The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 43

Saturday April 17 1999 The Guardian i pi Via TODAY 3pm Plenty. Cate Blanchett (right) in David Hare revival. Albery, London 7pm All Saints. Combat-trousered soul for kiddies. Blackpool Opera House 9pm Fatboy Slim Armand van Helden.

Super-DJs clash. Brixton Academy SUNDAY 10am Henri Cartier-Bresson. Touring photo-journalism. Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art 5pm 8V2 and La Dolce Vita. Classic Fellini.

Riverside Studios, London 7.45pm Phoenix Dance Company. Five new works. Queen Elizabeth Hall, London It's written by Tennessee Williams, it stars Hollywood darling Rachel Weisz, and the hero Vmi tlipi udges Michael BiiHingt gets eaten. Suddenly Last Summer it does, says Summer dark secret; this is a character on the edge of madness. Even when she stubs a cigarette out on the palm of a nun's hand, Weisz somehow seems irrevocably sane.

Gerard Butler is also little more than an amiable cipher as a sympathetic doctor, and it is left to Johanna Kirby as Mrs Venable's browbeaten servant to convey the right atmosphere of hidden terror. After the rich Shaffer-Stoppard double bill with which Warehouse Productions launched its occupancy of the Comedy, this seems a way that no other medium has managed. Compare the accents on Talk Radio with those who ring in to Nicky Campbell's Radio 5 Live show. It's the difference between Elthain and Kent. Of'course, in terms of maturity we're talking about the Beano versus the Sun.

Talk Radio still has its pet Oscars and gerbils doing triple salchows, but it also has real debate. Intricate discussions on the pros and cons of the minimum wage; heated arguments about the age of consent for gay sex. Long gone are the days of shock jocks like Caesar the Geezer. Now the presenters are polite, as if they're holding a soiree at their club. It's the callers who can be extreme.

Serbs defending Milosevic, people worried that Kosovan refugees will be moving in next door, racists who think that Gary Dobson and his mates are the real victims. We may not like to hear this stuff, but it is what lots of peo- Most "of Talk Radio callers are sane. But they do stutter pie do think. Talk Radio is their confessional. It lets the poison out.

In a controlled way. The vast majority of callers, of course, are sane, and almost always stuttering. Only on The Sports Zone are people eloquent. They talk with a passionate, poetic abandon about football. They are all experts.

Maybe it's just a reflection of" the fact that as a nation we know and care more about Man United than we do about Kosovo. On Thursday morning Gary Dobson gave his first live interview. Outside the building, the Anti-Nazi League demonstrated. But in fact the people gave him a harder time than Martin Bashir managed. Not hard enough, though.

Dobson ducked and dived, wriggled on the hook and clean away. He said he might have been a bad boy in the past, but he'd swear on his mother's life he was innocent. He pronounced himself pleased with this trial by radio. But, of course, he never said, "Sorry about that." Anne Karpf returns next week. Lyn Gardner I ii Mumuiug viuuiam, uiuy xsi at would apparently drop their loads, shrug their shoulders and say, "Sony about that." If truth is the first casualty of war, civilians are the second.

On Thursday news bulletins reported Nato's admission that it may have accidentally bombed a refugee vehicle. Sony about that. On Wednesday morning on Talk Radio guest John Pilger was talking about war crimes. Not Milosevic's, but the Americans'. He told of the 500 Iraqi infants who die each month because of the West's stance.

He said that in his lifetime, thegreatest war crime was the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima. The night before on the James Whale Show, an ex-CBS war corre-spondentsuggestedthat the outcome of wars has less to do with military strategy than with the weather. When the planes set out to drop the bomb on Japan, he said, four cities were considered as targets. Three were shrouded in fog and rain; Hiroshima was bathed in sunshine. Sorry about that.

If you want to know what the person in the street thinks about Kosovo, listen to Talk Radio. It's practically wall-to-wall war. We are all generals now. Talk Radio has grown up in the last four years. I'd date it from the death of the Princess of Wales.

Suddenly the nation had something to talk about. And once you've plucked up the courage to express your views on the radio, it's but a short step to express it to the switchboard at Buckingham Palace. Sometimes I think it might be easier if we did away with government and let Talk Radio callers decide. Should Nato be involved in Kosovo? Sixty-six percent for, 34 percent against. Is Gary Dobson one of the men suspected of Stephen Lawrence's murder (and Thursday's guest) guilty? Thirty-four per cent yes, 66 per cent no.

