The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 24

Playing up to the gallery Abuse is easy, even enjoyable. Constructive criticism, argues NORBERT LYNTON, is harder words spilled out, sharp and witty. The readers would have fun too; the paper would welcome something controversial. Writing it felt quite different from telling readers why a piece of art, especially anything abstract, was of special interest: that is uphill work, whereas demolition pieces write themselves. I stopped doing them, though I didn't hesitate to question the praise heaped on some stars.

In 1969 young Richard Cork, now the urbane voice of The Times, descended on London from Cambridge to be the Evening Standard art critic. He immediately told us how wrong we were to show interest in all but a narrow range of avant-garde art. In 1971 young Caroline Tisdall took over at the Guardian and promoted much the same sector; in due course she became the champion of the new man from Germany, Joseph Bcuys. The art critics became plangently moral: to disagree with them, even to have other gods beside theirs. "rrr" Spinning a strange fable Kathryn Hunter as the Skriker PHOTOGRAPH HtNHltTTABUTLEH The Skriker may look arresting, but what does it mean, asks MICHAEL BILLINGTON Lost on a magic roundabout WHAT is art criticism for? The fuss stirred up by the letter printed in the London Evening Standard on January 5, signed by 35 people (of whom I was one), has polarised attitudes to a nonsensical degree, and looks likely to leave the situation worse than it was.

Other letters followed, some for, some against our complaint. This was about Sewell's antagonism to any art not obviously rooted in the Renaissance tradition and about the abusive terms he uses against art and the individuals producing and presenting it. That this torrent of negatives occupies so much space in London's evening paper, to which people turn often in choosing which film or show to see or which book to buy, is part of the issue. His piece on the Serpentine's Writing on the Wall exhibition, a small selection of art by women, chosen and commented on by women writers, was the match that lit the rocket. Since then, a lot of noise but no illumination.

The press quickly gathered around the victim, crying "Censorship!" Perhaps the oddest contribution was that of the Observer, where Sewell was given 14 column-inches to kick the 35 in turn with one-liners. A letter sent to the Evening Standard by 20 other art-world people was printed on January 13. Again, the signatories were artists, critics and gallery people, plus two editors of eminent art journals. They accused us, the 35, of "purporting to represent the London art and supporting "a relentless programme of neo-conceptual art in all the main London Our letter, they said, added "further weight to the notion of a conspiracy running London's art They too cried "Censorship!" At this point one begins to wonder who is censoring whom and on which side the conspiracy is. Is a protest censorship? Against one with as much access to the media as Sewell? His is not the only voice routinely raised against modern art, and of course it's normal by now for everyone, except for Channel 4, to rubbish the Turner Prize.

If there were a conspiracy it could well be on the other side. Does protesting against that kind of writing mean we must all be signed-up devotees of "neo-conceptual 1 was the Guardian's art critic in the IXQs. In the middle of writing a lively attack on somebody's one-man show I found myself wondering why I was having such a good time. The typewriter hummed, the Vice-chancellor, after thanking me publicly for my lecture: "Fine slides, very interesting, but don't you really agree that all abstract art is nonsense?" I1. "You, vice-chancellor, are a great music-lover, how do you respond to the music in many ways equivalent to this abstract art, to Schoenberg or Webern for He: "They are all nonsense It is good to learn that more and more people go to our national gatlenes to see modern art as well as old, yet I wonder how many of them go around without knowing how to relate to much of what they see, old or new.

Do I like this picture? Yes. Do I like that picture? No. On to the next. Read the label: oh, a Van Gogh, he cut his ear off. A quick glance at the painting, then, on.

One of the functions of art criticism is to encourage readers to go and look and think. Not just at and about masterpieces (an abused word), but that broad range of activity out of which a masterpiece, as we call it. sometimes arises. That means praise and encouragement but also some degree of teaching-by-example, if you condemn or demote something, give good reasons and don't take pride in the fact that you may be damaging one person's career, another's interest. If you praise, say why.

When people take notice of what you say you are implanting attitudes and methods. Let's take a Sewell example, one quoted several times since that first letter. Reviewing the Tate show, he belaboured several of the works shown and the writers who had chosen them. Vanessa Bell's seated Nude he swept aside with the comment that it "would have no appeal even to a purblind That is insulting in several directions but, worse, he has not said anything you could call art criticism. The nude is indeed ungainly.

So are nudes, by, say, Rembrandt. I am not an automatic admirer of Bell's, had not seen this painting before, and it struck me as a flawed but amazingly strong work. Nearby hung another Bell painting, a better-known one, with another nude woman in it, ungainly too but less disconcerting. Why and how? It would have taken a paragraph to home in on that, a more useful exercise than going around the show putting the verbal boot in. But perhaps less entertaining.

