The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 33

THE WEEK 1 7 Ih9 OmmtWh Saturday May 31 1997 Welsh cowboys goto town One can understand their point. Although the notion of a Welsh western Is Intriguing, and the richly textured narrative hinted that screenwriter Michael Chaplin knows how to construct the framework for a satisfying drama, the dialogue waa too schematic for the characters to be more than cyphers. "I have never unitemtond the difference between church and chapel," said the doe-eyed naif of a landowner's daughter, Elizabeth. "Well. I suppose folk like you go to church and folk like me go to chapel," said Aaron, the rich crumpet' bit of hunky rough.

Either Elizabeth was a little thick or the screenplay was presuming viewers were. If the script was all signposts and no substance, the music was worse. Harmonica wailing over bongos over strings during the opening sequence suggested that composer John Altman didn't know if he should write Western pastiche, banal world music or bog-standard costume-drama violins, so he decided to throw them all together. Sentimental strumming greeted every long shot of cattle crossing the lovely Brecon Beacons, incidental music for the hard of understanding. There were small pleasures to delay wandering minds.

When you're shoeing cattle for a long drive (mark my words, you'll find this useful some day), you should smear pork dripping on the nails to stop them from rusting. So that's what you should do with dripping. Dr Johnson once advised cooks that cucumber should be prepared carefully and then thrown out of the window. Dripping should be collected carefully, pasted on to any nails you have handy and then hammered into cows' feet. On no account eat the stuff.

There were no such handy tips on Can '( Stand The Heat (Carlton Food Network), in which Tony Banks was due to prepare stuffed peppers and a pasta dish in his vast kitchen. He was distracted, since Carlton arrived a few minutes after No 10 had phoned, and Banks was drinking deep from the cup of joy. "I said, 'Clear off, Blair. I mean, who's interested in being sports Of course you did, Tony. There were handy tips a-plenty on Harry Hill (Channel 4), who filled the Phil Kay slot with even more strangeness and wit than the Scottish loon.

To transport an owl, roll it in newspaper, fasten with an elastic band, and cut two holes for the eyes before you place it, jauntily, under your arm for the journey. Don't bother cutting holes if the owl's sleeping. It doesn't need them then, you see. A budgie can be carried in a toilet roll cardboard tube. Holes optional.

Patrick Marber's done it again. The former comic has another great play in Closer, says Michael Billington Stand-up guy Unhappy couple Liza Walker (Alice) and Clive Owen (Dan) PHOTOGRAPH HUGO GUNDINNING wider issues, as when Larry reveals that his new nurse-lover refuses to go to bed with him unless he abandons private practice: if the play seems a bit hermetic, it is because Marber only fleetingly relates sex to society. He is. however, a first-rate director of his own work. As in Dealer's Choice, he casts excellently.

Liza Walker, as Alice, has exactly the right mix of orphaned solitude and street wise smartness: "Men," she sardonically says, "want a girl who looks like a boy." Not wholly true, as shown by Sally Dexter's voluptuous, classy Anna. The men are equally sharply contrasted. Clive Owen's Dan has a boyish helplessness that is fatally attractive to women, while Ciaran Hinds's larry is an outwardly tough, upwardly mobile bruiser whose macho bullishness is secretly scorned by his lovers. It's a well-acted, highly satisfying play that touches on identity, sex and death, truth and illusion. But what lingers is Marber's sense that, however much they couple or fraternise, men and women remain forever trapped inside their own skins.

In rep at the Cottesloe, London SE1 gesting she fakes two times out of three. Later she describes how women disclose all their past emotional freight at the start of a relationship. With men. she claims, it's a more painful process: "A great big juggernaut arrives with their luggage it got held up." Marber takes no sides or prisoners in this candid, scathing, very modern view of the sex war. At different times, he suggests, we are all predators and victims.

But. although he shows men and women behaving equally badly, he almost inevitably writes better about male torment. The most romantic character is Alice, the tough cookie who. we discover, has invented herself. The most complex is Larry, the working-class surgeon who gets to earn a fortune in private practice and whose pain is tangible.