This may all seem trite, but one of the strengths of Talk Radio is that it has given a voice to the voiceless in I 3 July i960 two American movies opened within a week of each other. One, Please Don't Eat The Daisies, dealt with the travails of a New iZi-, 3 York drama critic. The other, Suddenly Last Summer, ended with the cannibalistic consumption of a gay poet. That avid moviegoer John Gielgud emerged from the latter and wittily dubbed it "Please Don't Eat The If only something of that lightness of spirit informed Sean Math-ias's revival of Suddenly Last Summer at the Comedy Theatre. On one level, Tennessee Williams's 90-minute play is a macabre fable about universal destmctiveness.

On another, it is a piece of high-camp Southern Gothic at which the author himself apparently used to chuckle. Yet from the moment the curtain rises on Tim Hatley's overblown visualisation of a New Orleans garden full of predatory plants, it appears we are meant to take the play with total seriousness. I find that difficult because Williams seems more intent on illustrating a thesis than on exploring a situation. We are surrounded, he suggests, by omnivorous destroyers. So we meet the richly decaying Mrs Venable, who feeds off the memories of her dead son, Sebastian, and who incantato-rily talks of the Encantadas where birds devour new-born sea turtles.

Mrs Venable also wishes to see Sebastian's cousin, Catharine, lobotomised because she knows the truth about his death. And, for good measure, Catharine's mother and brother turn out to be a pair of parasites impatient to get their hands on Sebastian's money. All the world, in Williams's view, is like the Venus flytrap that dominates this Southern garden. Williams was perennially obsessed by the conflict between the poetic soul and materialism. But while in A Streetcar Named Desirehe fully dramatised that clash, he here takes it as a given.

And while Catharine and Sebastian Jj PHOTOGRAPH- NEIL LIBBERT thin fare. A piece of eccentric minor Williams, which feels more like a sinister anecdote than a fully fleshed-out play, is rendered with souped-up sound effects and in a luxuriantly cluttered set that almost upstages the actors. If the work is to be revived at all, it requires a strong counterweight, a leavening humour and an ensem ble whose experience of the hothouse South extends slightly flirtherthan Bexhill-on-Sea. At the Comedy Theatre, London SW1 (0171-3691731). till July 17.

Jfora Fordham celebrates a fascinating can go wrong. But and Rachel Weisz In Suddenly Last the rhythms of Williams's prose. Only Sheila Gish, looking like some Garden District Lucnezia Borgia in regal purple, fully inhabits either the American South or the muscular music ofWilliams's writing. And when she displays a photograph of "my son, Sebastian, in a Renaissance page boy's costume at a maskedball in Cannes" she seems aware of her character's inherent absurdity. Rachel Weisz as Catharine has a peaches-and-cream beauty but hardly suggests a girl haunted by a week for jazz tempo shifts, showers of ArtTatum runs, borderline-dissonant phrasing that almost suggested Cecil Taylor, and ruminative classical impressionism.

It was fidgety, very flash, and the bass and drums sat a little squarely on top of the time, but it gripped like a vice. So did Garrett's music, and nobody sat on the time. After five years often representing the pure-jazz content of Miles Davis's funk bands, Garrett has grown into an improviser of massive stature, and the variety of line and texture he can thread into a gale-force solo packs volumes of music into high-energy outings that in other hands can just be jazz aerobics. Garrett's superb pianist Shedrick Mitchell is a McCoy Tyner admirer with a distinctive touch who applies constant counter-melodic pressure to everyone else's work, and though the repertoire often refers to the familiar, the group feel remoulds it all. Practise your clapping there's plenty of audience participation.

Kenny Garrett is at Pizza Express, Dean St, London W1 (01 71 -439 8722), till tomorrow. tortured as student rebel in Lagos. Both escaped to US. He didn't know she was raped. So stabbed her in chest with kitchen knife.

Then felt ashamed. Ludicrous to have this story squeezed in like this. Get back to them next week. Do proper storyline. You mind waiting? We're real busy now.

Dr Ross was leaving. He was breaking Hathavvay's heart How could he go to Seattle and leave her in freezing February Chicago? Immature. Emotionally underdeveloped. Needs to keep the flawed part of himself at bay. Guys.

Like, what is their problem? Broke her heart. At the end, Dr Green and Dr Ross saton abench brown-bagging. That's, like, drinking out of a paper bag. Windy City skyline across the frozen lake. Ross going to Seattle.

