IT SHOULD be a good time for gays in America. Mr Major was chosen, then elected, as a break from the Wagnerian thunder and dry-ice of Thatcherism. .?Yes, folks, you can count me out of this year's D-Day celebrations. The play tries to recreate the thrill of the movies (if you can't beat the pulling power of cinema, appropriate it), and Brooks even considered putting a rain-machine outside the phoney box-office (to recapture the feeling of escaping into the dark comfort of a cinema), but foul weather made this unnecessary.Clair de Luz is a formal exercise, an attempt to make the stage, blocked off into a screen-like shape, imitate the camera.

The outstanding voice is Timothy Wilson's counter-tenor, whose precision and subtlety lend genuine pathos to the part of Otho; Susan Roberts rises impressively to the considerable demands of the title role. In a programme that also included Strauss, Dvorak and Grieg's Piano Concerto, it was Gerard McBurney's imaginative, painstaking reconstruction of Shostakovich's 'light-music circus entertainment' score, Hypothetically Murdered, that had the promenaders cheering and stamping for more. Unconventionality in the science field always appealed to Lewis.In 1983, when he left university, the country was in the middle of a depression. It focuses on works that deal with the end of childhood in the physical and psychological sense. But with stores of some key components expected to run out in two days unless supply lines are replenished, there are doubts about how long the plants in Leyland, Lancashire, and Birmingham can remain open.Tony Woodley of the transport workers union, the TGWU, said yesterday that he had information that the Dutch and Belgian governments were working on a secret restructuring deal that would leave Leyland DAF out in the cold.There were similar reports in Amsterdam where Dutch analysts said DAF planned to cut its worldwide workforce of 13,000 by a half, scrap production of light trucks, vans and defence supplies, and concentrate on medium and heavy trucks, production of which is based in the Netherlands.A spokesman for Leyland DAF said: 'As far as we are concerned all of this is speculation.'Any move to strip out production of lightweight trucks and vans would mean the effective closure of Leyland DAF with an estimated 15,000 direct and indirect job losses.UK sources pointed out, however, that Leyland DAF's receivers now had a free hand to do what they considered in the best interests of bank creditors without recourse either to the parent company in the Netherlands or the administrator appointed to run it.The UK is DAF's biggest single market, and the Leyland plant contains its most up-to-date manufacturing facility. ARENA (9pm BBC2) has wrapped a snappy history of Soviet space culture around the story of cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, stranded in space by the collapse of Communism back down on earth ('Comrade Tom to Ground Control' was a typical British newspaper headline of the time) Krikalev's home videos are a must-see. (Photograph omitted). But in the year of the battle, 1876, America was celebrating its 100th birthday as a nation, and was certainly not in the mood for recriminations over Little Big Horn.