The vigour and potency of van Dyck’s work struck them like a shock of forbidden insight. In a land that would soon be stalked by a Witchfinder General, it may even have appeared demonic.Van Dyck was not deflected by any criticism. but truly I think it is like the original.” Others took issue not with his methods but with his very existence.Puritans regarded pictures as an abominable offence against the Second Commandment and an incitement to further horrors such as dancing, masquing and adultery. Some sitters complained of his insistent realism, the Duchess of Sussex declaring, “The picture is very ill-favoured, makes me quite out of love with myself, the face is so big and so fat.

Van Dyck’s view of the English court is lit by a Holbeinesque belief that he was dealing with men, not gods – a very different view from that of the virulent royalists who would posthumously recruit the painter to their cause.Van Dyck’s creative path was not always a smooth one. But to me, of all England’s court painters, he is the only worthy heir of the shrewdest and most honest of them all, Hans Holbein the Younger. And he has, indeed, stood accused of making his way by glamorising and flattering the illusion of Divine Right. You might therefore expect van Dyck to be a contented salaryman, glorifying the King with skills honed during his early years as a devotional artist. Painters often doubled as diplomats or spies and pictures were a currency of political patronage and exchange.

Somewhere below must be the card with a hastily scrawled name and number. In the age of the Guildford Four you can believe this essentially innocent, if misguided, man could be tried and executed, but such anachronistic mirages (or jokes) only work because of van Dyck’s accurate delineation of the man inside the ruler.
Painting and government were closely related in the 17th century. The Roman sculptor Bernini (who relied on van Dyck’s painting to make a marble bust of the king) thought it melancholy and full of foreboding. To us, the picture is ominous in a different way, irresistibly recalling police-station mugshots: the king’s head full-face, flanked by his left and right profiles. ANTHONY VAN DYCK’S triple portrait of his employer, Charles I in Three Positions, is one of the most remarkable works which will be on show at the Royal Academy in September (“Van Dyck 1599-1641″).

How did she ever pick me – just a wrestler and roustabout?’ “Chester Ribonsky (Paul Novak), sailor, bodybuilder and bodyguard: born Baltimore, Maryland 1923; died Santa Monica, California 14 July 1999.. On 22 November 1980 she died in her sleep, with Novak at her bedside.A few years before she had said that Novak was “a good guy”, adding, “Of course there’s 40 guys dyin’ for his job!” In her last years West continually asked him to contact an attorney so that she could change her will in his favour, but he later stated, “I always said to her, `Now now, dear, there’s plenty of time to do that.’ I guess I thought she would live forever. Returning, he said, `I’ve got to catch a plane’, and he flew home to West, leaving me to drive back to Los Angeles alone.”During the final years of West’s life, she and Novak lived a quiet life, entertaining small groups of friends (including the directors George Cukor and Robert Wise) or strolling by the sea near the 22-room beach house in Santa Monica where they spent most of their time, though West also had an apartment in Hollywood.With Novak’s constant protection and his concern for her diet and excercise, West survived until the age of 87, when she had a series of strokes. As Paul was leaving, she told him, `Just remember, there ain’t no swingin’ doors in this place!’ ” Joe Gold added, “Just as Novak was about to board ship in New Orleans he stopped to make a phone call. On one occasion after an argument with West’s brother and sister-in-law, whom she supported, Novak rang Joe Gold and asked him to drive him to New Orleans so that he could sign up for another tour of duty with the merchant marines.Dolly Dempsey, a long-time friend of the couple, said, “It was the first time I ever heard Mae really talk like Diamond Lil. From that meeting and up until the end of her long life, Novak would be at Mae’s side to tend to her every need. His devotion was noted by nearly everyone who was in their company, and for the first time in her life Mae began to settle down in a monogamous relationship.Though those who knew them attested to their mutual devotion, they were both strong-willed and temperamental, and Novak, like any paid companion, was not popular with all of West’s friends and relatives.

