The Daily Telegraph from London, Greater London, England • 8

6 6 6 6 6 a ROBIN STRINGER "MARTHA GRAHAM speaks" reads the first item on the programme announcing the fortnight's visit to the Royal House of the Martha Graham Dance Company. Tonight this diminutive founding mother modern dance, now 85, is due to step through the huge curtains once again to address her audience in the quiet, low voice that induces a reverential hush. That act will be as much a work of art as any of her dances that follow it. She is the living embodiment of her own dictum that theatre is a verb rather than a noun. The weight of every gesture, each word and its delivery will have been considered.

At the saine time she will be spontaneous. As she would say: a computer that has untold memories. You just press the right button." No other dance company could be thus heralded, for there is no comparable figure in dance. She devised new patterns of movement, particularly earth-based movement, extended the boundaries of dance and became a distinctive Acknowledged as a choreographic genius, she virAmerican modern dance and companies here, notably London Contemporary Dance, and all over the world have followed where she led. Remarkably she is still creating and brings several works new to London as well as some dozen others dating back to 1930 out of her repertoire of over 150.

One of the new ones, The Owl and Pussycat, has Liza Minnelli role of narThen rator. She doesn't dance a great deal, but she moves around." says Miss Graham. I was very anxious to do it because comedy is so very hard to do. It has to be SO clean and clear otherwise its exhibitionof the worst sort." Remarkably, too, Miss Graham still travels with her company. Every night whether in Lisbon or London, she goes backstage after the performance to talk to the dancers.

she is not nearly as formidable as her reputation and her imperative Will you be seated would suggest. She is charming. She looks frail and sounds strong. She proffers an arthritic hand from under an all-encompassing beige shawl and quickly hides it again as if in embarrassment. She has taken hard the physical limitations of old age.

She admits she never will adjust to not being able to dance, a defeat she did not finally accept until well into her 8 The Daily Telegraph, Monday, July 23, 1979 What 1 price replacement windows? Since you're going to live a long time with your 1 new windows, you owe it to yourself to get the best buy. It makes sense to see just how much more Crittall can offer you- -at sensible prices. An extensive new range of aluminium replacement windows, with a sparkling white Crittall finish, inside and out. The benefits of double glazing- -at no extra cost. Skilled installation by Crittall-trained craftsmen- usually in and out in a day.

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AIR HIRE CONDITIONING Offices ANDREWS 01-648 6174 OR SEE YELLOW PAGES meets Martha Graham THEATRE What makes a play? WHAT ATTRACTS people into a theatre? The question arises with the arrival in the West End of Bent after playing to capacity audiences at the Royal Court. The subject of Martin Sherman's drama is homosexuality in Dachau. My own instinct. if a friend suggested going along, would be to ask, 6 What else is on? The presence of Ian McKellen in the cast at the Criterion might get me there. Unless, that is, I was put off when told more about the play.

It provides details of the torturing of 66 gay men in concentration camps. It shows Nazis ordering one to beat his lover to death and then rape the corpse of a 13-year-old girl. It concludes with a suicide: a man throws himself on an electrified fence. You practically go theatre for a midhear pother sizzle. Let's all summer night's scream.

Ed wresist, Bond such plays material. ears In of the innocent are penetrated with knitting needles, the eyes removed by a machine. Will you nightmares for ever," vells a film poster. Mr McKellen gives a mesmerising performance in "-hair cropped, eyes furtive and wolfish, limbs locked in a hideous tension as to keep nervous panic in control. But he did not alter my belief that degrading spectacle- cannot be made to serve a serious cause.

The peddlers of titillation have tool kit removed. torture from the of the serious artist. "Bent" seeks to glamourise homosexual love by presenting coming to valiant birth amid the most succulent horrors in recent history. I admit packs a thrilling punch, it seems to argue plant that being a homo is all right because it blossomed even in Hitler's torture-chambers. The torture chambers are too hideously alive in the century's experience to be used to promote any sort of thrill.

