JOHN RUSSELL TAYLOR at
In Extremis/ De Profundis
RNT Cottesloe

No argument about it, Corin Redgrave's epic solo rendering of Wilde's long last letter to Lord Alfred Douglas from Reading Gaol is absolutely riveting. It certainly keep the Cottesloe audience completely mesmerised for nearly an hour and a quarter, uninterrupted by any extraneous effects and only briefly, towards the last, underlined even by music. I have often in the past found Redgrave rather chilly and detached on stage, as though he is living in his own world and not quite connecting with anyone else in the play. But if he does indeed have that quality, it is perfectly employed in a long monologue: left to himself he expands, comes out of his shell, produces variations of tone and pace, and mastery of a whole structure, which one would otherwise have thought quite beyond him.

Of course, the quality of the writing helps. And the fact that though couched in letter form, De Profundis (not Wilde's own title, by the way) is written by an extremely skilled playwright and public speaker, who cannot but give it a sort of dramatic shape and tone. Two things are astonishing even (or perhaps especially) today, a hundred years after Wilde's death. The first is, how modern it all sounds. As a rule, the style is easy and colloquial: there is very little, even in the occasional flowery patches, that a skilled writer might not write in the 21st century (though he might not talk about going to one's fate like an ox into the shambles, as we have rather forgotten the literal meaning of ' shambles'), so that we have the uncanny sensation that Wilde is speaking directly to us, here and now.

The second facer is that there is so much humour, so little bombast in Wilde's account of his disastrous relationship with Lord Alfred. As far as one can judge from outside evidence, even his most severe criticisms of Douglas's behaviour and character are amazingly reasonable and unclouded by personal bitterness; when he says all that happened was my fault too, because I saw what was happening and let it happen, one perfectly accepts his sincerity and takes it as a statement of fact as he genuinely saw it. Nowhere does Wilde look faintly like grovelling and begging for our sympathy. If it is an act, it is performed by a consummate actor.

It interests me that, if one looks at the recent history of Wilde impersonations, he has become steadily more and more Irish. Peter Finch and Robert Morley's accents were not even slightly Irish-tinged, and Stephen Fry only dropped a few faint hints of it - even though Vanessa Redgrave as his mother was speaking some weird kind of bog-Irish. Admittedly in De Profundis Wilde does on occasion (particularly when speaking of his distinguished family) accept his own ineradicable Irishness. But how did he actually speak? I recollect no contemporary commentators remarking on his accent - though quite possibly some references exist - and I think Redgrave manages it very sensibly by just making what he says come out occasionally with a clearly Irish lilt.

Neil Bartlett's curtain-raiser, In Extremis, is, like most curtain-raisers, almost wilfully slight. A two-character piece, it brings Wilde together, around midnight on March 25 1895, with a palmist and clairvoyant called Mrs Robinson. The meeting did take place: Wilde wrote to tell Ada Leverson so, and enthused about how helpful Mrs R had been. Apart from the fact that she predicted a triumph for Wilde in whatever enterprise he was currently engaged on (the first trial, of Queensbury for slander, was only days away), we do not know at all what went on at that meeting. But Bartlett has been sufficiently intrigued by the whole affair - and especially why such a sensible, educated person as Wilde clearly took it so seriously - to pen this dramatic speculation.

And was it worth the effort? Well, just about. Mrs Robinson chatters on endlessly, and when Wilde can get a word in he retaliates with a barrage of slightly used epigrams. But then, after a while, both begin to tell us what they are really thinking, what they would have liked to have said, but didn't. In the end what it boils down to is that Mrs Robinson, though she has presentiments, cannot help telling her clients what they want to hear - especially for 100 gns - and Wilde, though he has his serious doubts, finally consents to swallow them down because the implied advice squares conveniently with what Bosie wants him to do.

More or less what any of us would guess, in fact. But Sheila Hancock and Corin Redgrave keep the ball rolling along very nicely, so who's complaining? There is, though, one intriguing detail in the staging (by Trevor Nunn and Corin Redgrave). In the text Mrs Robinson clearly specifies that the plush is maroon, Wilde's tie gold, and his gloves yellow, none of which is true of what we see before us. A broad hint that we should believe nothing of what she says? I suppose so. But would not it be more interesting if we were left to make up our minds for ourselves?

