Evening Standard from London, Greater London, England • 136

Reviews EVENING STANDARD Unsettling spells in a stormy tease of a tale 56 MONDAY 11 MAY 1998 Bad Weather The Other Place Stratford NICK CURTIS fathers where women are martyred and bad boys are indulged Why does Jamie take the rap for Luke? Why does Agnes take the problems on her shoulders and why does she fall for Luke despite a 40-year age gap? Holman keeps us urgently guessing The great strength of his script is the sympathy he generates for these characters None of them save serene and sexy Agnes is particularly likeable yet he makes us feel the charisma of Luke the charm of abrasively lippy Rhona This is a sustained tease of a play spun tauntingly out to three hours by characters repeatedly asking each other for few more min- Inner thoughts hung out to dry: Paul Popplewell and Susan Engel and Jamie this duo summon Agnes (Susan Engel) who was nanny when she was growing up as wait for it an heiress to a French vineyard which only causes further problems of misapplied affection As the action switches between the council-estate squalor of Teesside and the sunny tranquillity of the Champagne region Holman depicts a world without whether filial or sexual is a random thing beyond the explanations of logic Or come to that of an RSC playwright Like love Bad Weather is a strange fascinating and unsolvable mystery In rep: box-office 01789295623 of their scenes The unsea-sonal weather that rains snows and hails down on Ashley stark sets is a metaphor for the unusual and often unwise associations the characters make The languid atmosphere of production emphasises that love WHEN a young Middlesbrough yob tells an ageing courtly Frenchwoman that she's than it feels like a pretty fair summation of Robert Holman's play Bad Weather is an odd enigmatic but strangely hypnotic work that shoots off fbom its social-realist setting to explore all sorts of weird byways of affection The characters float through Steven muted production as if drugged or dreaming with their inner thoughts hung out on display hard to comprehend going on harder still not to care The aforementioned yob Luke (Paul Popplewell) has inflicted GBH on a policeman then let his relatively innocent friend Jamie (Ryan Pope) take the fall and go to prison mum Kay (Susan Brown) is tom apart realising she always loved the psychotic Luke more than her own son pregnant girlfriend teenage sister Rhona (Emma Handy) moves in with her So does Noel (Barry Stanton) a married emotionally needy juror who sympathised with case In a bid to help Kay Rating adequate good very good outstanding poor The Euro siren who screams blue murder APART from the ability to scream blue murder in even more European languages than Ulrika Jonsson a performance by Diamanda Galas brings out an audience who like their cults on the grim side of dark true that Galas exerts a hypnotic allure for voyeurs as she rails against the injustices of Aids with earth-scorching venom but the inky goths and moustachioed chaps at Concert for the Damned board piano and microphone) which enable her to perform on the fringes of studious insanity She began with Phil Iron Lady (a metaphor for the electric chair) and then got really gloomy as she took on Baudelaire Willie Dixon and Motown reducing all to rubble Her shrieking like an operatic banshee is part of the catharsis although her classical piano playing which nods towards Stravinsky and Satie is an even more effective weapon when applied to Paolo painftil Supplies a Mia Madre Galas also does the blues or should one call them the reds? 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