They must not be used to promote any sort of thrill. They must not be used at all. So the answer to my question is simple: off-putting material can attract playgoers if it is hyped up with sensation. Ah, but what then was the intended appeal of Michael Crawford's last play? In 66 Flowers for Algernon" this popular comedian played a moron crippled by brain defect, a grown man locked into the inarticulate innocence of childhood. He undergoes a risky operation, and for a spell becomes a genius.

Then he reverts, and returns to his moronic state for ever. Before you say such a story would keep people out in droves, let me recall a play of 12 years was about an intensely bored schoolmaster. Bri, a despairing joker who teaches in a secondary modern slum. His rocky marriage to Sheila is put under appalling strain by their 10-year-old daughter, a spastic, human parsnip but that needs regular nappy changes and is subject to fits. Sheila's devotion to her child leads to the neglect of her husband, but he is wrong in thinking she is having an affair with a neighbour, a hearty do-gooder.

This neighbour tries to persuade Bri to put the child into a home, but Sheila will not hear of it. Then Bri's mother calls, a woman so stupid and possessive she does much explain Bri's childish self pity, which is beginning now to weaken his endurance. Suddenly he decides to put his child to death. Having failed, he packs bag and leaves his wife. who plainly escapes from her real responsibilities by putting a hopeless idiot before a hopeful husband.

You might not think this would a jolly and satisfying evening, in the stalls. But the Death of Joe Egg," by Peter Nichols, ran for five months at the Comedy Equally puzzling, perhaps, is the current success of Brian Clark's Whose Life is it Anyway where the hero is a paralysed sculptor, totally incurable, who fights the hospital authorities for the right to end an existence that has become empty and meaningless. The problem is how to treat a subject like this so that the audience does stampede to the exit doors not, Flowers for Algernon relied on a star, trick scenery, lush songs and a live mouse. Gimmicks. in fact, to sweeten the mixture.

But what was the play saying? The public soon discovered was saying nothing. It was a sci-fi anecdote, sympathy for a predicament about a fictitious didn't work. The play closed in three weeks. But Nichols and Clark were real predicaments (Nichols had personal experience of a spastic child), both were passionately concerned to share their deep feelings, and both solved the problem in the same way: through comedy. Joe deployed five brilliantly drawn people, and used an astonishing battery of musichall routines and monologues.

Whose Life?" too, demonstrated that you do not live with tragedy by being gloomy. You cope. The best of plays unpleasant is always the same. They are implacably truthful to the everyday facts of existence. To be fair, Bent may also be saying some such things, through all the sensationalism.

If people receive play, it may do some good. JOHN BARBER dancer. But six years later, dissatisfied with the Denishawn emphasis on the exotic, she struck out on her own with the notion of creating essentially American dances. She never looked back. Her total devotion to dance was interrupted only briefly by marriage and she has no children.

There is," she says, something sacred about the expressive instinct. If a dancer is good he is part of the legend of life." Hence, self-indulgence in dance, of which she concedes there is a great deal, is anathema to her. She recalled that when dance caught on a very big way in America it all the thing to express yourself. She remembered a company that shall be nameless dancing to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony squirming, rampaging creatures sheer selfindulgence." "In dance, you must be sure that it is not self-indulgence on your part. Teachers are not people who are working out a neurosis though too often they are." When confronted with such shortcomings, Miss is inclined to be direct.

can be very ruthless when get mad," she says with a smile like smile the la crocodile. There are many who are chosen 99 she continues, slipping gracefully into her Biblical style, 66 and there are very few who will submit to the sound of the ancestral footstep." She and her aides are now temptinfado get to companies grips with that have sprung up teaching Graham techniques." 66 Some of them are awful," she says. 46 One girl came to my school in New York saying she had studied Graham technique somewhere in the mid-West and I did not recognise a thing. That is why we are trying to codify our practice. If they want to experiment, that's their privilege, but not in my name." Even if some critics began during her last visit here three years ago to be more conscious that her style seemed dated and limited, her dance status is unassailable.

