liberals Henry Goodman and Margot Leicester in Arthur Miller's Broken Glass also sharply reminds us that the woman is both a victim of her own acute antennae and someone with an insistent capacity for suffering. Henry Goodman is equally extraordinary as Philip: he starts out as what the doc's wife dubs "a miserable little pisser" but gradually takes you inside the character's soul to reveal his wounds and insecurities. And Ken Stott as the doctor exudes He is also blessed in his interpreters.

The play could easily fall into deadly literalism. But David Thacker whose best production to date this is and designer Shelagh Keegan suspend the action half-way between fact and dream: minimal furniture, a few wintry branches, an angled archway in whose mirrored panels we see the characters reflected. Margot Leicester as Sylvia with messages. What I deduce from the play is the need to combine self-acceptance as Sylvia's sister says "you do your best with the hand you got" with social and political concern. But also the need for Americans, now as much as then, to affirm their common humanity over their victim status.

Philosophically, Miller is not that far from the Tony Kushner of Angels In America. an uneven, one-dimensional reading of Britten's Peter Grimes Making the cut possibly last" is his constant rallying cry to his patient Miller's characters are neither wholly good nor bad: even Sylvia's implacable disappointment with her life has, you feel, castrated her husband. But, even if the audience is some- times ahead of the game in picking up the psychological clues, what moves one is the generosity of spirit behind the play. Miller doesn't pound us love hath no man than this," quoth he, "that he lay down his friends for his life." It was the turn of American politicians to suffer in Michael Moore's TV Nation (BBC2). Moore's show wears its brash-ness and uncouthness on its sleeve, and he had great fun hiring a professional lobbyist to persuade Congress to launch TV Nation Day across the USA.

It was difficult to spot the join between satire and reportage, especially when the TV Nation Bill actually made it to the floor of the House. Better still was TV Nation's visit to Hot Springs, Arkansas. This is where Bill Clinton grew up, a fact he likes to forget. He prefers to waffle on about his birthplace, Hope. Hot Springs seemed to explain everything about Bill.

A bartender was asked what activities would have gone on while the future President was growing up. "Oh, wide-open gambling, bookmaking, prostitution, all the officials were on the take it was a party town." Gangsters flocked there, while the mineral water baths were popular with venereal dis ease sufferers. If Whitewater doesn't drown the President, Michael Moore may have done. scrupulous as their latterday counterparts. On the other hand, the film suggested how much the tone and presentation of politics have changed.

Macmillan's chancellor Selwyn Lloyd, blissfully unaware that his emotionally unstable prime minister was lining him up for the long drop, was seen explaining his latest Budget to a TV interviewer. Today's image consultants would have been aghast as poor Selwyn bumbled, stumbled, and appeared to be trying to tell the truth. Chancellors "should do what they think is right," he said, and ignore temporary swings in public opinion. In 1994, he might just as well have said "I Lloyd was devastated by his dismissal. He left his dog, Sambo, behind at Chequers, and Cockerell described how the beast sniffed around the new Cabinet members as they assembled for a group photograph, forlornly seeking its master.

Macmillan's purge prompted a splendid ban. mot from Jeremy Thorpe. "Greater Adam Sweeting THE reasons Timewatch (BBC2) chose to re-examine Harold Macmillan's draconian Cabinet reshuffle of July 1982 last night remain shrouded in Westminster-style secrecy. Thirty-two years and a few days is hardly a significant anniversary. Perhaps there was some metaphor for machinations inside John Birt's BBC.

Whatever, Night Of The Long Knives proved more gripping than expected. The tone of Michael Cocker-ell's investigation was set by the use of Mac The Knife as introductory music. He managed to convey the impression that whatever agonies the protagonists suffered, this was all part of the on-going cycle of politics you win some, then you get the sack. The likes of Rab Butler and Iain Macleod were plainly every bit as un ACTORS in documentaries often sound like unwelcome interlopers: they bring another layer of interpretation and an artificiality which can upset the documentary's claims to truthfulness. And it takes skill to integrate them so that the join between different types of material acted, narrated, actuality is comfortable.

