The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 30

Things that A load of old cassocks bump go the night that witnesses all go into court to tell the truth. I don't believe "Some people think I'm a bit rude and aggressive and, if it upsets them, that's just too bad." He is not a bitrude. He's extremely offensive. His caseload is as ramshackle a bunch of reprobates, rapscallions, rag, tag and bobtail as ever cluttered up a court. Sometimes you seemed to be peering down a plughole at a collection of little eyes peering up.

Sharon was up for shoplifting. A pretty girl with exceptional cheekbones and a pronounced pout. George knows her well. She's a regular customer of the firm. "Her mother and father have been drug addicts and both are affected by HIV.

Her mother has Aids. She is a drug addict. She has two young children and tries her best to look after those children. It's a bleak situation. She doesn't have much of a chance now really." He fought on a legal technicality.

Sharon had not, as alleged, kicked a shop assistant in the face while shouting "You fucking cow." Not abitof it. She had fallen on the assistant accidentally while exercising every citizen's right to avoid unlawful arrest. The sherifftook all this with a pinch of snuff. George shrugged. "In asituation like that you've got to try otherwise youpleadguiltyallthetime." George's clients don't plead guilty.

Robert, with a face you could use to clear a room, was all for scarpering before the trial. The po-lis. he said truthfully.didn't likehim.Hewasupforhitting them.Georgegavehimabrisk lesson in charm: Don' call me George in the court. Be polite to the fiscal. Call him sir.

It's very much a game but you've got to play by the rules. He tied a few plain policemen in a few fancy knots and Robert was acquitted. Looming over his defender, Robert said "Excellent! Ne'er-seen be'er. Where cuid you get be'er than tha'?" George's ver- diet was sterner than the court's: 'He will take drink again and he's an easy target for the police because he'll draw at-: tention to himself by doing something silly." Both Sharon and Robert reoffended. George said: "I've been doing this job for 27 years and 1 don't think badness and goodness come into it.

The vast majority are just feckless, inadequate people. Criminals tend not to think of the consequences of their own actions. I can't understand it myself but that's the only way I can describe it. Someone with a time horizon of about three minutes, who never thinks, ahead." I am haunted by the unap-peased shade of Sheena Elizabeth, of whom we know nothing. Except she died after 20-year-old Tom.

comingthe wrong way down a carriageway, collided with her car. The photographs looked like a breakers' yard. PHOTOGRAPH: FRANK MARTIN An eye-opener Josef Houben and Kathryn Hunter in Out Of A House Walked A Man MICHAEL BILLINGTON on the technical audacity of Complicity No Cite limits in pression of the story of Wagner's Ring into half an hour, with digs at Wagner and Chris tianity while every imaginable German and Austrian culinary speciality was being served. Pontac's speciality is the lampooning prequelsequel, and with luck he might work his way through the canon of over blown classics, thus freeing the rest of us from having to endure anything but his witty synopses. Vivian Stanshall, was one of the more entertaining pop figures of the 1960s, breaking up the prevailing earnestness with his pastiche group, the Bonzo Dog Band.

But Radio 4 mistakenly handed him carte blanche and allowed him to revisit his old Southend haunts, from the now-disused pleasure dome to the electronically-run bingo hall in From Essex Teenager To Renaissance Man. While the cultish Stanshall's wit was in evidence in the scripted opening, thereafter he sounded excruciatingly as if he were doing his own This Is Your Life, prompting assorted ex-friends to dust down their best anecdotes about the man. In among it all was a sense of injury his father had been hostile, his girlfriend married another awkwardly handled, which sat oddly among the bluff attempts to sustain a rather paltry eccentricity. Chris Tarrant may make big money from Capital Radio; Big George Webley at the Chiltern Radio Network in Milton Keynes doesn't make a penny. But Big George is of the old school and passionately hostile to drum-kits, samplers, the record industry jeez, even Dolby.

His Thursday evening show, Big George's Real Music Hour, consists of the music he prizes, an idiosyncrat- lcally eclectic mix of country, rock, new bands, and even (last week) a Scottisli mod group as well as Woody Guthrie. No pol- lshedpatter: his speech is con fined to exhortations to buy this or that record and invective against the record companies (playing a band who couldn't secure a deal in Britain, he says it because they don have a member in the cast of East-Enders) in the unmistakable tones of the proselytiser, giving his show the feel of a pirate station. The ads in between sound surreal shopping malls and Alice On Ice; George, who composed the rousing theme tune for Have I Got News For You, is a bit of a bully and seems to get off on being a Luddite, but by god he loves the. music and it shows. Otherwise You And Yours (Radio 4) included a useful report on how the credit card companies disclaim legal responsibility for faulty goods and services provided by foreign companies.

