The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 30

Putting the man in Mandy MICHAEL BILLINGTON marvels at Richard Eyre's production of Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman Irony in the soul faintly absurd and infinitely tragic. You see all this in Paul Scofield's magnificent performance as Borkman: his finest since King Lear. With his frock-coat, grey spats and cockatoo-like crest of white hair. Scofield presents us with a man who is a legend in his own mind. Confronted by visitors, he still plays the role of the great tycoon.

He stands with legs firmly astride, with-eringly dismisses Foldal as if he were still in his employ and, when Ella announces she has come to take his son he grandly announces "You've a cast-iron even emotions are described in the debased language of commerce. Scofield's greatness lies in the way he reveals the private turmoil behind the posturing facade. Left to himself, he emits fierce guttural growls and apostrophises the walls of his self-imposed cage. And when, in the last act, he wan- ders out into the ON paper, it looked inviting: on the stage, it is sensational. Richard Byre's production of Ibsen's penultimate play, John Gabriel Borkman, at the National Theatre, combines emotional intensity with rare wit: weave constantly reminded that behind Ibsen's forbidding, bewhis-kered exterior there lurked a master-ironist.

Irony, in fact, is the key to this haunting masterpiece in that dreams are constantly subverted by reality. liork-man. the would-be Napoleon of capitalism, dreamed of having "power over power itself" and harnessing the energies of sea and land: instead he was imprisoned for embezzlement and for eight years has paced the great hall of his echoing mansion in demented, vulpine solitude. But Ibsen's ironic vision extends to all the characters. Bork man's embittered wife, twin-sister.

Ella, fight tooth and claw for emotional and physical possession of the former's son, Krhart, only to lose him to a seductive widow. Paul magnificent performance as his finest King ing. In one theatre, two patients were lying with opened chests waiting for 1 he same donor heart w-hile a gunman demanded, with a fusillade of bullets, that his brother should get it. In another, a surgeon was removing explosive bullets from a policeman. There was a particularly tense moment when the man's heart stopped and the surgeon had to restart it.

there'sa bullet in there!" "Get back, Camille!" "Stop it. he'll It was about now that I began to feel the show should be not Life Support but Shur-rup. The gunman was twitchy shur-rup! You shurrup and you The police and the hospital authorities were failing to fuse into a fine fighting force "You shut up!" "You shut up!" "And you shut And guess what Dr Hun-cock said when, at the end, he was asked how he liked Chicago Hope so far? In this human Punch and Judy show, Chris Penn was uniquely moving as the gunman. Do I really need to tell you where the donor heart finally came from? There were small but showy parts for well meaning nuisances me talk to him! I've got my guitar" "Put me in there! One punch, he's but the award for the most mesmerising supporting role in a medical series goes to the leech won't bite. Well, in fact he i 1 1.

The size of those things. By the way, for Alan and all animal lovers, spiders don't catch melanoma. At least not if the melanoma sees it coming. Meanwhile back in Savannah (ITV) Reece. Peyton and Lane are giving each other big hugs.

Communal hugging seems prevalent among American girls. The Golden Girls have got it down to a fine art but remember, they have been doing it for years. Do not try triple hugs yourself at home. You may smother the littlest one between your bosoms. Savannah is soap in the purest sense of the word.

Not only do the people look as if they were carved out of Lux (Tom is a strikingly successful soap sculpture) but the dialogue is written in toothpaste: "Pardon me for not. following you" "Try to release her from your thoughts" "My biological father then conceded to have my mother as his maid." It's certainly not English. Perhaps its Pepsodent. Scofield's Borkman is since Lear Paul Scofield and Vanessa Redgrave the perfect balance revelation Henrietta butler ter with a vase and clawing possessively at Erhart's body she has the desperation of the dying. But the most memorable image of Redgrave's performance comes in the last act when she sits, hunched and shivering in the snow, listening to Borkman's lunatic fantasies before finally covering up his dead body with a care that bespeaks total enthral-ment.