Easier said than done – especially when the scandal is of excruciating personal embarrassment, and desperately wounding for one’s family.His second point, with which, again, few would argue, is that Vietnam and Watergate have left the presidency a circumscribed and weakened office. He is no mere beat reporter, but a man who has lived and breathed Washington at its highest levels for a quarter of a century No one knows more about the way the modern presidency works. Politics is process, but it is also people.Shadow offers barely a whiff of the growing mutual loathing between Clinton and Starr, which largely drove the scandal in its later stages.We deserve better from Bob Woodward. The style is plodding, the tone monotonous, with hardly a shaft of insight or judgement to illuminate it. The excuse, of course, is that facts should be allowed to speak for themselves But facts have to be marshalled, and made digestible. The Lewinsky affair was a scandal to beggar belief, a spotlight on the fleshly weaknesses – but also the extraordinary resilience – of one of the most fascinating occupants of the White House.Yet Woodward’s account is a monumental bore.

But, for the most part, the movers and shakers of Washington have found that a work-out with the six-guns in Dodge City in the company of Bob Woodward is far preferable to inscrutable oriental discretion.Shadow, however, accomplishes a notable feat. Everyone had to do their own thing, the former president wrote to Bob Woodward – mixing metaphors in his own inimitable style – saying: “Mine is to stay the hell out of Dodge [City] – and do as the old Chinese mandarin adage says: `Stand on sidelines, hands in sleeves’.”Clinton, too, declined to help. But it was never the stuff of impeachment.Iran-Contra, a secret White House operation in defiance of official policy and the law of the land, indubitably was And Iran-Contra was infinitely more serious than Watergate. All that saved Reagan was his own reputation for dotty incompetence.Who better than Bob Woodward, one of the Washington Post duo who unearthed Watergate, to explain it all? He is a charming man, a gifted listener with a knack of making important people spill the beans, who has talked to almost everyone who has mattered in Washington since Richard Nixon.One of the few he did not talk to was George Bush. So the trail led from the obscure Whitewater land deal in the early Eighties to a few bouts of furtive sex with a White House intern in a windowless anteroom of the Oval Office between 1995 and 1997.I remain convinced that Clinton should have resigned out of shame at the humiliation visited on his country by the Lewinsky affair.

The independent counsel law, signed by Jimmy Carter in 1977 as a down payment on his promise of a post- Watergate cleansing of government, was an unmitigated disaster. Inadvertently, a virtual fourth branch of government was created, controlled by and responsible to no one.By the end, Starr was conducting a rolling, real-time investigation of whatever he chose at the Clinton White House. The office has lost power even as retinues of courtiers, security details and other trappings of power have grown more bloated. To use the league tables Americans love, none of its recent occupants can be classified as “great” or even “near- great”. Instead of great deeds, there have been great scandals, and independent counsels probing them. Indeed, the presidents, the scandals and the counsels almost constitute a parallel history: Nixon, Watergate and Archibald Cox; Ronald Reagan, Iran-Contra and Laurence Walsh; most recently, Bill Clinton, the Lewinsky affair and Kenneth Starr.
Looking back, a couple of things are clear.

Things were fouling up and having to be helped along at every stage of the process, and I think that after five months one can fairly say that this is a machine that does not and is not going to work; in a real factory, a radical redesign would have been insisted on long ago.There were glimpses, though; glimpses of small, precise and rather balletic operations which, if they’d all come together, would have made a beautiful performance; a work in praise of the hand and the machine and chaos, (the utilitarian rhythms decorated with the erratic flight and fall of the planes). And it has apparently made and flown one or two planes, though I’ve not met anyone who’s seen this happen, nor (on various visits) have I ever seen the machine even trying to work.But last Saturday I did, and it was a revelation Admittedly, it hardly functioned at all. It has a sign describing it as “a work in progress” that has encountered “unforeseen technical difficulties”. Taking an elementary artefact, very easy to make by hand – a balsa-wood, paper, glue and rubber- band plane – Burden tried to devise a machine that would accomplish this simple bit of handiwork automatically, assembling a plane from its parts, winding up its propeller and launching it into the gallery once a minute.

