The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 30

Director Mike Newell has a problem, an awfully big problem the follow up to his last film, Four Weddings. JONATHAN ROMNEY asks the questions After the honeymoon IF 'f III lll WOULD be belittling to portray Mike Newell as some sort of lottery winner. Making last year's most unexpected international hit, Four Weddings Hush Puppy man 'I'm not a deal maker, it doesn't turn me on like being a director turns me on' "We were still ordinary human beings Reversals of fortune aren't new to him. After the success of Dance With A Stranger, Newell was simply offered more doomed-love plots After the downbeat Anthony Hopkins drama The Good Father, he had a mixed run that bottomed out with the kids-against-the-bomb fantasy Amazing Grace and Chuck (aka Silent Voice). His 1991 pastel-and-linen costume drama Enchanted April was a surprise hit in the States, but by that time, the press here had more or less given him up.

"They either Weren't aware of it or they pissed all over it as being a soppy little film about girls and flowers." NEWELL tells a story of his lowest ebb, a freezing, desolate stay in Ireland for his film Into The West. One day he was feeling miserable, and couldn't bring himself to read what he knew would be a hostile Sunday paper review of Enchanted April, so he burned it. "I set off every smoke detector in the building. I had to tell the Dublin fire brigade the whole sorry tale. This fireman looked at me and said, 'By God sir, that must have been a powerful piece of writing'." It's clear that the question of profile worries Newell.

"It would be wonderful to have all those broadsheet critics love you. You would believe that you're some kind of kosher New Wave director. It isjustajob," he says. "If you beat panels good, then you're a good panel beater. But now people come to him to talk about the theory and practice of panel beating.

discreet Hush Puppies, as a transatlantic cigar-waver. "I'm not a deal maker," he says, "it doesn't turn me on like being a director turns me on." It's tempting to think of him as the new Robert Wise. Wise made The Sound Of Music, which, like Four Weddings, many people seemed to enjoy seeing 10 times or more; but how many ever said they couldn't wait to see the new Robert Wise picture? Still, people are watching Newell's moves closely, especially since his new film departs at an interesting tangent from Four Weddings. An Awfully Big Adventure, based on Beryl Bainbridge's novel of post-war theatricals, is Newell's most interesting work since Dance With A Stranger, a return to that film's intense, claustrophobic evocation of Englishness and repression. "It's the story of a girl's progress from adolescence to adulthood." says Newell, "and that's usually a very sentimentalised subject.

I loved the book because it caught the arrogance that late-teenage girls can have, and at the same time you can see that this child is terribly at risk emotionally. That risk was very difficult to get a modern audience to understand. Things have become very deadened these days." Very much a labour of love, Newell says, An Awfully Big Adventure at first glance seems to be recklessly flouting commercial fortune, since it casts Hugh Grant in a part radically different from the cuddly pin-up fop of Four Weddings. Here he's gay, depressive, vaguely demonic, more intriguing altogether. In fact, the film was already near completion when Four Weddings became a hit.

PHOTOGRAPH: DAVID SILUTOE films that I make, I've got more ironwork on the mantlepiece than I can handle, what on earth am I on about?" What indeed? These days, if he wanted to, Newell could be talking world domination; instead, his game plan's simple: He wants to take the traditional step next, a big project in the States. "One day I'll either have learned to ride the bicycle, or I will revert to type and be happy as a sandboy making minority-interest movies on very low budgets." If he does ride that American bike, he'll be laughing. In Hollywood, no one asks you why you'd rather be a panel beater than a breast beater; if you're lucky, you'll get the time and the money to be a panel beater world class. An Awfully Big Adventure is released on Friday. looks a touch pained.

"I feel that there is something I don't do for you broadsheet guys. Does it bother me that the films I make seem not to have been directed? It certainly does. It really pisses me off that insert name of prominent national critic can shit all over Enchanted April I remember watching a rough cut and I thought, 'That's been done really well'. It's going to come out looking really self-pitying, but I hate answering those questions because in the end they're useless if I don't like it, I shouldn't be in the water and so fuck off out of my psyche. "You've touched a nerve, and it's a nerve that, like a politician, I should not have in public.