Everything in Eyre's pro Nancy Banks-Smith OF COURSE, if you are a man called Mandy, it will come out in terrible tantrums. I blame the parents. John Wayne would not have felt the need to shoot all comers if, when the preacher said "Name this child." Mr and Mrs Morrison had not replied Mandy Patinkin. who plays Dr Geiger in Chicago Hope, (BBC1) was in a temper from the off. Alan, the little whispy one, was singing to his baby "Itsy bitsy spicier up a water spout.

Down came the rain and wasied the spider out. Out came the sun. "At this moving moment, Mandy snarled "The spider dies from melanoma because of the sun." This gloomy prognosis weighed on Alan's mind throughout the programme, all through through the business of the kidnapped heart and the exploding policeman. The BBC has reactivated the first series of Chicago Hope. It started up again after a year like a stalled car with an exhilarating bang.

Sky has already shown the first series and half the second. I seem to have missed both. There are a limited number of surgical series any one person can take without being found running down the street in their nightie but I am sorry to have missed this. It is black farce of a high order. Watch suave Dr Watters reassuring two sets of worried relatives.

"Unfortunately, your husband's donor heart has been kidnapped by a man with a gun. And. unfortunately, your son was shot with bullets that explode. We remain hopeful he won't blow up." The relatives stared at him open-mouthed. "We will." he added wildly "keep you appraised," and ran like a rabbit.

But 1 was telling you about Mandy. He was in a particular temper because a newly arrived surgeon. Dr Hancock, had appropriated the donor heart he needed for his own patient. He told him so with maximum offensive-ness. "That took 22 seconds for him to hate you.

It must be a new record," said Dr Watters. "It's not a record," snapped Mandy. All this and they were still running the opening credits. Now we are off and gallop- DANCE Ramfaert Quicksilver Coliseum RAMBERT Dance Company are celebrating their 7Ut birthday and director Christopher Bruce has given them two presents. The first isa season at The Coliseum a venue massively grander than the tiny Mercury Theatre where Ballet Rambert modestly began.

The second is his new work Quicksilver --a tribute to the company's founder Marie Rambert. Quicksilver was Marie's nursery nickname and one of the recurring images in Bruce's work is the straw hat with which she was photographed aged 10. It's a hat which she was forbidden to wear but which she insisted on clutching in her hand, and the mulish expression captured on her face vividly prefigures the juggernaut determination with which she later willed her company to survive. Bruce's dancers take turns wearing this hat, and whoever has it is invested with a quickened energy. But they also play with other costumes and these too havea transforming effect.

Women trying on Edwardian OPERA Alzira Royal Opera House SCHOLARS disparage the rarely performed Alzira, Verdi's 1845 Voltaire-based opera set in 16th century Peru, but this one-off concert performance was a cracker. True, Alzira contains no moment where the clouds part to reveal gleaming glimpses of Verdian treasures to come. But there are two ambitious finales, some higlily imaginative orchestration and a terse expressive aria each for each of the lovers. This was one of those occasions where everything gels on the night. Chief credit for that goes to whoever insisted that the orchestra should perform on the extended stage rather than in the pit, bringing a thrilling immediacy.

The other big plus was the outstanding conducting of Mark Elder, working here Bernard Sumner and Johnny Marr, two of the great icons of eighties pop, tell DAVE SIMPSON what keeps them going Why two's company duction is perfectly pitched: not least Michael Bryant's Foldal who is not some cringing lackey but a man as encased in a fantasy that of being a tragic dramatist every bit as potent as Borkman's. rbsen's point seems to be that we all live in a world poised between reality and dream. And Anthony Ward's design confirms the point in that the Borkmans inhabit a house whose narrow, arrow- be intertwined with the messy death of the Smiths. Perhaps this is why Electronic whatever their mood of the moment will always sound somehow both joyful and yet tragic. "My favourite songs that I've been involved with are the ones where you don't know whether they're happy or sad," concurs Marr.