ROBERT COHEN
in Denver

It is very big. Peter Hall's outrageous production of John Barton's Tantalus - six months in rehearsal, ten hours in performance, and eight million dollars in expenses - is surely the most spectacular classical stage production in the history of American theatre. What is more to the point: it is also a damn good show.

Indeed, this Tantalus, a production of the Denver Center Theatre Company in association with the Royal Shakespeare Company, is one of the most impressive and important theatre events in the fifty-odd years of American regional theatre mountings, ranking side by side with the Arena Stage's Great White Hope in the 1960s and the Mark Taper Forum's Angels in America in the 1990s. Like these forebears, Tantalus could change, for the coming generation, the very scale on which theatrical production can be conceived, financed, staffed and mounted in the United States.

Barton's panorama is vast: the Trojan War and its aftermath, as seen not only in Homer's Iliad, Hesiod's Theogony, Euripides' Trojan Women, but also in Euripides' astonishingly revisionist tragicomedies of Helen and Iphigenia at Taurus. What do these ancient Mycenaean conflicts and rivalries have to do with us? Possibly everything. 'In the beginning...' the Storyteller intones, and by play's end we feel it was indeed our beginning: that this ancient world of Attic gods and demigods, of phalanxed armies and huddled victims, of heroes and soothsayers, nourishes us still. The eight million dollars, much of it contributed by Denver Center board chairman Donald Seawell, has somehow managed to bind us - here at the feet of the Rocky Mountains - to the most ancient roots of civilisation.

This Tantalus is a mounting of stunning theatricality; a virtual textbook of startling stage effects. Hall described the technical rehearsals as 'three weeks of Hell,' and at least one of the effects - full face masks for all performers - reportedly cost him a principal actor and one of his two co-directors (the other remaining being son Edward Hall) as well. But if it can be done in the theatre, it is done in Tantalus: characters flying up into the air, disappearing under the water, striding through fire and rising through sand; bloody animal sacrifices; spike-helmeted goon squads (the 'antmen') applying fire-brands to squirming naked women; stars falling from the heavens and flames bursting from the earth; full-body paint (Achilles first comes to us straight from the Blue Man Group; then, as a ghost, in a top-to-toe coating of uncongealed blood); a drenching, full-stage rainstorm; a continuous nine-hour lightshow of projections onto mirrored images; a loving couple (Agamemnon and Cassandra, in the play's most shining moment) disrobing by a ring of firelight; enough thunder and lightning to rattle downtown Denver; and an ever-present onstage orchestra that limns all with flutes, keyboards, and an array of luminous percussion. Plus an ingeniously-designed, long-awaited, and absolutely full-scale Trojan Horse. American audiences rarely if ever see this luxuriant theatricality, certainly not in serious classical dramatic stagings (though Europeans familiar with Peter Stein's Oresteia, Peter Brook's Mahabharata, Matthias Langhoff's Prince of Homburg, or Michael Bogdonov's Faust will have seen pieces of it), and the splendour of the process, abetted by two dandily served meals in the Denver Center ballroom during the play's extended breaks, made for an all-consuming event of the highest order.

I would like to say that the triumph extends to the dramatic text, but it simply doesn't. Dramatist Barton apparently also departed long before opening night, his 50-year friendship with Hall in tatters, and when the existing nine-play product finally opened it was billed as 'an adaptation from the original ten-play cycle by John Barton,' instead of simply the last three words of that citation, with the disquieting added note, 'additional text by Colin Teevan' further confusing the authorship. A published Barton text was on sale in the lobby, but I didn't feel obliged to pick it up: the as-received text from the Barton/Hall/Teevan mélange proves serviceable but is rarely inspired, and indeed only soars when Barton (or an adapter) tosses in some unannounced Shakespeare: specifically Cassandra's famous lament ('Cry, Trojans, cry!') from Troilus and Cressida, and the 'hellish Pyrrhus' speech from Hamlet, or, more precisely, from the 'caviar to the general' play that's within Hamlet: a play within a play that has now become a play within a play within another play. But that play, Hamlet tells us, is 'well digested in the scenes, set down with as much modesty as cunning,' and this does not really apply to the Barton/Hall/Teevan text, which though it has plenty of modesty, has little cunning, and rarely extends much beyond a series of abstract debates alternating with quasi-narrations, most of which are baldly dramatised by having chorus members cry 'Tell us the story!' or 'So, what happened next?' A few minutes of this could be easily swallowed, given the expository demands of a play dealing with 25 mortals and 15 gods, few of them readily known to contemporary Denverites (or probably even contemporary Athenians), but a few hours of such ill-digested interrogations heavily freight the action. 'My words are flames of fire!' cries Hecuba, but the statement is basically authorial wish-fulfillment.

