Sunday Telegraph from London, Greater London, England • 40

THE SUNDAY REVIEW Arts 8 THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH JULY 27 1997 ALASTAIR MUIR Illogical but magnificent Uattee fv Marguerite pretentious writing Aden Gillett as Michel and Julie Christie as Suzanna Andler who fails to convince us that the sphinx has much of a riddle Artistry in the monsoon Happily the Kirov maintain pride of place in any review of last dance For their Sleeping Beauty as with their Don Quixote and Giselle enormous allowances have to be made a frank recognition that we are entering a time-warp that for what until recently was Soviet ballet the 20th century has not yet made much of an artistic impact With their Giselle it is difficult now to remember that it was with this production that Natalia Makarova conquered London way back in 1961 Much has happened to the Gis-elles since then From the early 1960s Peter Wright in a series of productions restaged and rethought Giselle until we now expect a much more logical and dramatic first act Would Makarova still conquer London if she too could enter the time-warp and appear as she did then? The answer is probably yes However illogical and undramatic the first act of their Giselle is with the Kirov we are prepared to make such allowances because the dancing and indeed the high points of the leading performances are still so magnificent With Sleeping Beauty the choreographic changes to the Prologue seem unforgivable although I am more prepared to accept the cavalier dismissal of much of the dance associated with the first appearance in Act II allowing the production to move quickly into the Vision Scene Yes they exaggerate the gestures yes Hi lar ion in Giselle is a hoot yes there are lapses in taste that are positively staggering but who cares? What bowls us over is dancing of such style and commitment it makes these criticisms seem so much crackling of thorns under the pot Altynai Asylmuratova as Aurora Igor Zelensky as her prince and Uliana Lopatkina as the Lilac Fairy make up a rare formula for audience delight Given these incomparable stars everything else fades into obscurity particular vvhen the corps de ballet is itself such a dance joy From this to Spiral Arts Dance Theatre Company at the All A rts Centre in north London a small unsubsidised company struggling on the fringe of arts scene with fewer than 10 dancers requires a considerable adjustment of critical expectations though if anything the company was even more ambitious than the Kirov They attempted to take us on an imaginative tour through The Odyssey While using both music and song in a stimulating way thev depended heavily on omer himself in Robert Fitzgerald's translation adapted by Toma Gray and Andrew Potter This involved a narrator Andrew Potter himself who had a richly dramatic voice and brought every phrase vividly to life As if this was not enough he doubled the role of Odysseus ith another dancer entering into the dance with an athletic elegance that spoke almost as eloquently as his words The choreography was by Bryony Williams and Elizabeth Blake who both also danced with impressive com- Tiieatre John Gross Kiss Me Kate Suzanna Andler Chimps was clear that Ian Talbot's production is a striking success Within a short space of time we had alreadv seen Debbie Bjshon and the company kick off proceedings delightfully with Another Op'niri Another Show Issy van Randwyck as the hoofer with artistic ambitions had serenaded her undependable boyfriend to fine funny-poignant effect with Why Can't You Behave? Louise Gold had given a powerful rendition of So in Love Am I and in conjunct ion with Andrew Wadsworth a hilarious one of Wunderbar the burlesque tribute to Viennese operetta Nobody who enjoys musicals is likely to need persuading of the virtues of Cole Porter But it is easy to forget if you haven't heard it for a while quite how much artistry and imagination went into a show like Kiss Me Kate I came away enormously cheered up in spite of the rain but also dimly resentful of the puritanism Nicholas Dromgoole The Kirov Ballet Spiral Arts Dance Theatre DV8 Physical Theatre mitment I have praised work before and admired here the same sure sense of what works in terms of movement and drama I was reminded of those mesmerising books imaginative aunts and uncles gave us when we were young where the illustrations captured the mind almost as effectively as the prose Spiral Arts managed an illustrated Homer for the theatre as it were and it says much for this talented group that they never seemed overwhelmed by the grand material but on the contrary added a visual component that made it even richer Another look at DYS Physical Bound to Please this time at the Queen Elizabeth Hall left me once again full of admiration for this challenging creative group They have almost by their own efforts alone done much to help change the landscape of our experimental barefoot dance world audiences do not sit back and admire the pretty patterns in space created by the dancers They have been trained to look for symbolic content does it mean? What are they trying to say? What are they hoping to show they dutifully ask themselves And the company undoubtedly has rewards to dole out Bound to Please ventures into contentious territory It looks not only at some of dance's basic assumptions that dancers should be well-made and good-looking and conform to some vaguely classical canon of the body beautiful but also at our attitudes to the ageing body and particularly to ideas about the old making love and having sex with the young Diana Payne-Myers positively flaunts her well-preserved but nevertheless ageing body appearing in nude sex scenes with a younger man and proceeding then to wash naked in a very small tin bath At one moment she takes up the very pose of La Belle Heaulmiere where Rodin revealed the terrible effects of age on a once beautiful female body Our withers are duly wrung Sensational stuff I could not help wishing the dancers if they were going to play ith classical ballet positions had been able to do them a little better Of course for all I know they may be deliberately doing them badly but looking at some of those feet and backs the said nastily I rather doubt it A company such as Neder-lands Dans Theater 2 for example would have been just as much at