The Independent from London, Greater London, England • 36

25 SEPTEMBER 1997 EYE ON THURSDAY 0 DANCE They can Trock till they drop Les Ballets Trockaderos Peacock Theatre, London As I sat in the dress circle of the Peacock Theatre last week, there was a soft, snuffling noise behind me: it was the strange and lovely sound of a dance critic weeping with laughter. The Trocks can have that effect. Their first mixed programme got off to a broadly comic start with a parody of Act 2 of Swan Lake a smart choice. Although the humour is a little obvious in places, it assures the audience that they are there to enjoy themselves and sets them up for an evening of more subtle delights. La Esmeralda, although occasionally given an airing by the Kirov, is seldom danced in Britain, yet unfamiliarity was no barrier to either hysteria or genuine admiration and by the time we got to Paquita the audience was quite reconciled to long periods with a straight face.

A large contingent from the Royal Ballet were sat in the circle and Darcey Bussell and chums could be heard squealing with delight at the balances and gasping with sympathy at each hop on pointe. Robert Carter (alias Olga Supphozova) was particularly impressive. I've certainly seen it danced worse and it wasn't by a man. Supphozova was out in force again on Tuesday, appearing in three of the ballets in the company's second programme. The evening opens once again with a familiar classic, this time Act 2 of Giselle.

The Trocks' Wilis are a creepy bunch of balletic zombies with partially decomposed faces and tutus as grey and grungey as old net curtains. Myrtha is played with indomitable cruelty by the beaky and statuesque Ida Nevasayneva (Paul Ghiselin) and Giselle by the diminutive Fifi Barkova (Roland Deaulin), whose nifty pointework and soulful manner were by turns heartbreaking and hilarious. The highlights came in the middle of the evening when Robert Carter powered his way through Grand pas Classique, which was played straight for the most part until the ballerina took to carting her partner around the stage in her arms. Go for Barocco is a wickedly observed pastiche of the sassy neo-classicism of George Balanchine. Mr was noted for his affection for lean, leggy dancers in diamond earrings and practice clothes, but he gets more than he bargained for in Jai Williams, whose legs go on for a fortnight and whose high split jumps let his body sail across the stage with the angled menace of a javelin.

The evening concludes with Parisienne. It was interesting to see the audience laughing like drains at jokes that actually exist in Massine. They wouldn't laugh that loudly at a ballet company doing it partly because they've lost their inhibitions but largely because the Trocks have greater comic gifts. Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. To Sunday, Peacock Theatre, London WC2 (0171-314 8800) Louise Levene DON'T SAY YOU Utagawa the NFT.

Grab the Hiroshige's exhibition opportunity before the of coloured woodcuts Empire disappears. showing Japanese landscape. Royal Academy, Piccadily, WI to 28 Sept. Price £3.50. Information: 0171-300 5676 The Empire Strikes Back Special Edition showing at 2.30pm and 8.30pm at THEATRE ROBBIE JACK I EA At a wonderful loss for words Blue Heart compulsion can cause.

It focuses on Royal Court Downstairs at the Duke of Derek, a boyish-looking 40-year-old York's, London man (superb Jason Watkins) who cons elderly women into believing Now pushing 60, Caryl Churchill that he is the son they gave up for continues to be the most playfully adoption. The injury this inflicts on and profoundly innovative drama- everyone's sense of identity (intist in the country. Blue Heart, the cluding, crucially, Derek's) is regnew double bill at the Royal Court, istered in the gradual disintegration combines high-spirited formal fool- of the play's language. ing with deep, troubled yet elusive Your ears twitch incredulously feelings. This is theatre joyously re- when, out of the blue, the words juvenating itself in a production by "blue" and "kettle" start to crop up Max Stafford-Clark that's a mira- in the dialogue as replacements for cle of buoyant, biting precision and whatever word the character actuunderlying melancholy.

ally means. At first, this has a smack "Heart's the first pan- of the kind of substitution game chilel in this thematic diptych, plays a dren play and you wait for its logic hilarious waiting game with the idea to emerge. But it becomes apparent of what it is to anticipate something. that a closer analogy would be with The world of Victoria Wood collides a computer virus spreading through with that of Ionesco, as a spoofy the whole piece. By the end, comsoap-opera trio of sixtysomethings munication has broken down to the (bickering married couple and sis- desolate blurting out of bits only of ter-in-law) prepare for their daugh- the two usurper words.