It required, of course, a fantastically elaborate machine.Which was built – and has been sitting there since February, often surrounded by technicians. And if more high- minded arguments against art being fun fail, then the practical point strikes me as pretty decisive: there is no point in people crossing town for a level of amusement that can be easily found at home.And now it’s time to say a wistful goodbye to Chris Burden’s One Minute Airplane Factory, which finally ended its (extended) run in the Tate’s Duveen Gallery the day before yesterday although, as you may know, it never really got started.The idea was to set the manual against the mechanical. But, for myself, when I feel in need of being mildly diverted, I don’t trek off to an art gallery, I read a paper, stare out of the window or something. For the rest: “arch”, “whimsical” and “pointlessly weird” cover the field, and the point of Abracadabra’s layout seems to be to put all the works in a relay of reciprocal interference – each one there to distract you from the negligibility of the last.I don’t deny that there are some mildly diverting notions and gizmos here – and no disrespect to mild diversion.

These are large white discs, lying on the floor or raised just off it, that revolve and orbit each other by some unseen mechanism. You can see that in other, quieter conditions, this would be a graceful and mysterious piece. It becomes one more odd thing that is happening on a screen.Likewise with Xavier Veilhan’s Spinning Machines. The model is here, switched off, with videos of it struggling along city pavements, with the artist (in nurse’s uniform) in attendance, helping it round corners Fine But in this happy-clappy world, the joke can hardly live. But the trouble is that the Tate supplies it with an unlimited number of balls, so that it just becomes a jolly, non-competitive knockabout; it’s only interesting if you play a proper, one-ball, goal-scoring game which then requires both real and extended teamwork.Momoyo Torimitsu’s robot is another could-be good joke: a life-size and highly life-like model of a suited Japanese businessman, with an expression of intense determination fixed on his face, and when you switch him on, he commando-crawls along on his elbows, an image of painfully undeterrable purpose.

Blunkett is obsessed with tests and targets, and determined to impose his “mechanistic philosophies” on every “energetic, inspirational and exemplary” teacher noble or foolish enough to fight the good fight for progressive teaching.
This is nonsense. The National Literacy and Numeracy Strategies are squeezing the individuality and professionalism out of primary school teaching. His focus on basic skills is crippling our children’s imagination. DAVID BLUNKETT, Secretary of State for Education, has said that he will resign if national targets for literacy and numeracy are not met by the year 2001. Prize-winning children’s author David Almond thinks that he should go now.

Blunkett has, Almond and his fellow liberal critics believe, driven all fun and creativity from the primary classroom. But those who doubt the wisdom of working themselves to the limit of their passions should give themselves a treat, and take a trip down to the Battersea Arts Centre this month.. It should perhaps be mentioned at this point that the director is 21.The result, for me, was spellbinding, a truly remarkable evening of theatre, in which the heat of the summer evening was forgotten and the limitations of the space were turned to advantage. Part religious meditation and part ghost story, The Dybbuk emerges as an unexpected, searing romance, in which the two doomed lovers are played with mesmerising intensity by Sally Hawkins and Luke de Lacey.Maybe Mr Rosenblatt, Miss Hawkins, Mr de Lacey and the rest are not taking time to smell the flowers.

Last year’s runner-up, Simon Godwin, is currently staging Eurydice at the Whitehall Theatre.This year’s winner, Mark Rosenblatt, was aiming particularly high. His proposal was to put on S Anski’s complex and intense exploration of mysticism, sin and the supernatural within an ultra-orthodox Jewish community, an epic story of love and betrayal, with a cast of 12, plus three musicians, playing a score commissioned for the production – all in a studio theatre in Battersea. Of the shortlist of eight directors who spent a weekend of workshops and interviews at the Battersea Arts Centre prior to a final decision being made, three, including the winner, have subsequently been commissioned to put on productions in London. A bursary is provided, underwriting the cost of production, and the recipient’s production is put on for a three-week run at the Battersea Arts Centre.This is not amateur hour, by any means. A bright, dynamic man, charming but with a will of steel, he lived for the theatre and during his mid-twenties established himself as one of the most promising directors of his generation. His death from heart failure was sudden and unexpected.In memory of James, a trust was established, aimed at providing an opportunity for a young, untried director to bring a classical work to the stage.

