The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 11

ARTS NEWS 1 1 1 The Guardian Saturday September 19 1998 Kidman makes jaws drop French kissing at the Royal Ballet Revived: the Thatcher years' best play Eyes wide open This week he deplored the "film star behaviour" of Brits in Hollywood like Minnie Driver, who, he said, "would go to the opening of an envelope squeezed into one of those silly little dresses" if it would get her into the papers. You wouldn't Find him doing that. No, no, no. So it must have been another Ewan McGregor who was spotted discussing quantum mechanics with Anna Friel backstage at the Reading Festival. Thought so.

Prisoner, Cell Block David Beames (left) and Stephen Beresford in Our Country's Good john haynes and the whole group is spiritually liberated by occupying the "small republic" of theatre. Seeing the play again, I was struck by its structural similarities to Keneally's earlier piece of docu-fiction, Schind-ler's Ark. In both works a persecuted group is offered temporary salvation by an act of individual initiative. But what made an even greater impression was the obsession of Wertenbaker, educated in France and America, with the nature of Englishness. The conflict between exemplary punishment and enlightened redemption is one our judicial system is still trying to resolve.

And the prisoners themselves are ferociously ambivalent about their native land. "I hate England but I think English," says the mutinous Liz Morden as she awaits hanging. Even the title acquires a punning irony as a Jewish convict pens a prologue proclaiming, "We left our country for our country's good." As in Three Birds Alighting On A Field, Wertenbaker seems to be tussling with her divided feelings about England in particular, its mix of cruelty and creativity. But the play also works because of the intelligence of Stafford-Clark's production, in which 10 actors play 24 roles. The doubling is very much part of the point, since it shows how officers and convicts are locked together in the "profligate prison" of a penal settlement.

Stephen Beresford as the second lieutenant who turns play-director, Jonathan Cullen as both the enlightened governor and an aspiring convict-writer, Sally Rogers as the defiant Liz and Sarah Walton as a former thief also give sharply defined performances in one of the most uplifting plays to have emerged from the wretched Thatcherite eighties. Crooks' tour of England We've had some stirring performances on the London stage of late from Hollywood's finest Juliette Binoche, Kevin Spacey et al but none have quite given of themselves like Nicole Kidman in The Blue Room. Nudity is never easy especially for a redhead but in the course of the evening Kidman, who plays all the female characters, has sex five times with Iain Glen. And all for the Equity minimum wage of 40 a show. Now that's charity for you.

Being an imaginative little so-and-so, David Hare who adapted the play from Schnitzler's La Ronde for the Donmar decreed that they do it five different ways lest the audience get bored and wander off into Soho during the interval. This includes a jaw-dropping scene in which Glen goes in for a bit of no-hands gynaecology. Even for the audience, it can sometimes be a discomfiting experience. "You're afraid to blink," one of the lucky few to get a preview ticket told us. "You blush until you can blush no longer.

It's quite an experience." But think what it must be like for Kidman's hubby Tom Cruise, who is babysitting their children Isabella, six. and Connor, four. Tom, we hear, hasn't actually seen a full performance yet, although film star buddies Sandra Bullock and Matthew McConaughey came, saw and needed a stiff drink. Needless to say, despite the chill outside, the Donmar has not yet felt the need to put the heating on. Security, though, is tight, with everyone searched for cameras before they are allowed in.

Thirty have already been found. So is Kidman any good? "She's truly magnificent," our mole tells us. "She really is a great actress. And my God, what a body!" One gobsmacked thesp, a knight of the realm no less, was heard to whisper on leaving: "It's nearly enough to turn one heterosexual." Heaven forbid. BBBftBBBBBBBB' iJaBBBL QHbBHhBBBBbVBBBHbIbbb HhIBHBBHHbV HHBHBMBHBHBIBBHBBBHBBBBi IBbBIbBbSBBHbbT --WKtBKKtmmm bBV bbhbBibbIIBRIRBbbbH' Thomas Keneally's The Play-maker and the historical fact that George Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer was performed by a group of convicts at Sydney Cove in 1789 the first recorded piece of theatre in Australia.

With tact and sympathy, Wertenbaker shows how the convicts are imaginatively transported by putting on Farquhar's play and the process of impersonation. Having been brutally condemned as "vice-ridden they acquire dignity, purpose and an enhanced sense of individual and collective identity through the alchemy of acting. One female convict, about to be hanged, is encouraged to break her self-incriminating vow of silence for the parlour Nicole Kidman. giving of herself at the Donmar yesterday photograph- richard mildenhall Now Deborah Bull, Darcey's old rival for prima ballerina, is being left to Irek's tender mercies, while Darcey retreats to the safety of the second cast. We recommend lots of raw garlic, Debs, or a gumshield.

Passion is also proving to be a problem at the Royal Ballet, where the hot-blooded Russian Irek Mukhamedov has put our own dear, demure Darcey Bussell to flight. The pair were clue to dance Twyla Tharp's Mr Worldly Wise next month but relations have become so strained, we hear, that they can no longer share a rehearsal room. The problem? Irek's ardour. "Every time they kissed in rehearsal he slipped the tongue in. Well, that's not Darcey at all.

She's not that sort of girl," our source says. "It's a difference of approach more than anything else. The chemistry is not there, so both agreed it would be better to have different partners." Irek, who is known in the rarefied world of Floral Street as either Big Balls or Big Bum, depending on how his tights are coping on the day. also had a problem with the "advice" Darcey was giving him. "Irek does not like being told what to do, especially by a woman.

