The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 28

Joe in the nineties Bone-domed babbling barrister MICHAEL DILUNGTON oooo PhyilWa Lloyd's Lyttctton rovhrcl off What Tho Dutlor Saw Adam Sweeting concerned with trying to reproduce the kind of thing he does on his chat show in the climate controlled hothouse of the South Bank studios. His Kenyan interlocutors greeted his laboriously-manufactured drollness and throwaway lines as though humouring an eccentric relative who'd been in the sun too long. It's also hard to believe that it was Anderson's idea to introduce his glamorous safari guide, Caroleen. with leering. pseudo-Hey Big Spender music.

Perhaps The Mrs Merton Show's (BBC2) host will soon have her own travel show too. Already, she is boldly venturing out of the studio, on this occasion tracking down Mary Whitehouse in her Colchester lair. "It's so nice to meet you in the flesh if I'm allowed to say flesh." said Mrs in that trademark tone of carefully-calibrated insolence. Mrs Whitehouse looked bewildered, as though she'd expected Anne and Nick and ended up in the clutches of General Pinochet's secret police Actually this was a pretty good night on BBC2 Would be Cartier Bressons could have done worse than catch The Photo Show, which pulls off the difficult balance between information, instructiveness and breeziness of tone with panache. Animals featured strongly Liza Goddard's cheese-eating wolfhound, a skittish tiger called Kismet, and braying wedding guests snapped in various states of incoherence.

On a tearful concluding note. Quentin WUlson had assembled an emotional tribute to Donald Healey 's classic sports cars which left scorched rubber all over the fifties and sixties (The Car's The Star. BBC2), before being dumped by godawful British Leyland. The contemporary plague of bland Japanese clones Is our punishment. HOW seriously is it possible to take Clive Anderson, travelling investigator? In Our Man In The Maasai Mara (BBC2).

the bone-domed barrister bounced across landscapes denuded of foliage, and the wildlife that used to live in it. by the new breed of crop-farmers who are reshaping the Ke ny an economy and wreaking havoc with the ecological balance. Anderson had the decency to look embarrassed when he suddenly found himself pontificating about Kenyan wildlife conservation Realising, like Dennis Price's bogus Bishop of Matabeleland in Kind Hearts And Coronets, that he was really in no position to preach, he beat a panicky retreat along the lines of "I'm just a sentimental old animal lover. Anderson's team found one exceedingly provocative witness, a businessman from Nairobi who said elephants are ugly and smelly, all wildlife should be swept away in favour of industrial-scale crop farms, and the Masai should move with the times and join the late 20th century. Before long, he added, the Masai will be like Morris dancers, dressing up in traditional costume solely for the sightseers as they obligingly did at the swanky tourist lodge where Anderson was ensconced in sybaritic luxury.

The businessman's implied point was that the West has industrialised itself, but would be quite happy to salve its conscience by keeping Africa as its picturesque holiday theme park Anderson's approach would work better still if he wasn't so Churchill and a disembodied penis doesn't exactly knock you out. But Orton is at his best when he shows authority disintegrating into panic: Prentice, for Instance, frantically trying to discard an unwanted lady's shoe. Orton pushes the rules of farce to the limits; but it is his ability to depict gathering chaos with algebraic precision and Wildean finesse that keeps us laughing rather than the supposed novelty of his ideas. That is certainly the impression left by Lloyd's production which starts with cool deliberation and gradually escalates into hilarious frenzy. John Al-derton plays Prentice perfectly as a practiced, suede-shoed seducer who descends by degrees to a bloodied and haunted wreck.

Richard Wilson also rightly makes Ranee a figure of puritan sobriety who only gradually reveals his mania and lechery: the conspiratorial gleam that comes into his eye when he announces that 'Boys cannot be put in the club. That's half their charm" is pure delight. And Nicola Pagett's Mrs Prentice, malevolent in a Mack slip, and Debra Gillett's shocked secretary, hurled on and off the consulting-room couch like a rubber doll, likewise observe the rules of the game. In 1969 the play was booed by the gods and attacked as a hymn to perversion: now we laugh knowingly at its jokes about gender -bending and the madness of power. What actually makes the play so exhilarating is Orton's ability to theatricalise received ideas: when at the last the characters ascend skywards on Mark Thompson's glittering golden platform it is as if the world of farcial mayhem has suddenly been invaded by Euripides and sixties satire has mated with The Bacchae.