Abusive criticism is bad for all concerned, including the writer, and worse for the reader. This is how we are to approach art, is it? Either it fits our preconceptions of what we are prepared to like, or it's rubbish and deserves all the invective we can give it. Thus we keep art in its place. Sewell can write brilliantly about paintings and drawings he admires, and we benefit from him when he does. When he is being abusive he is doing harm.

Would the Evening Standard employ a film or a theatre cntic who rubbished nine-tenths of what he reported on? Of course not. As for art. who cares? Just another blood sport for those on high horses. tic meteorological phenomena. But in a classic fairy tale a simple story naturally gives rise to multiple meanings; here you have to impose the meanings on the story just to make sense of it.

What you do get. however, is a piece of skilful theatrical magic. Waters's production, lan Spink's movement. Annie Smart's design and Judith Weir's music all create a world in which the co-existence of mortal and immortals seems perfectly natural. Toads, at one point, tumble out of Josie's mouth.

A fairy hangs from the ceiling and the Skriker pops up through the sofa as the two women talk. And. as Lily casu insect and plotting revenge for ancient wrongs in a dense, pun-packed Joycean prose. Cut to a mental hospital where inmate Josie, who seems to have killed her own child, is being visited by the pregnant Lily. And when the two young women flee to London they are ardently pursued by the shape-shifting fairy who turns up in various guises as American tourist, derelict hag, street urchin, ball-gowned queen and trousered male wooer.

Whisking Josie to the underworld and claiming the maternal Lily's love, she oscillates between evil spirit and fairy godmother, but inescapably she remains a potent symbol of death. My puzzlement stems from not knowing quite what the story signifies. Is Churchill spinning a fable about the strange otherness of the world around us, warning us about the danger of fulfilled dreams and desires, or reminding us that we are all born astride a grave? In the most potent speech in the play because it touches on a common human fear the Skriker even becomes an eco-prophet of doom foreseeing the death of the planet As she says. "It was always possible to think that whatever your personal problem, there's always nature." Not, however, in a world of seasonal disturbance and apocalyp NO. IT'S not as newspapers have been sugesting all week The Striker, which might be a play about Gary Lineker or the trade unions.

Caryl Churchill's new work at the Cottesloe is The Skriker: an ancient word for "a shape-shifter and death Like Shakespeare, the Brothers Grimm and Barrie before her, Churchill poses a world in which fairies and mortals comingle but, while it makes for eye-arresting theatre, 1 still found the play strangely opaque. We first see the Skriker the protean Kathryn Hunter looking like some squat, hairy Lots of 'educated' people regard modern art with suspicion. I've met them eminent minds made up meant choosing paths of darkness. Peter Fuller's achievement was to sharpen this moralising tone. His anathemas echoed around the country.

But his sermons aimed in the opposite direction, veering at first, until his blessings were all bestowed on traditional figurative art, the good, the feeble and in-between, while those who did otherwise were roundly denounced. Calling Richard Hamilton "the whore of art" was a sort of climax. But what is art criticism for? We live in a country where lots of especially "the regard most modern art with suspicion. I have met them eminent minds firmly made up. They know what they like, and what they like is what they like already; art has no business to be attempting anything else.

Two exchanges. The Arts Council's music director: "Why are you showing that awful stuff at the Hayward (one-man show of well-regarded British painter in 1: "What don't you like about it, what is wrong with it? He: "Wrong with it? Wrong with it? I haven't been to see it!" A profitable pause Norbert Lynton was art critic for the Guardian (1965-70). director of exhibitions. Arts Council (1970-75); professor of art history. University of Sussex (1975-1989).

ally kicks off her shoe, it is suddenly replicated downstage by a giant-size specimen in which sprites and goblins cluster. Playing Lepage-like tricks with scale, the production has a free-floating ingenuity. And, at the centre of it, there is Hunter's prodigious chameleon skill, Sandy McDade's spiky intensity as Josie, and Jacqueline Deffer-ary's maternal pratcctiveuoss as Lily. As a theatrical experience, it is full of kaleidoscopic magic; but what 1 miss in the writing is that element of naivety that is common to all great folk tales. In rep at the Cottesloe.

Box-oHice 071-928 2252 windswept sidewalk having a quick drag strikes me as increasingly preposterous. Or am I wrong? AUTHORS reading their own work are always revealing: one thinks of the dry precision of Eliot, the booming fruitincss of Dylan Thomas, the classy jauntincss of John Betjeman (for whom girls always became To that list 1 would now add Harold lhnter. whom I heard on Wednesday, in the course of a jolly interview with Chris Bigsby at the University of East Anglia. reading extracts from five of his plays. He made Stanley in The Birthday Party seem a dangerously disturbed fantasist, lent Lenny in The Homecoming a spivvy cruelty and, above all, gave the cuckolded Robert in Betrayal a heart-breaking feigned insouciance.

