It's not often that you hear a record that almost makes you crash your car but with Curly Locks by Baby Fox

It's not often that you hear a record that almost makes you crash your car, but with "Curly Locks" by Baby Fox it was very nearly death on the roads for me. Pushing an unknown promo cassette into the stereo normally occupied by Island's "The Story of Jamaican Music", where Junior Byles's original version of the song is pretty near the best cut in a four-decker set of continuous glory, the unsuspected appearance of another, strikingly different, treatment was so immediately wonderful that I briefly lost control and had to pull up sharpish to avoid mishap. For Giovanni, the choice is between different actions; and what you are is defined by what you do.That this complexity comes through intact is to the credit of Guest and her cast. Peter Gaitens is a sterling David, Ed Vassallo mostly a persuasive Giovanni (though the closing scenes, when he has to mime out solo his final murderous encounter with the decadent Guillaume, leave him exposed). They are brilliantly supported by Michael Roberts, nicely understated as the ageing, self-disgusted Jacques, and Bette Bourne's flamboyant Guillaume.The adaptation starts slowly, with a long, wordy monologue by David, occasionally interrupted by other characters, and ends limply - the murder scene is unfortunately starchy. The problem for David is not simply that he is a gay man struggling to be hetero; it's that he feels he needs to define himself as being one thing or the other, and then act in accordance with his decision.

More interestingly, it's an old-style drama of the clash of Old and New worlds - we're deep in Henry James territory here, with American puritanism, which sees everything in black and white, failing to come to grips with European pragmatism.At their first meeting, Giovanni talks to David about pain and death and love, "All the things you Americans do not believe." And later on, when David's fiancee Hella (played by Guest) catches him in flagrante with a sailor - after some embarrassingly archaic lines about how a woman needs a man before she can be herself - she declares "Americans should never come to Europe" (a line that on Wednesday got the biggest laugh of the evening): it makes them unhappy - "and what's the use of an unhappy American?" Giovanni can't understand why David should feel unable to carry on an affair with him at the same time as seeing Hella, his fiancee.This isn't simply a difference of opinion about morality; it's about the whole question of how we construct our identities. The story follows the descent into hell of David, a young American living in Paris, who enjoys an affair with the beautiful waiter Giovanni but ruins both their lives when he deserts Giovanni for a more conventional relationship with an American girl. On the surface, this is a straightforward fable about the folly of trying to deny your true self, and certainly that aspect of the story hasn't lost its relevance. You guess that Out and Proud's adaptation of James Baldwin's 1956 novel Giovanni's Room is predicated on the first one - a note in the programme by the director, Maia Guest, talks about "Baldwin's timeless prose" - but what you notice is just how old-fashioned it now seems. There are two basic reasons for wanting to stage a classic - either because it has some universal message, or because it's an interesting period piece. Where the rest of the company looked frayed after nine Manons in three tour venues, Guillem made it seem that the ensembles were merely interludes while the star got her breath back.

However, even her most accomplished moves are in the service of characterisation: her idle pirouettes suggest Manon's reckless physicality, the saucy ease with which she presents her triumphantly arched foot to be kissed speaks of a woman who takes a certain pleasure in sin. Tart she may be but she's worth 43 quid of anybody's money.n Royal Opera House, London WC2 20 July (mat & eve), 22, 24, 31 July (0171-304 4000). That his mistress and his sister should both adore him is no surprise and his fraternal feelings for Manon are given a savage twist by the guilty pleasure he obviously takes in presenting her body for a client's delectation. In the brothel scene, this flickering shadow of incest is darkened by the fact that it is brother and sister who are dressed to match. No one ever doubted that Mukhamedov would excel as Lescaut but when Sylvie Guillem was first scheduled to dance Manon in 1991 people with long memories of Antoinette Sibley predicted that the character's kittenish amorality would be beyond the too-knowing Parisienne. How wrong they were; eschewing the corrupted sweetness displayed by Durante and Bussell in the role, Guillem's interpretation forcibly reminds us that Prevost's anti-heroine is an agent in her own destruction The dancing isn't bad either.