The Daily Telegraph from London, Greater London, England • 14

14 WEDNESDAY, APRIL 23, 1997 THE DAILY TELEGRAPH REVIEW A great night out for masochists Theatre The Caucasian Chalk Circle National Theatre NO ONE can doubt that Richard Eyre has presided over golden years at the National Theatre, but there is one aspect of his regime that has always baffled me: his absurd fondness for boring When old the Bertolt Berlin Brecht. came down, one of the great incidental bonuses was the thought that we'd probably never have to sit through Brecht's leaden theatrical parables again. They were, after all, the works of a man who celebrated a failed and odious political system. But in recent years the National has presented major revivals of both Mother Courage (admittedly with a great performance from Diana Rigg) and The Good Person of Sichuan. Now comes his last alleged masterpiece, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, written in 1944 during his American exile.

Nothing's too good for Bertolt, and the Olivier has been expensively remodelled into tan theatre in the round. It's a superb theatrical conversion, creating a space that is both intimate and epic, and I hope that the configuration will be used regulaordial loathing of this show, staged in Stoic: Juliet Stevenson as Grusha show, staged in collaboration with Theatre de is likely to be a minority view. Brecht still has a lot of fans (masochism has always been an English trait) reaction and at the the audience, evening was little short of ecstatic. But how can you take seriously a play that begins with a prologue showing a Utopian meeting between Soviet farmers who agree to settle a bitter territorial dispute for the common good under the benign eye of a party apparatchik? It's the theatrical equivalent of those notorious propaganda films about sun-bronzed Soviets on the prairies with their combine harvesters, and it was written at a time when Brecht was well aware of the crimes of Stalin and the atrocities of collectivisation. The play itself is an immensely fatiguing fable about a kitchen maid, Grusha (Juliet Stevenson), who rescues the baby of the governor during a palace revolution in the Caucasus and cares for it despite risk and hardship.

This is intermittently moving, just as Mother Courage's endurance is moving, but the tale is interminable, and is accompanied by a depressingly unfunny gallery of grotesques and a tiresomely florid narrator (Jeffery Kissoon). Grusha is a onedimensional character, all earnest goodness and stoic suffering, which suits Stevenson to a T. She is even given a brief opportunity to do some of her famous runny-nose acting, though to judge by her ghastly rendition of the dirge-like songs she should steer clear of the musical theatre. Finally, after what feels like several weeks, the play reaches its predestined climax. Grusha is brought to court, where the boy's real mother is demanding his return.

The court is presided over by the enormously, tedious Azdak, regarded by some as a great comic Picture: ALASTAIR MUIR character. He's a drunken and corrupt buffoon, and Simon McBurney treats us to his now over-familiar performance as a. bespectacled manic nerd. The solution to the problem of who is the rightful mother is based on the Judgment of Solomon. But Brecht hammers home the point that in a capitalist society the law needs to be subverted to ensure natural (for which read socialist) justice: a corrupt judge who favours the poor is infinitely better than a ruling-class placeman who abides by the rules.

The company, directed by McBurney, perform with Theatre de usual mixture of intensity and imagination. There's a good deal of Georgian folk music and choral chanting, demonstrations of 101 things to do in a theatre with sticks, a character on stilts, a puppet and a nasty outbreak of masks. It's absolute bliss when it stops. Tickets: 0171 928 2252 CHARLES SPENCER Wit and surprise are the elements to look for at the Hayward's new exhibition of objects as art, says Richard Dorment ARTS Hypnotic power of the object HE USE of the object in works of art began in this century with the invention of collage. Later, the Dadaists and Surrealists exhibited objects (whether manufactured by the artist or taken from the real world) as autonomous works of art.

For me the object-as-artwork carries overtones of sensual, the fetishistic, the dangerous and the fascinating think of Meret Oppenheim's furcovered cup, saucer and spoon of 1936, or of Man Ray's clothes iron bristling with tacks. I expect to have a different kind of experience in front of an object-based artwork than in front of one that has been modelled, chiselled or constructed. Instead of visual drama, they offer wit, surprise and perhaps a nagging sense of disorientation. Marcel Duchamp's carefully chosen readymades are a perfect example of what I mean. Though of little visual interest in themselves, each one lodges in the back of the mind like a ticking clock that keeps you awake at night.

