F-B-F.org -

More than 2,000 of the country’s most fascinating properties – many of which are normally closed to the public – are offering free admission this weekend as they throw open their doors as part of Heritage Open Days 98. Heavenly Creatures, The Wicker Man (right), Blood Simple and Shaft feature in a strong line-up of cultish classics, from which London Kills Me is the only notable omission Be afraid, be very afraid. Highlights include the Belle Tout Lighthouse on Beachy Head, the University of Lancaster’s Ruskin Library, Witley Parish Church in Worcestershire (below), the Manchester Velodrome and the Waltham Abbey Royal Gunpowder Mills, which isn’t officially open until the millennium. Prince Charles Cinema, London WC1 (0171-437 7003) 18 Sept 8.30pm – 20 Sept 8.30pm.

Single and multiple tickets will also be available over the weekend. The Barbican’s excellent “Inventing America” series presents Native Rites – a one-day festival of Native American culture embracing dance, drumming, spoken word and workshops. These afternoon events are free and in the evening a special concert is headlined by the Santee Sioux John Trudell, a prominent Native American rights activist whose lyrics set to a bluesy rock beat are a particular favourite of Bob Dylan. Lanky Dakotan flautist and dancer Robert Tree Cody, the multi-disciplined Gathering of Nations and storyteller Gayle Ross round off a bill that mixes contemporary performance with heritage. A paltry pounds 50 is all it costs to see the entire programme of 21 films, with free showers, unlimited coffee and pasta, and a shiatsu massage among the helpful freebies for anyone attempting to go the distance. Billed by organisers at London’s Prince Charles cinema as “Glastonbury with the Movies, without the Mud”, Primal Screen is a 48-hour, back-to-back, non-stop orgy of cinema kicking off this Friday evening.

Finally, in case you get peckish en route, a colourful night market will sell snacks with a fishy theme, including barbecued trout. Thames Festival, tomorrow from 8pm, Victoria Embankment (by Waterloo Bridge), London SE1 info: 0171-928 8998. The public are encouraged to bring their own torches and add their own light to the burning throng as it heads south across the river at Blackfriars Bridge. On the water itself, a flotilla of illuminated rivercraft and a choreographed speed-boat display will be augmented by an extravagant display of pyrotechnics while a floating stage booms live music into the night air. The highlight of last year’s Thames Festival was the spectacular high-wire walk across the dark waters of London This year’s event is more of a collective effort.

It opens at dusk on Sunday with a magical riverbank procession in which a cast of thousands will be parading along the riverbank – giant illuminated sculptures (above), bright-shining carnival costumes and thousands of flaming torches and hand-held lanterns will bathe the city in a firey glow. Trevor Nunn and Nicholas Hytner have turned their attention to the great American musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein, and revealed their engagement with deep and sometimes difficult themes.When I directed My Fair Lady I tried to find anew the delicious and sometimes quite eccentric wit of the original.For various reasons it was not a complete success, perhaps precisely because we became obsessed by style.Certainly on the New One, our task is clear; its raison d’etre is to spread joy and delight, and that is what we are gathering together this week to engineer in the wittiest way we know how.. The tough thing lies in engaging with the essence of the piece in question, which is what Daldry and MacNeil so brilliantly did with An Inspector Calls, identifying it as neither a cryptic detective story or a piece of theatrical leger de main, but as a hard-hitting analysis of society.Where does that leave me with my forthcoming musical?Well, of course, there are musicals and musicals. The Zeitgeist permeates us all, consciously or not; acting style belongs as much to its epoch as does the style of the design or of the lighting.The audience’s perceptions and expectations are constantly changing, too, to the extent that an acclaimed production of only a few years ago can seem oddly disappointing; that word again.Any attempt to find a new language of design for its own sake will provide a purely superficial innovation: to set it now, for example, once a favourite ploy of directors in the search of a fresh angle, normally suggests a failure of imagination.Of course there are, or must be, parallels to contemporary life, but it’s in what is different that the fascination lies.

The sense of creation is fatally absent.The theatre moves on all the time. The thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of participants in its multifarious activities each making his or her contribution, large, small, even infinitesimal – are between them evolving the state of the art, for better or for worse, day by day. If we attempt to imitate the ethos and the attitudes of the time in which the text was created, we become involved in reproduction, not, alas, in the biological sense, but in the sense known to the furniture industry. Why not just do the show the way the author wrote it? It seems logical.After all, we look at old films without qualm, in fact, with delight; we look at paintings and buildings that were created centuries ago, with simple pleasure.The crucial difference is that these films and edifices were made in their time, by the living. With his admission of “inappropriateness”, Mr Clinton was trying to salvage a thread or two of that doubt, and, who knows, if Judge Starr’s report hadn’t followed up so quickly, he might have managed to cloud the issue, with his bombings and his bearhugs and his smiling eyes. The producers and I determined that we wanted to make it new, while avoiding either updating the text or by reverting to Fifties retro-chic; we want to come at it from an unexpected angle to reveal it as more fully itself.
This of course is what everyone wants to do; very few directors arrive with the intention of creating a piece of museum theatre – unless they are forced by an intransigent estate to do so – although some may set out simply to “zap it to ‘em” in the most basic way possible.The most striking example of the unexpected angle approach in recent theatre history was the hugely successful production of An Inspector Calls, in which Stephen Daldry and his designer Ian MacNeil resorted to a stage- craft that JB Priestley would never have recognised – but which made a piece long regarded as a clapped-out war-horse into the most pertinent show on the London stage.It’s a hard trick to pull off, this identifying the core of the piece and then liberating it into the audience’s imagination It also sounds a trifle onanistic. NEXT YEAR I’m directing a famous but little-revived Fifties musical which must, for boring reasons, remain nameless for now We are in the thick of preparations.