Then take what you get for it.” Coincidentally, a new production in Battersea of the classic Jewish play The Dybbuk has reminded me of a late friend, and cousin by marriage, whose short life was a testament to the wisdom of Ford’s advice.James Menzies-Kitchin died three years ago, at the age of 28. I’ve been reading Ford Madox Ford, whose advice, based on his own hilariously busy life, was “Work yourself all out, to the limit of your passion for activities. What should they do now? Fall in love sharpish, to get their hearts good and callused for the long haul ahead? Grab as much meaningless sex as possible, before the ghost of commitment has them in its thrall? Scramble for cash, like a coke-fuelled Eighties commodities broker, and risk ending up an exhausted has-been at the age of 30? Or drift along, taking time to smell the flowers, like a Sixties hippie, and risk missing so many buses that in the end the point of the journey will have been forgotten?As a long-time member of the bus-missing community, I have always favoured the gradualist approach, trusting that, if you played it cool, your future would somehow find you, introducing itself like a beautiful new friend at a party.Now I’m not so sure. They are about to emerge from the cocoon of education, more or less grown-up, slightly qualified, but still confused. It would be foolish to deny that, like most columnists (with the possible exception of Paul Johnson), I suffered a pang of jealousy when Sunscreen, or whatever it was called, became one of the relatively few newspaper columns to reach the top of the charts.But it’s the advice to the newly adult that is the problem. A version of this meditation will shortly be appearing in the Reader’s Digest, a career peak which I long to emulate with my advice for those coming down from university.
The spoof graduation address, of course, has been done by the ridiculous woman from Chicago who wrote a semi-ironic piece about flossing your teeth and looking after your knees which was subsequently put to music. Last year, my thoughts went out to teenagers who had received dodgy A- level results, consoling them that, however they had done, their souls were beautiful, and that their parents were more proud of them than they were currently able to express.

An overbearing young buck does a deal with a wealthy citizen to take his free-thinking daughter off his hands for a dowry. The vexatious female is bundled off to a husband who bullies her, denies her food and clothes, turns up for their wedding in rags and odd boots and humiliates her until she capitulates in such a wholesome fashion that everyone in earshot wants to throw up.To make matters worse, Shakespeare’s prologue, which puts the proceedings at a distance by making them the dream of a drunken tinker, Christopher Sly, has been omitted from this production.On the opening night, the heavens opened in reproof, delaying the start (in five years of outdoor shows on this site, only one has been rained off). The play is the story of the subjugation of Kate, a fiery woman of independent views, into a submissive wife who would agree that white is black if her husband said so. Would it have been better to have circumnavigated this hoary old potboiler? Kinder to pretend that it did not exist?
Consider the plot. Continuing through the Shakespearean repertoire, the company has arrived at the stumbling block of The Taming of the Shrew. In previous productions, the setting – an 11th-century Norman castle moat – has provided an inspired backdrop for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and has been gloriously flooded for The Tempest. I’m not sure we would want to see Shakespeare staged and acted the way he was four hundred years ago either..

THIS PRODUCTION by the Northcott Theatre in Exeter’s Rougemont Gardens marks the fifth year of open-air Shakespeare performances in the city. “Designers specialised in certain settings,” as Scholl explains. “One might do only palace interiors, and another parks.”Did this hectic aesthetic represent the taste of the time, or more Vsevolozhsky’s personal taste? Either way, it makes you question the issue of theatrical reproduction. The Kirov exercise is historically interesting, entirely worthy and probably extremely costly, but it is a fossil exhibit, rather than an event coming to life. Designed by Genrickh Levot, the scenery is so decorated as to become oppressively leaden; but the decor improves with successive acts, and different designers – five in all, according to the custom of the time. It certainly made sense for him to choose a time-span from the 16th century to the 17th, so that the finale’s painted apotheosis of clouds includes Apollo as a reminder of Louis XIV the Sun King, the creator of a new, civilised order through the arts and establishment of ballet.