The dark walls and strong spotlights in the Hayward Gallery's Material Culture: the Object in British Art of the 1980s and '90s (until May 18) emphasise the hypnotic power of the object, making the works appear to glisten invitingly from vitrines, to sit menacingly on plinths and floors, or to glare down at us from walls and ceilings. High up on the walls of one gallery the remarkable young Scottish artist Christine Borland exhibits From Life, a row of 21 glass shelves, each of which holds the imprint in dust of the bones of a human skeleton. Borland lights the transparent shelves from above to cast ghostly shadows of long dead limbs on the gallery walls. In making a work out of dust and shadow, she creates a memento mori which is itself as ephemeral as the brief life it seeks to make us aware. is of.

also on (Borland's show at recent the Lisson Gallery, 52-54 Bell Street, NW1, until May 10.) If at this stage you feel your spine shiver it is probably not because you are worried by Kerry Stewart and Ana Ghost, a sized polystyrene figure of with sheet over his head. After all, its whole point is that we deal with our dread of death by turning the dead into jokes or cartoons. No, you are being made uneasy by. the racket generated by Anya Gallaccio's 21 kettles hooked up to an air compressor in a base- TELEGRAPH GARDEN OFFER 6 Old Fashioned Geraniums for only £9.95 Our carefully chosen selection of Old Fashioned Geraniums were loved by the Victorians for their beautiful flowers, scented leaves and colourful foliage. They will brighten your garden this summer and are ideal for pots and tubs as well as flower beds.

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Reg. in England 451593. Reg. Office: 1 Canada ten, Princess Michael and Wallis Simpson. By combining the genealogical chart of the House of Windsor with a colour chart, the artists suggest that the Royal Family is the lick of paint that covers over a dingy reality of life in Britain.

About this work and the one by Cragg I'd say the same thing: profound, no; clever, yes. There is no point in my continuing to list the ways artists as different as Susan Hiller and Bill Woodrow, John Latham and Mona Hatoum use objects in their work. There is room in this show for Damien Hirst to display glistening jars containing animal parts, as well as for Richard Deacon to manufacture fantastic abstract forms out of suede, brass and plastic. In a deliriously silly but utterly charming work, Richard Wentworth inserts neatly folded chocolate-bar wrappers in the Pocket Oxford Dictionary on the pages where the name given to the sweet appears, starting with Boost and Bounty on pages 83 and 85 and ending with Topic and Wham on pages 891 and 957. This otherwise well-chosen and displayed exhibition (supported by the Henry Moore Foundation) would have been strengthened had the organisers defined the word "object" more rigorously.

The most disappointing gallery is the one at the entrance, where a truly unpleasant, turd-like carapace by Antony Gormley hangs from the ceiling between a giant reflective mirror by. Anish Kapoor and one of Julian Opie's life-sized prefabricated sheds. The problem is that you look at these large-scale works (and those exhibited by Alison Wilding and Shirazeh Houshiary) for their sculptural form, not as objects. The catalogue by Michael Archer, however, is indispensable and for once clearly written. 6 30 Lighting up time: Richard Wentworth's 1994 work, titled Wick We tend to draw a line between artists of the 1980s, who are primarily sculptors, and those of the tend to work with more ephemeral materials such as video, installation and language.

By concentrating on the use of the object in British art over the past 20 years, this show is able look at an area where the interests of the two generations overlap, placing Tony Cragg, Richard ment room at the gallery. Shrieking and mourning like souls trapped in the lowest circle of Dante's Inferno, they are the disembodied voices of Borland's 21 ghostly skeletons upstairs, longing for release. While we're on the subject of death 'n' things, it is not hard to see Gavin Turk's gleaming rubbish skip, painted in Stygian black, as a postmodern sepulchre. Seeds of revolution Seeds TT'S NOT the big baton gestures that change the state of music, but tiny marks in the score. The Lottery's £78-5 million splurge on Covent Garden, while arousing tabloid fury, does no more than conserve a troubled company.

"Stabilisation awards" a million or three to English National Opera are given, as the name implies, to anchor the ship rather than help it change course. The prizes that catch the public eye are, in fact, the ones that matter least. It's among the small wins that revolutions are made. In six weeks, I hear, the Arts Council of England will nudge the Lottery wheel to release a modest fund for recording and publishing projects. Performing groups, literary houses and large record labels will be encouraged to seek subsidy.

