The Independent from London, Greater London, England • 67

riti Therefe nothing wrong with the Nationals first venture into theatre-in-the-round apart from the production, that is he Circle line thafs going nowhere Robert Butler shouldered by the cast the lovers meeting either side of a stream that rises and falls as the cast raise and lower horizontal staves; and the hatboy-ack4-wswtgy brought to life through the veMritoquist gurglings of McBurney. But tne challenge of theatre-in-the-round the hand-ting of point of view, control of focus and blocking for a cast of 15 through 36(1 degrees -isn't convincingly met. The second act trial scene, in partcubt is Iro static for this treatment. During the climax I had an uninterrupted view of an actor's back. As Grusha, the maid who saves the life of the Governor's baby, the compelling Juliet Stevenson could be in takes on a new version big play in a new version of a big space ana then delivers his own version of a big role.

He creates a Compbcite Chalk Circle and puts nbntelfm the Raddle. The actor is pulling Mm in one cS-rection and rhe director in the other. One of them should have let go. Critks arriving at the Royal Court Upstairs (at the Ambassadors) for Tbm Murphy's Bailegangjini (1985) were handed a copy of the play. The smart move would have been to go away arid read it Miirprty'spkty sub-ODUnheStaryofBataarajaacand arid curuiindy constructed (as I discovered the next inorning).

But watching it is a mild form oftorture. On stage, a senile woman Mommo (Rosalind Une-han, acting forcefully from the waist up) lies in bed eating food out of a rn and chatting to imaginary characters at the end of her bed. She is cared for by one granddaughter, Mary (an impressively stoic Brid Brennan, padding round the kitchen in gumboots), and visited by anoth-ecDoiyOtumMcCahel who is pregnant and wants Mary, her sister, to look after the baby. Mommo has a story to teU and no one wit stop her. This thne-hander runs two noun and 40 minutes.

In James Mac-donald's slow, brooding production with its tow-level fighting and herbal cigarettes (whose skkry wafts have replaced the smell of greasepaint as theatre's distinctive odour) the daushophobia got to me more than the play. There was more confinement and recycling of painful stories ki Out Cry, first performed at the Hampstead Theatre Club in 1967, when It was 77' Two Chancier Pity. Tennessee Williams then rewrote it three times. (It was, he said, "dose to the marrow of my Horribly close. Cheek by Jowl premieres tMs latest veraknet'astary of an adce and an actress, a brother and siller, who find themselves deserted by the rest of the company, and end up performing to each other.

This is minor Williams. In Tim Walker's highly charged production it is also wearyingly mtrospec-tive. It's hard to find a point of entry. As the actress Claire, Sara Stewart has the taut vulnerable histrionics for a Williams heroine never take uppers before the mnervaT), but she and the euually neurotic Jason Mer-rells (Matt in Casualty) keep tutting the same rntes. What is reality and what is illusion? Done this way, the subject seems desperately fey.

Any-one who's already anting in a theatre has worked out the deference. tewamCMCMr': Um Sl Win SM22SZI fuc ct vx2 am sissom. 17am TO GET from the foyer of the Ottvi-er to row AA, BB or CC, the mirror iniage of rows Bar you disappear down i corridor, through one door, then another, arid then another one after that One marc door aid you could be in fomeone'i dressing room. Where is this? Seconds. later, you're standing on a stage that you hardly recognise.

AD the way round membersof the audience are sitting and watching other members of the audience sitting and watching them. In the thcatn4the-round at feNationalabig-top canopy hangs from the root bloddngout the balcony level Here, none are more equal than others: everyone gets a good seat bu would never know it hasn'tahvays been this way. This redesign for two productions only has the authority of a hit. Sbu can imagine why the director Simon McBurney thought that The Caucasian Chalk Circle might work this wav. Not just because of the fide.