And Virgin 1215 is demonstrating its anti-sexism and its way of addressing women with its current ho-ho poster advertising campaign which reads "Don't disappoint your girlfriend with your frequency Anne Karpf IMMICK-DETBCTOR I at the ready, I didn't start off well-disposed -mi to Are You Still Awake? (Radio 3), a series of nightly 15-minute comic plays by Russell Davies set in bed, recorded in bed, and based on the idea that talking lying down sounds different. Whatnext the radio snuff play (authentic aural gore And getting "real-life" couples to play fictional ones seemed a daft, titillating conceit, ensuring only that we'd be scrutinising then-voices for signs of extra intimacy or venom, or in case they slipped in the odd "see you at home later for a But in the event, two of the three I heard worked a treat not because of the bed, or even the coupledom, but on account of the quality of those old stalwarts, the writing and acting. The first was a rum little wartime piece in which a civil servant husband (Timothy West) and his wife (Prunella Scales), settling down for the night in their Morrison shelter, swap troubling daytime experiences. Witty, but not the kind of Cowardesque banter which There was a sense of injury which sat oddly with Vivian Stanshall's eccentricity two-handed playlets so often become, and it was allowed to meander in an interesting and unpredictable fashion. Davies also recognised the way that one member of a couple invariably launches into a major life-topic last thing at night, just as the other is about to drop off.

The second playlet about a couple lost on a hike and forced to bed down in sleeping-bags seemed contrived and lifeless by comparison, but the third was engaging: an actor and his actress wife, in theatrical digs owned by an archetypal dragon-ish landlady, whisper about the evening's performance of Macbeth in which the old knight playing the thane veered off into Hamlet. Both writing and acting (Imelda Staunton and Jim Carter) were exuberant; Carter, what with the recent Cracker and this, is now beginning to show his range after years of typecasting as Mr Nice Guy (here he was Mr Nearly Nice Guy). And though actors rarely manage to giggle convincingly, these did. Prunella Scales turned up again in good form in Perry Pon-tac's The Lunchtimc Of The Gods (Radio 4), a hilarious com vignettes and who in 1927 helped form The Association for Real Art. In the Stalinist era, he and his friends were arrested for writing socially irrelevant "trans-sense" poetry.

On release Kharms concentrated on children's literature but was re-arrested in 1941 and died a year later in the psychiatric wing of a prison hospital. The conflict between artistic experiment and state orthodoxy was the theme of Dusty Hughes's Futurists at the National in 1986. But where that contextualiseda whole movement, Complicity's show concentrates purely on re-creating Kharms's work. We see, for instance, a "tragic vaudeville" in which a seducer unaccountably loses his penis. We get a chilling Kafkaesque sketch in which a furtive lecher and his accomplice are arrested by a man in a.

black coat. But the bulk of the two- apartment-block voyeurs. Gerard McBurney's score, for eight on-stage musicians, consciously echoes Shostakovich, with whom Kharms may have considered working. And Tim Hatley's solid-seeming set finally dissolves into a cascade of fluttering paper as if in protest against the suppression, until recent times, of Kharms's work. But, in the end, the evening raises as many problems as it solves.

Does what Neil Corn-well calls the "skeletal terseness" of Kharms's prose gain or lose by being expansively theatricalised? And although the scarecrow-like writer-hero and his alter ego arc on stage throughout, don't we need biographical data to make sense of his work? Why also is there no reference to the fellow-experimenters who worked and suffered with him? What you get is an intriguing Kharms kaleidoscope celebrating the persecuted lone visionary. What you don't get as in Hughes's Futurists or Pownall's Master Class is any real reflection on the role of the artist in an oppressive society. For that reason the show remains an elliptical spectacle. At the Lyttelton POP A Tribe Called Quest Subterania SeanO'Hagan MANY ways, A Tribe Called Quest are one of hip-hop's best-kept secrets. Their debutalbum, People's Instinctive Travels.

one of the defining moments of that short-lived era. Since then. Quest have become a rap group Nancy Banks-Smith THINGS have gone from bad to worse in Revelations (Granada) and I'm not just talking about the acting. The bishop has murdered his pregnant mistress and legged it from the scene as lithely as a cassock permits. By wearing his vest back to front, he hopes to throw the police off the scent.