0 OD's curse light upon alldlrec tors!" wrote Joe Orion after watching ZefflreUi's National Theatre Much Ado in 1967. But even he might have changed his sardonic tune if he could have lived to see Phyllida Lloyd's Lyttelton revival of What The Butler Saw: it's beautifully paced and shows absolute understsadingof Orton's peculiar mix of verbal precision and sexual anarchy. What Is fascinating about the play unrevised at Orton's death is that it has survived the absorption of its central ideas: that there is something arbitrary about routine classifications of gender and sanity. Set in a private clinic, it starts with a randy shrink, Dr Prentice, attempting to seduce a pro pec tive secretary. With the arrival first of Prentice's wife and then of a suspiciously zealous gov eminent inspector.

Dr Ranee, it turns into a Gothic variant on bedroom farce in which sexual roles are freely swapped, cops get drugged, the seemingly sane are straitjacketed and the only happy unions are incestuous. Orton's aim in 1967 was clearly to shock to smash taboos and to evoke some pre civilised world in which the libido was unchecked by restraint. But even then there was a certain quaintness to Prentice's argument that "Many men imagine that a preference for women is, ipso facto, a proof of by the late sixties we were already in the age of public androgyny. And the notion that the dividing line between madness and sanity was often precariously thin was becoming ultra-fashionable in the era of DLaing- It is not Orton's ideas which keep the farce alive so much as his respect for the classic mechanisms of the genre. He is at his worst when he strains for outrage: the running gag about an exploding statue of Winston Concentrated choreography All-American JUDITH MACKRZLL charts the proems of Shobena Jeyasingh's Kicking Of EJeps end (below) finds Dejart's latest offering too Continental 8 dancers in Sbobana Jeyai swoop in sensuous curves or an impulsive thrust sends them sliding to the floor.

The inter locking structures of Bharajha Natyam are pared down to stark single shapes or else made reckless by speed. At its first performance details in the work were blurred by dancers still technically unsure of the style. In its revival for this year's Spring Loaded at The Place Theatre. Making Of Maps is danced by Jeyasingh's finest company yet As skilled and subtle as silversmiths but sturdily bold in their attack these dancers make total sense of the movement the intricacies with which its patterns gather Caesar salad Dance stance National Tounng UMMran sponsored by BT 5k. At the Lyttetton (box office 0171-928 2252) until April 12.

then touring. the grotesque Ornamental Prints from the British Museum 25 February 8 Apnl 1995 Thai WMtworth Art OaMary Manchester Tel: 0161 2734865 15 Apnl 10 June 1995 lILuA Koyav Aawri Exeter Tel: 01392 265858 WHENShobana Jeyasingh created Making Of Maps in 1992 it was the plainest statement she'd ever made of her confidence in charting her own artistic territory. If her steps are rooted in the grammar of Bhar-atha Natyam her sensibility owes as much to London or New York as it does to Madras. Using a score that mixes classical Indian music with urban ambient sounds Jeyasingh takes her native language on a Journey across centuries and continents. The dancers' traditional poise is thrown off balance as their backs Essence MAURICE BEJ ART always gives great free copy.

In the programme note introducing his Essence Of Bejart evening (a medley of IS pas de deux) be writes: "A pas de deux is the power which pushes $9 and sensibility MAII0MA1 EXHIBITIONS hum mm tm ami tin cmm mum PHOTOGRAPH TOM JENKINS dancers look suddenly wild and free, their urgency intensified by the repeated chants of "kabbadi kabbadi" in Daiyaraaja's driving score. During one passage the dance actually threatens to dissipate ink) rather uninteresting chaos. But with the onset of a second score, Glyn Perrin's duet for violins played over a rich exhilarating percussion Jeya singh starts curbing the movement into more geometric shapes, stylising the dancers bodies into elaborate positions where a roughly clenched fist becomes a graceful curve Dance and sports movements are dovetailed into a meditative exploration of form where speed and stillness, toughness and grace clash and merge. So completely satisfying is this last section that when one dancer disappared in order to have an injured ankle bandaged, hardly anyone in Thursday's audience even saw. Last performance torwght.

