The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 30

Shim mam mmm A drop of the soft stuff JUDITH MACKRELL hails the Richard Alston Dance Company A dashing debut ter that he erred in splaying Baker so prominently across the weekend. ButDanny is still jabbering away, though occasionally he helpfully plays a record over himself so you can't hear. Baker, though nobody any longer wants to admit it, is not But the other dancers may also have initiated new elements in the choreography. Where Alston used to pare away any drama that was extra to the steps he now. lets his dancers play and suffer with the movement we respond to them as people not just beautiful technicians.

The chore-. ographytoohasanewheat.its force is more reckless, its curves voluptuous. In Shadow Realm the tautly crafted movement has no extra flesh but as the two cers wind round each other we pick up on poignant intimate mysteries and their final embrace is sharply tender the women jumping wildy on to the man's crouching back then stretching sensuously along its length. In Lachrymae (Britten's score), there's an equally heart- stopping moment where a woman leaps across the stage her hand quivering in front of her moufli like an icon of burnished soitow. In Something In The City (music by Man Jumping), Alston's amazingly hard working dancers combine energetic mischief with rather lovely oriential musings.

There are however passages of slack four works made in under a year couldn't all equal Petrushka. And the evening may not please casual viewers. The concentration of music and movement is intense; the stage is bare of design and the costumes -arc not stylish. But to see Alston' on such leaping form, to see a whole evening place such passionate emphasis on the dancers and the dance is to feel very good about the state of the art. IT'S NOT often that British choreographers get handed their own fully-funded company to do with as they please, nor that they get to show a whole programme of newly created work.

There are in fact few who could accept such a gift without it turning to ashes or embarrassment. Richard Alston is luckily one of them. On Wednesday night the company which used to be London Contemporary Dance Theatre had its London re-launch as the Richard Alston Dance Company at The Place Theatre. It was a big event, not only in LCDT's history but in Alston's career for you only had to watch two minutes of Movements from Petrushka to see he's on a winning streak. The work is an abstract of the 1911 Fokine ballet, its brightly coloured carnival drama stripped away.

With only a piano versionof Stravinksy's score as accompaniment, Alston reduces the ballet to a stark encounter between an eccentric individual and a crowd. Four couples stamp and flirt, the springing rhythms of their steps, the laughing carriage of their bodies, then-deftly syncopated shrugs all knitting them together as a group. Alone, in an untouchable space dances Dar-shan Singh Bhuller. Where the others are all neatly extrovert, Bhuller's body strains and jerks at painful angles, his gaze scorching inwards or scanning invisible horizons. Impulses of delicate lyricism eddy through his body then convulse into heavy falls or impotence.

It's a remarkable performancevisionary, anguished, transcendent and raw and Bhuller seems set to become Alston's new muse. PHOTOGRAPH: FRANK' MARTIN Set piece Willard White as Khovansky bestrides designer Alison Chitty's spectacular tower ANDREW CLEMENTS applauds ENO's new Khovanshchina Thinking big Anne Karpf ARE Gerry Anderson and Danny Baker really so bad? Don't the two undisputed candidates for Most Vilified Broadcaster of the Year deserve a second hearing? In Anderson's case BBC people have been urging me for months to try again because his programme has improved, got over its teething troubles, etc. So I have. And it hasn't. It's hard not to sound ad homi-nem when reviewing an eponymous programme like Anderson Country (Radio 4) because in some sense he is it.

After all, the format these days isn't that different from You And Yours or any other long-running R4 magazine programme. Tuesday's programme started with an item on Special Constables in this case a woman which would have sat quite comfortably on Woman's Hour. And the subsequent interview subject people doing good works is a Radio 4 standard. No, it's Anderson who's the problem. For a start he seems to have trouble reading a script something of a problem, I'd have thought, for a national broadcaster.