But what costumes, what fussiness, what a quantity of clashing colours and different shapes.The garland dance with adults dressed in red and white and children in blue and white produces clear French-tricolour patterns, but elsewhere there is such confusion it is hard actually to see the dance.This is particularly problematic in the Prologue, with its mass of characters, all with contrasting costumes, positioned within the ornately carved walls of a throne room. As the Maryinsky Theatre’s then director, the francophile and playwright Ivan Vsevolozhsky co-wrote the libretto of The Sleeping Beauty with Petipa, and designed the costumes. This brings the Prologue back in line with the Royal Ballet’s, although our Sleeping Beauty is not always more authentic in other areas.This revival’s biggest handicap, to my mind, are the original designs. More successful is the restoration of the Tom Thumb and Cinderella divertissements, as well as the Fairies’ symmetrical formations in the Prologue, where they once again appear with cavaliers.

His books, his life are saturated with gore, which is shed at every possible opportunity. Ketchum, Kilimanjaro, Key West and Havana are easily built into a style – faded colonialism, the outdoor life, the bright splashes of colour of the African bush, French cafe posters and the bullring.Yet there is one element that seems to be missing from the Hemingway range: thick, pulsing, dark red arterial blood. Hemingway’s writings could hardly be said to dwell on interior design; there is quite a bit of fucking, but not much shopping.However, Thomasville, the furniture company that has released the Hemingway range, sees him as a brand, not just a writer and a dead human being, and you can see its point. Nor was he any proto-Martha Stewart, living as he did in a state of total disarray. But he was always suspicious of commercialisation, and rightly so; during his lifetime Buick asked for happy endings for the televised versions of A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises and To Have and Have Not (they were refused). It is true, perhaps, that there are few others who could so easily be co-opted to consumerism (Kerouac’s Kar Kabin? William Faulkner’s Tragically Southern Fried Chicken? The Henry Miller range of.. never mind). Literary lifestyles sell, if suitably marketed.But it is strange in many ways that, if America is to choose a writer to turn into a line of soft furnishings, it should be Hem.

F Scott Fitzgerald, by means of his character Jay Gatsby, was unwittingly responsible for the return of baggy white trousers in the Seventies, just as the popularisers of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited ensured that a whole generation cannot look at a teddy bear or a bow tie without recalling those wistful days of the early Eighties. He lives on in Hemingway Inc, a company run by three of his children and sharply disdained by his granddaughter, which licenses a range of products for sale. This is “the business of peddling Hemingway as if he were a QVC home-shopping network item”, wrote Lorian in GQ magazine.Of course, he is hardly the first great writer to be turned into a nice range of gentlemen’s casual wear and some desirable household objects. An auction house is even offering one of his shotguns for sale, which seems a little tasteless in the circumstances.Hemingway is now an industry, a lifestyle, no longer just a writer. He did not design the Hemingway furniture range, or the spectacles, fountain pens, or any of the vast range of other consumer durables that are being marketed under his name He did not write The Hemingway Cookbook. To the best of our knowledge, he never envisaged the Hemingway lookalike competitions that will be under way this weekend in Key West.