The world ter's imminent homecoming from ends not with a bang but with hicyears spent in Australia. cuped single letters. Acute to the fact that to wait ner- You could make a marvellous vously is also to imagine and to fan- straight play with the basic materitasise, Churchill keeps stopping, al: the central character's bleak rewinding and restarting the action psychology and the intriguingly varfrom different antecedent points, ied reactions of the conned ladies and sending it off on absurdist al- from Anna Wing's Joyce Grenternative routes (cue the arrival of fellish 80-year-old, who can't rea 10ft ostrich). It is Death, of course, member what she felt at the time not a daughter, whose ring at that remains a blue to Avon Lady-doorbell we sit in fun- the complex competitiveness of the damental dread of a consideration two women, riskily brought togethsoberingly threaded into the up- er by Derek, who each think that the roarious proceedings. With a splen- other is just his adoptive mother.

didly dotty daintiness, the cast The linguistic tricksiness backtrack and fast-forward, laying Churchill has added does not get in and unlaying a table more times than the way but takes us to the heart of it's had hot dinners placed on it. The the theme by, as it were, performpiece must be a nightmare to play, ing it on the level of language: subbut they play it like a dream. stitution and loss in a play about Darker in tone, the second play, substitution and loss. A truly weird "Blue dramatises both our and wonderful evening. deep imaginative need for alterna- To 18 Oct.

Tickets 0171-565 5000 tives to reality and the damage this Paul Taylor CLASSICAL MUSIC Keeping it all in the family Kurt Sanderling Conducts RFH, SBC, London The first Philharmonia concert of the current South Bank season saw Kurt Sanderling conducting solid, patient and characteristically considered accounts of Beethoven, Schumann and Brahms. Beethoven's overture Leonora No 3 was kept very much on an even keel, with sober speeds, hushed string playing in the quieter passages, a rather four-square off-stage trumpet and a vigorous coda scuffed by untidy strings. Mitsuko Uchida gave a memorable account of the Schumann piano concerto, powerfully italicised in the opening chords, fluid and malleable in accompanying passages (her response to the Intermezzo's heart-rending cello melody especially tender) and with a flowing cantabile in the central episodes of the first movement. Uchida would cross her arms during tutti passages as if shielding herself from the cold; she looked just a little fragile, even vulnerable, and yet her command of the situation was absolute, her overall interpretation precisely focused. Sanderling conducted a sympathetic accompaniment, but his handling of Brahms's Symphony No 2, while typically structure-conscious.

was oddly featureless. Best was the string playing especially in the second and fourth movements. and that rather ominous passage in the slow movement where the trombone and bass-tuba answer each other. But phrase- shaping elsewhere sounded prosaic and the finale only caught fire in the closing bars. It wasn't so much sluggish tempi that put the dampers on, as what seemed like a lack of involvement untypical of such a master Brahmsian.

As it was, Kurt Sanderling's distinguished life and career had already been celebrated on Sunday night in a Wigmore Hall concert marking his 85th birthday. Mitsuko Uchida was the prompting inspiration and she opened the programme with forceful, big-toned accounts of Schubert's Fifth and Third Impromptus. The Fifth features some exquisite dialoguing between the bass and the treble, which Uchida charted with unusual urgency, rushing or retreating as the musical mood dictated. Her warm, fluid touch brushed at the mellifluous major but. again.

not without a suggestion of anguish especially in the central section. The evening also included contributions from Sanderling's wife Barbara and from two of his sons, cellist Michael and conductor Stefan. Michael joined Uchida in Brahms's heroic Second Cello Sonata, a fiercely assertive rendition marked by bold piano playing and a vibrant if somewhat nasal cello tone. After the interval, the Wigmore's compact stage was filled to capacity by 12 wind-players of the Philharmonia and Barbara Sanderling on double-bass for a robust, if unsubtle, reading of four movements from Mozart's great Serenade No 10 (or Gran Partita). I've heard more sensitive readings of the heavenly Adagio, and the promised sixth movement was for some reason replaced by the zestful Finale, but it was an invigorating encounter none the less and the audience raised a hearty cheer as Uchida reappeared to present the venerable Kurt with a well-deserved bouquet.

Rob Cowan £5.75 £4.75 members. Box Office: 0171-928 3232 Wall Of Sound: Second XI. Singles from the likes of Mekon, The Wiseguys, Les Rythmes Digitales, Dirty Beatniks and Akasha. THURSDAY'S TICKETS We are giving away 10 copies of the new Ministry of Sound Dance Nation IV. Name and address to MoS, Alister Morgan on Clubs, 1 Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London E14 5DL.

We have 10 pairs of tickets for the new Atom Egoyan fim, The Sweet Hereafter, plus a CD soundtrack plus a copy of Russell Banks's novel (Vintage Apply to 15 Percy Street, London W1P 9FD..