Evening Standard from London, Greater London, England • 7

i EVENING STANDARD THURSDAY 12 NOVEMBER 1998 7 The North exacts its revenge for Sir Ian "mmu 91 by Nicholas de Jongh a Guiding Star Cottesloe THIS is alarming Sir Ian McKellen having fled the capital and donated himself as a theatrical gift to the West Yorkshire Playhouse Everyman Theatre retaliates on the behalf by sending down this absolutely dire new melodrama by Jonathan Harvey I am flabbergasted that Trevor Nunn the director and his literary manager Jack Bradley should have acclaimed and welcomed Guiding Star The play strikes me as below the standard of new work regularly presented by those leading London theatres the Royal Court the Bush Hampstead and the National itself Harvey won the Evening Standard Drama Award as Most Promising Playwright in 1994 for his remarkable gay teenage romance Beautiful Thing But the only aspects of that original talent here surviving are his Scouse wit and humour together with a true gift for raw dialogue Otherwise Guiding Star merely resembles a flawed trial-run or rather trial-ramble for a promising Channel 4 Liverpudlian soap opera Harvey bombards us with so many undeveloped plots we could think ourselves plunged into midst There are so many diffhanging incidents you are left breathless with anti-climaxes There is one important saving grace The actors are superlative ough football disaster That Terry abandons his job is just the first of the dramas and comic reliefs with which Harvey liberally drenches the play Tragedy and melodramatics are soap constant companion So too here The death of the neighbours' teenage son from cystic fibrosis the angry estrangement of Terry and his wife Carol the arrest of their gay teenage son Liam with his subsequent outing in the family circle the near collapse of a dinghy containing Liam his brother Laurence and girlfriend inspire a mood of lurid hecticness None of these incidents are fully treated or considered: encounter with a prostitute in an Court bed-sitter is the height of aimlessness People exchange deadly cliches in angry earnest and maintain a front of rueful sometimes amusing comic banter Colin Terry memorably conveys a sharp sense of bottled rage and long-term dejection As his two sons Laurence and gay Liam Kieman and Carl Rice invigorate portraits of ungainly adolescence while Samantha Lavelle as mindless girlfriend is a lovely distraction from the general breast-heaving Ratings: -O adequate it good very good outstanding Xpoor More reviews: Pag 44 They import conviction passion and naturalness to a play which rarely resists cheap tears mawkishness deadly cliches and the flamboyant wearing of hurt hearts on sleeves Otherwise irritations come thick and fast like mosquitoes on a damp summer evening Bruce set is not just gratuitously hideous to look at it evokes little sense of a working-class Liverpool home and cannot adapt itself to the constant cumbersome scene-changes in Gemma awkwardly staged production Apart from a tilted backcloth of clouds the stage is dominated by two grey edifices with doors at the base Centre-stage on and around the sofa are gathered a tangle of story-lines involving the Fitzgibbon family and their neighbours Mami and Charles Sweet In fits and starts it transpires that Terry Fitzgibbon has been traumatised since he and his two young sons were trapped in the Hillsbor Bottled rage: Colin Tierney and Elaine Lordan go some way to redeeming mawkish melodrama picture: alastair muir Loedtom school to ditch CmrricMtam shile director of by JOEL WOLCHOVER turnj5g Education Correspondent the traditional curriculum upside TTI down and repackaging it to make it more accessible to the pupils school site to nearby want to develop a curriculum a which is much more likely to inspire City Technology College A FAILING London school is set to become one of the first in the country to ditch the National Curriculum in a bid to raise standards Hatcham Wood School in Lewisham which was in danger of being closed down and sold to another school nearby is now to be totally revamped Among the changes being agreed with Department of Education officials is a brand new timetable which does not follow national guidelines It will be the first school in London to be granted permission to scrap the National Curriculum and only the third in England The others are in Sheffield and Newcastle Althea Efun- young people who are at the moment switched off from education and motivate them so they have a lust for Plans include using the National Lottery as a tool for teaching maths and asking pupils to study the adverts shown during Coronation Street This year 13 per cent of pupils left Hatcham Wood with no qualifications at all and only 14 per cent of GCSE candidates gained five good grades The national average was 46 per cent The school where high numbers of pupils do not speak English as their first language and many have special needs has failed two inspections by education watchdog Ofsted Parents were outraged when they discovered that the council was considering selling the funded directly by the Department of Education Councillors have now decided on a under which Hatcham Wood will close and reopen with a new name a new governing body and new uniforms for the 650 pupils A new will also be appointed with the offer of a £70000 salary A spokesman for Lewisham said that the demands of running a large inner-city secondary school justified the financial rewards on offer The new name will be the fourth which the school has had in its 20-year history Weight Problems? New treatments for Weight Control are now available in the UK from medicentre A medicentre you can be sure that our GPs and nurses will thoroughly review your needs and recommend your best course of action in conjunction with a balanced diet and exercise For more information on weight control or regular GP services including health screens impotency tests vaccinations and other services call at any of our London clinics at Victoria Euston and Waterloo Stations and Oxford Street Plaza or Sixth time of asking for job nobody wants EDUCATION chiefs are desperate to find a suitable applicant for a £900-a-week job that nobody seems to want writes John Taylor The Islington primary school that Tony Blair sent his children to is making a sixth attempt to recruit a new head teacher St Joan of Arc Roman Catholic primary in Northolme Road Highbury has been without a head teacher for more than a year Now in a desperate bid to fill the vacancy it is being advertised at a higher salary up to £47649 ES PLEASE PHONE 24 hrs mP 0870 600 0870 cent.