What am I squawking about? What's so fucking bad? I'm going to make a great deal of money out of the next couple of angry he is. Perhaps he's not quite sure either. "You understand, I'm giving you an unaggressive answer. I think what you're saying is that you feel there's something jogalong, middle of the road, uninspiring, that I refuse to aspire to in front of you. Is that what you're saying?" Not altogether, although I may have got round to implying something of the sort.

But strictly speaking, I was comparing his approach with the more fashionable throw-away-the-script-and-watch-me-direct attitude. "I see." He subsides a little. "Well, that was an interesting little spat in itself. Loyalty to the script? Sure. It's probably a habit from television that a writer is accorded a lot of respect.

Being good at getting the best out of actors, as Newell certainly is, can be a liability I ask a question I know he's heard before, the one about how difficult it is to detect a consistent thread in his work, a signature. He groans. "I'm so tired of that fucking question. I really am, it goes right up my nose. If you can't see you're not looking very hard.

It seems to me that there must be signatures there, even though I don't care to name them and I'm not aware of them." I ask whether there's a certain reticence in the way Newell approaches his work. Rather than direct out of whatever heartfelt angst au-teurs like to lay claim to, he seems to maintain a distance and pay traditional respect to scripts, steward them attentively. This question hits an unexpected button. "Fuck off out of my psyche, OK?" There's a pause, in which I'm wondering how genuinely MICHAEL BILLINGTON finds moon exploration Suffocating in shaky ground on which to base the Zone AndAFuneral, can'tjusthave been a matter of luck even though much of the euphoric press rhetoric around it gave the impression that it was a predestined hit waiting to happen and Newell just happened to midwife it. Newell admits he was as surprised as anyone else.

"I had reckoned, if I was ever to be loved, it wouldn't be for Four Weddings. You feel embarrassed and you feel fraudulent. It's a jolly good film," he says, and laughs somewhat nervously, "but itappears to be slightly more than that." Newell has been around long enough to be circumspect. He's known overnight success before his 1984 film Dance With A Stranger, about Ruth Ellis, put him in the limelight after nearly a decade directing for cinema, and after chalking up a slate of television drama since the early 1960s. Over the past decade, though, he's had a patchy career, and despite respect in the industry, he's enjoyed rather less among critics, who have found it difficult to get too enthusiastic about his work.

Four Weddings changed everything. Now Newell is as near a household name as he's ever been. He has set up a new company, Dogstar Films, and struck a deal with Disney, which is funding him to develop new British and European projects; he will direct two of his nextfour films at Disney. Yet you can't quite see this bluff, polite Englishman, with his dry, measured diction and CLASSICAL BBCSOBainbridge RFHRadio 3 Andrew Clements RUSSIAN music Rimsky Korsakov and Tchaikovsky made a curious frame for Simon Bainbridge's new work, which sets the post-" Auschwitz poems of Primo Levi. But Ad Ora Incerta, Bainbridge's cycle, has such an intense character of its own that it would come through in the most unpromising circumstances.

The genesis of this BBC commission was curious: originally he'd planned to writea bassoon concerto but early on realised that the work was transforming itself into a song cycle. The bassoon remains an important presence in the score, vying with the mezzo-soprano for centre stage, and giving a dark, introspective character to every aspect of the work that's tellingly tuned to the subject matter of Levi's four poems, which deal with his recollections of being transported to Auschwitz and his work there as a chemist. Bainbridge uses the word landscape for his musical environments for the poems, and there's a real sense of his exploring totally new musical territory. Some of the textural ideas are familiar Bainbridge techniques, but much more seems fresh and emotionally direct, especially the pared-down leanness of the second setting, in which the voice and the bassoon unravel a threnody with the barest string accompaniment, and the delicately touched-inpictori-alism of the third, Lunedi, which describes the trains setting off for Auschwitz and Bainbridge evokes the rhythms of the carriages in an obsessive string figure. Ad Ora Incerta is a big piece, 30 minutes long, and imposingly sustained.

Thelast song is the work's emotional heart, full of sweeping vocal lines and anguished orchestral commentaries, suggesting that Bainbridge has found a new expressive freedom in his music. That final section places the greatest demands on the solo mezzo; Bri-gitte Fassbaender was originally going to give the premiere, but when she announced her immediate retirementat the beginning of the year Christine Cairns took the work over. Combined with Kim Walker's elegant, elo it's one of those invisible as- pects of directing. Four Weddings, I suggest, is a prime example of a film in which viewers immediately take to the lines and the players, but don't necessarily see the direction. I've hit the red button again.