a peace without occupation, without destitute peoples, and without citizens whose homeland is denied them… pro-Israeli) negotiations in 1975, the Syrian president said then that “for our part we look upon peace in its true sense… Even though he knows that Mr Barak is offering little more than Mr Netanyahu, he doesn’t want Syria to be blamed for the collapse of the “peace process”.
Be sure that if the world – for which read the White House, CNN and the European Union (newly grateful for America’s participation in the Yugoslav war) – regards Barak as the man who can make peace, Assad does not want to be the man blamed for its failure Frustrated by Henry Kissinger’s highly partial (i.e. Hence the Syrian press (government controlled, let us not forget) praises Washington’s peace-making Hence President Assad’s enthusiasm to restart negotiations. He wants the return of Golan – all of Syrian Golan – in return for peace.
And when Barak is being feted in Washington as the man who will fulfill the promises of peace, the Syrian leader is not going to be left out. Having watched the Palestinians writhe under their 1993 Oslo agreement – which let the Israelis renegotiate 242, deciding which bits of occupied Palestinian land they would give back and which they would not – Assad has understood the need to keep to the original text. Baker promised that if Syria took part in the Madrid Middle East peace conference, “peace” would be founded on UN Security Council Resolution 242, which demands, specifically, the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Arab land in return for the security of all states (including Israel) in the region.

In 1991, Assad – though he has not yet chosen to reveal the document in public – received a letter from then US Secretary of State, James Baker. As if “peace” was to be found on a supermarket shelf, to be put “back on track” when all the Israeli signals were green. Woe betide anyone – any Arab – who suggested that the toy train should not be put back on the railway line.
And given the royal treatment of Barak in Washington – not a single critical voice asking why he would need 50 more F-16 fighter bombers if he was so keen on peace – it’s not difficult to see why the Arabs are fearful of being left out. BBC World Service was trumpeting the cliche in its headlines yesterday. A man with real power, a man with whom the Arabs could – in words made immortal by the Americans when they were dealing with dictators like Saddam Hussein (before 1991) and Slobodan Milosevic (before 1999) – “do business”.

And no sooner does Ehud Barak sit down with Bill Clinton in Washington than the satellite television boys tell us that this is the moment when “peace” – and let’s keep the quotation marks around the word – is “back on track” It’s odd how the networks use this tired old phrase. The moment Ehud Barak was elected prime minister of Israel, we heard President Hafez el- Assad of Syria announce that Barak was an honest and strong man Note the word “strong”.

And anxious not to be blamed for its failure, the Arabs and Israelis leap to express their support. Every few months in the Middle East, the Chamberlain bell is rung: “Peace in Our Time”, it tolls. A man with real power, a man with whom the Arabs could – in words made immortal by the Americans when they were dealing with dictators like Saddam Hussein (before 1991) and Slobodan Milosevic (before 1999) – “do business”. The moment Ehud Barak was elected prime minister of Israel, we heard President Hafez el- Assad of Syria announce that Barak was an honest and strong man Note the word “strong”. And anxious not to be blamed for its failure, the Arabs and Israelis leap to express their support. One Golan area wine producer has already started planting vineyards in Galilee to stay in business after an Israeli withdrawal..

Talk of big disposals is still there.A raft of competition inquiries unsettled several blue-chips. Engineer Invensys firmed 7.25p to 334.5p as HSBC said it might upgrade after Friday’s annual meeting. An intriguing rumour suggested that Misys could be the mystery predator stalking smaller rival JBA, up 16.5p to 197.5p. Poor old Aegis lost 6p to 140p.The rising big hitters were few and far between. Caterer Compass served a 21p rise to 652p on revived whispers of an offer from Rentokil, up 1p to 244p. Allied Domecq frothed 17p better to 592p after the pubs saga ended with the sale to Punch Taverns and Bass, down 4.5p to 934p.Software designer Misys bucked the techies’ malaise and rose 7.5p to 617.5p on a WestLB Panmure push ahead of tomorrow’s results. The market was ecstatic at the news that it has poached the chief executive of media agency Aegis after a year-long search.

The FTSE 250 did better, finishing 17.4 lower at 6,072.5, while the Small Cap lost only 1.6 to 2743.7.Marks & Spencer’s fell 15p to 373.75p amid suggestions that some of its staff were selling stock received in the latest profit-sharing handout. The struggling retail giant was hit by a wave of small deals, with some orders totalling as few as nine shares.Another fallen giant, the magazine publisher Reed International roared back with a 37p rise to 492.25p. Sharp falls in US techies’ stocks also contributed to the malaise. Under the deal, New Jersey-based GPU bought Cinergy’s 50 per cent stake in Midlands. Cinergy had been opposed to the acquisition of a water company and its disappearance from Midlands’ share register left its management free to pursue its diversification dreams.If a foreign rival pips Midlands to the Yorkshire post, the power group could turn to Severn Trent, down 3p to 978p. Sector peer Anglian Water was also buoyed by vague bid talk, rising 15p to 748p.The rest of the market took another sharp tumble as sellers gained the upper hand for the second consecutive day.The FTSE 100 shed 91.7 points to 6,392.0 as bearish US economic data and fears over equities’ valuations depressed sentiment.

