The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 30

THE WEEK I 7 Saturday September 28 1996 The Guardian Michael Billington sees new life and new meaning breathed into Edward Albee's classic Who's afraid of politics? ii i i i i wim i ii i i in i i i iiiii in iii ii I III I Mill Mil II Will II III! II I MIM IMMWHIMI Hill II I Mill I Hi I I I ll 11 ff I Hill I Ml I I I IIIII I II 11,11 I III IWIHMIIB II I 1 I I llllll IHHl I I 4ft I llll II its ijuai irrn nw iwwn ir ihhii mu iiii I ii 1 1 iii ii iiiimimi I ii I llll iiiiii i I in ii i vi n.t HnwiraK and distrait like elderly actresses forgetting their lines and bursting into tears if bullied. It is difficult for the layman to tell a featherheaded sheep from an shrewd, deep thinking sheep but a dog knows the difference. Sid came smiling through to win the heat. The suspense of it all kept me on the edge of my bed. Score: no snores.

Two new comedy series on BBC 2: the return of Shooting Stars With Reeves And Mortimer and All Stand For Julian Clary, who has moved sideways from Channel 4. Shooting Stars is surreal, anarchic and extremely rowdy. The camera seems to be having a fit. According to the second law of thermodynamics everything in time is reduced to chaos and, boy, has the second law got it right or what? Snore factor one. Perfect repose difficult because of the racket.

Julian Clary, an odd amalgam of Dame Hilda Bracket and Princess Diana, mediated between mildly warring factions. "A charming if modest terrace," as he put it, had fallen out over hanging baskets. A close harmony group had broken up in discord. He called it "A load of camp old nonsense from the BBC." I call that harsh. One snore.

English Country Garden (BBC 2), a wander through posh plots, is more dreamy than sleepy. Rosemary Verey must be 78 and comes from a different world. The language, the accent are a little different too. She said "Gardening is so a word that my mother-in- law used to use lenitive. I don't think it's in an English dictionary but it means soothing." She says "Oh gosh!" and "Amazing!" and "Orf and "Orfen." The fingers pushing seeds into peat and perlite wear diamond rings.

In this world there is usually a temple at the end of the vista and a head gardener in the background has got tremendous She and Christopher Lloyd have had world enough and time to create great gardens. As they wandered through his garden at Great Dixter, their grey heads well below the level of the blazing flowers, they talked about September has such a beautiful light, so obliging, so kind You thought serene old age and, then, the dying of the light. the early hopes of the Kennedy era. I am not suggesting that people are drawn to Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? by its politics: simply that the play is much more than a marathon bickerfest and that Albee is an impassioned social critic. Two years ago he told me that he liked plays to be "useful, not merely decorative" and that he feared that America was in danger of becoming "a non-participatory This was clearly a man deeply concerned by the state of the Union.

In Howard Davies he has also found an ideally sympathetic interpreter who understands that Albee's play is both domestic and cosmic. John Napier's set is a cluttered campus living-room that, like the play itself, opens up on to wider territory. And the actors visibly grasp that the play offers a battle of ideas as well as egos. David Suchet's marvellous George is both a ruthless games-player and a man who hides his sense of disappointment behind a sardonic exterior, watching him run intellectual rings round the hapless Nick, it struck me that George was the ancestor of all those Simon Gray academics who conceal their hurts behind a relentless one-upmanship. What the lustrous Diana Rigg brings to the party as Martha is also much more than the conventional blowsy drunk: she presents us with a highly intelligent woman conscious of her power as the college president's daughter, yet who at the same time is haunted by self-disgust.

The most moving moment in Rigg's stunning performance is her admission that George has made "the hideous, the hurting, the insulting mistake of loving me and must be punished for Lloyd Owen and Clare Holman as Nick and Honey also prove that their characters are much more than punchbags for the older heavyweights. It is very much a team show in which all four characters seem to embody variant aspects of Albee's vision of the collapsed American Dream. Some say it's too long. But, as in Long Day's Journey Into Night, the epic breadth seems to me the point. We become part of the ritual in which the characters slug it out until a kind of exhaustion sets in.

Albee had O'Neill in mind but I am not sure that his is not the greater play. In Long Day's Journey O'Neill dramatises his own family's tribulations: Albee's achievement is that he puts on stage a much larger slice of his scarred and fatigued Republic. And to those who complain, like Sam Goldwyn, that messages are for Western Union, one can only retort that Albee himself once THE title is a godsend: Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? But what is Edward Albee's play really about? Marriage? Language? Truth and illusion? All those things. But watching Howard Davies's exhilarating revival at the Almeida I realised that Albee's intimate epic is a highly political play about America. Initially labelled an Absurdist, Albee is really a committed social commentator.

Like all good plays, Virigina Woolf operates on any number of levels. At its most basic it is a black Strindbergian comedy not unlike The Dance Of Death about a couple who exist in a permanent state of love-hate. George and Martha, a New England professor and his older wife, bitch, booze, flay each other alive and role-play for their unfortunate guests: a young biologist and his up-chucking wife. Expert at probing each other's weaknesses, George and Martha exist in a state of chronic dependence: their marriage is sustained not just by the idea of a fantasy son but by a paralysing fear of solitude and death. But Albee's play is political metaphor as much as studied domestic realism.