home in classical ballet positions as in contemporary and seems all the better for it as dancers Why pick N'DT? The Rambert Dance Company have just the same easy dance expertise Strictly speaking DV8 should have it surely? Or is the work trying to tell me how wrong that set of assumptions is too? of Telephone International Media Limited which has done so much to drive pleasure out ot the theatre in recent years (so that even musicals have to have and of the crassness which has done so much to drive out vvif It wasn't always like that Marguerite Duras's Suanna Andler at the Minerva Theatre Chichester is set in St Tropez in February The Suzanna who gives the play its title has come there to look at a handsome house (with eight bedrooms) which she is considering renting for the summer Money is no problem her husband Jean i a millionaire but she dithers and her hesitation is part of a larger indecisiv eness about where her life is going She is six months or so into an affair with a journalist called Michel It is her tirst extramarital excursion and her thoughts still seem centred on her husband even though he has made no secret of his own frequent infidelities She is uncertain about what she feels and so are we The whole play is a mass of oblique reactions and minor deceptions of meaningful silences (but what exactly do they mean?) and fretful pacing back and forth It might just have worked as a short story an evocation of mood and atmosphere or even as a short novel in which fluctuating feelings were subjected to minute analysis But in the theatre we crave for something stronger and bolder than Duras provides Not for the first time she comes across as a fairly pretentious writer laying claim to a good deal more depth than she delivers That needn't be the end of the story An empty part if it has a sufficiently interesting outline can still create theatrical opportunities It gives an actor a chance to fill it in as Eileen Atkins reportedly did when she played Suzanna in 1971 (The play itself dates back to 1968) At Chichester however Julie Christie fails to convince us that the sphinx has much of a riddle Her performance has clearly been care-full thought out but it remains stubbornly prosaic Watching her I found myself recalling the old James Thur-ber cartoon: why must you be inscrutable Marcia?" The punitive slowness of Lundy Davies's production 5j fS 3 3 I I i 1 The actors the Open Air Theatre Regents Park often put up a noble fight against the elements usually with success but at the opening of Kiss Me Kate last week the rain proved too much for them After a few minutes as drizzle turned to downpour the performance was interrupted Than heroically it was resumed but after another half-hour as downpour turned to mons there was no choice but to call it a night 1 hope to review the show soon in its entirety but even from this sodden fragment it This is the second week of Wednesday Lucky Dip Every Monday one reader will win £250 worth of lucky dip entries for that lottery draw 250 chances to win the jackpot! doesn't help either But it could hav been worse Aden Gillett as Michel and Julie Le-grand as Suzanna 's friend Monique inject some much-needed life: the sombre elegance of Julian Engels' set (shuttered gloom a misty seascape beyond) is reinforced by Nick Beadle's lighting and Catherine Milli-ken's music these are consolations and in the circumstances one clings to them SIMON Block's Chimps at the Hampstead Theatre is much more interesting Two years ago Block scored a success with his first play Xot a Game for Boys the game in question being table-tennis In his second play he turns to the world of high-pressure salesmanship Mark (Darren Tighe) is a young illustrator who has thrown up his job in order to work on a children's ABC: so lar he has only got as far as A for Armadillo and for Bunny Stevie his girlfriend (Ashley Jensen) supports him it's her earnings that are paying the mortgage for the house they have bought She is pregnant too and he has promised to help prepare a space or the baby Instead he takes pity on a pair of salesmen one of them is coloured and makes the fatal mistake of letting them get a foot in the door In no time at all they have persuaded him that the walls of the house are disintegrating and that his only hope lies in signing a contract for the treatment which they are peddling Stevie urges him to resist but they play ruthlessly on the tensions in his relationship with her and in the end he succumbs There is a horrible pleasure in watching the reptilian reps at work You laugh and shudder simultaneously at their patter their dodges their quick thinking And to add to the interest the relationship between the two of them is not what it seems The apparently deferential younger man (Fraser James) is in fact in charge His middle-aged partner (Nicholas Wooder-son) is new to the racket he is still on trial and still subject to distracting twinges of conscience The play isn't strictly plausible and isn't meant to be It sets out to mix domestic realism with Pinteresque fantasy and for the most part it succeeds But it does have one imbalance: Block has succumbed to a bad case of male cringe Stev ie is not only better than Mark (which would be fine) but incomparably better She is brave intelligent hardworking loving (when she is given a chance) and life-affirming Mark by contrast is weak vain and worse an insect who is pretty well good for nothing once he has fertilised the female That little problem apart Gemma production makes for a satisfying evening And it features some excellent acting from Nicholas Wooderson in particular but from all the others as well which manages to be at least as tuneful as the real thing All this together with amusing dialogue clever plotting lively dance routines colourful costumes (by Paul Farnsworth) genial supporting performances No wonder you could sense the audience's exhilaration undimmed ev en by having to peer around the umbrellas 1997 See the paper tomorrow when will will publish details on how to enter by telephone and post along with an application form Token three will be published tomorrow HOROSCOPES Catherine Tennant Catherine telephone horoscopes are updated each week-Call your number now for this weeks in-depth reading ARIES Communication is a key 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