The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 28

Better for verse, richer for poems ANNE KARPF waxes lyrical about the recent explosion of poetry on the airwaves Role reversals (from left to right) Vivian Tierney, Neilt Archer, Christopher Booth-Jones and Susan Blckley in ENO's new production PHOTO: HENRIETTA BUTLER MARTIN KETTLE on a new feminist Cosi Fan Tutte Earlier this year Radio 4's Pan-scrub Voices had a poor reading of a bad translation of a wonderful Jacques Prevert poem that quite effaced the rhythms in my. own head. Radio 5 has innovated with a new series called Black To The Future (BTTF), giving a black and Asian view of the news, and last week Radio 4 (shamed into action?) pitched in with its own black and Asian magazine programme In Living Colour (ILC). BTTF led with a story about the threat of deportation suffered by "overstayers" after the expiry of their permit, which differed significantly from most current affairs by concentrating on overstayers' point of view and eschewing the usual devil's advocate style of questioning. ILC interviewed a lively black American academic about black people's growing confidence to speak out without having to make themselves acceptable to whites.

Both programmes themselves provide a space for this to happen, even if their presentation styles are still a little breathless. But the most ethnically interesting programme last week was the BBC World Service's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, transposed to Trinidad in carnival time with a perfect fit. This was no novelty Shakespeare: Caribbean speech rhythms are far better suited to Shakespeare's language than those of contemporary British actors. The forest's shango magic and calypso music also worked a treat in Hilary Nor-rish's production, while Claire Benedict's Titania was a hilarious teasing Trinidadian matriarch. Part two tommorow, 1pm.

Cecil Day-Lewis in 1950 plumped squarely for those with distinctly aural qualities: "radio, since the car cannot hold a whole poem before it as the eye can, requires a series of clinching phrases which the intervening passages lead to and disappear in." There were clinching phrases aplenty last week on Radios 1 and 4, where the splendid Poetry Please! unashamedly celebrates the popular verse requested by listeners. Last Sunday's edition also had poetry written by them, with the winners of the BBC Wildlife Poetry Competition reading their entries. Radio 4 also has Stanza, a lively discussion series with studio guests and returns next month, as does Radio 3's collage Poetry In Action, while Selected Poets rummages gorgeously in the BBC sound archives, earlier this year bringing us Eliot, Auden, Berjeman and Plath reading or talking about their work. On the BBC World Service, Shakespeare's Sonnets are currently being analysed by contemporary poets. Desmond Dunn showed how it shouldn't be done: when he praised the "aboriginal nco-balladic disclosure of rhyme and run of sense and syntax" I switched off textual analysis should enhance enjoyment, not extinguish it.

Stories In Verse, by contrast, was unpretentious, usefully introduced by Joy Boatman, and well read by Robert Hardy. But, unfashionable though it is to say so, poetry can lose as well as gain by being heard: instead of just hearing the poet's voice, you hear the reader's too. OETRY'S un-nat'ral," declared Tony Welier in Pickwick Papers. Not today, it ain't; even if you discount the hype that it's the new 'n' poetry is everywhere, and as of last week on Radio 1 in the daytime too. For decades, poetry was dogged by its obscurantist and elitist image, but the generations reared on Bob Dylan or weaned on rap have no problem with the gnomic, the suggestive, or the plain rhythmic.

Words On 1FM, Radio l's welcome new poetry venture, slips the poems into the schedules as if they were all of a piece with songs, kicking off nicely with Benjamin Zcphaniah reading Dis Poetry, his send-up of traditional poetry which guarantees that it has "no big words Liz Lochhead, John Hcgley, Lavinia Greenlaw, and Spike Milligan read their own poems while Paul Merton read Lewis Carroll's, against a musical backbeat which never overwhelmed the words. The growth of performance poetry, dub poets, and pub readings marks a renaissance in the oral tradition of speaking verse, and restores to radio a leading role. (TV, aside from last year's Poems On The Box, generally ignores poetry, because there's nothing to look at.) But broadcasters have long debated whether radio should concentrate on poems pleasing to the ear or on excellent ones, even if these work better on the page. Women's realm at the Coliseum Ferrando and Guglielmo hoisted with their own petard. This feminist triumphalist reading of Cosi is unfaithful to Mozart and da Ponte.