Perhaps Poles Apart, which got an early and deserved repeat on Radio 4 last week, worked so well because it was virtually all acted. This feature told the story of the cross-class friendship of Tory politician Sir Anthony Nutting and staunch Labour supporter Bill Wheeler, the caretaker of an old people's home. They met in 1964 when Wheeler attended Nutting's election meeting, and thus began a relationship lasting until.Bill's death in 1991. One can't help treating such friendships with suspicion was Nutting slumming it, or acting the Lord Bountiful? Was Wheeler impressed with the good life? Perhaps, but what emerged from Chrissie Gittins's script, based on interviews with the two men, was a sense of two people who had genuinely connected, respecting each other while acknowledging their differences. And by the end, the acting had become wholly persuasive hardly surprising, since Bernard Cribbins played Bill, Peter Jeffrey was Nutting, and Martin Jenkins directed.

Number Seven, Planty Street on Radio 4 was a very fine dramatised documentary about a terrible historical event. Old tales of atrocity are hard to hear when there are so many current ones around, but there was something especially awful about the 1946 massacre of Kielce, in which 42 Jews had their skulls crushed by a mob, since it happened only a year after the end of the war and among the murdered were Holocaust survivors. The pogrom was set off by the fabricated story of a nine-year-old who claimed he'd been kidnapped by local Jews (of whom there were only 200 left in Kielce out of a pre-war population of 25,000 but then you've never needed Jews for there to be anti-Semitism). The rumour spread rapidly among the Poles for whom it became another instalment of the "blood libel" that Jews were killing Chris tian children and using then-blood for ritual purposes. Colin McLaren script was well stuctured: it began with the bare bones of the story and then, using interviews with his torians, supplied you with the tools to help understand it, finally returning to complete the story in detail.

Polish anti- Semitism, it became clear, was a necessary, but not sufficient, explanation. Jonathan Steinberg described the state of Polish post-war peasantry as illiterate, enserfed, virtually feudal, in a country without a middle-class; the Polish Jews were seen as outsiders. The Pol ish primate, after the massacre, blamed it on the Jews. In producer Louise Green- berg's hands, this was a powerful but always dignified programme: she was sparing with Alexandre Tansman's plaintive music and got from her actors the kind of unshowy, restrained acting less of a performance than an account which most documentaries and this one above all, demand. Tim Pigott-Smith's narration was also appropriately low-key.

No actors needed in the first of a new three-part Radio 4 series, Fresh Air And San dals, on late Victorian Utopian socialists and their descen dants. Many arc still alive and were interviewed, others are there in abundance in the archive. Here were the early hikers, the fresh air movement, and cycling for socialism, with all the fellowship of the road (the YHA Youth Hostel Association was said to stand for Your Husband Assured). And presenter Bea Campbell learnt of the latest in hiking technology the Filo-fax satellite system tells you where you are to within 30 feet. I not sure why this pro gramme seemed so flat for much of the time, except that some of it (such as the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass) had been well rehearsed, and the whole seemed unfocused, with differ ent organisations and move ments yoked together without adequate attention to their connections or differences.

tried listening to Radio 3's play Victoria (translated from the Danish) about a 10-day-old baby fighting for her life in an incubator, but I had to switch off. It was surely a dreadful mistake to cast in the epony mous role a seven-year-old with the kind of cute voice used to sell washing-up liquid or Aladdin spin offs. Though casting an adult would have risked the Look Who's Talking syndrome the arch impersonation of the very young by the much older here you got the oppo site: an ingratiating child's voice saying "a kiss is labial contact with another human And this was a pile of the brown substance produced by all human beings. the easy charm of the good lib eral guy while dropping sly hints of the man's sexual vanity and political naivete. In short, a first-rate production of a com plex humanist play; and, at the end, it was moving to see Miller nsing from his stall to acknowl edge the audience own spontaneous affirmation.

In rep at the Lyttelton (071-928-2252). ven for Rolfe Johnson's "Great bear and Pleiades" aria is a coarse and ineffective touch. Nunn misjudges the delicate boundary between narrative add-on and poetic reinforcement. And to judge from the broad vulgarity of Robert Poulton's friendly Ned Keene and Donald Adams's downmarket Justice Swallow, he is evoking the Stagecoach tradition. Big John Wayne is just up the coast.

Alan Opie's singing as Balstrode was typically purposeful, but he is not the chorus intermediary be should be in the opera's moral conundrum. Rolfe Johnson is a natural for the role of Peter, capable on this scale of all the impact and ferocity required. He sang the notes very musi cally and registered a firm view of the part. I just hope that one day he will study it with a more subtle, provoca tive and questioning director. At Glyndebourne tonight and Tuesday, and In rep until August 25 (Box-OffiCe 0273-813813).