We see him grovelling before the armour-plated Alice in the sex club and, in an even better scene set in his office, torn between revenge and charity as he con fronts the no less desperate Dan. Marber writes well, no question. But, since it ti avei es similar territory, it's difficult not to compare his play with David Hare's Skylight, seen in the same venue. What Marber lacks as yet is Hare's ability to see sex in a broader con text: there's no equivalent here to Kyra's great speech in Skylight about the "right wing There are just occasional hints of snapper named Anna and is smitten. Initially spurned, he gets his revenge by setting up a blind date, via the Internet, between Anna and the surgeon Larry, who briefly examined Alice after her accident.

Having cruelly played the role of a website Cupid, Dan finds he has unwittingly forged a real alliance. What follows is a crazy sexual square dance in which partners are constantly swapped. Dan has an affair with the newly married Anna, while the bereft Larry seeks his revenge via Alice, now working in a posh, hands-off West End sex club. But what Marber conveys, through all the jumps in time and serial bed-hopping, is the extraordinary physical and emotional gulf between men and women. "You don't make me come." Anna sharply tells Dan.

at one point sug you begin to understand why. Marber seems to be saying that, while we pride ourselves on being cool and sophisticated about human relationships, and while we have commodified sex. we are as screwed up as ever. In particular, men and women, however honest they try to be, remain out of synch. Marber makes his point through four characters whose lives accidentally converge.

Dan, who writes for a newspaper's obits page (unkindly described as "the Siberia of rescues a tough waif called Alice from a street crash; on a bench in a London square called Postman's Park, filled with memorials to acts of private heroism, they fall in love. But a year or so on. Dan, who has written a clunking first novel, goes to be photographed by a sexy Sex and passion. They are natural subjects for drama. But they are also tricky to write about.

As the dramatist hero laments in Stoppard's The Real Thing. "Loving and being loved is unliterary. It's happiness expressed in banality and lust." But Patrick Marber gets round the problem in Closer at the Cutteslue by dwelling as much on agony and deceit as on the lineaments of gratified desire. The result is that relatively rare thing, a good second play. In his highly accomplished first work, Dealer's Choice, Marber showed us a group of male sad-sacks who use poker as an escape from real life.

After seeing Closer, Tim Ashley detects unpleasant undertones Marching into the in Christian Thielemann's LSO debut Romantic forest rovers Gold (BBC 1) took I a wrong tur This costume drama about an 1840s cattle drive from the Welsh valleys to London's Smithfleld market should have trotted pleasantly across the gentle landscape of Sunday tea-time schedules. Songs Of Praise rising tn the left. The Great Antiques Hunt declining to the right. Inspector Morse's sunny Oxford looming like an old friend on the horizon. Teeming with evil landowners, lovably roguish Welsh cattle men, brooding Men With To transport an owl: roll it in a newspaper, fasten with an elastic band and cut two holes for the eyes before you place it under your arm Pasts, toffs in bonnets, poor in rudimentary toilets, this was the Dickens of a reassuring moral story, the traditional fare that BBC1 has served up for decades to go with the dripping on toast and weak tea.

Instead, the series wound up in the Sodom and Gomorrah of Friday night programming, with its libidinous sitcoms (Game On), its infantile reportage (Euro trash), Richard and Judy's shock-horror special about youth in crisis (Kids Behaving Badly) and the proverbial intellectual rigour of TFI Friday. Drovers' Gold looked lost here, like a dopey cow that had strayed stupidly into an al fresco orgy. The schedulers clearly didn't really believe in the series: why else marginalise the feature-length first episode to 9.30pm on a broadcasting night traditionally given over to soaking up the dregs, at a time when much of the target audience is tucked up? Screw the union Ten years ago the Australian state of Victoria regulated brothels. Now the Miscellaneous Workers' Union is offering sex workers a union card. In You Can't Touch Me, I'm Part Of The Union, a segment in the excellent Your Place Or Mine? series (Radio 4), they weren't exactly queueing to sign up.

In fact, the union had only one recruit. She wanted sick pay, maternity rights and retainers. Of course, if she had been British, she would have demanded Luncheon Vouchers also and quite right too. At one Melbourne brothel called Ladies For Gentlemen, home-cooked meals came as a perk of the job. The state government is probably slapping in a tax demand at this very moment.