But it is, in its way, a logical misreading of the tangled situation and insights of the piece. It is plausibly done, with the sisters transformed from the teddy-boar cuddling girls of act one into the angry young women who sot off for new adventures at the end of act two. Unfortunately the central performances have not yet risen quite to the challenge. The singing, in Anne Ridlcr's welcome new translation, is good but toD much is characterless. Vivian Tierney's Fiordiligi is nearly but not quite there, her second-act aria Per Pieta fuller of tonal contrast and emotional depth MICHAEL BILLINGTON on a cannily camp reading of Les Parents Terribles, Cocfeau's tale of erotic mayhem Switching from It's a family affair poll to poll GOOD to find our lately Europhobic the National Theatre reviving Cocteau's Les Parents Terribles at the Lyt- telton in timcfoii.the-opening.of the Channel Tunnel.

Even better to find that neither translator Jeremy Sams nor director Sean Mathias treats this 1938 story of erotic mayhem among the Parisian bourgeois-decadents with total seriousness: it comes across like a camp version of Oedipus Rex. I suspect Cocteau himself was writing slightly with tongue in cheek. His heroine, Yvonne, is a slovenly, bedridden, incestuous diabetic. Her husband George once passionately loved by her spinster sister Leo devotes liis days to developing an underwater sub-machine gun. And the trouble starts when their son Michael announces he has fallen for a young book-binder, Madeleine.

The news drives his mother into a state of possessive frenzy and his father to despair, since Madeleine is also his own mistress. You could treat the play as high tragedy but, as Jacques Guicharnaud brilliantly pointed out; the cosmos surrounding Cocteau's characters is not that of a great moral order but a mere Coney Island contraption. You could see the play as a political study in class-decline, but these bourgeois bohemians are too hermetic to be representative of anything beyond themselves. In Sams's witty translation, the play comes across as a piece of self-sustaining irony that owes as much to Feydeau as to classical tragedy. That note of theatrical introversion is nicely captured by Mathias's production and Stephen Brimson Lewis's design: the sound of a wailing, OUR ERA recognises Cosi Fan Tutte as a cruel masterpiece.

The time has long gone when a production could simply churn out the traditional "all women are fickle" version and expect everyone to have a good chuckle. Modem Cosis seek to reinterpret this infinitely illusive piece in the light of contemporary sexual politics. The result has been a succession of productions which probe the deeper, darker and more cynical sides of this outwardly comic opera, moving it away from Italy to settings such as a pack- THEATRE Rough Justice Apollo, London Claire Armitstead WHY IS it that, when all else fails, playwrights go rushing back to the courtroom drama? The question contains the answer: because all else fails. And audiences love it. Whether they will love Ter ence Frisby's new play is cause for doubt.

Ostensibly, it uses the courtroom format to give gravity to an important debate about mercy killing. In the dock is James Highwood (Martin bhaw), media celeb and confessed killer of his 10-month-old brain-damaged son. His interrogator is a woman QC (Diana Quick), a Catholic and pro-Lifer. So far, so clear. You, the audi ence, repair to the bar in the interval to find a scattering of voting sups asking tor guilty or not guilty verdicts.

Only, Frisby makes it increasingly hard to see what the issue is. As the defendant and his solicitor know and the judge and prosecutor suspect it was not Highwood, but his seven- months-pregnant wile who actu ally killed The trial, then, is a sham be cause, this revelation makes it impossible to separate legal and moral debate from an idiosyncratic set of emotional circumstances. What remains is not a rigor ous investigation but a flaccid plea for which in Robin Herford plodding production treats the law like a barrel of red herrings, and rests its case on the persuasiveness of Shaw's oh-so-touching emotional outbursts and the human decency of Quick's QC. Soap opera in silk. Box-office: 07M94 5070.

THEATRE Trainspotting Glasgow Mark Fisher COARSE, brutal, nauseating and feverishly funny. That was Irvine Welsh's 1993 Booker contender, Train- straight out of a Sergio Leone Western. And there is justice in this, since Molnar has reinterpreted Cosi as the women's triumph. Her crucial intervention is to have the women overhear Don Alfonso persuade the men midway through act two that they can get the women to marry them. Until then, the sexual politics have run along traditional rails.

From this moment, the men (Alfonso included) are the unwitting victims of the sisters' trickery. At the end, they substitute two servant girls for the wedding scene and depart with a wave, leaving ranged performances that articulate the fearful nihilism of the dispossessed. Box-office: 041-429 5SB1. REGGAE British Reggae Awards The Grand, Clapham Rick Glanvill THE BRITISH reggae industry's equivalent of the Oscars the 13th was an alternately maudlin and optimistic event. Gone are the days when British reggae wasyto paraphrase Gandhi, just a good idea; but a renascent Jamacian scene has superseded homegrown luvvies like Aswad and Maxi Priest.