"You're not become aTrailblazers fan, are you?" "Or the Sonics." 'That's just wrong." Totally wrong. In Friends (Sky 1), Chandler proposed to Monica, But not in a good way. He'd made her angry. Thought he could make everything OK again by getting down on bending knee. The yutz.

Schematic portrayal of flawed masculinity. Guys. Like, will they ever get with the programme? You know? Full of Eastwood promise Too nice by Gerald Butler clearly represent finer feeling, it is hard to take the latter's martyrdom at face value. He seems less the poet wantonly destroyed by a cruel universe than a pampered dilettante torn to pieces by the Spanish boys he has so assiduously colonised. The work's saving graces are Williams's musical ear and ironic humour.

Both, however, emerge rather fitfully in Mathias's heavy-handed production. He fills the air with sound from cawingjungle birds to beating tom-toms; he seems less sensitive, however, to Highlights elsewhere came from two musicians rather more advanced down their respective paths: the great guitarist Jim Hall and post-Coltrane alto saxophonist Kenny Garrett. Hearing Hall's lyrical, bluesy music and Garrett's stormy and highly collectivised sound within a few days of each other as a fascinating reminder of how diverse jazz still is, and how little its power to move depends simply on intensity and attack. The 68-year-old Hall is a minimalist performer with a tone like moonbeams, who hardly needs to touch the instrument to make you hold your breath. He often plays solo or in duet, but varied his customary softness at the Barbican two Fridays ago with a punchy band and a repertoire of oblique funk and Latin.

Saxophonist Chris Potter added the bite, and bassist Scott Colley was almost as gracefully eloquent as Hall himself. The first half of'the show was taken care of by Martial Solal, a veteran French piano master. Solal's trio set was a firecracker of that 's th rough the roof!" Never mind. Out of the way! Otttta the goddam way! 'This is a crime scene!" "Not anv more, it isn't!" In ER (Sky 1), battles of wills and self-righteousness between doctors and cops always won by former. radius in the thorax.

ruptured diaphragm. "What's that?" "That's intestine." Meanwhile, Dr Ross was attending to Jeanie in her crashed car. "Multiple lacerations. She's HIV positive and didn't have a seat belt" Back at the ER. "The hand make it?" No one answered.

"Somebody order four pizzas?" Incidental music: plaintive piano arpeggios plus a whiff of clarinet. Lucy and Carter. Had sex the other week. Regrets? He had a few. She's an intern, he's resident.

Immature. Not in touch with his feelings. He wants herbad. Only doesn't know it. Guys.

Like, what is their damage? Vignette about Nigerian woman raped by 10 soldiers. Husband Jim "e- mmmr mmssik 'wrais liJhey call jazz the sound of surprise, but one of the sur- iJ prises of recent days was a sight rather than a sound that of an Eastwood betraying an emotion. Clint's bass-playing son Kyle was in London, leading his brisk and eager hard-bop group, and giving every impression of enjoying himself, given the public's reluctance to take him on his own terms. There were 20 photographers outside the Soho Pizza Express on his opening night not to catch the band in action, but in the hope that piano-playing, jazz-loving Clint might drop in for a pizza and maybe even a jam. The show was fine, if formulaic, with saxophonist Eric Alexander whacking in some reverberating multiphonics, and hustling dmm-mer Yoron Israel maintaining the pressure.

Eastwood's bass playing is anything but laconic, though it can sound subdued. But he's far from just a pretender with the buying power to hire a sharp band, and if left alone his music may well find its way along a more personal path. Channel swUng StiiaHjeffiies -Si chool bus hit by a snovv- plough. Can't talk. In proper ''-'1 'sentences.

Too busy. "Oh man I was hoping for an easier day." "I should have called in sick." "Called in sick. Ttiat's, like, "Ironic?" "Yeah, right. Really. Ironic." "Because we already work in a os-pital." 'Yeah, I got that already" "Do we know what's coming in first?" "Blood.

Chest. Traumatic amputation and a kid with a spinal cord injury." "All at once?" "Lovely." Bodies started arriving. "Ten-year-old female. BP 90 over 60. Or maybe it was VP.

Enunciation not strong point. In emergency trauma situation. LostoOccsof blood." "Do we still have the hand?" "We're still looking for it at the accident site." "Nine-year-old boy slammed into the seat in front of him. Not moving his limbs. Internal bleeding." It So Ae Guy, Thing.