"I know I am in my right place- at she declares. I do what I am supposed to do." And yet despite that, despite alertness, her fluency and her ready recall, she still will not give an interview without a supporting presence. She has, so they say, the arrogance of her, security. few While actually like many headmire always the one that does something," she says, drowning her identity in a generalisation. It's the rest that follow.

It's not a popular doctrine." EDUCATION JOHN IZBICKI IF YOU PRICK US," Shylock moaned, do we not bleed? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?" The Bard's words are today echoed the entire teaching profession, which is about to be pricked, suspects that about to be poisoned and anticipates that it is going to be wronged by both central and local governments. Its unions have already cried Revenge 79 and have secured the full backing of the TU C. Certainly, the suspicions of teachers not entirely without foundation. Cheshire envisages teaching posts and the closure of 50 schools from next year; Dorset wants to reduce its teaching force by 20 per cent; Hampshire is reported as wanting to remove 400 teaching posts and 500 other jobs in the education service: Somerset is to cut 110 and non-teaching jobs; Staffordshire is to scrap 500 posts in the current year; Sutton has already, lost 22 primary teachers and plans to lose a further 20. Many authorities are freezing teacher replacements, pruning nursery education programmes, reducing capitation grants, abandoning plans to repair, redecorate or renew schools.

sell off teachers' centres, increase college and adult education fees and sacrifice some timetabled subjects, including second ancient and modern languages, arts and crafts and swimming. It is an impressive, often tragic, list. that their ranks might be reduced by some 70,000 colleagues over the next 18 months. And the hysteria that into one or two speeches at the recent conference of the Council of Local Education Authorities at the Trent Polytechnic, Nottingham, did little to diminish That there must be economies for Britain to be able to pull herself up by her pathetically tattered bootlaces and effect some vestige of economic stability cannot be questioned. It is essential.

The Government has kept its promise to reduce taxation and has ordered, again as promised, radical reductions in public expenditure. The Welfare State has grown to such proportions that it has become a selfdevouring monster. Its growth must be curbed before it destroys itself altogether. Hence the cuts of £55 million in Government capital grants to education and £325 million rate support grants with more come next year. But the economies could be achieved without the loss of a single teacher, a single text book, even a single nursery place.

Today, I should like to present 99 Carlisle with a shopping list that could work if the necessary legislation were speedily effected and implemented: 1-School Meals and Milk: At present, milk, more spilled than drunk, is given free to all pupils up to the age of seven at the rate of one-third of a pint per day. More than six million meals are served each day, one-and-a-half million of them free. Each meal costs 54p to produce and, from September, will cost the paying pupil 35p. Together, and meals a Government subsidy of TELEVISION Plans across the sea ON returning from my recent North American odyssey the first BBC man I chanced to encounter was Stephen Hearst, head of the Corporation's think tank." He is paid to think ahead and on this sunny afternoon in Soho he was cheerfully thinking that in ten years the BBC might well be dead. Never mind the conflicting range of forecasts, from 10 to 25 per about the share of the total television audience to be secured by ITV-2, emanating from the Independent Broadcasting Authority and the ITV companies.

point, urged the logical Mr Hearst, was that commercial broadcasting lives by a commercial imperative and in order to maximise advertising revenue it must maximise its audience; leaving the two BBC channels with 40 per cent. of viewers or less. It will be a 1957 situation," he declared. A 1957 situation? That apparently was the year in which the first, onslaught of ITV reduced BBC audience share to under 30 per and Ps received letters from their constituents asking how the BBC and its licence fee could be justified. Success for ITV-2 would produce just the same public response.

My mind was transported back to one of the scattered Toronto offices Canadian Broadcasting Corporation where I had been a week before. There I had heard Peter Herrndorf, assistant general manager of CBC's English-speaking wing, talking in a similarly clearsighted way about his Corporation's struggle for survival. The difference was that CBC was looking to retain a modest ten per cent. of the total Canadian television audience in the face of the commercial onslaught from both sides of the United States border, and the diffusion of choice created by cables and The mother of modern dance seventies. Dance is to her the way of living.

