The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 9

ARTS NEWS 1 9 The Guardian Saturday May 30 1998 Old rocker's graveyard tryst Richard Eyre's Royal Opera masterplan Micrjael Frayn goes nuclear When Rod met Ronnie though, is unlikely to lift the (sagging reputation of the jgallery. Tate supremo Nick iSerota turned the Whitechapel i into one of Europe's premier contemporary art venues, but it has since dropped back a league, despite i-ecent shows by Thomas Schutte and a forthcoming Peter Doig exhibition. Catherine Lampert's directorship of the gallery has been somewhat directionless, and she is slowly stepping back from her curatorial role, so Nesbitt strikes few as being an ideal appointment. The news of the resignation of Kim Sweet as director of the tiny but influential Showroom Gallery, but a short walk from Chisenhale and the Whitechapel, set tongues wagging once more. Sweet worked at Chisenhale under Watkins.

Will she return to rule the roost? Watch this space. IT'S not quite in the Beatles league, nor maybe even the Spinners' one, but the Bee Gees, those walking monuments to the glory years of NHS dentistry, are getting together again. Whisper it, though. It's meant to be a secret. The Brothers Gibb so enjoyed their For One Night Only concert in LA to be shown tonight on BBC2 that they decided the public could be deprived of them no longer.

Nothing at all to do with the band's renewed commericial potential on the back of the Saturday Night Fever and Grease revivals, of course. All will be revealed at a "worldwide press conference" at London's Cafe Royal on Tuesday. Buy your earplugs now. MEANWHILE in Truro, Cornwall, the veteran harmonica player Larry Adler was showing the Bee Gees how to really make a comeback. Witnesses report the assembled audience gasping in horror as the 84-year-old maestro 'He was pottering towards the exit, and popped off the edge of the stage' fell off the stage.

But after a rest in his dressing room, Adler insisted on finishing the second half of his set before going to hospital. "Larry wears thick glasses," says Chris Warner, who runs the Hall For Cornwall, "and he just missed the gap in the wings. He was pottering off, missed the exit and just plopped over the edge. "We got a doctor and had him checked over and said ho didn't really think it was a good idea," Warner continues. "But Larry kept saying, 'No, I've got to do it, I've been in the theatre for 70 years, I'm not going to give up So we did a deal and I said, 'OK.

if you're going to do the second half we are going to sit you down and tape you to a When the curtian came up to reveal Adler in his chair, there was a huge ovation. The badly bruised octogenarian finished the show with Rhapsody In Blue by George Gershwin, who once told Adler: "The goddam thing sounds as if I wrote it for you." Adler quipped: "That should be my epitaph, which it very nearly was." Adler's world tour continues. Stories by Adam Sweeting, Brian Logan, Deirdre Pugh, Fiachra Gibbons, Matt Pengelly. More arts coverage in the Saturday section, pages4 and 5. shocker, Cleansed, has slipped a disc.

"It is quite a gruelling show," admits director James Macdonald, "so that may have something to do with it." Come on, James, tell us how it really happened. "Er, she got the injury trying to pull her dog off another dog." Even in Mac-donald's outlandish production', nothing quite matches the poignancy of this image. Two performances were duly cancelled. The rest seemed set to follow suit until, suddenly, an understudy was found for whom learning the lines would pose no problem: Sarah Kane, the playwright herself. A day's frantic rehearsing ensued, and "the bit in which the actress used to be thrown up against the wall and beaten up" was hastily reworked.

After all, "we couldn't risk a The result? Despite the fact that one insensitive member of the audience laughed himself silly when Kane's starring role wa's announced before the show, the playwright acquitted herself admirably in a role that offers nowhere to hide. It's even possible at a stretch to see the play's climactic stitching of a like you did 20 years which left Rod speechless. Later, old mate Ron Wood joined him on stage for some chirpy banter. "You know what this reminds me of?" asked Ron. "Your dad's funeral," quipped Rod.

Laugh? We did, actually. NEWS at last of Sir Richard Eyre's now almost mythical report on what to do about London's opera houses. Our spies in Chris Smith's Whitehall bunker tell us that a weighty draft version hit his desk yesterday morning. Why just a draft? Could it be that Sir Richard wants some stylistic tips from the Culture Secretary, whose own literary effort, Creative Britain, has garnered such glowing reviews "semi-literate populist drivel" and the final, crushing "disproves the theory about the monkey and the We fear not. Rumour has it Smith wants to polish it up and then publish sometime during the World Cup.

For maximum media exposure, of course. FOUR weeks into her nightly odyssey of buggery, dismemberment, electrocution and being punched a lot, it comes as no surprise that Suzan Sylvester, the star of Sarah Kane's Royal Court LWT's An Audience series has never been the home of incisive interviewing, and tonight's programme starring Bod Stewart with guests Mick Hucknall and Emma "Baby" Spice is no exception. The celebrity audience of footballers and TV personalities packed into the South Bank studios had been primed with questions that would make Hello! blush. Des Lynam asked Rod how important "great hair" was to a rock singer. It's only the voice that matters, said Rod sagely.

Husky Mariella Frostrup wondered if Rod's even huskier voice helped explain his success with women. Even Kirsty Young threw journalistic rigour to the winds, asking Rod: "What's the most exotic place you've ever made love to a woman?" Rod pondered. "A cemetery," he declared. (Rod was a gravedigger in his youth.) A few spontaneous moments did creep in, though (ah, but will they be broadcast?) The very first question was from a man who wanted to know why Stewart didn't "do things Emma Bunton gets An Audience With Rod Stewart Baby meets Grandpa penis to her character's crotch as a symbol of the success of this audacious theatrical transplant. So could this be the start of a glorious performing career? "The other actors," says Macdonald suggestively, "are monitoring her progress." find curators and administrators walking in endless circles, greedily eyeing each other's jobs.