There was an intriguing moment when Bigsby asked him why, on Ins last visit to Norwich, he had denied that The Birthday Party was a political play. He had, he saiii with a smile, been lying. A salutary reminder that all interviews are as much approximations to the truth as statements by characters in dramatic fiction. ROCK MUSICAL Bad Boy Johnny And The Prophets Of Doom Union Chapel. Islington Caroline Sullivan ROCK music has been compared to religion ever since the first girl screamed at Elvis's pelvis.

Rock musicians have always fancied themselves the scourges of establishment. These two weary truisms form the basis of this rock musical. Written and directed by alternative-theatre veteran Daniel Abineri, the production comes direct from a highly successful run in Australia. The show opens with a leering vicar hading a chorus line of high-kicking altar boys in a jolly pop song they would like it in Australia. Father MacLean the vicar, muggingly played by Scots comedian and sometime TV hast Craig Ferguson, turns out to be a kinky one who seduces girl parishioners and goes boozing with nuns.

Pitted against him is Johnny (aka Mark Shaw, ex-singer with Then Jenco), altar boy, aspiring rock star and all-round good egg. Maclean kills Johnny's mother and becomes his manager. Then, inflamed with power lust, MacLean arranges to have the Pope bumped oil. As the skirt-chasing Liberty III, hilariously acted by Stephen Marcus, is the wittiest character in the show, it's a shame to see him go. But go he does, and Johnny becomes Pope.

The backing band is fine, but the mawkish ballads and Meat Loafish fast numbers written by Abineri aren't. Neither is the mora tliat everything would bo all right if we played Stratocas-ters and sang like Meat Iiaf. On tonight and Sunday. liux-office: 071-379 Nil. MSB PROTECT YOURSELF British pop is in a parlous state.

But can a council-sponsored event like Sound City '94 help? PAT KANE reports Musical meltdown in the lab I WITH THE CLINICALLY I WITH THE CLINICALLY 4 PROVEN VACUUM I CLEANER DOCTORS RECOMMEND part of the genius of Stephen Daldry's production is that it telescopes the action, forcing us to see bourgeois incrimination, collapse and re-creation as a continuous process. Once again, it becomes a richer play. Audiences now absorb information more quickly. Writers increasingly seek for an all-embracing metaphor that will encapsulate their vision of the world; it is fascinating to note the parallel progress of Beckett and Pinter towards shorter, more compressed plays. This is not to say that we shouldn't respect past dramatic conventions Ibsen knew precisely what he was doing when he divided Hedda Gabler or A Doll's House into three acts.

But do we really need prolonged commercial breaks? For some people, a night out is obviously not complete without the arcane rituals of the interval. But a growing number, I suspect, crave an experience of vtolent intensity unbroken by skipping to the loo or indulging in all-in wrestling simply order to get a coffee. Some plays obviously demand a pause, but the idea that we can't sit for more than half an hour without needing to wet our whistles or lurk on a already a thriving market for performance-based music ill Scotland, as lung as it's wrapped in mist and runes. But folk and pop an? never keen to dance the same commercial reel. Previous international music seminars organised by Williamson Glasgow have taught him that Scottish pop's pitch to the wider world "has to be targeted and different And it's the cultivation of difference which has to lie the fundamental aim of initiatives like Sound City.

Why else would anyone want to have some breathing space from the pressures ol the pop marketplace, which such events provide, if it wasn't to make more innovative and creative music? Screw your eyes up tight when you're at a Sound City press conference, and you might just mistake I FM's Bannister foi Lord Keith, procuring diversity for the good ot the nation. Billy Bragg used to quip brutally about how "the music industry should be Maybe the mixed-economy approach of Sound City '94 is a slower roll down the same slope. In these days of Mr Blobby. permanent Phil Collins and techno-ephem-era, anything's worth a try. Even councillors in chain-mail.

and Charlecn Spiteri ofTexas Macbeth. Mr Richards's point is that you have to give audiences a break for a variety of reasons: physical relief, a smoke, a drink or a coffee, intellectual refreshment or the chance to slip away from a dreadful show. My correspondent goes on to say that, in future, he will check in advance whether there is an interval: if not, a play will have to do without his custom. I see the case, and I've no particular wish to sit through an unbroken King Lear or a pauseless Parsifal. But there is a counter-argument: intervals should be determined by aesthetic rather than social or commercial considerations.