"Depression makes you feel empty, but melanchol ia or sadness is an emotion that actually fills you up and uplifts you. That was the connection 1 had with Mor-rissey and it's the connection I have with Bernard." Marr despairs of the nationalism and laddishness of current Britpop and says "it takes real strength to be It's not a throwaway statement. The duo grew up in Manchester's bard inner cities of the sixties and seventies. The recent bombing reminded Marr how he was branded an "Irish pig" by classmates who equated being Irish with explosions. He can alsoremembersittingon buses in the rain, face pressed up against the window, star snow-bound forest and imagines the veins of iron beneath the earth, his hands flicker in the air describing the contours of their twists and turns.

Scofield embodies Bork-man's tragedy and, by implica tion, that ot all capitalist tycoons: that dreams of ultimate power are a form of madness. We see Borkman both objectively and subjectively; but that is true of all the characters in the production. Eileen Atkins is breathtakingas Mrs Borkman: a woman no less trapped than her husband. She describes how he prowls up and down in his cage like a sick wolf and then unconsciously echoes his own movements. But Atkins presents us with much more than a hardhearted Gunhild.

She has both a caustic humour and a quasi-incestuous fixation with her son that drives her. when confronted by his loss to another woman, to fall to her knees clutching her face in a Munch-like silent scream. This is acting with the gloves off. The same is true of Vanessa Redgrave's nakedly emotional Ella. She enters clutching a glass of water and popping pills, reminding us the character is terminally sick: threatening to strike her sis- dog's "wee-wee" a word now superceded by except by those still in nappies.

A woman protests about bread rationing by arguing that the rich won't suffer, only the middle-class, the pour, and people with children, and you sense a shift in our use of class terms, from a time when the middle-class could comfortably be bracketed with the poor (a definition to which perhaps we're beginning to return). Though the series mislead-ingly splices together material from many different sources as if they were one. it's also enjoyable and brilliantly researched, having tracked down people involved in key news stories, sometimes matching them with archive material. And presenter Geoffrey Wheeler achieves the almost impossible, with a voice plummy enough to sound like a 1940s newsreader, and modern enough to fit in with the new interviews. The second play in Radio 1's Five in July series.

Marcy Kalian's Everyone Comes to Schiklgruhers'. was except for tile peculiar staged interview with theauthorthat preceded it well-nigh perfect. In a very funny shaggy-dog story. Nathan Water-stone, an aspiring New York film-maker, learns from his Great Uncle Lou that Hitler's half-brother was a pastry-maker in pre-war Vienna, and determines to track him down, to the disgust of his high-earn ingyuppy girlfriend. The joke, essentially, was that Schiklgruber was uninterested in the momentous historical events initiated by his close kin: all he wanted was recognition for his sublime strudel.

One hesitates to call this Woody Allenesuue. if only because Allen is often talked of as though he were the only comic Jew in New York, yet Kalian's hero the knowing shlemiel is straight out of the Allen canon (with a touch of Roth. too). Though some of the other characters tipped over into stereotypes, Kalian was well-served by Ned Chail-let's pacy direction and a fine cast including Kerry Shale as Nathan and Lee Montague as Uncle Lou (with bit parts for Cyril Shapsand David Kossoff). She didn't put a foot wrong until the ending a bit of a damp squib.

Perhaps she didn't want it to finish; neither did I. But Krhart, in his bid for freedom, becomes the toy-boy of Mrs Wilton who will hand im on hen she is good and ready to a bank-clerk's daughter. And even I' oklal. the bank-clerk and aspiring tragic writer, finds that he is run over by a sleigh containing his fugiiive daughter: a sign of Ibsen's black humour. But Ibsen's greatness lies in his combination of Olympian irony and autobiographical pain.