"That's my misfortune," Newell replies, a touch stiffly. "I was there." Is it a misfortune? Do you feel uncomfortable about it? "Well, I think so, because this conversation has got quite gritty since we've been talking about it. It pisses me off that there is some notion of what I do for a living that people feel dubious about that I don't do. I think you would be pissed off." I put the question another way. Newell seems to set out to make a film, rather than unfilm de Mike Newell.

"I don't th ink un film de is very helpful." He a drama HENRIETTA BUTLER ventures amongst the astroanuts. That said, he directs his own 90-minute play perfectly well, and Stewart Laing's design encompasses a spectaclar climactic display of the galaxy reminding us of earth's relative insignificance. Trevor Peacock as a grizzled survivor of the moon-landings, Nigel Terry as an obsessive supervisor of space programmes and Pooky Quesnelasan astronaut's wife isolated from her husband's experience, also give strong individual performances. But Godfrey's play confirms that the carefully-programmed, highly technical nature of space exploration somehow prohibits poetry and has a tendency to cramp not release the dramatic imagination. At the Cottesloe.

Box office 071-928-2252. The programme seemed to be hyping the Internet as cultish and cool: it used William Franklin's fruity voice ironically to give out the e-mail address as if to suggest that the Internet intrinsically mocked the whole notion of institutional authority (though the fact that Franklin had been used in the same role in a recent Radio 4 young comedy programme somewhat undercut its effect). On the other hand, there was a clearly demystifying purpose to the programme, in which respect it probably succeeded. In its final hour, it also began to grapple with some less-rehearsed aspects of the debate the Internet's potential i Dexter Fletcher (front) and Nigel Terry The four dancers, dressed in sublimely sharp and erotic style by Antony McDonald, are indulged with aggressive jumps and high-flying legs. The women's hips shimmer with a delicate sensuality, the men's bravura stunts are softened by a near rapturous lyricism.

Stravinsky does-this for choreographers. Though he famously insisted his art was all surface and no content, his surface is so'' richly expansive it demands an entire world from the movement. When I first saw the Royal's staging of Balanchine's Duo Concertant I disliked its stilted sentimental outlines, but danced by an alert, relaxed looking Viviana Durante and Bruce Sansom I saw how intricate the give and take was between dance and music, man and woman. There's the same pressure of detail and invention passing from score to dance in MacMillan's Danse Concertantes, even with the silliness of Ian Spurling's designs. Twentieth century ballet without Stravinsky doesn't bear thinking of.

THEATRE The Mosquito Coast Young Vic Claire Armitstead THE Young Vic is becoming a useful showcase for a body of work that grew up in the 1980s work that has bucked English tradition and put its roots down in Europe and beyond. The Glasswork now on display combines the physical vocabulary of mime with an almost subliminal oriental imagery in an adaptation of Paul Theroux's novel. It is the work of David Glass, whose solo piece Lucky plays in the studio. What has this talented performerdirector to say about Theroux's fetid vision of an adolescence eked out in the shadow of a mad, pioneering father intent on bringing ice to the Caribbean? In truth, not that much despite the stunning virtosity of music and design (respectively Derek Houghton and Rae Smith) that merges into an oppressive landscape of sucking swamps and mosquito whines. It's a problem of perspective there's no internal landscape in Tom Hodg-kins's father or in Peter Bailie's son to match the external panorama.

wired seemed in short supply as the new technophoria took over, and the Internet was compared in importance to the capture of fire and the development of the neural cortex. Indeed, one of the least attractive aspects of the recent media obsession with the Internet has been the return of technological determinism, with both those who are wildly ant i as well as those wildly pro making extravagant claims for the technology itself, as if it had an existence independent of its users. quent bassoon playing and Bainbridge's urgent conducting she made sure the work generated all the necessary intensity. BALLET Stravinsky Staged Royal Opera House. Judith, MackreJL IT'S HARD to think ourselves back to the Paris of 1911 which first raved over Fokine's Pe-trushka.