There is abundant evidence to show that, in the serious theatre, both dramatic form and audience expectations are radically changing. Not everyone pines to have their evening disrupted by queucing up in a dingy crypt for an overpriced gin dispensed by surly teetotallers. Some plays Macbeth, for instance are also much better ing to turn British album buyers towards new acts, an acrid tang of anxiety surrounds initiatives like Sound City. One point was hammered home by all press conference speakers, like Matthew Bannister of Radio 1 FM. Dennis Scard of the Mus-cians Union and John Deacon of the BPI, that music industry success rested on the performing musinan.

playing live. And the band that followed them on stage, Incognito, are one of the most accomplished and virtu-osic British pop groups. Hut Incognito are a loaded choice: a dance-club act that can visibly play rather than simply switch on their sequencers and trance out. There's an implicit judgement on Britain's recent techno-dance explosion in the acts that have been highlighted for Sound City. Bluntly put, British dance doesn't export that well and the new Ameri- Tim Burgess of The Charlatans without a break.

Slice up the drama and when I first saw it at Stratford in the fifties it actually had two intervals and it becomes a broken-backed affair of waning tension. Play it straight through as Trevor Nunn did 20 years later and it is an unbearably powerful experience. It is only chopped up for profit: a point neatly proven by the fact that when Michael Bog-danov took an interval-less ESC version on the road he was greeted with howls of execration from touring managers worried about lass of bar profits and ice-cream sales. 1 also suspect that many theatregoers now hunger not for some interminably spaced-out evening but for a short, sharp shock that drastically alters their view of the world; witness the fact that four of the most popular plays in London are An Inspector Calls, Machinal. Medea and The School For Wives, all given sans interval.

The case of the Priestley is especially fascinating: can acts that are selling here, like Pearl Jam and Nirvana, are re nins of old British indie-rock, except much better marketed. So municipal events like Sound City are a kind of "back to basics" for the music industry: if all great pop has come out of urban communities, local musicians playing for and against each other, then let's try to hothouse the process, with some benign instruments of development. There is, however, a major question hanging over this otherwise laboratory event. How far can you force success in the xip world? To what extent does it all depend on flaky artists, dodgy entrepreneurs and unpredictable shifts in public mood? Can pop music policy go any further and deeper than lightly-worn trade fairs in regional cities? John Williamson, one of the organisers of Sound City '9-1, wants a clear result from April's events. "Local councils have always been gelting stung by rock musicians, asking for grants and then misusing the awareness within Glasgow City Council at least that rock is deserving of business support.

We can show that musicians and their managers can be responsible enough not to abuse any help the state might give them." Glasgow being in Scotland, there's also some vaguely soft-nationalist hopes for the event. Recent festivals like Celtic Connections, held in the city this January, were remarkably well attended proving that there's Michael Billington ID YOU have a good interval?" enquires a character in Michael Frayn's Look, Look. It's always struck me as a wonderfully witty line implying that the theatre interval has now acquired a status somewhere between that of art form and Buck House garden party. Indeed at West End first nights you can sense people drumming their heels impatiently waiting for all that stage-blather to stop so that we can get back to the real business of the evening. Hut I have a question to pose to producers: is your interval really necessary? I ask because I am gravely chid by a reader.

Mr Richards, for deploring the presence of an interval in a recent ous sites have been Norwich and Sheffield. The sponsors are heavyweight including Radio 1 FM, BPI (the record industry's top body), the Musicians Union, and the host city's local council. On a UK level, Sound City will manifest itself in the live broadcasts from Glasgow on Radio 1 in early April, featuring local, national and international acts. Names already confirmed are The Charlatans, Buffalo Tom, Texas, Incognito, lnspiral Carpets. Urban Species and the Boo Radleys.

The underlying aim and the reason why rooms full of rock citizens will be on their best behaviour is to "stimulate and encourage local musicians and Pop music contemplating its lnfras-tructural navel; and about time too. Billions of pounds have been generated by British pop over the last 40 years, and millions of makers and listeners are involved on a daily basis. Yet it's taken until the nineties to organise the most minimal kind of compact between the music industry's major institutions, public and private, addressing the basic issue: where does new music come from, and how can we encourage it It looks, in retrospect, like classic rock'n'roll laziness. Hut there's a certain urgency at the moment. With articles in America's Billboard magazine anatomizing the "talent crisis" within the British music industry, and promotions like the Mercury Music Awards desperately try Hadtvac'a stote-oMtw-art dust filtration yatem achieve absolute retention of the microscopic duet I mite allergen that trlooera over 80 at all aetnmadust allergy attack in the home.

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