The received stories, however, are grand indeed. We begin on a beach in contemporary Attica - it could be Mykonos - where a storyteller, a souvenir salesman, is selling plastic miniatures of Zeus and Clytemnestra to a bikini-clad group of young women - they could be Vassar alumna - sunning themselves on the sand, listening to Greek pop songs on the boombox, and cooling themselves under an onstage shower. As the salesman becomes a storyteller to the curious gals, the masked goddess Thetis rises from a bubbling River Styx, and the salesman-become-storyteller now morphs into Peleus, Thetis' husband and father of Achilles. Gradually, masked Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Iphigenia, and their kin appear, morph, and remorph into the characters of this multi-year saga, and not long afterwards the Vassar girls morph too, by the acquisition of their own full-face masks, into the suffering Women of Troy, and eventually into the tattered refugees of Bosnia, East Timor, and Sierra Leone. Eventually all are wrapped up in this half-classic, half-modern adventure (the non-chorus costumes, by Dionysis Fotopoulos, go from ancient to contemporary - Greek himation to Australian trenchoat - as the play goes on), which first peaks with the pre-war arguments of Agamemnon and Odysseus, then with the sacrifices of Iphigenia and Polyxena and the Trojan Women, and finally with the coupling of Agamemnon and Cassandra, and the aborted trial of Helen, and the final return of Thetis and Peleus into the River Styx from which they never return.

As one might expect of a work of this magnitude, and this bravery, not all of Hall's staging works. The skin-hugging masks, modelled directly on the actor's faces, leave an unfortunate shadow on the upper lip, making the women all look mustachioed under the downlights; they also leave certain actors sounding muffled and looking wooden, although Greg Hicks, as Agamemnon, Meneleus and a stilt-walking Priam, cocks and recocks his head with absolutely magisterial mimetic meaning. And a largely declamatory speaking style, when combined with the often-lumbering prose (Odysseus: 'We didn't mean to do it - it just happened.' Hecuba: 'Let me handle this.' Nurse: 'Pull yourself together!' Odysseus: 'For a girl to refuse a god is unusual, even these days.') brings unwanted titters, while Agamemnon's deliberately understated drolleries, expertly delivered by Greg Hicks (the clear star of the show), get the big intended laughs, but at the expense of parodying, and thereby diminishing, the very play they're intended to serve. Some silly gags - everyone on stage trembling at thunder, or jumping up at a loud noise - seem pandering and out of place, as does Peleus' pun about Achilles: 'let's try not to put an infant in charge of the infantry.'

Is there an overarching theme of the play? Good and bad are barely delineated: Agamemnon and Odysseus repeatedly apologise for their sins, Iphigenia and Polyxena are all but complicitous in their sacrifices, and the trial of Helen, with which the play concludes, is inconclusively aborted. The choice to end the saga with Euripides' notion of a double Helen - the real one having lived out the war years wholly in Egypt, and the so-called Helen of Troy being simply a decoy - makes the Trojan War nothing more than a case of absurdly mistaken identity. This was surely appalling to traditionalists of the 5th century: it is equally appalling at a time, as I write this, when the American presidency hangs by a mere chad (an incompletely punched-out hole) on a disputed election ballot. We look for closure and certainty, and find only indecision and the absurd. The gods of Tantalus are infinitely dangerous and utterly unknowable: Aphrodite caused the war, and we are all her victims. ''True' is only a word humans invented to find meaning,' avers Thetis; ;tide in, tide out' should replace truth and meaning. The cycles of nature, and the certainty of Tantalus's Rock hovering above our heads, are all that we can know. We left Denver ennobled by our mythic past, and inexpressibly grateful for the vast commitments of time, talent, money, energy, and the sheer audacity to grapple with the monsters of time, tide, and tragedy. As Artaud said, the sky can still fall on our heads, and Tantalus's Rock - right here in the Rockies - has the power to remind us of this.