Maybe audiences watched the ballet as we might gaze at an Attenborough wildlife programme, transfixed by the sight of an exotic species 19th century Russian villagers milling realistically around the natural habitat of Benois's lifelike designs. But yesterday's avant-garde theatre becomes today's museum collection, and the ballet's studied naturalism and daringly un-balletic choreography can now look ploddingly quaint. The life certainly hasn't all gone from the ballet. The Royal's production is impressively huge and its moments of magic are eerily strange. When The Conjuror displays his three puppets, their manic dysfunctional dancing not only terrifies the crowd but seems like torture to their poortwitchinglimbs.

Their characters too are brightly drawn. Though Gary Avis could have pushed the Moor's doltish machismo further, Lesley Collier's Ballerina responds with a pert-faced repertoire of coquette emotions and Irek Mukhamedov is a mesmerising Petrushka. He re-invents all the details that bring the puppet pathetically alive his body wincing in frustration, his limbs flailing in spastic surges of joy, his head banging to dull the pain. Here the dancer's body is not an instrumentfor communication it's a block. And Mukhamedov manages to reveal simultaneously both the poetry inside his characterand its physical frustration.

In Ebony Concerto, though, Stravinsky has travelled to New York and Ashley Page puts the London Jazz Ensemble onstage to accompany his new ballet. Page is as profligate with dance steps as Fokine is sparing. But there's a humanity in Ebony Concerto which seems directly inspired by the rhythmic detail of Stravinsky's score. bog- standard anything-to-do-with-computers programme, brought to you via the lumbering old medium of radio. The interactive element was that instead of phoning in to the programme you could use e-mail which, in the global ranking of giant leaps forward, comes in somewhere around the billion mark.

(E-mail, it turned out, was prey to exactly the same problems as the telephone with the channels to Radio l's web site clogging up.) But for much of the time sceptics Lost in space GEORGE STEINER claimed that nothing is more symptomatic of the enervation of the Western imagination than our incapacity to respond to the landings on the Moon: "not a single great poem, picture, metaphor has come of this breathtaking act." Paul Godfrey's new play The Blue Ball does nothing to change that: indeed, the best one can say of this curiously earthbound play about space exploration is that it goes some way towards explaining why this vast subject has failed to ignite the artistic imagination. The play exists in two time frames. In the present we see a dramatist called Paul interviewing sundry American astronauts male and female, young and old to discover what the experience of space is like: mostly he gets programmed sound bites from capable technicians who talk in mundane generalities. And in scenes from 30 years back, we see a young pilot called Alex being selected for a pioneering space programme that is a synthesis of American and Russian experience: transformed into a national icon, he is a deeply ordinary guy deprived of any future purpose. Godfrey has clearly done his homework, but he hasn't forged it into a dramatic event.

On the way, he offers several fascinating bits of information: that one of the veteran American astronauts received only $30 in expenses for his trip to the moon, or that there was a collusion to cover up the fact that micro-meteorites pass through the brain in space. But he never gets to grips with the politics of space exploration and the extent to which it was always governed more by super power prestige A healthy antidote was provided by Rob Newman, sans Baddiel, here attempting to make the move from computer yokel to computer nerd in a cybersecond. Duly modemed, he found he had no-one else to communicate with, but eventually fashioned a sentence about the glories of technology to send to someone else's friend. His final verdict? "It's a whole invention they haven't found a use for yet" a Utopia for people who write on toilet walls. Another contributor, meanwhile, provided the salutary reminder that only one third of the world's population lives within a half-day's walk of a telephone.

It was also noted that tokenistic inclusion of co-host Andrea Oliver, a nice, sensible lady apparently intended to "balance" the programme's non-stop diet of politically-incorrect crudeness. It's like insisting that rap acts must have a social worker onstage to provide instant counselling for the audience. Andrea complained politely about the plague of rap videos crammed with writhing women in G-strings, but this only served as a cue for Ice-T's breast (if you will)-beating announcement that this sort of thing would not only continue but would get worse. There was a solitary joke, provided by a Time Out art critic discussing Chris Ofili's pioneering sculptures made from elephant droppings. These, she assured us, are "a razor-sharp critique of the way black British artists are stereotyped in this Next, they'll be telling us it's The great weakness of Vanity Dies Hard (1TV) is that it occupies three whole hours of airtime.