If the takeover floodgates open, Yorkshire, soon to be renamed Kelda, could be one the first company to be swallowed up.Supporters of a bid from US-owned Midlands pointed out that the electricity group has made no mystery of its desire to expand in water. This strategy was given a boost a few weeks ago when Midlands’ feuding parents, the US groups GPU and Cinergy, made peace. Most experts predict that water companies will be hammered by the regulator’s proposals for tough price cuts.However, the arrival of the long-awaited Ofwat review will remove the cloud of uncertainty which has been hanging over the sector and could start a round of corporate action. The UK group Midlands Electricity is the market’s favourite, although some less insular dealers muttered that a European or US group could strike.
The trigger for any corporate action will be next week’s price review by watchdog Ofwat. The utility bucked the trend of a sharply falling market and gushed 16p higher to 497.5p. According to City leaks, rivals are sniffing around Yorkshire. THE MARKET was excited by bid rumours from “up North” yesterday as predators were said to be circling Yorkshire Water.

He can have a conversation between various characters (so long as he does all the voices himself) or he can talk to the audience and share his thoughts. But as he grabs at words, stutters in the middle of riffs or hurries through the domestic scenes, he looks as if all he wants to do is get on with his own material. If you are doing a play about a highly individual free-wheeling comic, the last person you need is another highly individual free-wheeling comic. You want an actor.Izzard turns in a Herculean performance as Lenny. He throws everything at the role, from the uncompromising opening – where he is naked – to his death from a morphine overdose at the end He’s daring, exhaustive and often funny. It’s no surprise that Bob Dylan named a song after him.
If Bruce’s stage act was edgy, angry and disturbing, then Eddie Izzard’s performance in Lenny, Julian Barry’s biographical play, is only loveable and untroubling.

For the director, Sir Peter Hall, the idea of casting Izzard as a stand-up comic with a gift for surreal flights of fancy was probably irresistible If so, it was only a so-so idea. Bruce believed in logic and laws, and for all his hilarity he was more than a bit rabbinical. He called his autobiography How To Talk Dirty and Influence People and if that sounds facetious, well, he was in earnest. From Lenny Bruce to Eddie Izzard, alternative comedy can be seen as a sustained effort to shed light on those areas of life that still qualify for the one Polynesian word that we all know. Back in the 1960s, Lenny Bruce was making his name by getting arrested for breaking the taboos surrounding four-letter words, six-letter words and 11-letter words (if you’re counting, that last one ends with “sucking”). Bruce believed that by constantly repeating “nigger”, “yid” or “greaseball” you could rob these words of their violence. Long, long ago, in a land of volcanoes and coral reefs, where the warm Pacific breeze ruffles the coconut palms, the local inhabitants came up with a concept that was to become central to alternative comedy: the taboo.

He didn’t have the melody yet.”`Divas at the Donmar’: Donmar, WC2 (0171 369 1732), 23-28 August. Another one, Adam Guettel, brought McDonald a song that became “Baby Moon” on her CD “He’d only written the complement. The bad ones say they’re “art songs”, “inaccessible” and “aping Sondheim’s worst flaws” and the good ones say “sure to become standards”, “miles away from the formulaic pap” and “music of the late 20th century and definitely of the 21st”. Either way, McDonald is an inspiration to this new generation. LaChiusa wrote Marie Christine for McDonald after hearing her sing a song at an audition.

