So for those of us who think they’ve got the name wrong

So, for those of us who think they’ve got the name wrong, at least one corner of Bridgewater Hall is forever Barbirolli.. This is the still, small voice of the agnostic, his eyes widening at the imagined splendour of the godhead. Simple truths assume a visionary gleam, a starry theatricality. Tortelier was magnificently in control of his far-flung constellations. He achieved stasis and movement and implacability in equal measure.

And the hall didn’t fight him.PS: on Saturday, Barenboim officially christened the “Barbirolli Room”. From a seat in the centre-circle, with Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony working the room, such complaints were a fiction. First impressions did confirm a fierceness, a steeliness in the upper partials, a certain sterility about the ambience in general It isn’t the most welcoming of acoustics Yet. Daniel Barenboim presided over that like a seasoned actor-manager who’s played all the parts himself many times before. From another bygone age came a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth that fire-blasted familiarity and gave us something new to shout about.

The hall opened to it, the kind of work-out it had been waiting for all week. Early reviews of the Halle’s opening concerts complained of poor definition, booming bass, muddled textures. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra stormed Manchester’s new Bridgewater Hall on Saturday night and stopped the chorus of disapproval in its tracks. There were tributes to both Sir Johns – Barbirolli and Falstaff – in the shape of Elgar’s richly pictorial orchestral pageant. Neilson’s nasty little fable has now finished its run but deserves another outing. If it does return from the fringe incinerator, it’s worth seeing, if only to admire Jimmy Gallagher’s slavering madman humming a maniacal “Old MacDonald” while he chews up the window box of Velma the would-be cannibal.n ‘Hard Shoulder’ and ‘An Audience with Queen’ at Riverside Studios, London, W6 to Sat (0181-741 2255) Festival to 5 Oct. Set in a post-BSE Britain of Linda McCartney steaks and black-market meat dealers, this beautifully acted slice of suburban horror is a one-idea drama, pared to the bone and played for laughs.

The same could not be said of Hoover Bag, a delightfully sick piece directed by Anthony Neilson at the Young Vic Studio, and certainly the shortest, silliest and most entertaining of the three. The play milks the fish-out- of-water bathos of this situation, but Sullivan’s script is more remarkable for the way in which it disconcerts the audience, creating a subtle uncertainty about the exact nature of both the characters and their environment. Primitive unworldliness makes the Boy and Housekeeper incredible to the Queen, while a five o’clock shadow developing on the royal chin arouses their own suspicions as to the real identity of their mystery visitor. As each confronts the other, Sullivan explores the power of storytelling to shape reality, weaving well-written original folklore into a larger meditation on the fictional nature of national news.

Along with her ear for broad Scots dialogue, Sullivan’s talent lies in pursuing the comic logic of her argument to imagine a world in which tabloid stories have exceeded their role as gutter gossip and achieved the status of self-fulfilling prophecy.Both of the above could benefit from a bit of pruning. Taking a premise not dissimilar to Sue Townsend’s The Queen and I, Sullivan’s drama finds the monarch stripped of pomp and ceremony and stranded in the grounds of an old Scottish mansion that appears to be jammed in some quasi-Victorian time warp. She becomes the guest of a hostile housekeeper and a savage boy, an eccentric pair who live in the woods, creating their own reality through fairytale as they wait for the house to be cleared. As the play progresses, it becomes clear that, while the Queen may have slipped out of time, she, like the house, awaits repossession by the media and her bodyguards.In this pastoral bubble, the Queen predictably excavates the real personality that lies under her role as national icon. An all-inclusive plot obviously strives for State of the Nation realism, but succeeds only in an almost hysterical gloominess, running through child abuse, arson, senile dementia, joy-riding and ram-raiding like some grim Daily Mail check-list of social malaise.In contrast to the urban sprawl of Hard Shoulder, Anita Sullivan’s An Audience with Queen is an exercise in spare, poetic licence.