Knight doesn't take Queen: Endgame, Duchess Theatre

Is musical theatre really the panacea for these uncertain times? For the West End is currently taken with the plays of Samuel Beckett, that arch-miserabilist modernist. Just as the recent production of Waiting for Godot closed at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, Endgame opened at the Duchess, while Godot is about to return, re-cast, due to audience demand. And the actors in these productions - Mark Rylance, Simon McBurney, Patrick Stewart, Miriam Margoyles, Ian McKellan and Tom Hickey, are stellar names.

Perhaps our collective thinking goes something like this - the world is going to the dogs, but it hasn't quite reached the inertia, despairing and hand-wringing of Beckett's theatrical vision. The relief! There's redemption in all this bleakness. Or, as Nell (Miriam Margoyles) would have it in Endgame, 'nothing is funnier than unhappiness', the play's most important line, according to Beckett.

Talking of words, Hamm says, 'I feel a little queer', changed by actor, Patrick Magee to, 'I feel a little strange', with Beckett's approval, but has been returned to its original form in this production. Being surrounded by a joshing gang of sixth form students, I was surprised by their failure to snigger at this. In fact, I can't remember a moment in public in the last twenty years when the word 'queer' didn't cause laughter.

Endgame is an exercises in entropy and hopelessness, and the real world is heading nowhere good fast, but at least we seem less bent on ridiculing gays on our way to oblivion.

Music Matters - Kreutzer Sonata, Gate Theatre, Notting Hill

The Kreutzer Sonata - adaptated by Nancy Harris from Tolstoy's novella - has a man, Posdneyshev (Hilton McRae), talking to us on a train about his relationship with his wife. He is a complex figure - part Ancient Mariner to the audience's wedding guest, who, we learn, was tossed on a sea of jealous fantasies about his beautiful wife's suspected, but unconfirmed, affair with a dashing violinist.

Posdneyshev is both a radical and a misogynist, who attempts to lure us with his man-to-man frankness on the condition of women (this being late 19th century Russia, he's no proto-feminist). A man in the audience laughed during last night's performance at the description of the wife as smelling like a peach so overripe she had the stench of a whore. Which is proof positive how some people have ended up in the 21st Century without stopping in the 20th at all. Posdneyshev's jealousy is Othello-like in his blind belief in the truth of the affair. He can inspire himself to murder without even needing an Iago.

The apparent affair between the piano-playing wife and fiddler is presented behind a lighted scrim, where the wife and her 'lover' perform snippets of the great Beethoven violin sonata, dramatising Posdneyshev's monologue. They supply a suitable accompaniment, as the sonata's first movement is all crescendi and rasping double-stops, perfect for his descent into murderous rage. It's gut wrenching stuff and powerfully dramatic.

The scrim reminded me how the original Kreutzer Sonata, the concerto-like piece in A major for piano and violin from 1803 by Beethoven, has become as layered with meanings and associations as a sunken ship. Premiered by George Bridgetower, the mixed race, 'mulatto' violinist, Beethoven's original dedication to him was revoked in a fit of anger after Bridgetower insulted a woman not knowing she was the great composer's friend. Perhaps this subtext of rivalry between a composer and a musician inspired Tolstoy's story. The sonata's name comes from Rodolphe Kreutzer, a famous French violinist at the time, who was awarded the dedication instead, although he never performed the piece and thought it unplayable.

Another nail in the coffin of art's chances of ever outflanking fact.

Limen, world premier, Wayne McGregor, Royal Ballet

Is Wayne McGregor the dance-maker Michael Clark would have been if his career hadn't been stalled by drugs? I ask this because in McGregor's latest work, Limon, which had its world premier on Tuesday at the Opera House, the crack team of the Royal's first rank - Leanne Benjamin, Yuhui Choe (a new Miyako Yoshida?), Eric Underwood and Edward Watson - were given the thrusting hips, off balance precision and stop-start robotic movement which are pure Clark.