I'm not one for preened voices, but surely the contrast between the "read" scripted bits and the interviews shouldn't be so huge? The scripts anyway are riddled with cliches on Tuesday we got a "community spirit" within the first few seconds. But Anderson Country's most pernicious aspect is its feelgood quality its confected upbeat tone, and the patronising way that participants arc characterised as salt-of-the-earth. The programme is a haven forenfhusi-asts who sound like wallies, while Anderson treats the seri- ous and the trivial alike: when, in last week's ghastly running item inviting listeners to nominate people deserving sainthoods, a caller got going about a man doing work with destitute children in Colombia, he was abruptly terminated because it was time for an interview with someone who analyses doodles. Nuff said. Danny Baker's Radio 1 air-time has now been reduced by two-thirds a frank admission by Controller Matthew Bannis without charm and wit.

His trou ble is that he's all shtick and once you've heard it, well, as he put himself last week "you know the score by Myself, I think he's got a death wish. Most people's idea of hell is hearing the plot of some ancient film or TV programme which they've never seen from someone who can't even remember its title. Danny Baker solicits such material. Still, one can't help warming to a man who breaks in to announce "that's the first mention of Moshe Dayan on this Ian Hislop and Nick Newman clearly know their Danielle Steele Judith Krantz Jeffrey Archer mini-series. Their mini-series, Gush (Radio 4), about the rivalry between two young masterful males, one British, the other American, has assembled every known cliche in the canon.

It's hard to know how they're going to sustain it over six episodes since even this one seemed to flag aptly perhaps, rather 1 ike the originals they "re satirising. The best bits were the hilarious representation of British-ness and Yankeeism, matched by the sound effects. I remember that Dynasty would signal a London scene by cutting to a red bus passing in front of the Houses of Parliament and add a few bars of Rule Britannia or some such. Here each mention of Cambridge was followed by the peal of bells and the singing of choristers. Otherwise Radio 5 Live new series on sporting issues On The Line turned in an interesting report on sport in Northern Ireland, a place where political affil iation and cultural identity are threaded through each and every sporting encounter.

The ate Frank Zappa reminisced articulately in the first of two programmes on Radio 1, while jazz composer and pianist Carla Bley splendidly dry account of her life and work in the first of a new six-part series. Strange Arrangement (Radio 3), was matched by the sparing commentary of playwright and fan Alan Plater, who made an amus ing and useful guide. HOWEVER you cut it Khovanshchina is a problem, not because Mussorgsky left it unfinished or because he never got around to the scoring, but simply through the dramatic inconsistency, the moments of sheer miscalculation. The best of it. music drama of blazing intensity and excitement, goes a long way to justify the rest, but a strong sense of direction is still needed: there's no way that Khovanshchina plays or stages itself.

The last time the opera was seen in London was 14 years ago. That English National Opera has mounted a new staging now is a real act of faith, largely due. one guesses, to the special pleading of the music director Sian Edwards, who believes firmly in the work's greatness and conducts it with real commitment and understanding. If in the end the evening doesn't quite set the imagination racmgand the emo tions aflame as often as it threat treated with huge and equal sympathy by Mussorgsky, with the passionate objectivity of a composer profoundly committed to his country's history and by implication its future too. Francesca Zambello's staging keeps it in the 1 8th century, resisting the temptation to update the opera as a parable of post-Soviet Russia.

Alison Chitty provides a semi-abstract design, dominated by a multipurpose steel tower cunningly jointed so it can support flats, supply walkways or turn itself into a giant climbing frame over which the rival factions can scramble to be harangued and harrassed. Zambello's at her most convincing organising these hordes, and the ENO. chorus works very hard, sings with real vitality and attack and provides the dramatic backbone ortheevning. But those moments, with Mussorgsky revving his dramatic engines at full power, are not the problem with the opera. The dif Well, er no Paul Weller meant as vehicles for long instrumental improvisations.

Weller seems to have abandoned the idea that rock should uplift audience as much as musicians. Sporting a listless grey sweatshirt and Prince Charming haircut, Weller was introduced as "Live and direct from The humour promised more than it delivered. The first minutes of music. Has My Fire Really Gone Out? and Pictures On The Wall, were ens to, the venture seems more thanjustified. There's no doubt too that singing Khovanschina in language that the audience understands is a great bonus, for few operas require more detailed homework on their intricacies.