Witness the overwhelming success of Buju Ban-ton the controversial HJ who put Caribbean gays on the agenda Shabba Ranks and Chaka Demus and Pliers, among others. The UK variety is still regarded like English wine: fresh and fruity, but no vintage. Big winner was lovers' rock sexpot Don Campbell whose singles I Can See It In Your Eyes and What Lovers Do prevented a Jamaican wipeout of specialist charts. He snapped up four awards including best singer and songwriter. The late Deborahe Glasgow was rewarded for her contribution in a tragically short career.

The indigenous industry isn't blameless. It still revels in its isolation. Like a boxer beating 'the count to take another on the chin though, the UK reggae establishment remains keen and brawny, WNK radio, north London's sole legal reggae station, closed amid recriminations, succeeded by the first round-the-clock-reggae station across the 'capital not to fly the skull and crossbones. Holding a 28-day licence to coincide with the awards, BRI FM was a roll-call of DJs who kept the music alive through the lean times and who have been excluded from sharing in the success of a style at its most potent for two decades. Man Ezeke, deadheaded by Radio 1, praised Tony Williams, reggac's unsung evangelist and BR1A coordinator "The whole o'we from a hard family," observed Ezekc, and everyone knew what he meant.

age holiday, a New York diner or a Mediterranean cruise ship. In Engish National Opera's new production Nicolette Mol-nar has moved the action yet again. This time we arc in the 1950s, though exactly where is not clear. The women dress like Doris Day. They read Picture Post.

Despina busies herself around the house with a succession of 1950s gadgets, including an early vacuum cleaner. Less attention has been focused on the men. They could come from any modern era, though in disguise they are no longer Albanians but Texans, spotting, a novel that gave voice to a lost generation of Edinburgh junkies, wasters and alcoholics. Written in a believable east-coast vernacular vulgar, vitriolic and energised the book gave a much-needed about-face to the city's tourist-friendly image of pretty gentrification. Its characters lurch from boozer to drugs den to overdose in a frenzied haze of violence, abuse and emotional inarticulacy.

Welsh dialogue npples with the kind of vigour that is rare in fiction ample explanation for the novel's speedy transition to the stage. Ian Brown studio production at the Citizen's ably proves the power of Welsh's writing, iuuirunating the swagger of his urban demotic, punching out its rhythms with barely a word changed. Harry Gibson's adaptation retains much of the narrative style of the original the characters telling their stories as often as acting them out but hops around the novel to create a dramatic sequence more palatable to a live audience. There are two gains here. The first is that lines that have the reader squiriming become cor-uscatingly funny in front of an audience.

It's the kind of humour at which comedian Gerry Sadowitz excels; you laugh despite yourself only to be caught short by the painful reality of it all. Welsh shows the sad degradation of the heroin addict the constipation, the vomiting through stories of such terrible, bungling charm that it can only seem funny. But the aspect that Brown's production really forces home is the bleak tragedy of a no-hope needle-sharing generation -angry, helpless and self-destructive. The central figure of Mark Renton played by Ewcn Bremncr becomes less the street philosopher, more the hell-bent hedonist, though still smart enough to do something about the impending catastrophe that ids lifestyle portends. James Cunningham's hapless Tommy, ensnared by heroin at a low moment, has no such resources to bail him out and, as friends start to die from Aids-related illnesses, the grim logic of their situation becomes apparent.

There are moments when the pace lags but for the most part it is a breathlessly dynamic production full of dangerous, de- for season Quide on sale Hall, booksellers, 8 than her Come Scoglio. But she needs to have the confidence to sing more dangerously. Susan Bickley's Dorabella is more complete, dominating the duets with a vocal ambition which the other principals slightly lack. Ncill Archer is a gruff but generous Fcrrando, and Christopher Booth-Jones acts well but gives a somewhat neutral Guglielmo. The two crucial manipulative roles go to singers at opposite ends of the spectrum of experience.

Sally Harrison has graduated to a bright and busy Despina, while Richard van Allen brings all his guile and stagecraft and sadly his declining powers of intonation to a well-acted Alfonso. After Solti's brilliance two nights previously, Nicholas Kok's conducting of the piece seemed slack. But with a run of 12 performances ahead, one senses the best is yet to come. party rally round the leader. Banks said that'll be a change, Michael.

The Victor of Newbury ventured a soft interjection. "Shut up," said Mellor. "You may not bo a feature in the next election. No I am not getting nasty." There was'a" protection ot the next gen eral election result. Labour 364 seats.

Everybody else fed up. Banks said he could feel his grip tightening on that red despatch box at this very moment. Mellor said that ought to frighten a few million voters back. The Victor of Newbury looked like a vicar who had wandered into the belfry just as the bcU-ringers decided to tackle something jubilant. Politicians seem to become unbuttoned in the most decorous way I suppose in the small hours.