THEATRE Henry IV Part I Chepstowtouring David Adams IT'S summer and there's a surfeit of Shakespeare. And the alfresco variety, as often as not staged in castle ruins, is rarely about text and performance but about accessibility and context. To sit on the grass and strain to hear the words at Chepstow Castle is not the same cultural experience as the contract entered into at Stratford, say, although both may rely on the tourist trade. Nick Bamford's production of Henry IV Part I for his FOD Theatre is easygoing, enjoyable and well done. But you wouldn't think that some consider this to be the bard's finest achievement, a profound examination of a nation at a turning point, a supremely skilful argument about honour, status and responsibility.

But it is also a comedy and it's the antics of Falstaff and the Eastcheap gang that make it a good night out Consequently even Hotspur is a bit of a joke. Anderson Knight's gawky Geordie conveys all the impetuosity and simple-minded courage of a character usually played as a noble, albeit rash, hero, but in the context of a jolly comedy he becomes little more than a like able, brash street-fighter in a compcllingly gutsy perfor mance. Terry Dauncey's Fal staff may not suggest any of the import of the rolo but takes us with him although I have to confess I find the comic scenes just not that funny. When the final battle scenes arrive, though, some of the audience, so enthused with the lightness of it all, still laughed and left gaping open that question of how to be serious in a production that eschews the real matter of the play. Yet it is a pleas ant surprise to be engaged for three hours and a disappointment only if you want your grey cells exercised as well.

I New Inn, Gloucester tomorrow, Clearwell Castle, August 10-12. SPIKE HYDE turns on, tunes in, and then drops out of the auditions for the avant-garde project 101 Electrical Guitars They came, they played, they got appalling earache rt Edinburgh Festival OUHKlvlllUIIL TOM SUTCLIFFE on Nursery TREVOR NUNN'S more or less naturalistic staging of the Britten classic looks cramped and quaint in this final revival of the new Glynde-bourne season. It has a strong new Grimes in Anthony Rolfe Johnson, and has given up the unhappy experiment of Suffolk accents that marked and marred its first appearance in 1992. Franz Welser-Most, departing maestro of the London Philharmonic which is in the pit, introduces a lot of Puccini-esque rubato at passionate moments, which Britten, who favoured clean transitions and a steady pulse, would certainly have disliked. The opening scenes plodded.

Welser-Most's lack of experience and occasionally indistinct direction made for untidiness and a flaccid un- thusiasm, lack of Arts Council grants, opportunities to meet other guitarists (at least 100 by my maths), look good on CV, chance to perform at QEH etc. I took that as a The prospect of not getting paid wasn't on the agenda for many of the guitarists I spoke to afterwards. In fact, they were rather taken aback at the suggestion. They felt that it was all in the name of Art and were delighted to have been given the chance to be involved. I couldn't help wondering where 'loosened up' with a startlingly amateur version of the surf classic Rumble At Waikiki the 25,000 receipts (if both nights sold out) would go.

I also wondered about the School Play Theory. Now, there's never been a poorly attended school play has there? There's always been an over-abundance of friends, parents, friends of parents, desperate to see their participating member's glorious truimph or public humiliation. Depending on the popularity (or even better unpopularity) of the chosen guitarist, you should be able to guarantee at least 500 interested parties a night That's break-even already the "disinterested" curious will provide the profit. Or not. Putting such unhealthy cynicism to one side, the composer Rhys Chatham does have an a I Ellen (too) sob noisily after Balstrode and Peter have pushed his boat out does not affect my tear ducts: rather the reverse.

But it suggests Nunn realised something was missing. There are good things. The confrontation of Ellen and Peter over the prentice's bruise outside the church builds thrillingly, but then is wrecked by Nunn's inability to manage the denouement: Grimes is left standing and waiting for his music to catch up with his passion, so be can declare "So be it" unforgivable weakness of staging. Yvonne Howard's Mrs Sed-ley is an absurdity of coarse over-acting, which Nunn should not have permitted. But some of the characterisations are very fine, especially Menai Davies's Auntie and John Grahame-Hall's pipe-smoking manic Bob Boles.

The latter is spoilt, though, by the Klanish blazing cross and rifle and pike posse at the end. Again raising the roof at the Boar ta- VISUAL ARTS Adolphe Valette Manchester Robert Clark ALTHOUGH French by birth, Adolphe Valette spent the first quarter of the century working and teaching in Manchester, the city's very own genuine Impressionist. Here he almost perversely struggled to adapt the Impressionists' sun-catching techniques to fit the smog bound environs of the Manchester Ship Canal. Until now he has usually been remembered more for his influence on the provincial northern artistic life of the time than for the significant achievements of his own work. Whilst his vision of Edwardian industrial Manchester might have little of the eccentric humanistic charm of Lowry, the work is certainly quirkily inventive enough to warrant a reappraisal.