As Penny and Louise were prone to complain, all a decade of regulation has brought them is a bill for back-tax and superannuation. Feisty girls, they were not going to take the situa tion lying down. But they were against the bosses. All men, of course. One, who ran a brothel with 125 girls and 25 management staff, argued that he could not be held accountable for the women's working conditions because they were private contractors.

"Like plumbers or he ad-libbed brightly. He moaned that getting them to turn up for work was a problem. "They've always got an excuse. Their mother's just died or their neighbour has had a heart attack." Well, if you only employ plumbers and electricians, you're sure to get plumbers' and electricians' excuses. Days In The Trees (Radio 4) had Corin Redgrave selling himself in a shady Parisian nightclub in order to feed his gambling too eclectic a genius to pigeon-hole himself as a high Romantic, adored Mozart as much as Wagner and repeatedly flirted with classicism at one end of the scale and modernist dissonance at the other.

Thielemann seems determined. phosen is likewise awkward. The harsh-toned, astringent ensemble of 23 soloists that Strauss prescribed is converted into a full string orchestra. The polyphony clots and cloys The unremitting expression of grief that transcends Arguably BEST LITERARY MAGAZINE IN THE WORLD Koran Bennett: A Lifer's Life London Review OF BOOKS JLrj I (0171 -928 2252): booking till August 23. the work's ambiguous inspiration is turned to nostalgia.

The real problem is that Thiele mann's style is beginning to become cramped and mannered by his devotion to German Romanti cism, while the repertoire he favours tells half the story, the half that charts Romanticism's slide into reaction. Perhaps someone should remind him that the mod ernisni of Mahler, Schoenberg and Berg is equally founded in a vision of revolutionary individualism, and that Romanticism could be a progressive movement too. of Books, London wcia 2hn I if LXJ (01711 109 1151 and urwJu.l liul uw) tic ut mlrrmui the bm FOf CNOUNO habit. He was watched by his rich old mother (Rachel Kempson), who quaffed champagne and greedily consumed peach melbas. In Marguerite Duras's rainy-day play everyone was so hungry they gobbled one another up like ravenous sharks, bones and all.

Kempson and Redgrave are, of course, real-life mother and son, and this was yet another production that deliberately set out to blur the line between factual and fictional relationships. I blame no one but the BBC if millions are now under the impression that Corin Redgrave is a secret gambler and Rachel Kempson has the table manners of a piranha. The mournful dialogue so gorged itself on human misery that at the end I felt plumb tuckered out. Duras is an interesting writer but, like Sylvia Plath, so clearly off her rocker that the points she makes are of limited relevance to anyone in the real world. After an hour and a quarter, I felt that a spell living with negative equity in Boreham Wood would have done wonders for her perspective.

The best radio plays are not those that leave you feeling bloated but those that make you want more. Shelagh Stephenson's Five Kinds Of Silence (Radio 4) was repeated on Saturday to celebrate its well-deserved Sony award. No less intense than Duras's play, the story of two young women who murder their abusing father demonstrates the power of understatement. "Something's gone on," the policeman says, surveying the bleeding corpse. "We don't want to talk about it, if you don't mind," one of the sisters replies.

In that short exchange is a tragedy of Greek proportions. For a little light relief, there was Brian Dooley's half-hour debut play Missing Mandy (Radio 4). Dooley is the latest of a string of stand-up comics to turn dramatist this year. God help them if they all think there's more money in the theatre. Deserted by his girlfriend Mandy, the nerdish Peter decides against slitting his wrists and instead mentally bumps Mandy off.