The adulatory titles of High Priestess and Goddess that have been bestowed upon her she dismisses lightly. I have done some bad dances when I was evolving," she confides. want and acknowledgement, but to dwell on what you have done is fatal. You should be a bit hungry for experiences, for life." Miss Graham is free with precepts. She slips into them quite naturally in conversation.

You experiment," she says, and then, You do not dance for the 3,000. You dance for the one." or Never go on the street if you are ill. tired or if sad. It will show in your face and it's a communicable disease." And then again, Pity is a corroding thing." Just as she extended the bounds of dance by bringing it down to earth, as it were, without losing of the stars, SO has she devised heightened dance vocabularly of her own to explain her sources of inspiration. Certain such as the inner landscape," The frescoes in that hidden world." in the of the to get behind the beyond and so on.

All speak of a religious devotion to dance. It has dominated her life almost since the day she was born in 1896 in Pittsburgh the daughter of a New England doctor to the maladjusted. If there was too much of the Puritan in her upbringing, at least, she laughs, it was tempered by Roman Catholicism. At the age of 20 she joined the Denishawn school started by the pioneering Ruth St Denis and Ted Shawn and quickly became a leading Tory finger on the trigger £400 million a year. By.

scrapping the service, this a amount would be saved. Instead, a cafeteria system introduced to each school, selling simple dishes at reasonable but economic prices. Children would prefer hamburgers or beans on toast, a glass of milk and an apple to the stodge often served up (and also often wasted) now. The cafeteria system could run at a small profit of per child per year. At six million children, this would bring an annual profit of £9 million.

Total Saving £409 million. 2-Capitation: Parents could be asked to contribute £1 per child a term (£3 a year) to subsidise the cost of books and materials. eight million (drop in birth rate taken into consideration) would bring in £24 million. Saving: £24 million. 3-Nursery Education: At present 415,500 children attend as full or part-time pupils before the statutory school age five, either in nursery or in infants schools.

It is a ridiculously number and ought to if each parent were to contriincreased. But even at 415,000 000 bute £3 a term per child (£9 a a year), it would bring £3,735,000 annually. Saving £3,735,000. This package will have virtually no effect on education, yet will save a grand total of almost £437 million a yearor per cent. of the £8,000 million spent on education each year.

Of course, the leaves certain questions unanswered -such as how will children receiving free meals at present receive free cafeteria snack meals? I be opposed to special tickets." Why not add, say, 50p a day to the supplementary benefits so that parents could then pass on the money to their children on a day today basis? There will, no doubt, be the argument that many parents will not hand over the cash. If that is the case, then they do not deserve to be parents. The time has come for spoon-feeding to cease. A group of teachers to whom I spoke about the above plan asked how the money for capitation and nurseries was to be collected. Teachers won't want to do it," I was told.

Frankly, it does not matter whether form teachers or school secretaries collect the cash during the first week of each term. If they refuse, they should be sacked the spot--which would save a few more pounds. It is time to call halt to minor demarcation squabbles and unions that face membership massacres should teach officials that the driver syndrome will have no place in a society where no one will have any screwdrivers left to turn. Why youth cries out MARK CARLISLE has received a remarkable magazine from the headmaster of a 1,450 pupil comprehensive school. Unlike the usual type of school magazine, this contains nothing than a selection of normal home and classwork in English and art.

Peter Targett, head of Southgate School in the London borough of Enfield, wanted to show the Secretary of State and Sheila Browne, the Senior Chief Inspector, just what comprehensive school children were capable of really trying (they did not know any of their material would be picked for publication). In a way, getting good homework classwork published is a reward for excellence," Peter Targett told me. Examples of sketches, paintings, poems and essays by more than children aged 12 to 18 are: contained in the glossy magazine which seems to that Southgate teachers at least have taken note of the recommendations contained in the Report set by Bullocket Thatcher (when she was Education Secretary) to investigate the teaching of reading and English in schools. Although I am sure Mr. Carlisle will be impressed with the contents, he is also likely to be as disturbed as I was when I was first shown the magazine at the dark violence and nihilism contained in its One story (by Carol Dangerfield of the lower sixth) with a voung girl in a coma, attached to a life-support machine in hospital.