Box-office 0171-387-0031. Bejart 'The pas de deux is perhaps Paradise Lost' rhythms, its sensual curves and stiletto attacks invigorating the pulse the way few Bejart dances do. The show also features a deft, musical duet for two Pulcinellas and an enjoyably neurotic dance for a fluffy Cygnet and her reflection. They're like encountering a few witty conversations in a room where everyone else is shouting at the top of their voices. Last performance tonight.

Box-office 0171-278 8916 unfinished: but that is in its nature it is more a mobile than an artefact, and its musical language, always in a state of flax, seems to suggest many more possibilities. For over 40 years, Boulez has expressed a deeply felt antipathy towards backward looking, nostalgic or neo-classic composition. It was thus a surprise here to find him conducting Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin: and indeed, he did so in a severely indifferent manner, allowing the woodwind little time to phrase and coldly regimenting the rhythms. Boulez was manifestly more at home in Bartok's Violin Concerto No 2. The soloist was Kyung-Wha Chung, whose superb virtuosity and trenchent delivery proved a great asset: her partnership with Boulez and the LSO in fact gave the work a greater sense of formal "hrenfn thwi ii ftn tft album of the unwary over-enunciated vibrato in place of poignancy, a tendency to the epic and declamatory.

In short a touch of the Charlton Hes-ton's. So in the end a mixed offering. But the accents? Never even noticed. Last Sunday night, searching for Kitchen Cabinet (a programme from the old Radio 5) I came upon Special Assignment. Its subject was Croatia, a country one had clean forgotten about, what with Bosnia.

Chechenia. etc having taken its place in the news. But not for long, apparently, since the UN may soon be booted out and, according to the warnings of several interviewees, a Balkan war may be about to begin. (I thought one already had.) A sharp piece of reportage to raise our despair level several notches, but valuable and, it turned out, on Radio 5 Live. So much for the new network's mucn-trum-pcted distinctiveness from Radio 4: 1 was quite convinced that it was 4 I'd been listening to.

Meanwhile, over on the echt Radio 4, the Kitchen Cabinet was getting a group of women from the Isle of Dogs to talk about poverty, welfare, old people, community, etc. While this is plainly a well-intentioned programme, aiming to enfranchise working-class women, it was curiously dissatisfying. For a start the discussion was desperately unfocused. One could see why presenter Susan Marling was reluctant to intervene since she's endowed with a voice so fruity that she can't help but sound like the Lady Bountiful she's plainly not, though occasionally she got muddled and instead of treating them as experts began to interview them like victims, examples of poverty themselves, which they smartly disavowed. So then why have a presenter at all? Or why not one closer to the milieu of the women themselves (unless they're so Other that they need mediating for a middle-class audience the radio equivalent of subtitles)? Certainly the odd interesting idea bubbled up la its sense of community and extended family the Bangladeshi community, they all agreed, was like the old East End used to be and the concept of "relative poverty" was enlisted to settle the disagreement between the Jamaican woman and the English.

But despite the joUity and jokes there was an awful lot of restating the obvious. If you're going to have a traditional presenter then it's a hit patronising if they don't rigorously cross-question. As for the title, re-appropriating pejorative terms can work Is the obvious example), but some phrases are wholly resistant to appropriation. I rest my Anne Karpf THE trouble with an ail-American Julius Caesar (Radio 3) is that one feels bound to discuss its Ameri-can-ness: like the all-male or modern-dress production, this becomes its central characteristic, the organising feature for both producer and critic alike. And that ushers in the hoary old debate about Americans and Shakespeare in which positions are taken up and attitudes struck.

It sometimes seems as if we need Americans to fail at Shakespeare, in order to confirm British superiority over the New World upstarts a few and the odd "nonny no" and you can intimidate almost an entire society. Shakespeare seems to have become our revenge on Amie and Disney: they may have the dosh, but we've got the class. This Anglo-American co-production had it both ways, with an American cast but a trusty BBC director. Martin Jenkins one, moreover, experienced working with American actors. Certainly, in the first half, it was a gripping, classy affair, full of urgent plotting and whispered treachery.