Valette looks directly at the visual phenomenon of the city, its architectural grandeur filtered always through a grim silvery haze of rain and fog. There are some dreadfully academic portraits, still-lifes and rural landscapes here that are all perhaps best ignored. The large scale urban scenes mostly also fall into mannerist technical bad habits. Every thing tends to get finished off in an aggravating systematic network of vertical daubs. It looks here as if Valette couldn't quite make his mind up whether to so for the obses sive dottincss of Seurat or the atmospheric spontaneity of Monet.

It's in the several tiny oil studies that he really brings things off convincingly. Here the impasto clots of mid-toned mauves, ochres and grubby pinks build up a shimmering world of urban enchantment. The painter obviously adored the city. Adolphe Valette, A French Influence In Manchester at Manchester City Art Gallery until September 4. Grimes dramatic atmosphere.

But he did help to bring over the text clearly, and the generally impressive casting eventually got things firing on all cylinders. Nunn's direction is unpretentious and intermittent. He seems to think this is just the story of an accident-prone and misunderstood fisherman: when Vivian Tierney's plangently moving Ellen Orford intervenes with her proof-text about "her without fault casting the first Rolfe John-sou, who is picking seaweed out of his nets at the front of the stage, smiles smugly to himself. Just why the prentice John starts loudly sobbing in the scene in the hut is never explained. Britten's opera is drained of metaphysics or nasty sub-text and as a result stirs very little pity or terror.

Making impressive reputation for the more "challenging" musical experiences. Originally trained as a classical musician, he had the good fortune to see New York godfathers of punk The Ramones when he was 16, and his ears were opened to the possibilities of rock. However, as no doubt his classical peers had warned him, by 1982 he'd over-indulged and begun to go deaf. A few years working with (apparently) quieter brass instruments and midi-pianos helped to restore his hearing, and he was soon back to his old tricks like Warehouse Of Saints: Songs For Spies (100 electric guitars, bass and drums) and last year's Tauro-maguia, also involving 100 guitars. Just another classic combo really If you suffer from guitar-phobia then, as the unambiguous title 101 Electric Guitars suggests, the QEH next week is to be avoided at all costs.

If you don't, then the effects should be amazing. The guitarists will be split into sections rather like a choir: some playing the soprano parts, others the tenor and bass parts. And there will no doubt be some thunderous moments when all 101 play together and the conductor will know what it feels like to direct taxiing aircraft on the tarmac. As for me? Well, I cr left my guitar tuner on the bus, er the dog ate my amplifier, had to wait for the gasman to call I could have been a star though, honest. 101 Electrical Guitars will be performed tomorrow and Monday at the QEH, South Bank Centre, London SE1 (071-928 8800).

Reviewextra person otarrr la Ui trt, tthtrr Ui Lr inn 1 1 0 -1 mu ask WHAT kind of music are you into?" asked Tim the musi cal director. It was a question he would ask over 120 aspiring vol unteer guitarists during the next three days. He was holding auditions to find the lucky many who would make up the scratch guitar-orchestra to perform avant-garde composer Rhys Chatham's 101 Electrical Guitars little over a week later at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. "Er sort of blues, R'n'B, country I suppose," I replied and, accompanied by Tim and a keyboard player, I "loosened up" with a startlingly amateur version of the surf classic Rumble At Wai-kiki. This was mercifully ended by Tim after a few minutes.

"OK. Play a strong, fairly complex rhythm piece and we Tim and the keyboardist will try and put you off." As if a small hall gradually filling up with fellow auditionccs wasn't off-putting enough. I began a busy rhythm pattern, including the odd bass twang, with Tim and co occasionally throwing musical yorkers at me. But I was unshakeable. (I was also making it up).

"OK. Now try this," and Tim showed me a percussion chart which involved the guitar playing a chord every four beats with every other bar including a dah-dah-dah variation (stop me if it's all too technical). "A little Wagnerian," he suggested humorously, I thought That seemed to go OK too, and I was invited to turn up with my guitar, 50-watt amp and guitar tuner for next week's rehearsals for the Big Night. "Do we get paid? I asked, rather ungratefully. Tim spoke rapidly about commitment, en 16 the Observer The of Festival.

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