He himself guiltily sacrificed his life to art; and Borkman 's cardinal sin is that he once traded Ella's love to become chairman of the bank. As Ella says in Nicholas Wright's admirable new version. "You murdered my soul and and Ibsen's later plays, from The Master Builder onwards, strike me as withering self-indictments in which cold-heartedness is seen as the ultimate crime. Kyro's production strikes the perfect balance between Ibsen ite irony and self-revelation: these characters are both History in the making Anne Karpf YOU CAN tell a lot about the present from the way it constructs the past. A new Radio 5 series, On This Day.

takes us back to 19-16, via what purports to beadaily news bulletin, made up of 1'ath and British newsreel. archive interviews, magazine advertisements, and news stories read by modern actors. The world they depict is suspiciously like that of today: housing shortages, football hooligans, conflict in Pales i ne. and endless cricket. But of course, this isn't history neat and unmediated.

and one can't help suspecting these issues have been chosen, from the wealth of available material, to draw analogies and suggest a notion of timeless human nature. It also implied that we were hearing ordinary people's preoccupat ions, when in fact it was a little of what someone saw fit to record. The chief changes it highlights are social, and here we got the kind of amusing, items, like "ladies, knit your own A murder victim was last seen, drinking champagne inn Bournemouth hotel with a a man described as an "aiiforce Just as you are about to chuckle, you realise that it has been included precisely for that purpose, to confirm a certain view of the 1910s, as full of Noel Coward-like rakes all strangulated vowels and cigarette holders: this is the past made amusing for the present, a history designed to emphasise thesophistication of today, even if the intention of the series is less to spoof than to illuminate. The more intriguing changes are micro, almost incidental. An adidt talks of a between Ibsenite irony arid self shaped rooms hover between the actual and the surreal.

Coming in the same week as Bryden's Chichester Uncle Vanya, this production also nails one of the great myths about British acting: that it is somehow more physically constrained and emotionally corseted than that of our European neighbors. Watching Ja-cobiand McCowen trading childlike blows in Vanya and Atkins and Redgrave squaring ing at Victorian buildings. "It definitely has an effect on your psyche," he say. "Quite often, you want to be in that place. I suppose it's poignancy." Both felt alienated.

Sumner never knew his father and was an only child. "That lends itself to introspection," he admits, "because you've got too much time to think. I definitely thought too much. I still do." The pair didn't meet unt il the eighties. Both were young men with huge weights on their shoulders.

Marr was (unfairly) blamed for the end of the Smiths, Sumner had never quite come to terms with the pressure of being a frontman. never mind a lyricist. He didn't want people to know what he was thinking. Hence, most Now Order lyrics were notoriously ambiguous. Musically, Sumner and Marr bonded around eight ies electro, the naive club sounds of which form an eerie backbeat to Raise The Pressure.

Marr says there'sa lot of them as teenagers on the album. Sumner, typically, disagrees. up to each other over Erhart's body in John Gabriel Borkman, one realises British acting long ago shed its inhibitions. We can do irony; but as our treatment of Ibsen and Chekhov shows we can also do the rage and volatility that lie beneath in a way that makes these great classic plays live in the present. John Gabriel BorKman in rep at the Lyttelton (0171-928 2252).

"I think if we were the same people it'd be boring," says Sumner. "He's got the bits! lack and I've got the bits he lacks." Today, the pair prefer running round the block to running wild a far cry from the halcyon years of New Order and the Smiths. Marr says: "If you give any 20-year-old a load of money they're gonna drink. And I did." Sumner's hedonism grew out of boredom and a fear of" performance. But both of them talk about how lucky they have been.

Their next touring band includes musicians from the dole. "A lot of my friends are criminals." says Sumner. "They're not stupid people. It's just that there-are no opportunities for them. Society's become divided into those who work and those who don't.

And the Government won't allow you to live another way. If they're gonna bring in the Criminal Justice Act and forbid the travellers to live like that then they've got to provide employment and decent places to live." Now in their thirties, Marr and Sumner are perhaps unique in British pop that their idealism seems purer than ever, while they've never resorted to flag-waving. Stunner's new lyrics are still ambiguous. But his sleeve-notes to the LP are anything but a searing two-paragraph dissection of the education system and mass production. "I'm not a fan of protest songs, but 1 wanted to do something pro-active," ho explains, before embarking on a rare anecdote.