He has written one song just because her voice has a strong angry quality on the `E’ These new composers can’t wait to show her stuff. I kept sneaking off to do summer stock-and-belt.” When McDonald took the role of the student in Master Class, all these issues came “flying back in my face”.If you read the 43 customer reviews of Way Back To Paradise on the amazon website , there is a consensus about her voice: “honey-like”, “angelic”, “glorious” and “shattering” The reviews split when it comes to the songs. It sounds like a radio station.” The conflict for McDonald was acute. “I was discovering that my voice is operatic, I have a naturally classical voice But my love is for musical theatre.

Yet no number of posters and postcards can adequately prepare you for the kooky majesty of this wonderful building which stands over the town’s main square where every newcomer arrives. Yet in the still busy markets, in the wiles of the Moorish merchants and in the 90ft-long barges that plied their trade along the Niger, he saw enough to fascinate him and, according to the accounts I had read, the intervening 170 odd years had not done too much to alter this traditional way of life.If Sydney has its Opera House, and Bilbao its museum, then Djenne has its mosque. During the 18th century new trade routes opened along the coast of Africa sending these two gateways to the desert into sharp decline. When Caillie arrived he found Djenne already well past its heyday. In 1826 the French explorer Rene Caillie entered its walls disguised as an Arab. He was only the second European to have reached this “city of gold” and the first who survived to tell the tale. A centre of Islamic learning from the 14th century, it was strictly off- limits to non-Muslims.

Both Djenne and Timbuktu had grown rich on the trans-Saharan traffic in slaves, gold and salt. But as the hours passed it became apparent that no one was going my way, and I ended up gratefully paying some inflated sum for a midnight ride to Mopti, the place I had tried my best to avoid.The following afternoon I did eventually make it to Djenne, more anxious than ever to see this town which had, together with Timbuktu, once been so fabled for its wealth. My one ambition was to get off the bus.
The warning in my guidebook, never – under any circumstances – to disembark here, was not enough to stop me from carrying out my ill-fated plan. I stepped down onto the baking tarmac and prayed that I would get a lift to the island town which for weeks now had been shimmering across my imagination like a mirage. But when the driver pulled up at the crossroads to Djenne, no such thoughts were in my mind.

Locally it is known as the beautiful, or at least better preserved, twin sister of Timbuktu, the smooth lines of its striking adobe architecture having not yet begun, in the way of its sibling, to succumb to the encroaching sands. As I sat waiting for a lift at a crossroads in the middle of Mali, one of Africa’s largest countries, I vowed never again to forget that patience is the one virtue which, in this part of the world, you should observe above all others. For 10 long, hot days I had endured the insults and injuries of a dozen clapped out jalopies – all because I had decided to make a pilgrimage to a town called Djenne. From what I’d heard Djenne sounded like something out of The Thousand and One Nights: for in spite of being on the fringes of the Sahara, it sits in splendid isolation on an island in the middle of a tributary of the River Niger. Above me the sky had long since turned from blue to pink and then to black. In every other direction the Sahel (central region) stretched for miles upon miles, an endless scrubland of stunted trees and desiccated bushes In the distance something howled.

Eight hours after getting off the last bus to Mopti I had to admit that I’d made a mistake. It is essential to travel in an organised group due to all the checkpoints and especially if you are going into the desert.. Deep in the Libyan desert, you will never see anything like them.LIBYAGETTING THEREBritish Airways (tel: 0345 222111) offers direct flights to Tripoli for around pounds 1,000. Air Malta (tel: 0181-785 3177) offers return flights to Tripoli and Banghazi via Malta from pounds 661.GETTING AROUNDArab Tours (tel: 0171-935 3273) offers group tours in Libya. British Museum Tours (tel: 0171-323 8895) offers specialist archaeological programmes from pounds 1,998 per person, including return flights, accommodation and tour lectures.FURTHER INFORMATIONTour operators will arrange your visa. Currently, the Libyan Bureau (tel: 0171-486 8387) does not issue individual tourist visas, but this may change in the future. To this day, Sudanese travellers still believe they were drawn by the djinn (spirits).