The Grinning Through Grief Group provides him with his comfort and his nemesis. Dooley's writing was sprightly enough but, like so many first-time radio writers, he never gets beyond the monologue. Yet the humour was ghoullshly spot-on. The leader of the support group offers him a discount if he books sessions in advance so that he can "mourn in 1998 at 1996 That's what I call a bargain. STjiji rf SMnkrCOTtaraiMtB ZafHrikron gtautoAdaMiiliflHjHHVK CUmt Bloom I i 'IPS Christopher liiliJ Chekhov anoWJHBB HMsru: MHH Women aBBBBBBBBBK Small Ugly pSjLj Michael Wood: 4t FrrdHatUdry JJREj rhe Remains nf CaBBBBB Virtnam before MP Evi Peron 0IbBBBBBW the War I NedtaehniMi VfB MnSatrraek jKm Redoing Europe's pops a cork for Pat Nathalie Sarrautt however, to push him back within Romantic parameters.

Thielemann's recent Elektra at Covent Garden slows the sonic cat aclysm and emphasises lyricism at the expense of radical harmonic experimentation. His Metamor THE Postcode Date For in-depth reasoned argument and literary criticism, the London Review of Books is hard to match. The Sunday Times calls it the 'boldest of the literary journals'. To Clive James it is 'the house magazine of the literary elite', while Alan Bennett considers it simply 'the liveliest, the most serious and also the most radical literary magazine we have'. The London Review of Books is many things, but it is not an easy read.

Simply because the issues facing the world today are not easy ones. Here is just a liandful uf the subjects and aathois which have appeared in recent issues: Alan Bennett (his Diary), Jenny Diski (in Antarctica), Colm Tdibfn (on the sins of Catholic Ireland), Stanley Cavell (on Adam Phillips), John Lanchester (on Fatties), Jacqueline Rose (on Virginia Woolf James Wood (on D.H. Lawrence), Stephen Sedley (on Law and Public Life), lan Hacking (on the Idea of Blindness), Ian Hamilton (on the FA Cup), Anne Hollander (on Yves St Laurent) and Hilary Mantel (a story). The LRB is as much a political paper as a commentary on books and their authors. For people who love the written word, it is required reading.

Take this opportunity now to introduce yourself to the LRB. Simply complete the coupon to enter a trial subscription. If you do so you will save 15 and receive your first six issues absolutely free. When you're as controversial a figure as the conductor Christian Thielemann, you know your every move will be scrutinised. This, after all.

is the man who allegedly claimed that "Germany has nothing to apologise the champion of Pfitzner and his ultra-conservative opera Palestrina. This doesn't trouble Thielemann overmuch at Ipast judging by the choice of material for his debut concert with the London Symphony. He brought to the Barbican Beethoven's Eroica and Strauss's Metamorphosen, two works that together represent a lop-sided history of German Romanticism. The Eroica shattered formulaic classical idealism once and for all in its demand that personal expression transcend traditional structure. At the same time, it instigated a cult of individual greatness.

In the central Funeral March, the composer as revolutionary presides over the mourning for a solitary, unnamed hero, while the finale reworks material from a previous score dealing with the figure of Prometheus, who flung an existential challenge to the divine order. Meanwhile. Metamorphosen. written in the last days of the second world war, peers over the resulting mess and ambiguously mourns the foundering of the heroic ideal into barbarism and atrocity. Beethoven's Funeral March with the words "In Memoriam" engraved in the score trudges wearily under its final cadences Thielemann underpins the links between the two by invoking the pivotal shade of Wagner as a mediator between Beethoven and Strauss.

The figure of the betrayed, disillusioned King Mark from Tristan Und Isolde hovers behind the melodic contours of Metamorphosen. and Thielemann lets the whooping horns of the Eroica Trio uncannily prefigure the destructive hunt during which the lovers are caught. He allows the climactic episodes of the Funeral March to become overblown, bringing in their train a whiff of Wagner's violent threnody for Siegfried. The results are never less than fascinating, but he comes dangerously close to unbalancing the work. His Eroica is a succession of astonishing moments that proceeds by fits and starts rather than being integrated into a complete whole.

Strauss, meanwhile, was London Review 2H-3U Little Russell Street, POST TOi London Review of Books, Freepoal, wniq, don wcia2br, England. No sump required if potted in UK. Please send me six free issues of the lndon Review of Books and enter my one-year sub-scripoon of 24 fortnightly issues at a saving of 15. I enclose payment now, but 1 understand that if, after sii issues, I with to cancel my subscription. I can do so and receive a full refund.

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