As Christopher Bigsby shrewdly notes in the programme, the very names of George and Martha evoke the Washing-tons, the college itself is stiuated in New Carthage and George, while his wife is playing adulterous games in the kitchen, curls up with Spengler's The Decline Of The West. Even the choice of professions is highly significant. Unable to face reality George, as a historian, seeks comforting patterns in the past while Nick, as a biologist, is credited with a plan for chromosome-alteration that will produce perfect specimens in the future. Not to exclude religion, Albee reminds us that Nick's father-in-law was a travelling preacher who reconciled God and Mammon. You can't accuse Albee of lack of ambition: he is writing about the decline of western civilisation.

If anything I find his views too narrowly determinist. George, using history as form of escape, clearly represents the failure of humanism while Nick is meant to embody a totalitarian future that destroys diversity But, even if the sense of doom is oppressive, one should remember that Albee wrote the play in the early 1960s when America was slowly emerging from the narcoleptic Eisenhower years and when peace was seen to depend on the balance of terror. Maybe the fact that George and Martha finally acknowledge the need to swap illusion for reality is even a symbol of slKBskkKKtkKmKK 'r -'EssflssssSLEsssBBBssElEsssEsssssBssBsssflBssssa BtmmBBsBBmBBslmmBmmeSaBBY isBr ''fiBssssEsBsEsssBSfBssssssEsEssjEEssssssssssssssEsfl RICHARD MILDENHALL Drink it in Diana Rigg produces a stunning performance as Martha Sleep is critical SO THIS lad turned up apparently, from the look of him, selling velvet pictures to finance his theological studies. No so. This one had come to retune my video for Channel 5.

Now I am a fair judge of a TV engineer. I married one. This looked more like Adrian Mole, aged 13 and three-quarters. He was in a hurry and I was hesitant but he had what the rental company called my Unique Security Number so I let him retune their video. After he had gone, it wouldn't work.

Television critics I don't know if you realise this work almost wholly from video cassettes. So, with my main video out of action, 1 withdrew to my second line of defence, the video in my bedroom. The only problem with watching TV in bed is that you fall asleep, the purest kind of criticism. I shall, therefore, rate Friday's television on its snooze factor. You might expect One Man And His Dog (BBC 2) to have the highest snooze rating.

All those sheep. Not a bit of it. For the first time it fielded a sheepdog called Sid. Sheepdogs are not called Sid. Sidney, Come Home! starring Elizabeth Taylor just doesn't sound right.

Like princes of the blood, sheepdogs have a limited choice of names and Sid's not one of them. He was instantly marked out as a pariah. Robin Page, the presenter who looks like Nigel in EastEnders, called him The Outsider. How would Sid measure up to the more correctly named Cap "son of the famous The sheep were Swaledale, which tend to be vague, grey Berger: a joke! THE QUESTION of the week is, does John Berger have a sense of humour? Berger isn't synonymous with clowning his talents lie more at the expository end of the spectrum, sometimes just this side of precious. But Will It Be A Likeness? his Radio 3 feature, seemed to be heading towards new territory.

Viz the opening sentence: "Last week I talked about the dog." Consult Radio Times: last week Berger talked about nothing. "A number of listeners have sent me faxes." You don't fax John Berger you send him a quilled letter. "The dog is the only animal with a historical sense of time, but he can never be a historical agent." Whoa, John Berger is making a joke. It's hard to tell, of course, because Berger serious makes the kind of aphoristic pronouncement that Berger prankster here makes, but soon it sounds as if he's guying his own sententiousness. He suggests that painting works better on radio than television because every painting has its own kind of silence, butterflies too have their own particular silences, etc.

Watch out Armando Iannucci, there's a wit about. But it couldn't last. Berger overplayed the fax joke "Excuse me, a fax" (sound of fax). And for jokes you need a light touch. Here Berger adopted a kind of stereo comic dialectic, he became his own devil's advocate, chiding himself for "empty leftist rhetoric" and being "a nostalgic old Of course the comic and the serious can tango together firci.mtTn Judith Mackrell laughs along with The Nutcracker Sweeties, dressed by Jasper Conran Dropping acid sugar plums and libretto don't attempt to be a yarn but slowly unfold through a series of tableaux and visions.

Unfortunately, a yarn is what Kudelka tries vainly to create and he plods through the story with a literalness that both exacerbates its slowness and reduces its revealingly, but coming from this artful polemicist, it seemed unconvincing. Then again I may have got it all wrong Berger might have been (playfully) serious throughout. The piece was billed as his debut as a performance artist, and he made certain near-whimsical attempts at radio magic realism Goya's dog was a running gag which only half came off. Berger is a Marxist with compelling things to say about culture, and an uncompromisingly poetic, elliptical style of delivery that can madden but also enthrall and illuminate. This time, talking about societies where everything is commodi-fied, he cast the odd spot of light, but also resorted to techniques used by those who have to sell their ideas.