Brechfsplay is a 1945 poling parable basedma 1300 Chinese one: a judgement-of-Solomon situation, where a young child is put in the code andpuBed in two directions by his natural mother and the young woman who has raised him. It looks as if it's storytelling at its simplest. So McBumey take the biggest theatre on the South Bank and encourages 800 of us to gather round. After that if hard to know what exactly McBurney 's production is after. If aumentiriry, then he achieves that with his brother Gerard Mc-Bumeys excellent music, which uses ethnic instruments, such as "shaku-hachi" and that bring us dose to the mountainous spirit of the Caucasus.

But that attention to place is not picked up elsewhere. If it is physical theatre, as you might expect with Theatre de Comphjcite, then the mime techniques are disappointing. This comxuw lack the bold precision that made their name. There's little thaf innovative here: Claude Chagrin was providing stronger, more imaginative "movement for the National in the Sixties and Seventies. This new version of Brecht has been retranslated in an Irish idiom by Frank McCuinness.

The disparate cast who come from (among other places) Cambridge, Seville, Paris and Sarajevo, adopt Irish accents. It might be more consistent if thev then broke into Gaelic jigs, but Mead they break into Georgian chants. McBurney opens with Brecht' prologue, a post-war dispute about land rights, which leads into the performance of the play. This gives the story a con-text but leaves us in a no-man's land, somewhere between a medieval Georgia and a 20th-century one. For the second time I was thinking: where is this? There an beautiful set pieces: the creation of a bridge over a glacier.

The Olivier's redesign has the authority of a hit her own play. She roots herself with an earthy stiffness, as if facing into the wind. The part of Grusha "a good gut but you have no brains' calls for directness and simplicity. This means quite a lot of acting from Stevenson, who is naturally skilled at presenting complex and slippery emotional mgcnce. She has to find instead a flat-out intensity that illuminates Brecht' cartoon story.

Azdak, the idiot fudge, who reverses each expectation, is a peach of a role, and McBurney should have resisted it He takes the opposite approach to Steverisorecaiicature. He nods, winks, winces, snorts, sniggers and leers. He swigs from two bottles as he swivels on Ins judge's chair. He has black specs and a nerdish manner dve his hair orange and he rrught stand in for nnr4raiis. But his actions speak louder than his words: vocally he's no match for the classically trained Stnvnton.

If a characteristic imbalance. McBurney Cry': Lyric, Mb (Olfl 741 231U I0I7M9. From Omaha with love: Jutlat Stavanaon finds a flat-out krtansNy a the maid who aavaa ma life of the Oovamor's baby Cast know where they're standing. Still EN Box Office 0171 032 8300 La Nicholas Barber gush of girlish, emphatic vocals, like Bjork's, but with a hoarse, sexv edge. So: Bjork fronting a poppier Radio-head.

The only question is why they aren't famous yet. One reason may be that Catatonia's name would persuade a browser that they were an adolescent doom-metal band. Another may be their utter absence of style: Matthevvs has her hair pinned up mess-ily, and wears gold necklaces over her white T-shirt as if she'd planned to spend the evening serving tea on EastEiiderf. If you've ever chuckled over one of those embarrassing early photographs of Suede or U2 before they sorted out their image, you'll know what Catatonia look like now. With a quick makeover, a level of success similar to these other bands' may be in the pipeline.

On the new afcum by Edward Ball, GttfaVir Guilt (Creation), he makes 10 stabs at rewriting trie Kinks' "Waterloo If our hypothetical browser heard these wistful Londoner's con-srssions, she would guess that Ball was a clevex very English peat-punk singer-songwriter, with a long and fairly illustrious chart career behind him. Someone along the lines of Elvis CosteUo, perhaps, or Nick Lowe or Ian Broudie (The Mill H01 Self Hate his best pop song by far, sounds ofaalesssacdiarineUghtningSeeds). She'd be right more or less, except for the bit about the past cares Bail has done Ms time in various forgotten indie bands, arid has served as an associate member of the Boo Radleys, but none of these have made his name. This veax promise Creation Records' ptessorBce, will be different. Ball will appear on Top of the fix headline his own tours and receive gold He once helped to run the company, so they were happy to get Anna Erie! to star in one of his videos, and thereby guarantee him an appearance on Tile Chart Show.