Yet, McGregor's aesthetic is to see his dancers as cells in some larger computer hard drive or as refined human machines given off-centre movements. His art is as much about collaborations with hi-tech scientists, composers and artists as it is about dance. And his choreography dismantles a classically trained dancer's urge to create pleasing physical lines with her body. Whereas for Clark it's about stretching ballet's refinement until it breaks - a butterfly in a vice. His work is often danced to the blasting rock of The Fall or Lou Reed. Either way, their effects are similar.

It's interesting to note that Clark's training was classical, while McGregor's was contemporary. Somehow they've found a similar dance language that straddles the middle ground. Without the lost years of Clark's troubled life, McGregor - who doesn't even drink coffee - is building a huge catalogue of work punctuated with ground-breaking collaborations. How much more could Clark have given the world without drugs? Though it's good to see him at the top of his game with his recent new work seen in Edinburgh and London.

Back to Limen - with Moritz Junge's neon bright costumes, Lucy Carter's impressive colour block lighting with artist Tatsuo Miyajima's video and set design, there's an overload of visual pleasure too. It's like Clark, minus the dark, troubled heart. A word to McGregor - with the lighted scrim at the start and the darkened lit curtain at the end - don't let your high-concept pyrotechnics push the dance to the wings. It's what we've really come to see.

Diamond Geezer, Jewels, Paris Opera Ballet, 1/11/09

During his bravura solo in the final 'Diamonds' section of Jewels (or, Joyaux, as we are in France), Karl Paquette executed pirouettes of such technical mastery, we cheered. As he span on his right leg in precise gyrations with his left leg at 90 degrees, he achieved the as before unseen feat (by this member of the audience anyway), of facing each corner of the stage by turn. It was if there was an imaginary audience in the wings and upstage who had to see this brilliance for themselves as his body whiplashed towards each position, a precise and unstoppable blond Dervish.

An accolade then to the excellence of Paris Opera Ballet’s roster of male talent that Paquette hasn’t yet earnt the top title of etoile (star). What possible entry requirement could a dancer such as he be lacking? Wings?

Balanchine’s Jewels fits the French national company like Cartier on Princess Grace. Moreover, their elegant sets and costumes are by Christian Lacroix. Which begs the question, why does our Royal Ballet have to put up with those lumpen original costumes in their production of Jewels which the Balanchine Trust insist upon them wearing like a priggish aunt?

Rhapsody Fantaisie, World Premier, Morphoses, Sadler's Wells Friday 23/10

When six couples come on stage at the start of Christopher Wheeldon's Rhapsody Fantasisie, it is an arresting an image as anything Wheeldon has choreographed before. The women were carried horizontally from the wings like human crosses over the stage. In vermilion jersey dresses and blunt-edged harem pants on the men, Mary Louise Geiger's cold lighting seemed to turn the dancer’s skin tones to a deathly pallor against the bright reds of their costumes (designed by Calvin Klein's Francisco Costa). If these were sentinels of the underworld, or ghosts perhaps, Wheeldon's characteristically individual choreography gave them the death-mocking vivacity of pulsing blood.

It is Wheeldon's arrangement of his dancers in intricate tableaux mixing refined with blunt and even perverse shapes that keeps us engaged. Similarly his smaller couplings are full of the unexpected. When Wendy Whelan and Andrew Crawford enter for their pas de deux, Whelan's head is cupped in Crawford's hand and is gently pushed like a ball, where it bounces back up and down, the figure is repeated back with Crawford’s head. This interplay, both odd and delightful, is mirrored by Rubinal Pronk’s entrance where is partner’s head seems to bounce on his puffed up chest a movement he mirrors on hers. These moments are full of play and seem to say that, no matter how serious or high art the enterprise, just below the surface is a delight in movement where bodies can bounce off one another like helium-filled balloons. Pronk, by the way, is a man to watch, a Dutch dancer of feral grace whose body is closer to liquid mercury than flesh and bone.