The moral of this is never tell a bishop you are going to expose him in the Sunday funnies while you are standing at the top of a flight of stairs, swinging from a chandelier or occupying any position from which you might possibly plummet. I cannot let this season of goodwill pass without announcing that, against the stillest competition from Carlton, Revelations has won the 1994 Turkey of the Year Award. A highlight of the presentation for which many tickets are still available in all parts will be Spike Milli-gan's famous, if indelicate, impression of the last turkey in the shop. What the bishop urgently needs now is a hot defence lawyer and I suggest wee Georgie More of Edinburgh, the subject of One Angry Man (The Trial BBC2). I don't know if you are familiar with the dog Bartholomew? He was a Scottie.

all whiskers and eyebrows, who turned up in Wodehouse with his teeth embedded in a passing policeman. He reminds me powerfully of George More. George makes up in hairiness what he lacks in stature. Ginger whiskers seem to leap from every orifice. The word bristle comes to mind.

His combative-ness is notorious. He doesn't reserve it for policemen and prosecution witnesses but spreads it generously around. As Murdo, one ot'his young team of lawyers said: "George would have difficulty getting more experienced people because they've all heard he can be difficult." By the end, all five had left. A few spoonfuls of George just to get the flavour. "There's an assumption of guilt in the whole setup" "Judges cannot conceive the possibility of police officers lying their heads off' "I find very few criminal clients unpleasant people.

The vast ma jority are there because they're poor There a tond beliel whose stature among the cognoscenti has grown the more they are overlooked by the mainstream. In the claustrophobic confines of the aptly-named Subterania, the show kicked offin defiantly low-key mode as Tip and Phyfe ambled on stage and, without ceremony, kicked into a free-form rap. If, on record, Quest are one of hip-hop's more iconoclastic groups, their live set kept to a more well-worn path. Pounding bass lines and cut up minimalist samples underpinned in-your- QGGQ2EQ9 hour evening consists of a staging of Kharms's longest tale, The Old Woman, in which the writer seeks to dispose of a putrefying corpse occupying his flat. This shows Complicity at their most inventive.

They bring out the echoes of Dos-toevsky and Pushkin as the penurious hero frenziedly cries: "My life lias ended with this old crow." At the same time, there is a wild Ionesco absurdity about the attempt to stuffthe recalcitrant corpse theastonish-ing rubber-limbed Kathryn Hunter into a suitcase. And the subsequent train journey, in which the suitcase is stolen while the hero is on the toilet, is marvellously evoked through swaying movement and the scuffing of the surface of a guitar. Technically, the show is highly sophisticated. Director Simon McBurney deploys the 12-strong cast with great fluidity to conjure up everything from bread queues to can be read vertically down each side or round the circumference. It's an astonishing ploy.

His wordplay, John Pattison's music and Jan Bee Brown's set are fused into a brainteaser of infinite ingenuity that, with the company as cheerleaders, lures young audiences into bursting response. With our help the group gets its hit and so does Ayckbourn's ingenious stagecraft and vivacious company. Stephen Joseph Theatre in the Round (0723-370641) until 7 January. TillHH.T THEATRE deCom-plicite have a great talent for rediscovery: in The Street of Crocodiles, they wove magical theatre out of the stories of Bruno Schulz. But in Out Of A House Walked A Man at the Lyttelton, they have set themselves an even harder task: finding a coher-ent structure in the fragments and prose miniatures of the Russian absurdist.

Daniil Kharms (1905-42). What you get is a show whose technical audacity often out strips its elliptical content. In a sense, it is a Catch-22 situation. You need to know something about Kharms fully to appreciate the show. But for most people seeing the show will precede reading the excellent programme or buying Kharms's Incidences in the bookshop.