Tup of the Fapt might be more tricky. At a low-key show at UxTdon's Borderline Club on Thursday, he proved to be an extremely likeable fellow, with a self-deprecating enthusiasm which suggested that he be as surprised as anyone if the hype came true. He hat lime cause for alarm. He is now on the wrong side of 30, and only just on the right side of JO, and he wouldn't quite have the looks for pop stardom even he pastiches the Beatles: "I woke up, fell out of bed Dragged a razor across my 'Live, his singing was weak and not always in tune, and the skilled band sounded thin and short of spark. So, no Ulus-trious pop past or future, but Bal could yet wheedle his way into the esteemed English cult songwriters dub, which is probably where he belongs.

Cast: Portsmouth Guildhall (01705 S14355). KWfeftt- Reading Rhrrmead (0173 50043), Tuet; Ombrktp Cam Wed; Sheffield City HaU (0114 273 5295), Thin. AT LAST August's V96, the festival which saw Britpup's stars squeeze one final peiformanre out of their 19)5 abums before returning to their recording studiosgoing on holiday, Supergrass and Elastics sounded unsure of their identities. They offered a couple uf new songs, none of which quite fitted in with their previous output. Cast on the other hand, had no such problems.

They were, as always, Paul Ul'lk-r's kid brothers, an old-fashioned bi-at group. With a knack for finding .1 Mngalong hook and writing primary-whool self-improvimcnt lyrics all "you've gotta and "I wanna" John rower achieve naivrlv and earnestly what the likes of Stock, Aitken and Waterman used to do while rubbing their calculators in glee. However, whafs good news for a summer aftemcxxVs open-air entertainment is not so good for a continuing, challenging career. The reason Cast knew where they stood was that they weren't moving on. They were typecast Sure enough, their dor) turned out to be as surprising as a bar of soap.

And, on Tueidjy, in the giant gym KaD that is the Plymouth Pavilions Arena, you wouldn't have known that time had passed since V96 at aD, were it not for John Rawer letting his curly hair grow, so that he resembled one of Harry Enfield's Scousrrs even more (as if chirping, "I just wanna be dinkin' doughts dat I dink, weren't Eruieldian enough). Hearing the pub-rock riffs of Mutter NWuw Caffs live, without the studio effects which John Ledde valiancy contributes, if hard to get too excited, about Cast Mind you, their all-round ordinariness accounts for much of their appeal Every one of the thousands otooys present Adidas tnin-ers and untucked button-down shirts looked as If he could have been a member. (And, who knows, any one of the crowd might have matched the band's performance abilities.) More than once I wondered if Cast weren't a ploy by Oasis' spin doctors to make the Gallaghers seem extraordinary. If not the wearisome psychedelic jamming on "History" that wHl convince the doubters (ie, me) that the group are worth their record sales, nor is it the shower of balloons, nor the giant ping-pong balls decorating the stage, instead, its a few mere songs like the propulsive "fine or the maximum RfcB of Ifs on these that rbwer's talent really takes flight. More deserving of your money are Catatonia, a newish Welsh band, who nonetheless fail to dress up as wizards or impersonate Svd Barrett.

On Wednesday they were in the ftxts-mouth Wedgewood Rooms, playing material from last year's debut nay Beyond Blue (Blanco Negro) and what material it is. From the twtakfing pop of "You've Got a Lot to Answer For" to majestic torch songs like Do bu Bebeve in Catatonia specialise in wide-open melodies and grunge dynamics, while the crashing waves of minor chords, Radiohead-styie, are even more dramatic onstage than they are on vinyl I couldn't say what the lyrics are about exactly, but ifs plain that they're Ordinariness is part of their appeal peppered with smart, me mot able phrases, written by the brassy Cerys Matthews. She flings, herself into the songs, and, when she's not swigging from a lager bottle, she's releasing a.