Featherbedding! I hear you cry. A licence to print witless and Oxbridge oratorios! Unwarranted state interference! Such fears, in former times, might have been justified. Lord Gowrie's Council, to its credit, has drawn a line beneath a legacy of pratfalls and is laying down tough entry criteria. It is also seeking prior approval from fairtrade inspectors at the DTI and in Brussels. The grants will be limited to music and books that are either unpublished or have been out of circulation for five years and, in the opinion of an expert panel, have the merit to be brought forth.

Awards may be as little as £500, rising to a maximum £100,000 for opera. Successful discs and books will pay back an open-ended royalty. If the subsidy kick-starts the career of the next John le or Andrew Lloyd Webber, the ACE might have to TINALLY, I can't I remember when I've enjoyed a show by a young artist more than that of drawings, sculpture and photographs by David Shrigley at the Stephen Friedman Gallery (25-28 Old Burlington Street, W1). Shrigley could best be described as an artist-cartoonist in the mould of the late Philip Guston, except that Shrigley turns the whole world into a carby exhibiting a black plastic cloud under which the viewer can stand when in a bad mood, and, with New Leaf, a big floppy green leaf that's just begging to be turned over on those days when you want change your life. His woeful, whimsical; funny and wonderfully truthful little stories and drawings made all the friends I've dragged to see them laugh, so it's not just me.

should also add by way of declaring an interest that Shrigley's work received this reviewer's ultimate, critical accolade one. news is that the show closes on Saturday. Deacon and Anish Kapoor alongside younger figures such as Douglas Gordon, Simon Patterson and Roderick Buchanan. Cragg shows an early floor piece in which he arranges a collection found plastic objects old biros, sieves, bottles and so forth to form the spectrum of the rainbow. As the blues give way to greens, and yellows to.

oranges and reds, we begin versive seeds that promise gradually to transform the state of play in British music. The fund is the brainchild of the ACE music chairman, Gavin Henderson, who in a brilliant career has run a London orchestra, a seaside festival flourishing sic college. Henderson regards the unleashing of a recording subsidy not as sticking-plaster in a casualty ward, but, in revolutionary parlance, "as a way for musicians to have greater ownership and influence over their own Dangerous talk. With the ACE as investor, ensembles of all sizes will be able to commission new work, bring it to fruition and use record companies their former taskmasters as hired distributors. Since most listeners hear music second hand, at a distance from the place of performance, the initiative snatches power back from the media and restores it to the message-makers.

It should prove of greatest benefit to jazz players, whose improvisational art is often squandered by lack of recording. The big loser in all this is the BBC, whose orchestras have used their salaried status to undercut other ensembles for what little commercial recording is still available. BBC orchestras, I gather, will not be eligible for subsidy unless they compete fairly on record deals. With extra subsidy, the London and Birmingham orchestras will put some BBC bands off the record and into the red. Two years ago, the Arts Council bit its tongue when the BBC walked out of a joint orchestral review.

Now, by a flick of small print, it has put the BBC on the spot. When dust finally settles, the orchestral map of Britain will look quite different. to see Cragg's point: that the variety of colours in industrially made objects is as infinite as that found in nature. Nearby, a joint work by Gordon and Patterson consists of identical cans of paint methodically arranged in stacks on the gallery floor. Each can is labelled both with its colour classification code and the name of a member of Royal Family, from the Queen to Earl Mountbat- Norman Lebrecht on Music relocate to a Dutch Antilles tax shelter.

So worthy. Another few Lottery drops in the artistic lily pond and no radical divergence from standard practice. The ACE's music department does give occasional loans to new releases and, in the cellist Steven Isserlis's 1992 hit with John Tavener's The Protecting Veil, actually earned back more than it put out. HE difference with this intent. scheme is The its new scale fund and is in effect bottomless; it acknowledges the grim reality that unsubsidised commercial recording of largescale classical works has all but dried up.

Sales are down and costs rising, along with a buoyant pound. The London Philharmonic, which has played on 1,300 records over six decades, hardly gets a studio these days. To get back on record, ensembles need a helping hand. US orchestras are begging private sponsors to pay for their sessions; independent British bands now have an ACE in the hole. As emergency aid, the scheme will ease the drought.

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