Fancisco Costa's costumes and artist Hugo Dalton’s projected sketches of dancer’s faces, bodies and hands are collaborations which Morphoses celebrates, harking back to the great Ballet Russes and Diaghilev’s explosive melding of avant garde musical and artistic talent. It’s impossible to imagine such combinations today causing the controversies of hundred years ago. In fact, there is something so slick and seductive about Wheeldon’s work and his creative partners, that he’s thus far producing a chic aesthetic that satisfies the super-refined tastes of the New York and London balletomanes. As a dance populariser, a role which he'd like to claim, we'll just have to wait. But as one of the aforementioned balletomanes, he needn't hurry.

Mother's milk. Mrs Klein, Almeida Theatre

When Melanie Klein (Clare Higgins) accuses her daughter, Melitta (Zoe Waites), of being a ‘bad clinician’, the audience gasped during last night’s opening of Nicolas Wright’s ‘Mrs Klein’ at the Almeida theatre. Perhaps their horror was imagining themselves chastised by the very woman whose theories on infant development form the bedrock of their own working practice? The Almeida is a stone's throw from the consulting rooms of Hampstead, after all. Indeed the audience, in this small, claustrophobic theatre space became a Greek chorus to the emotional dance of death played out on the stage. Loud coughing accompanied Klein’s violent attack on her daughter, as she threw wine in Melitta’s face and stuffed a torn letter in her mouth: a gross parody of maternal feeding. It seemed as if Melanie Klein was choking the rest of us too.

This is the power of Wright’s play in this stellar production directed by Thea Sharrock - an exploration of the complex dynamics between Klein, her daughter and Paula, a Jewish refugee German analyst seeking both work and to become Klein’s patient: a lost child in search of her mother. She also acts as audience, referee and protagonist in the primitive battles between mother and daughter whose persecutory routines become murderous against the backdrop of Hans’ recent death, Klein’s son.

Clare Higgins’ Klein, whose bad-breast antics would screw the resolve of any infant to shove shit in her face, is pitch perfect. Our ambivalence shifts uneasily between sympathy for this, a bereaved woman, and repulsion that Klein abused both her own children by forcing them into analysis with her (the name Melitta, ‘little Melanie’ flags up Klein’s narcissism like a storm warning). And yet, this very abuse of her role as mother allowed Klein to theorise early attachment giving us a model of human development that enriches psychodynamic and analytic practice today.

Our ability to manage these discords at once is the challenge Klein’s work sets out for us. Can we truly hold both good and bad in the same object? Can we accept Klein's theories while despising her methodology? Our strangulated gasps during the performance, followed by wild applause at the play’s end mysteriously symbolised Klein’s own theories of integration. And we left the theatre enriched.

Mrs Klein runs until December 5th at the Almeida theatre, N1

The Bigger Story

In the Telegraph Matt Lucas and Kevin McGee were once 'married'; while in the Mirror they were married without the inverted commas. In other newspapers and websites they were 'ex-partners' - which could have just meant they were no longer in business together.

When Boyzone's Stephen Gately died on Saturday after a history of depression, suicidal thoughts and possible addiction to anti-depressants, we are left wondering how his story may conclude after tomorrow's post mortem. An accidental overdose seems likely.

Gately was found by his, 'partner' (in the Telegraph) but who the Mail Online calls 'husband', for he and Andrew Cowles had a civil union in 2006. This may or may not mean they were 'married' according to where you read this story. Two things are certain, Gately's Catholic parents didn't attend his wedding/civil union or accept his sexuality.

There's surely a link between this slippery use of language and the mental health aspects of these two tragic stories. Research among young gays in the States suggests those rejected by their families are nine times more likely to attempt suicide than their straight peers. In the UK which has offered civil unions for gays, but not in the same language as straight marriage exposes the fault lines of our inability to accept full equivalence to gay relationships. Gays in civil unions do not have the same status and approval as men and women who marry. How odd does the phrase, 'heterosexuals who 'marry'' seem when we add those suspicious, wary, disapproving inverted commas?

Our newspapers' awkward inability to name exactly who is who and what is what shows us how far we still need to go before gays and straights enjoy the same privileges. And until we do, the statistically greater chance of addiction and even suicide will carry on blighting the lives of gay people.