The Whitechapel Art Gallery has just poached the director of the Chisenhale, Judith Nesbitt, as its new head of programming and set the merry-go-round whizzing, i Nesbitt's appointment, THE East End is a veritable maelstrom of artistic activity these clays. Ideas throb on every street corner, and the Bethnal Green Tesco has become London's equivalent of the Cedar Tavern in New York, though you are unlikely to meet Jackson Pollock in the toilet-roll aisle. Instead, we Noises Off (very, very loud ones) Atomic Marsh, Burke and Kestelman in Michael Frayn's play about nuclear physics tristram kenton scientist has the moral right to work on the exploitation of atomic energy. Given today's terrifying headlines about nuclear tests in Pakistan, the question has lost none of its urgency. And, in terms of the drama, Frayn presents us with a fascinating dilemma: was the saintly seeming Bohr, who eventually worked at Los Alamos, morally superior to Heisenberg, whose development of a German bomb was impeded by his failure to apply a crucial diffusion equation to uranium 235? Do we judge people by their motives or the consequences of their actions? Frayn's play poses endless questions, but its dramatic excitement stems partly from the way it uses science as a source of moral debate.

While breaking new ground, the play is also is a natural extension of Frayn's previous work for the theatre. He once said that the key philosophical dilemma is that "the world plainly exists independently of us and yet it equally plainly exists only through our consciousness of And out of our attempt to impose our ideas upon the world Frayn has created a whole series of philosophical plays. In Noises Off we see actors vainly struggling to create order through the complex mechanics of farce: in Copenhagen we see physicists seeking to harness the fission properties of uranium isotopes. Significantly, both plays end with an acknowledgement of the power of uncertainty. Copenhagen finally strikes me as a humanist play about science: one that recognises equally the darkness in the human soul and the precious-ness of earthly life, and that suggests that our continued existence may be due to "one short moment in The play is also directed with exquisite tact by Michael Blakemore, and David Burke's sturdy, paternalistic Bohr, Matthew Marsh's mercurial Heisenberg and Sara Kestelman's inquisitive Mar-grethe express the ideas with perfect clarity What Frayn has done is show how theatre can glamorise thought and provide a potent metaphor for the mystery of existence.

Details: 01 71 -452-3000. were out-paced by Los Angeles gangsta rappers. Their acrimonious split and subsequent silence suggested the most enigmatic rapper was finished. He took the stage at Subterania after midnight, still wearing gold necklaces and rhyming his puzzles and puns in clear, hard diction, accompanied by a DJ and a loud-mouthed master of ceremonies. Yet his taciturn nature and self-absorbed rhymes made Rakim a curiously dlsaffecting performer.

And the performance took on a surreal element when he appeared simply to be miming his eighties classics. Michael Billington Copenhagen Cottesloe, London MICHAEL Frayn has always been a philosophic enquirer, and his dazzling new play Copenhagen is a logical extension of everything he has done before. He starts from a fact and an enigma. In 1941 Werner Heisenberg, who was working on the German atomic bomb project, went to visit Niels Bohr, his private father-figure and Europe's leading quantum theorist, in occupied Denmark. What happened between them? What did they talk about? How did it affect the future of mankind? After all, the German project was unsuccessful, whereas Bohr later went to Los Alamos and participated in the development of the atomic bomb.

It's a brilliant starting point for a play, and Frayn offers neither a docu-drama nor a definitive answer but an exploration of what Heisenberg calls "the final uncertainty at the core of We meet only Heisenberg, Bohr and Bohr's wife, Mar-grethe, who acts as our representative in that she demands an explanation of scientific detail in layman's language. What we see are three characters, from the vantage-point of eternity, replaying the endless possibilities of the collision between these human particles in wartime Denmark. What Frayn does superbly is suggest a crucial equation between science and character. Heisenberg is famous for the uncertainty principle: the idea that the more accurately you know the movements of a particle, the less accurately you know its velocity and vice versa. Bohr went on to derive from this the theory of complementarity: that, if I understand it aright, mutually exclusive pairs of measurements are an indispensable part of quantum mechanics.

But the vital point is the dramatic use Frayn makes of this: the two physicists become the embodiment of their theories. Heisenberg's whole position in Denmark is marked by uncertainty: was he there to pick Bohr's brains about nuclear fission, to seek absolution for his work on the bomb, or to show off to his surrogate father? Equally, Bohr recognises the importance of complementary phenomena: in his productive marriage, in his endless research partnerships, in the fissile tensions of his friendship with Heisenberg. But nothing in the play is abstract or vague. Behind it lurks the question Heisenberg twice puts to Bohr: whether the 1986, his and DJ Eric B's stark minimalism and hard funk pulse set hip-hop alight. Rakim's unique lyrical approach celebrated black Muslim supremacy and the daily struggle for survival on the streets.

But they did not just push hip-hop forward. They also launched British DJ culture. When ColdCut scored a top 10 hit with their sample-laden remix of the duo's Paid In Full, and M.A.R.S. built their Pump Up The Volume out of the same song, it seemed Long Island's finest could do no wrong. However, hip-hop developed so quickly that by 1992 the duo The rapper's return Garth Cartwright Rakim Subterania, London TEN years is a lifetime in hip-hop, but it is a sign of Rakim's importance that, a decade after his finest moment, the New York rapper can still pack Subterania.

With a well-received comeback album, The 18th Letter, to promote, Rakim, the most invisible of rappers, has started to perform again. In.