Mussorgsky's eagerness to pour a whole chapter of Russian history onto the operatic stage left him little room for compromise on detail, and so this chronicle of the events of the 1680s, when Peter the Great began to tighten his grip on the Russian empire, is a tangle of plots and intrigues. Where most operas are happy enough to depict two factions struggling for power Mussorgsky has three, with Dosifey and the Old Believers craving a return to an old-style Russia founded on religious faith, the boyars led by the Khovanskys wanting to maintain the status quo and a third group, led by Prince Golitsyn, trying to create a more westernised and modern state. All three factions are CAROLINE SULLIVAN on Paul Welter's tedious 1 30 minutes at the Albert Hall Stuck in the jam A career that lias unbelievably "spanned three as a leaflet on each seat claimed, Paul Weller has undergone several image changes. The Jam's natty-suited teenaged Mod became the Style Council's cappuccino-drinking beatnik; following a period of critical disfavour, he has re-emerged the attractively-weathered solo artist. The one thing he has never been is boring, until now.

Weller's two-hour show was based on the albums responsible for his artistic rehabilitation, Paid Weller and Wild Wood. That in itself was fine, because both have been justly praised as a creative renaissance. The autumnal intimacy of Wild Wood, in particular, is as pretty as anything by anyone this decade. But these luminous songs were not made to be played in the wide open spaces of the Albert Hall (the venue Weller habitually chooses for his London dates). Nor, almost certainly, were they ficulties come with the smaller-scale scenes, the crucial confrontations and passages of explica tion, and there the direction seems less convincing, too detached almost.

Zambello and Chitty turn the fourth scene in Khovansky's house into a piece of sly orientalism; the Dance of the Persian Slaves is performed in and out of the bath by The Cholmondeleys in smoochy but not very sexy choreography by Lea Anderson, but the other inte riors are conventional, their characterisation often cliched. Paul Wlielan, a newcomer to the Coliseum, is the boyar Shak-lovitv, and proves to be a bari tone of powerful directness and a vivid sense of what he singing; Kim Begley as Golitsyn, Willard White as Ivan Khovansky and wynne Howell as Dosifey all communicate with confident ease. Anne-Marie Owens makes Marfa, the work's focus of compassion and conscience, a creature of marvellously credible flesh and blood. In the end much of the power of Khovanshchina gets across; that's the success, and a real company achievement. Further performances on Weds, then 3, 6, 9, 12 and 16 Dec (box-office 071-632 8300).

PHOTOGRAPH: EAMONN McCABE agreeably concise, the backing band tightly controlled by our hero's choppy rock guitar chords. Within moments, though, he was deep into muso territory. His longtime love of American seemed all but forgotten as he reverted to plain-spoken, vaguely Jam-like rock. The vei-y good keyboardist, Helen Turner, measured out some Booker The MGs funk trills, but this show was mainly concerned with building tunes into endless rockular jams. The man from Woking takes his guitar-playing very seriously these days, using a different instrument for nearly every song.

Only another guitarist could have detected any tonal variation between them. A roughhewn Miss You So was followed by what has become old Paul's tour party-piece. He got behind the keyboards, and his heavy-metal-mutha of a roadie played guitar for a song. It was fabulously funny, though Weller wasn't laughing. It hardly compensates for 130 minutes of rump-punishing tedium.

Until December 3 at The Place, then on national tour. THEATRE Landscape Cottesloe Theatre Michael Billington HAROLD Pinter's own production of Landscape, first seen at the Gate Theatre Dublin in May, has now moved to the Cottesloe for 18 performances. It is not to be missed. The play itself packs into 38 minutes a whole marital history of love, betrayal, exclusion; and Penelope Wilton and Ian Holm not only give performances of infinite subtlety but open up the mean-; ing of the play. Beth and Duff interesting that they both imply the prefix Mac sit on either side of a kitchen table: two domestic servants left alone in an empty house.