It offends his machismo." Darcey, though a darling in every other regard, has a reputation for this. Her nickname among the other dancers is The Schoolmistress. It is McGregor's proud boast that he has shown his monarch of the glen in every film he has made. Indeed, he thinks it the star of the upcoming Velvet Goldmine. Well, now he has competition.

Fellow Trainspotting star Peter Mullan triumphed with his own film, Orphans, at the Venice Film Festival at the weekend. Despite being discarded by those same geniuses at Channel 4 who cold-shouldered The Full Monty, it won three subsidiary awards. "Show us your prize!" roared someone in the audience at the ceremony. Quick as a flash, Mullan lifted his kilt and an awed silence fell over the auditorium. Meanwhile, hell-raising director Abel Ferrara, he of The Funeral and that old family favourite Driller Killer, was inspiring awe of another kind.

Like how can he consume so much drink and drugs and still be alive? Ferrara turned up at Venice with his entourage of the living dead to push his movie New Rose Hotel, but managed to miss one raft of interviews and then a dinner thrown in his honour. His embarrassed producer, Ed Pressman, apologised to guests saying, "Mr Ferrara is sleeping. We're trying to wake him." They failed. When he surfaced the next day, one hack asked him if it was true that he'd kicked drugs. "The hell I have," replied Ferrara in his best John Wayne.

God knows, Paul Merton's not the healthiest man in the world. In 1987 he broke a leg playing football, almost died of a pulmonary embolism and then caught hepatitis A probably because of the hospital food, his doctor said. In 1990 he spent eight weeks in the Maudsley because of a "manic Even now, he's so pale and flabby that we're thinking of organising a whip-round to send him to Champneys. But we were still surprised to see a pair of St John's ambulancemen in the audience for Merton's show at High Wycombe. "We have a couple along for every performance," said a spokeswoman.

"Just FULL TANK OF FUEL). CAR FEATURE 0 A 1 60 AVANT0ARDE Michael Billington Our Country's Good Young Vic, London Plays change with. time. Ten years on, Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good, now revived by Max Stafford-Clark for Out of Joint and the Young Vic, remains a deeply moving affirmation of the power of art. But, in the light of Wertenbaker's subsequent work, it also becomes a dissection of her own complex feelings about England and Englishness.

The piece derives from Mahler Tim Ashley RPODaniele Gatti Royal Albert Hall One of the Arts Council's recent proposals for averting Gotterdamm-erung at Covent Garden involved replacing the Royal Opera Orchestra with the Royal Philharmonic. Since the plan was mooted in August, there has been a curious silence on all fronts, broken now by the opening of the RPO's 1998 season with the first instalment of its massive Mahler retrospective. The first concert, conducted by the RPO's music director, Daniele Gatti, who coupled the First Symphony with six songs from Des Knaben Wunder-horn, proved a bit of a hit-and-miss affair, surrounded by minor aggravations. Prefacing the symphony with Edward Seckerson's reading of one of Mahler's letters seemed a good FROM ON THE ROAD ALL PRICES CORRECT AT At the Young Vic, London SE1 (0171-9286363), then touring. show off the RPO strings to perfection.

There are, as always with this conductor, important insights and flashes of genius: the slow movement's extraordinary transition from sardonic dirge to a brief vision of infinite peace, for example, was ravishingly handled. The choice of Wunderhorn songs, however, struck me as perverse. The First Symphony thematically reworks material from the Lieder Eines Farh-renden Gesellen, which makes a more logical companion piece, and the Wunderhorn songs work better as a complete set. The singer was the German baritone Andreas Schmidt, now, I fear, past his best. He closely follows Gatti's approach, infusing the songs with infinite sadness rather than morbid wit! His soft singing, heard at its best in Wo Die Schonen Trompeten Blasen, remains consistently exquisite.

Elsewhere, however, there were some barked top notes and uneven passage work, while his voice occasionally vanished in the vast space of the Albert Hall. A-class crash Two cars collide head-on bang One engine shunted backwards wallop towards passenger compartment wow A-class engine disappears downwards into hollow sandwich floor imilw Safety cell remains intact idea, but distortion and crackle from the Albert Hall's speaker system rendered most of the words inaudible. Plunging the auditorium into darkness for the songs left many Ln the audience peering through the gloom in an attempt to following the programme. And the squeal of a mobile phone added its irritating voice to the symphony's funereal slow movement. Gatti's Mahler is essentially post-Romantic big, rich and opulent.

He plays down the elements of proto-Expressionism the irrational emotional violence, the charnel-house humour that endeared Mahler to the early modernists. He favours lyricism and extreme speeds. The woodwind squeaks that accompany the trudging, Frere Jacques death march veer away from irony towards elegy. And the radiant, calm melody that attempts to pacify the sonic cyclone of the symphony's last movement is taken so slowly that you fear it might come to a complete standstill though, in the process, Gatti manages to TIME OF GOING TO PRESS Blrc.J.i till conk In another of those terrible coincidences that give cynics like ourselves so much glee, Bussell's autobiography. Life In Dance, is coming out at the same time as Bull's account of the Royal Ballet's last, troubled out of year.

Just to confuse things, as well as sharing much the same repertoire, the rivals also share initials. Keen observers will note that while Bull's book is being serialised on radio and in the Daily Telegraph, an obscure Docklands organ, Bussell is shortly to be the subject of an Omnibus special. Darcey is edging it yet again, we reckon. Much as we love Ewan McGregor, his latest role as moraliser doesn't quite fit. NUMBER PLATES, FIRST REGISTRATION TAX AND A Can an engine slide FOR MORE INFORMATION O5OO 20 21 20 MERCEDES A CLASS FROM ON IKE ROAD (INCLUDING VAT, DELIVERY, 12 MONTHS ROAD FUND LICENCE,.