"I met this guy from Salford once, just al ter Ian Cur-tis had died and I'd started with New Order. And he said 'You've got to keep going, mate. You've got to he successful. My father killed himself and 1 found him dead in the flat. I've got no brothers or sis-ters or anything.

But if you keep going all the people like me will keep Which is the most touching thingany-one's ever said tome. And basically, ijust want to move people." gowns acquire a sudden restraint, while men in tartan waitcoats rip through a dance that is part Bournonville, part disco and part Scottish jig. A woman puts on a blazing scarlet frock and runs in short rhapsodic bursts, even while she struggles to maintain her own more funky and belligerent style. These oddly assorted bursts of dance, set to Michael Ny-man's music for The Piano, don't make immediate sense but then delicate threads of emotion start to appear and a deep undertow of nostalgia. The work increasingly feels I ike an oblique and private tribute to Rambert's past, in which the rapturous, scarlet woman becomes a late descendant of Isadora Duncan (Rambert's first dance heroine), the Edwardian ladies become dancers from Jardin mix Lilas (one of the company's first ballets) and the tartan leapers could he groovy Scottish crofters from La Sylphide, Dance history might only survive as dusty costumes and remembered moments of glory.

But when dancers dress up in old ballets they are changed by them just as the works themselves change with every generation that performs them. Judith Mackrell with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment rather than the resident orchestra. Elder did miracles with this problematic piece, and the playing, in the orchestra and the onstage Imndu, was vivid and earthy. As Alzira. the Chilean Veronica Viilaroel seemed at times to be making the most exciting soprano Covent Garden debut since Cou-ubas a quarter of a century ago.

Her big, forward tone has an almost Callas-style drama, and she commands a phrase with immediacy. Keith Ikaia-Purdy gave his impressive all in the tenor role ol'Zamoro. Sorin Co-liban's baritone was dramatic too, but with too much in-your-face vibrato. Alexander Attache, a veteran by comparison, got better and better as the governor Gusmano. This was just what the Verdi festival should be about; committed playing and singing of a neglected but fascinating work.

Don't miss it on Radio 3 next Tuesday. Martin Kettle BEFORE Fantasy Football, there was fantasy pop music, where adolescent pop obsessi ves would spend hours dreaming up line-ups for imaginary bands. In the eighties, any dream line-up would have included Bernard Sumner, casually angelic voice of dancefloor emotionalists New Order, and Johnny Marr. Smiths guitarist, whose plangent chimings gave Morris-sey's misfit wailings the melodies to entrance a generation. So when Marr and Sumner formed Electronic in 1990.

it was no surprise that for many they were a plat inum vision of a pop group. Their 1991 eponymous album was, and is, a guitardance masterpiece. "An unimpeachable pop triumph." raved Melody Maker at the time, and some critics have since pronounced it one of the greatest ever Li's. Five years on. Electronic have released an intriguing new album.

But their fantas-t ic pop landscape has seen dark clouds on its horizon. Sumner has endured the collapse of Factory Records, the label with which he was associated with for 14 years with New Order 'Joy Division and, probably, the demise of that group. The recording of the Order's last album, Republic, was, says Sumner, "intolerably Meanwhile, Marr has seemed a lost soul, holding down a part-time job with The The. while both have undergone unspecified personal difficulties. Still, chirpily chatting on a Monday evening, both Marr and Sumner profess themselves delighted with the new record and personally happier than they've been forages.

Perhaps this is why the album Raise The Pressure sounds de-liciously poised on the brink of both ecstasy and sadness. Or maybe there's more to it. A cruel irony surrounding Electronic is that, were it not for the death of Joy Division singer lan Curtis, Sumner's voice would have remained unheard. Similarly, Marr's own achievements will always WHHHVX as 'iWVUlta Of II la iil si Bernard Sumner (left) and Johnny Marr joyful yet tragic.