Girl
New Art Gallery, Walsall
***

"I made him lick the dishes, I made him lick the floor, I made him lick a baby's bum, in 1994." This extract from a playground song is quoted in the catalogue for Girl, an exhibition on the theme of girlhood and girlishness at the New Art Gallery in Walsall. The song is a snippet of girl-power mischief in the making, of actual girl-culture as it is enacted when teachers, parents and all the other adults aren't looking. The 20 women artists who present work here, however, are alien grown-ups working from memory.

This may account for the general air of enchantment, artists' memories tending to be enlivened by fantasy. Girlhood comes across as a state of half-entranced fascination with life's little things. Elizabeth LeMoine's doll's house surrealism contrives cryptic meetings between a pair of silver flippers and a corset sewn with dragonfly wings. Claire Carter fills the corner of one gallery with 1,000 up-ended household brooms, their bristles spread evenly with 1,000 trinkets.

These are pleasant enough. Yet, at a time when any view of girlhood imagery can hardly ignore issues of child abuse and internet porn, the work rarely touches on sexuality, or only from an oblique perspective. It comes as something of an ironic relief when Susan Philips at least hints at defiant disillusionment. Her single photo-image shows us an overgrown corner of a council estate with a stick wrapped in silver foil standing upright in the scraggy grass. The title says it all: It Means Nothing to Me.

The unnerving highlights of the show, imaginatively curated by Angela Kingston, are in the video room. In Sarah Pucill's Backcomb a head full of raven hair creeps around a dinner table, upsetting everything and curling sensuously through the spilt milk. It's left to the terrible video-duo Jo Lansley and Helen Bendon to steal the show. Like Jean Genet's Maids, these two not-nice overgrown girls defy all expectation of proper behaviour. They steal eggs, stick them up their tights and climb trees. They trap stuffed robins in cages of dough. They make a rag doll that comes to life during the night and reaps perverse revenge by stitching up the lips of a lovely lady. Market research at the back of the catalogue mentions a fact they would, undoubtedly, identify with: the biggest toy craze among seven-to-10-year-old girls at the end of last year was Aliens in an Egg and Sticky Aliens.

Robert Clark

Until July 9. Details: 01922 654400.

Theatre

Threatening to be good

A Midsummer Night's Dream
Open Air Theatre, Regent's Park, London
**

On the first hot evening of the summer, the exquisite little open-air theatre in Regent's Park, now more intimate and secret courtesy of a lottery funded redesign, cast its customary spell. As usual though, this was in spite of the production rather than because of it.

It is disappointing because initially Alan Strachan's production threatens to be very good indeed. The slam of a door heralds the arrival of Hippolyta in high dudgeon, already tired of and irritated by her future husband, the Duke. This is no surprise, for he is a whiskered high Victorian of the most pompous kind. When Hermia is threatened with death for refusing to marry the stuffed shirt Demetrius because she loves the Byronic Lysander, Hippolyta offers the girl a flower. It is a tiny gesture of solidarity, almost unacknowledged by either party.

The play ends strongly too, with the Duke and his new bride getting quietly sozzled during the entertainment as if both know that this is the only way that they will be able to endure their wedding night and the long years of marriage ahead.

In between, Strachan's production has good ideas, but rather too many to create any cohesive whole. The wide reading that Strachan acknowledges in the programme seems to have resulted in a bit of this and a bit of that: a Jungian forest where the lovers lose their clothes, Puck is a threatening faun and the toothless fairy folk have an aggressive, earthy sexuality; a court in the grip of old-fashioned male chauvinism. The mechanicals end up beached between and barely raising a laugh. Paul Bradley's under-powered Bottom is most notable for his ass's head with its blinking eyes and wiggly ears.

The self-absorbed, comic excessiveness of the lovers is neatly played. Harry Burton makes Oberon more tender and pensive than usual, and Nicola Redmond is fine as Titania but really makes her mark as a sexy, dissatisfied Hippolyta, the future Hedda Gabler of Athens. In the end though, as so often happens at this address, it is the beauty of the natural setting and dusk turning to night, rather than the production itself, that creates the real magic.

Lyn Gardner

In rep until September 9. Box office: 020-7486 2431.

Pop

Remarkable guitar work

Nick Harper
Cecil Sharp House, London
****

It's not easy following in the footsteps of a famous father, as Julian Lennon, Ziggy Marley and even Femi Kuti have learned. There's that initial burst of interest and publicity, followed by those tedious but inevitable comparisons. Nick Harper is clearly aware of all the dangers, but is stepping out bravely in the footsteps of his wildly unpredictably, often brilliant dad, Roy Harper, the man immortalised in Led Zeppelin's Hats off to Roy Harper. Nick is clearly inspired by his father - after all, he toured and recorded with him before moving on to play with Squeeze - but has now developed a complex, wildly varied style of his own.

His dad started out playing folk clubs, although he had more in common with the rock scene, and Nick is doing the same, making his London appearance at that bastion of English traditional music, Cecil Sharp House. Old-style folkies would have been startled. The audience looked as if they had wandered up from the clubs in Camden while making their way to Glastonbury (where Nick is appearing later in June), and when he came out for a soundcheck he played so loudly that he blew the PA system, delaying the start of the show.

It was well worth the wait. He strolled in through the crowd, already playing an elaborate guitar solo, wearing a white T-shirt and suitably neo-hippy velvet trousers, and launched into a two-hour solo set that showed how far he has developed. His guitar work was remarkable, mixing bursts of rapid-fire strumming with finger picking, making delicate use of harmonics, then wandering off into unexpected chord sequences or bending notes by re-tuning the guitar in the middle of a song. All this was matched with a great sense of humour and the absurd - as when he suddenly veered into a manic treatment of Guitar Man, or wandered out through the crowd during Happy Man. Frank Zappa would have been impressed.

Harper's complex songs were not always as interesting as the instrumental pyrotechnics, but he has a good voice and his latest material, from the new album Harperspace, is his strongest yet, from the quirky lyricism of The Verse That Time Forgot to the witty acoustic psychedelia of Aeroplane. He could do with just a little less frenzy and a dash more of his dad's intensity (that inevitable comparison) but he deserves to become a major figure in his own right.

Robin Denselow

***** Unmissable **** Recommended *** Enjoyable ** Mediocre * Terrible