The 14 performers ape the dances of the East and the mesmeric chains of movement are bathed in Michael Chybowski’s lighting that makes the dancers seem like luminous figures dancing in darkness. World Power is accompanied by a Lou Harrison composition played by the South Bank Gamelan Players. The ability to select surprising but utterly fitting pieces of music is one of Morris’s greatest gifts, but the 1990 piece Behemoth uses no music at all. One of the powerful things about works danced in silence is that the audience, in endeavouring not to break the spell, tends to hold its breath. The second work, World Power, takes its name from Mark Twain’s scathing comments about US involvement in the Philippine War. The Mark Morris Dance Group made its fifth consecutive appearance at Edinburgh Festival this week and celebrated the event with a new work for the Festival’s 50th anniversary.
The premiere I don’t want to love was the finale of a quadruple bill of older work dating back to Morris’s 1981 Ten Suggestions, which he danced himself. Baryshnikov has danced this pink pyjama’d gem with a childlike innocence; Morris’s reading is more roguish. This is a more playful, trickier affair than Big Blonde, and if it lacks its pathos, it proves there really is no business like showbusiness Appealing though, it ain’t
n Hill Street Theatre To 31 Aug. Anderson’s prediliction for unhinged, larger-than-life females suggests a hint of fantasy fulfilment, which may be why she is so convincing as Linda.
A companion piece to the magnificent Big Blonde, Anderson has this time adapted an Edna Ferber short story for what is basically more of the same. Linda Fayne has hit the big time So big in fact that she barely has time to think. Broadway darling diva, part-time mother and all-round consummate professional, her routine is presented here by Shirley Anderson as a kind of high-camp version of Groundhog Day. As Linda races through her life in a day like the proverbial headless chicken, the social whirl threatens to spin wildly off its axis. His blond wig, mischievous eyes, love of crude innuendo and physical catchphrases, make him resemble that other self-knighted egomaniac, Sir Les Patterson, albeit at the opposite end of the sexual spectrum.
As with Patterson though, there is a lurking sense that the character is both too big for hisgags and yet has little imagined life off-stage from which to draw subtler material. These limitations are skated round with the help of David Walliams – whose misogynist stage manager and pig- ignorant royal watcher almost deserve their own shows – but sooner or later, he will have to stop resting on past laurels.
n Assembly Rooms To 31 Aug. Lucas’s performance is a joy to watch, switching from cherubic avuncularity to deranged alter ego with all the violence of radio interference. So confidently does young Matt Lucas now inhabit his creation, that Chumley stands to become the institution he imagines himself to be.