Perhaps they think no one is watching and they may well be right there. The BBC had David Dimb-lcby he is in all his splendour," said Jeremy Paxman waspishly) with John Gummcr, Jack Straw and Matthew Taylor. Really, you find yourself spending the night with people with whom you would hesitate to share a table in an all-night cafe. ITV had Alastair Stewart with Michael Portillo, Neil Kinnock and Charles Kennedy. There were no women on any panel.

Without them a sort of dogginess develops, a wagging and a snarling. Peter Snow was whipping up statistics to a standing froth with all the animation of a TV chef saying "If you understand that, you'll understand anything." The BBC had The BBC 20, which sounded as if a large number of the Corporation were mouldering in Wormwood Scrubs. Sky more modestly had the Sky 10. These were straw-in-thc-wlnd constituencies. Dimbleby was asking Sir Norman Fowler if he was planning to spend more time with his directorships.

Mellor was saying that the country was using the Lib Denis as a bucket to spit in. At Tower Hamlets, ITV had spotted Derek Beackon's press agent in tears. Charles Kennedy was saying that ono swallow didn't make a summer, but there was a very pleasant flock over his head tonight. Kinnock looked up nervously. In Edinburgh, Andy Sten-ton was standing in an empty, echoing, trestle-tabled hall, whence all but he had fled.

The Conservatives had been devastated in Scotland. "Turn the light off before you leave," said Adam Boulton, Sky's anchorman, and laughed. It may or may not have been a reference to the Sun's headline on the day of the last general election: "If Kinnock wins today, will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the light," druggy sax ushers us into a ramshackle maternal boudoir and for the second act we are confronted by the world's biggest spiral staircase. I don't think it's a good idea so soon after The Birthday Party to have the set grindingly trucked back at the end, but the production style neatly matches Cocteau's own floridly self-conscious theatricality. So too does the acting, which ignores polite restraint.

You feel that Sheila Gish's blowsy Yvonne only just manages to hold herself back from chewing the scenery. Alan Howard's gog gled inventor greets the news that his son has coincidentaUy fallen for his own mistress with a cry of "How could it happen in a city this size?" And Frances de la Tour is regally imperious as the kindly Leo. I don't think it's a great play. But it a fascinating exhibit from the world of pro-war camp put across by Ma thias ana his team with the right mad panache. Box-oHice details: 071-928 2252.

lfliUJHIariiffin. BARRY CLAYMAN and APOLLO LEISURE GROUP praunt Tbpol UddleronthGpof Bin- on Stielam AWrtwm Storin By Spdil (Wilulon at Arnold Pari N5fMfla I Nancy Banks-Smith IT safe to come out now? I live on the Isle of Dogs which had, until today, one BNP councillor. In the past couple of weeks I have received one visit from a Labour candidate, 13 Labour leaflets, one voucher for 1,000 homes to rent when Labour gets in, one card saying they were sorry they missed me (I was hiding), one Anti-Nazi League leaflet offering transport to the poll every hour on the hour, three Campaign Against Racism leaflets listing the criminal convictions of BNP members, one leaflet from Comics Against the Nazis are all household names and one leaflet behind my windscreen wiper saying the Nazis bombed the Isle of Dogs. It was like getting your head caught between two cymbals. An expression I noticed on the face of David Rondel, the Lib Dem MP who is usually referred to as the Victor of Newbury, as few can remember his name.

He spent election night sitting between Tony Banks and David Mellor on Sky TV. It is a sad fact that the most entertaining politician is the one who is out of office and ideally out on his ear. Banks and Mellor do nicely. Michael Portillo appeared, head and shoulders, looking like a Cheshire Cat which hasn't heard a good one lately. Tony Banks suggested genially that he should shoot himself immediately, adding that he was sure John Major would be absolutely delighted.

Portillo said reprcs-sively that the effect of the night would be to make the 0 Book JOSEPH by Music by Lyrlciby STEIN JERRY BOCK SHELDON HARNICK Royal Albert Hall iiiiaiEMLPaD 15 July -10 Septe Full details and booking all 68 concerts in the 100th are in the BBC Proms 94 now from the Royal Albert form li 442u2SLm TOUR music shops and newsagents throughout the country, price 3.50 Postal booking opens 9 May Telephone booking and personal booking from I june 7 Sept -24 Sept EDINBURGH PLAYHOUSE 031 557 2590 27 Sept 22 Oct BRISTOL HIPPODROME 0272 299444 25 Oct -12 Nov 8UNDERLAND EMPIRE 091 514 2517 15 Nov 26 Nov MANCHESTER PALACE 061 242 2503.