Briefly, he was a St Petersburg eccentric a mixture of Tristan Tzara and Lewis Carroll who wrote poems, sketches, prose BALLET Royal Ballet Royal Opera House Judith Mackrell NO NEW Michael Clark ballet, no Darcey Bussell dancing the Adagio in Balanchine's Symphony in a cluster of last-minute cast changes and injuries. People who had got excited about the Royal Ballet's latest triple bill when it was first advertised might well have felt there wasn't much left of it by Thursday night. Luckily they only had to sit through a few minutes of Ashley Page's fearful Symme tries to know they stul had very good reason for being there. Page vast and exhilarating interpretation of John Adam's score looked wonderful when it was premiered last June and in its second season it has grown tighter and more immense. The taut, humming group sequences have become more disciplined, the choreography sharp direc tional changes are more briskly arti culated and we register even more vividly the powerfully coiled spring of energy the ballet operates from.

Individual move ments curve implacably on themselves then fly apart with hazardous force, groups of dancers mass and separate as if dragged by magnetic fields and the whole piece builds, subsides and rebuilds until the stage can barely contain its emotional and physical pressure. Irek MuKhamauov was both enigmatic and electrifying as the ballet catalyst; Deborah Bull was beautifully, intelligently dangerous and Tetsuya Ku-makwa had me muttering oaths and imprecations at the demonic fury of his dancing. His hurtling jumps twisted so violently mid-air it seemed he must do himself an internal injury, his pirouettes so sleekly controlled, they looked powered by secret engine. Kumakwa actually seemed set to hijack the entire evening since he danced in every piece and became possessed by more audacious devils every minute. penalty points and a wee fine.

Legally, he had not caused her death. A technicality. face raps that hadlittlein common with the deceptively lazy lyrical delivery that is perhaps their key signature. Both Bonita Applebum and Can I Kick It? were enlivened by surreal call-and-response interludes that had more in common with the interstellar nursery rhymes of Sun Ra than the usual showbiz routines that fill out most over- extended rap shows. One for the faithful, then.

Thecurious should check out their unimpeachable back catalogue for the full Tribal experience. HQ fa iF.T.MIf.H'i M.UJJ.n.TJ fi kjKQJJJUl (SJJJ2J) Sf IJAXOS (WW OXFORD CAMERATA "Voices like Angels" thus spoke Classic CD Magazine of this superb group Such desperado virtuosity was naughty in the Balanchine which is a celebration of the company and its ballerinas, not a rce-f or-all for the men. Nicola Tranah, replacing Deborah Bull, dances well but hasn't the knack of projecting the fact, while a tentative Rachel Whitbred, replacing Darcey Bussell. doesn't yet have a sufficiently regal technique it's hard to swagger when you're suffering from nerves. Syl vie Guillem on the other hand, looks as if she's never had an anxiety attack in her life and the closing duet in William Forsythe's Herman Schmerman (replacing the scheduled but unfinished Clark ballet) is tailor-made for her brand of star quality.

The shocking ease with which she can flip her foot up to her ear or fold up her joints is perfect for choreography that turns the classic pas de deux into a louche argument. Guillem slouches round the stage then launches into flights of treacherous, put-down virtuosity. She is both wickedly droll and wickedly brilliant and she sweetly wipes the floor with Adam Cooper despite his very funny and sexy portrayal of her surly piece of rough. THEATRE The Musical Jigsaw Play Scarborough Robin Thornber WHY? is tlie name of a pop group who have dropped through the bottom of the charts. To climb out, they have to piece together a new number with the help of singer Jetta and most of the audience.

Alan Ayckbourn's new play for kids and their families reworks the simple pleasures of parlour games, jigsaw puzzles and the singalong into a display of dramatic cunning. The challenge is to solve rid dles set by an enigmatic, electronic Bamboozler involving the audience in a tonal jigsaw which builds into a word pyramid that iS OD TALUS I 1 Mass for Kour Voices 11 ONLY Heavenly music, at a down to earth price! Everybody can afford to be a collector of fine music with NAXOS the world's leading classical budget label. AVAILABLE AT: OUR PRICE, VIRGIN, TOWER, WH SMITH, ANDYS RECORDS, HMV, AND ALL GOOD RECORD STORES. oc 4 pdye cdtdlugui' obtdinjljlc l(un) the jbuvi' Ijy null (toin Oopt CNI, Ndxoi Promotions, PO Box 576, stifltieldStu ay nn mm JV BRIAN KAY'S SUNDAY MUSIC AND REQUESTS..