THERE are four of the them and they give themselves the correct names, but that is where the connection with Dostoevsky stops. Boldly moustachioed and in floppy velvet caps, they look more like Italian banditti; sometimes they don impressive Mexican headgear, at others they unfasten their pigtails and could be taken for wild-eyed hippies - except for Smerdyakov, whose red hair grows outward instead of down and rings a bald cranium that doubles as a drum.

Quoting from the Gilbert-and-Sullivan patter-song they parody, the group is the model of a modern juggling group. The simple backdrop of curtains, columns and frieze is part Temple of Luxor, part skittle alley. But the columns are gigantic clubs and it is smaller versions of these that the four toss from hand to hand - always from right hand to left, but by no means' always to their own left hand.

Working up from. the simple routine of one man throwing three clubs, the other' Brothers join in with their complements of three until, in the sequence they call Jazz Juggling, Dmitri (Paul Magid) is throwing and catching clubs with Smerdyakov (Sam Williams) at a rate of two to a bar while either side of him the cool, comic Ivan (Howard J. Patterson) and the entirely silent Fyodor (Tim Furst) are working at one to a bar.

This gives the outer pair time for tricksy variations, bounces, underleg throws and the occasional high flier. However, this, they would say, is too easy. So Smerdyakov starts dropping the odd club, disarmingly asking someone to recover it, and then drops another. At one marvellous point Ivan wanders upright across the throwing-field and, by choosing exactly the right moment and route, is struck by none of them.

In other routines they manage such intricate tricks as playing a giant xylophone while juggling with the strikers, and juggling with three disparate items proffered by the audience (on my visit a globe, egg whisk and open can of lentil soup). They are a splendid troupe: tremendous fun and display skills that, in truth, have to be seen to be believed.