The girl can hear those around her but can give no sign of consciousness; she is allowed to die and is "freed from darkness to float into the 46 beautiful, shining, heavenly light." A beautiful piece of writing. But it made me shudder. satellites. out Delirium," one of the illustrations from Art and English in Southgate school." There is a terrifying ink called Schizophrenic by Julie Postlethwaite, another sixth former, and yet a third, Fiona Tabaksman, has produced a nightmarish poem called Delirium with an accompanying drawing. The poem shrieks out against a world of science and experimentation but it is the drawing which demands our attention, for it shows a brilliant sun over a field and a gate, blotted out in part by the inmate of a con-: centration camp impaled upon endless rows of barbed wire.

Julie is just 17 and on the threshold of life. When I asked these younsters (and, incidentally, although Southgate is a mixed school, some the finest, most horrifying examples in the magazine British broadcasters may think themselves maligned and misunderstood by politicians, but spare a thought for their Canadian colleagues. Listening to the radio in Vancouver one morning I heard David MacDonald, the Minister of Communications in the new Conservative Government tell CBC that it must strive both to increase the Canadian content in its schedules and to withdraw commercials from the television service, as they were from radio in 1975. Clearly both these desirable moves would money; present annual advertising revenue is in the order of £40 million, but nothing was said about restoring the £35 million cut in CBC grant made by the departing Trudeau Government. Mr Herrndorf, nevertheless, agreed with the new Minister and considered that CBC Television survival depended essentially on upping Canadian content to 80 per giving it a distinctive quality compared with all the other United States-dominated channels and thus able to command a loyal audience.

In some technological ways be ahead Canadian broadcasting, looks to of our own. To provide truly national networks over a land vast enough to contain eight time-zones, there has be extensive use of satellites, and computers. A completely equipped Toronto viewer already has 28 Canadian and American channels at his disposal and this could soon be trebled. Besides the wondrous hardware the programme content is sometimes, curiously Toronto old weekend fashcoincided with the Royal Visit from the Queen Mother, highlighted by her appearance at the 120th Queen's Plate horse race. She was apparently greeted everywhere with much love and greater and the respect was evident in the television coverage.

In other areas there is a kind of deliberate solidity about the CBC output. In Vancouver, for instance, I was struck by the attractive slickness of the news as presented by the local commercial CTV station. Yet to outside news and public affairs, sport and talk programmes, Canadian commercial television contributes little. To a extent commercial television an alternative means of purveying the all-conquering tele-culture of the United States. The responsibility on CBC to counteract this is tremendous.

It is left to CBC to maintain the considerable Canadian reputation in the drama and documentary fields. And yet, as was pointed out to me i in Toronto, CBC must somehow succeed when resources allow only 80 hours of drama a yearcompared with the 400 a year made in the same period by the BBC. In the circumstances the standard is encouragingly high as may presently be seen by London Weekend viewers on Sunday mornings, with the showing of The Beachcombers magnificent action soap opera. In Canada, as in the United States, television is used to a large extent as a medium for escapist entertainment. A sixhour programme on the Ontario education channel.

showing some National Film Board movies confronting some uncomfortable realities of Canadian life, made a great impression. If the CBC service can survive in such a broadcasting climate surely Stephen Hearst can afford a slightly more optimistic view of the futureSEAN DAY-LEWIS came from girls) why there was SO much violence, the composite answer was disturbing but understandable. It was their comment on the kind of world that we, their parents, their elders, had created. I suppose we deserve youth's slap in the face. And what was it we wrote during those really troubled dark days of the War? Blackberry Picking," "A Day at the Seaside," Autobiography of an Old Coin How different from today.

The following are some of the titles in the Southgate School magazine: Absence." Darkness," Madness," Masochist." Poverty," Disease." Bores," My Life as a Battery Fear in the Night GENERATORS Over 400 sets in stock 1kVA-1000kVA Buy wisely from the manufacturers. with full after-sales CLARKE GROUP, Lower Clapton Rd, London E5 01-986 8231. Telex 897784.