The language was handled with a freshness, ease and modern resonance: when Casca says: "If Caesar had stabbed their mothers, they would have done no less' Jack Coleman put such a strong arching inflection on "their mothers" that one oouldnt help thinking of bow contemporary American sexual argot might have phrased it. Coleman and John de Lan-cieas Cassius were both well-paced and fluent, though Hal Gould's Caesar sounded disconcertingly like Alistair Cooke and Brutus (Stacy Keach) had a film-star's raspy deep voice. But then screen and radio acting are not dissimilar, and here the mike sometimes seemed pressed right up against their palates. The production lost its way In the second and more public half (though admittedly so does the play): the crowd seemed thin and the casting odd. Jobeth Williams sounded too emancipated for Portia not so much the sort of woman who'd go down on her knees to charm with well-commended beauty as a shoulder-padded LA Law attorney while Bonny Bedelia's Calr purnia never reached the starting block: she simply couldn't handle the verse and introduced the first note of melodrama.

The second, third, and fourth were provided by Richard Dreyfuss's Mark Antony, exhibiting all the classic problems with which and disperse the way its shapes hang suspended then fracture into minute rhythms and details. They're so good you begin to regret how little space this concentrated choreography gives to their individual personalities and style. You miss seeing vivid idiosyncracies of movement or the chemistry of different temperaments. But in Jeyasingh's new piece the dancers are liberated. Raid is based on the Indian street game kabbadi where single players make raids into opposition territory.

As they race the stage, slapping their thighs and leaping into space the passionate the gestures or dramatic the rhetoric, the movement remains impersonal. This is due to its glossy siveness. Every step in a Bejan dance strains to occupy maximum space, to force the limbs into maximum distortion or to startle the viewer with maximum surprise. The no-hands lift, that allows a couple to miraculously undulate all its arms and legs like Medusa's locks, has you gasping "Wow. bow did they get the woman balancing in a handstand who scrunches a leg back to touch her head has you wincing.

"Wow. that must The choreography holds too few secrets. It doesn't give the illusion of emerging from private, tender or particular emotions. We don't see the dancers as indi viduals but as virtuoso athletes. This sounds a very British response to a choreographer who's worshipped on the Continent.

In fact I loved the male Tango which is ripe with Insinuating Boulez's 70th birthday celebrations appeared spellbound throughout. The large orchestra required for the piece was quite drastically re-arranged on stage. Two mixed instrumental groups, to the left and right of conductor, enclosed two smaller ensembles of strings, wind, harp and percussion. But Boulez did not deploy them as separate contrastings blocks of sonority so much as a web of interacting lines and colours with the LSO. under the composer's direction realised with clarity and brilliance.

As the title of the work suggested, Boulez was concerned more with a continuous transformation and refraction of musical ideas: the varied tempi of particular episodes rarely articulated structure in a conventional way. Despite its revisions and enlargement, the work wiUprobably rwaaia Hj To Bring IS us with that sumptuous and insatiable force to become the other, body, flesh and soul striving to recover the primitive Adam perfect androgyne before God The pas de deux is perhaps Paradise Lost." Choreographers shouldn't of course be Judged by their prose style, however whacky. But Bejart 's dances do bear an unset tling resemblance to his writings, full of hectic abstractions and big effects that don't add up. The show, in theory, embraces a huge variety its styles ranging from grand classical ballet to a kind of tarty Kathak on pointe. its scenarios touching maternal love, a mystic encounter and a tango between Mephistopbeles and Faust.

But as you watch, a blur of monotony creeps over the stage. It's partly that Bejart repeats certain effects ad nauseam the sky-high leg extensions and split crutch lifts that turn his women into bendy Barbie dolls. But also that however CLASSICAL LSOI Barbican Meirion Bowen IF Pierre Boulez's extensive conducting schedule from the 1960s onwards distracted him somewhat from writing music, it nevertheless gave him invaluable experience of the orchestra which he quickly put to good use. Thus, whatever one makes of the labyrinthine format of his composition Doubles (1968) which he expanded in 1964 into Figures, Doubles, Prismes and enlarged even further four years later its aural precision is never in doubt. Not a note seemed out of place in this performance by the London Symphony Orchestra: and the large audience this nrntinuatrroi nf i in ii vlki i rl tilH- iVi iiigptiiii trill.