Can we have our old Berger back please, or the new one but without the contrived interruptions? Spalding Gray is much more comfortable with the comic but then he's an American. The nomologist has lost at least one layer of angst since he was last on Radio 3: now more famous and father of a boy called Forest (yup), his new series Further Shades Of Gray wasn't as mirthful as the previous one. (If the fellow gets too centred, he will have gained a life and lost an act.) But Gray still talks as others think, and his accounts of interviewing the Dalai Lama and the satisfying terrors of skiing remain cherishable. Inadvertantly, Bob Hescott's play Lost (Radio 4) raises the question not of whether there can be poetry after Auschwitz, but whether there should be plays about it. And Kindertransport notwithstanding, I think the answer is no.

Hescott's attempt to portray a group of Czech Jewish children recalling their path to Auschwitz was, I've no doubt, well-intentioned. But confined within the narrative conventions of the afternoon radio play, and with school dram soc style of child acting, it ended up sounding like the adventures of the Famous Five adding nothing to our understanding of the Holocaust, but diminishing plenty. Reading Martin Gilbert's fine forthcoming book about child Holocaust survivors. The Boys, you see the unmatchable power and integrity of testimony. treatment.

Its cutesy Chinese dance turns into a solo for Madame Sin (Agnes Oaks) with six-inch green nails and ice pick point work. Monica Zamora's Sugar Plum is a forties' siren sashaying on long, long legs and hexing the audience with her vermilion pout. Most comically, the Waltz Of The Flowers is a Come Dancing finale from hell, in which baleful cha-cha queen Chenca Williams keeps trying to upstage the beleagured Joseph Cippola. All of this is set against the tilting skyscrapers and neon signs of Peter Davison's sets and Peter Mumford's sumptuous lighting. And with the score performed live by the excellent Echoes of Ellington band, it's a combination hard to resist.

In cold fact there are passages where Bintley indulges in several high kicks too many and where you wish he'd been less obvious in his lindy, tap and baton-twirling borrowings. A really fresh take on the material could have made this ballet a classic. But Bintley knows well how to keep a dance moving and when the jokes and surprises do come they are hilariously entertaining. Unlike James Kudelka 's. new version of Le Baiser De La Fee, which was also premiering on Thursday.

This is a ballet that even Balanchine confessed he had trouble getting right. Although it tells a story (based on Andersen's The Ice Maiden) Stravinsky's music UNEXPECTED competition to London Fashion Week turned up on Thursday night when Jasper Conran unveiled his fabulous neo-glam-ourpuss collection in Birmingham. It was a strutting, purring, sexy show of tight-waisted tea frocks in acid bright fruit prints, the skirts cut high on the thigh and flaring in a razzle of pleats and petticoats. There were mini bustles in tarty stars and stripes, an evening gown that was a supple slither of cerise and witty black matador jackets teamed with a riot of neon coloured shirts. It was, in fact, David Bintley's new ballet The Nutcracker Sweeties, for which Conran has produced his best dance designs yet.

And the inspiration and the joke of the piece come from the ballet score, in which Duke Ellington wreaks gloriously raunchy havoc on the familiar melodies of Tchaikovsky's Nut cracker Suite. The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy degenerates into a saxophone stripper's num ber; the Waltz Of The Flowers has gone Latin while the Dance Of The Mirlitons sounds as if it's been soused in whisky and has a Jiun-dred-a-day smoking habit. Roil over Tchaikovksy and also roll over Ivanov, because the origi nal 19th-century ballet also gets the JL a and nnhe worked for them. At the Almeida, London (01 71 -359 4404). work's eerie extremes of terror and bliss.

Perhaps most disappointingly he has his dancers run through their most predictable routines Michael O'Hare performs yet another fresh-faced hero, Zamora does her smouldering gypsy number, Leticia Muller is the obvious nubile wife. Kudelka (who's been appointed director of the National Ballet of Canada) is the first guest choreographer to work with BRB since Bintley took over. The point of an outsider, though, is surely to give us a fresh slant on a company, not to repeat what we already know. A J.K. '( metaphors to narrative muddles.

Kadelka is a fluent, sometimes inventive choreographer and he spins passages of beguiling steps. But he frequently repeats himself inexcusably and he rarely pushes his choreography to either paint his characters or to conjure the Funl One of the Halliwells Film Video Guide newly revised definitive film video guide with over 1 ,000 new films, this 12th Edition also includes critics' quotes and reviews, quick reference to the most highly rated films of all time, and lists every Oscar winner since the awards began. 5-rahdtMr parents, Notional BBC teaming Is i BBC Learning tan; Magazine i Halliwell's Film and Video Guide, published on 71096 is now available i at the special price of 15.99 with free UK (rrp 16.99). To order call FREE now on 0500 418 419 or fill In this coupon Please send me copies of Halliwells Film and Video Guide at 15.99 I enclose a cheque PO made payable to 'Guardian Interactive'. Please debit my Access Visa Delta Mastercard Switch Card No.

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