Beth, staring out front, seems encased in memories of a rhapsodic seashore encounter and speaks in soft lyrical tones: Duff, facing her, seeks to penetrate her solitude with his own recollections of an admitted infidelity, with stories of their employer, Mr Sy kes, and with a show of technical expertise about the art of the eel-larman. All to no avail. In Peter Hall's original production there seemed a genuine thread of doubt: was Beth recalling Duff as he once was or re-living some passionate affair with their employer? Pinter's own production is much less ambiguous: Beth has cho- sen to lock herself into an ide- alised memory of her husband while Duff is driven to anguished desperation by her impenetrability. Wilton, totally still in a print frock through which her slip slyly shows, seems irradiated by recollections of her husband's past tendresse. Holm, hands fiercely clenched round -a cup, is like a man trying out a series of tactical manoeuvres to get through to his wife: only at the end does his voice crack l.

as he tells Beth of his remem-bered hope that "you would come into my arms and kiss me, even offer yourself to me" and rise to a crescendo of wounded fury and despair. Everything rests on counter point: past and present, ecstasy and betrayal, her mellifluous phrases against his harsh, coarse, brutal monosyllables. Pinter catches perfectly the collapse of a marriage into stony separation and his two performers, through precise tonal contrasts, play it like an exquisite sonata that lingers in the mind long alter one has quit the scene. Daytimes and early evening at the Cottesloe stage of the National Theatre (box-olfice: 071-928 2252) until December 6. POP Cyndi Lauper Shepherd's Bush Empire Lloyd Bradley HOW longshould girls just wanna havefu-un, before girls oughta.call it a da-ay? In theory, there is no upper age limit.

And in this particular instance signals looked good: that early eighties anthem Girls Just Want To Have Fun had been niftily updated into Hey Now (Girls Just Want To Have Fun) with one eye on the early nineties anthem shortlist; the capacity crowd as youngas they used to be. but were disproportionately boisterous; the recently released Greatest Hits package proves that, in the comfort of your own home, most of the material still stands up; and the amount of dyed red hair on offer had to be a good sign. A made to measure set of circumstances for Cyndi Lauper to re-establish herself beyond what seems to be her current role of All Purpose Mildly Raucous American Celebrity you know, famous for being famous. So what happened to make it take a good hour before this out to have fu-un crowd properly warmed up? Quite simply, the last 10 years happened. Back in 1984, Cyndi Lauper was part of a whole new approach, but since then "atti-tood" has become a culture in itself and gone stellar witness Hole, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Death Metal, Kurt Cobain, Buju Ban-ton and anything softer than "Fuck you!" won't be taken seri ously.

Cyndi Lauper 's half-baked feminism, polite social commentary and feelgood-orientated philosophy doesn't make much sense any more. Then there's the presentation. As 1980s nop assembled its agenda as punk finally lay down and died, the idea of stroppy women gimpy dancing, singing with a contrived awkardness and showing their knickers was genuinely liberating The Belle Stars, Amazidu, The Slits, Banarama, or Grace Jones, who turned ineptness into an art form. Nowadays though, and at 14.50 a ticket, people expect a degree of sophistication. Not that any of this would have mattered, had Cyndi Lauper approached this as an honest mutual celebrat ion of nostalgia the deservedly high sales figures for the Twelve Deadly Cyns LP would indicate there is a market.

But to try and put it over as, er, cutting edge meant it fell short. Cyndi auper doesn't have to be Norma Desmond to acknowl edge her contribution is largely past tense, but if things go on like this she might well end up that way. All fares listed are return, subject to availability and differing travel periods and must be booked by 7th December 1994. Air passenger duties (or taxes) will be payable. For details of these and many other World Offers sec your travel agent, British Airways Travel Shop, or call us on: 0345 222111 WORL.D OFFERS British Airways The worlds favourite airline.

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