The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 34

THE GUARDIAN Friday February 18 1994 Albertopolis, right on cue David Hare has transformed Brecht's Galileo into a fast-paced topical parable Speed) off ttDne Hare view, and on Wednesday he announced six months grace for The Graces. No one will be pleased to see it go, and if it does it is evidence of the failure of our present export licensing arrangements. I am reluctant to join that happy band of people who are already spending the anticipated proceeds of the Lottery many months before they roll in eating the calf in the cow's belly we used to call it down in Dorset But Lottery money must surely be used to ensure that when the export review committee determine that a work of art should stay in this country, resources are available to allow that to happen. Otherwise the system will continue to be a nonsense. BACK to Birmingham, to note that the Alexandra Theatre has been saved, and to salute the triumphant return to life of the Gas Hall.

This beautiful old building has been lovingly restored for use as a gallery by the exertions of a group of local people who have raised over 1 million, including, let it be said, a generous grant from the European Regional Development Fund. But the principal talking point in Brum at the moment is only cultural if you regard football as part of our culture. It's the crude attempt by David Sullivan, pornographer extraordinaire, and owner of Birmingham City Football Club, and Karen Brady (24), the club's chief executive, to bully the Birmingham Mail into putting lots of money into the club. The Mail has rightly told Sullivan where to go, and far from their circulation going down, as Brady intimated would happen, it's soared because Brummies can't wait to get further details of a story no soap scriptwriter would have dared to dream up. But at least Brady can console herself with the thought that she's now notorious for more than just telling Ron Atkinson how chuffed he must be that his son Dalian had made the Villa first team! the more reason to get on with it.

The Tate are well advanced with their proposal for a new museum of modem art. A scheme to restructure the whole South Bank area may not be far behind, while in Greenwich, derelict land on the Meridian Line has been identified as a site for a millennium festival. But perhaps most exciting of all is Albertopolis, brain-child of Sir Neil Cossens of the Science Museum. The architect Norman Foster and his team intend to turn the Victorian underground walkway from South Kensington to Kensington Gore into a glass-enclosed pedestrian area, with a huge glass dome linking the Science Museum to the Natural History Museum, and containing a subtropical forest of a magnificence to surpass anything at Kew. Albertopolis is fully integrated into the Albert Hall's plans to link up to the Albert Memorial via a piazza.

The end result will be the complete transformation of one of London's most popoular tourist and academic areas into an international showpiece, imaginatively blending the old and the new, and completing Prince Albert's vision some one and a half centuries after he first conceived it With ideas of this quality, we could end up celebrating the millennium in real style. A FORTNIGHT ago I suggested that to delay the export of The Three Graces for a further 18 months would be wrong. I am glad to see that Peter Brooke is of the same the idea that the Church is at the centre of the universe. But Hare's version highlights the notion that disinterested rational enquiry is always politically subversive. "Knowledge," argues the Thatcherite Pad-uan University Chancellor, "is a commodity.

It must profit the person who buys it" But equally the Holy Office's pressure on Galileo to recant now seems like a paradigm of the authoritarianism of the iron state: even Galileo's final gesture of smuggling out a copy of his Discorsi reminds you of the furtive guile of the modern beleaguered artist or intellectual. Hare has cut a couple of scenes entirely, shortened some speeches and turned the riotous Italian carnival into a puppet show celebrating "Galileo the But what comes across is the idea that reason is always dangerous and that the scientist (or artist) has a duty "to relieve the hardship of But I also see the play as a powerful self-portrait in which Brecht, who never risked his neck in Moscow and who denied his communism in Washington, makes Galileo a tormented embodiment of his own guilt. Richard Griffiths, an instinctively sympathetic actor, excellently suggests the multi-facetedness of Gali- Michael Billington AVID HARE is right it's I absurd to argue Brecht is 'old hat because Commu nism is in decline. But while I welcome Hare's sharpened, speeded-up new version of The Life Of Galileo, I have a few qualms about Jonathan Kent's production: what with Tobias Hoheisel's endlessly mobile, towering pine-panelled sets and the deletion of the choric interludes there is little sense of place or time. What matters, however, is the polyphonic richness of the play: one that yields new meanings with each decade.

Brecht's 1938 version was a defence of freedom against tyranny. Post-Hiroshima in 1947, he amended the play to stress the social responsibility of the scientist against the idea of truth as an end in itself. Now, in Hare's version, the play seems like a highly topical parable about the struggle of reason and knowledge against on the one hand, the commercial vulgarity of the market place and, on the other, the heavy-handed intervention of the state. Both ideas are, of course, already present in Brecht's play, the story of Galileo's research into the Coperni-can solar system which challenges David Mellor A BIG week for lottery watchers, with the presentation of the bids to run the thing, and the announcement yesterday of the new Millennium Commmissioners. Their appointment surely comes not a moment too soon.

When you look at the lead time on major building projects the planning delays, the scope for public inquiries, plus the ever-present prospect of the Great British Cock-up a la British Library we may have got round to laying a few foundation stones by the time the great day dawns. The Commissioners need a small portfolio of projects from across the nation. If London is anything to go by, competition will be stiff, so all jrm A disused warehouse in London's East End hosts the latest project from life IN THE city Urban stiffs tw i i mi mute msmtfr wmm tfnumm Sophie Constanti AS venues for theatredanceart events, disused warehouses in London's Docklands no longer possess the novelty factor they once had in the eighties. But even if Shiny Nylon which takes place at S-Shed in the Royal Victoria Docks had been staged during the last decade, the show's location would not have seemed a gimmicky irrelevance. Shiny Nylon is the latest in a series of urban performance projects commissioned by the Womens Playhouse Trust under the umbrella title life IN THE city.

A collaboration between choreographer and dancer Kristina Page, installation artist Anya Gallaccio and the writer Deborah Levy (who here also directs), the show focuses on three characters: Billy Boy (Sean Tuan John) and Girl Babe (Page), whose stories are told mainly through movement, and Bombay (Jennifer Potter), who is part-narrator, part-singer and goads both Billy and Babe into increasingly violent encounters. Page's brutal, wild-child physicality, the fitful, punch-drunk quality of Levy's texts and Billy Cowie's eerie, disjointed score suggest both the alienating effects of city low-life and the systematic decay of the urban landscape. Shiny Nylon's characters are edge-of-the-city dwellers, the spiritually homeless, and in the massive, icy space of S-Shed they are rendered powerless and apathetic. Like puppets whose cinematic actions are triggered by a mixture of fear, paranoia and crack-brained aggression, Page and John throw themselves repeatedly into splayed and curled positions on the concrete floor. Gallaccio's installation banks of old cinema seats for the audience, a pair of shabby, red velvet stage curtains hung as a self-contained unit has a disarming incongruity, at odds with the unremittingly harsh, cold and dilapidated environment of the warehouse.

The scene is made all the more uneasy by the combination of sitting and standing onlookers, wrapped in blankets, clutching hot water bottles. Rigid with cold, trapped in a space within a space, you feel like a mute extra in a surreal episode of The New Avengers. Runs until 27 February..