Ruth Rendell's yarns have been known to make gripping box-fodder, but this one falls out of the telly and dies on your carpet. The story so far unprepossesing Nesta Drage has vanished and her friend Alice Whittaker is darned upset. Foolishly, Alice has married Andrew Fielding, an "English teacher" and author who dresses like a computer sidesman and resembles a member of Take That. Alice's descent into neurosis and paranoia was that yoghurt poisoned? Has someone killed Nesta and are they trying to kill me? etc is spelled out by doomy, gloomy music overlaid on to interminable "sigh" shots. Eleanor David, who plays Alice, should have harsh words with her agent, because I can't recall seeing an actress so repulsively made up and shot in such remorselessly cruel lighting.

Turkey. Next! bassoon and voice, proved less illuminating on hearing the first performance of the finished work on Radio 3 on Wednesday night than the succinct interview he gave before it. But they meant that, having followed its painful genesis, one brought to this work a great surge of goodwill. Perhaps the most absurd aspect of the Today (Radio 4) row was Government ministers' assertion that the Labour crime survey wasn't news, as if the content of news (like that of jam) was strictly regulated and subject to pretty well unanimous agreement. Whereas of course news is nothing more than what news editors judge it to be.

Adam Sweeting THE GREAT strength of The Zone (BBC2) is that it only lasts 15 minutes. As Live Aid proved, even the most unutterably dull of pop performers can prove strangely palatable in tiny doses. Even so, a quarter of an hour of Janet Jackson tested the patience. This was the state-of-the-art publicity machine whirring away at its smoothest and most shameless, as Janet gave every appearance of answering questions while saying nothing whatsoever. Cleverly, this astute businesswoman contrived to appear bashful and perhaps slightly naive, speaking as if she were still recovering from the administration ol'a general anaesthetic and smiling toothsomely throughout the programme.

The uninvestigative process was hastened along by Andi Peters, the kind of anodyne, unintrusive "interviewer" who would make Jonathan Aitken's heart sing. Andi was so busy sharing a joke with Janet and arranging for himself to be shot in stylish monochrome that he overlooked pertinent inquiries altogether Michael do it? lor instance), though ot course the event served its sole purpose of plugging the singer's UK tour. The great strength of Baadasss TV (C4) is that it only lasts half an hour, in place of the yawning expanses formerly vomited over by The Word. Baadasss seeks to titillate, irritate and outrage with items from "the wilder shores of popular black though any vestiges of credibility that host Ice-T still commands will surely be ripped to tatters by the show pre-teen barrage ot tits'n'ass'n'willies. A major miscalculation is the Simon Bainbridge exposed the travails of composing in his nightly aural Diary Of A Composition (Radio 3) which charted the progress of his BBC commission for bassoon and mezzo soprano Ad Ora Incerta Four Orchestral Songs from Primo Levi.

We glimpsed not so much mad genius as composer's block, followed by prostrate, flu, fallen arches, and noisy builder problems. The coupde grace was the last-minute withdrawal of the mezzo for whom it was composed and the dispiriting trawl for a replacement. Bainbridge's technical glosses, though they did sensitise one to the interesting relationship he forged between than scientific curiosity; and his conclusion that the astronauts themselves, though undeniably brave, were chosen partly for their very representativeness is theatrically self-defeating. If the evening proves anything it is that dutiful research alone doesn't make drama. Indeed, Godfrey's introduction to the Methuen edition in which he describes the primitive nature of the Saturn rocket and the hand-stitched space suits is more engrossing than anything in the play.

If there is drama to be made out of space exploration, it lies in the moral and political issues it raises rather than the fact itself: Stoppard's point in Jumpers that the lunar landings throw earthly absolutes into question opens up far more lines of enquiry than Godfrey's assiduous surfers' mode of expression isn't noticeably rich, its parameters being mostly "So-and-so sucks" or "So-and-so In broadcasting terms, a lot of the evening's contents weren't new. The effects of the new technologies on music making, for instance, was done better and more extensively last year by Radio 3's The Music Machine (though Radio 1 had an interesting sequence on how Nirvana fans internetted each other with appalled news of Kurt Cobain's death while the mainstream media were either still ignoring it or, like dotty judges, asking who he was). And virtual reality has been virtually done to death over the past 18 months. The wireless gets Anne Karpf IT WAS CALLED Interactive Radio Night, yet I waited in vain for any sign of interactive radio. Eventually, it became apparant that the only interactivity happening in this three-hour Radio 1 programme was taking place off-air, via the modem, while on-air you had a.