It is almost an afterthought, therefore, to say that the creators, chiefly the two Halls, Barton, Seawell, set and costume designer Fotopoulous, Sumio Yohshii who created the amazing lighting, composer Mick Sands and choreographer Donald McKayle, and the actors - particularly Hicks, Alan Dobie (Odysseus) Alyssa Bresnahan (Cassandra and Thetis), David Ryall (Peleus) and Annalee Jeffries (Andromache, Ilione), deserve unstinting praise.

JOHN FRANCIS LANE
in Rome

After a prolonged summer during which the Roman Church's Jubilee Year upstaged all other forms of spectacle in the Italian capital, the season of more profane entertainments began with Rome's Europa Autumn Festival which, after last year's more audacious offerings of the Shopping and Fucking school of new British theatre, this year featured imports from the UK centred on a strictly aesthetic programme with samples of British Jazz and British Dance and with the Asian Underground as an added attraction.

The first of the commercial theatres to awaken from its summer lethargy was the Teatro Eliseo, celebrating its centenary this year and now under the artistic direction and management of Maurizio Scaparro. It has been the site of a theatre since 1900 when, as the Apollo, it hosted every kind of spectacle from music hall to silent movie classics. It took its present name from 1918. Rebuilt in 1937, under enlightened management it became the Roman home of the leading Italian companies of post-WW2 Italy including those of Luchino Visconti, Giorgio Strehler and Eduardo De Filippo, the three major theatrical artists of those years. It so happens, it was the first Italian theatre I attended, where I saw Visconti's production of Death Of A Salesman in which the young Marcello Mastroianni played Biff.

The 2000-2001 season was inaugurated in October with Luca De Filippo's company presenting one of his father Eduardo's lesser-known plays, L'arte della commedia (which I would translate as The Art of Playacting which doesn't however convey the full ironic sense in Italian of Commedia dell'Arte being reversed). It is a play that Eduardo De Filippo only performed himself for a brief run in 1965 in Naples (which I managed to see) but he never toured it to other cities as he felt his sarcasm about the way Italian touring companies were treated in the provinces might have upset the bureaucrats in Rome. In the programme notes for this revival at the Teatro Eliseo no mention is made of a revival of the play that Eduardo himself supervised with a semi-professional company in a town near Bari in 1973 which I also saw. A pity, because that was an occasion in which the difficulties of provincial companies getting subsidies was pertinent to that company and its determination to become professional.

The new production at the Eliseo by Luca De Filippo is obviously more professionally accomplished, and covers up with ingenious stage effects - and cuts - for some of the dated aspects. Luca plays in subdued tones the role created by his father, the provincial actor-manager who comes to the office of the new prefect in a provincial town on a cold winter day to ask for help in finding a new venue in which his tattered company can perform, their tent theatre having been destroyed in a storm. Condescendingly, the official at first enjoys generalising about theatricals but soon gets irritated listening to the actor bemoaning his specific experience. A truly Pirandello-like situation emerges when the actor leaves, having taken away mistakenly a list of names of local VIPs who are due to pay their respects to the new prefect that afternoon. When these 'characters' make an appearance, the prefect is persuaded by his secretary that these may not be the real citizens but actors impersonating them.

The 'comedy of possible errors' of the second act is a great theatrical invention which keeps the audience intrigued and amused to the end when, in the prefect's office, they are awaiting the arrival of the local police chief, the only person who could unmask the eventual impostors. But, as the actor-manager points out in a stunning final curtain line, their costume trunks had been saved in the fire and as with every touring company they usually include a policeman's uniform. The audience at the Eliseo were delighted with the play and the performances of Luca De Filippo and his company to whom was added for this occasion a distinguished guest star playing the Prefect, Umberto Orsini, who made his own debut as a young actor in 1957 at the Eliseo in a production of The Diary of Anne Frank.

On the front of the Eternal City's major subsidised theatrical company, the Teatro di Roma, there have been more dramas off stage than on. The Teatro di Roma had kept open during most of the summer and autumn in various venues, including Jubilee events, mostly in an exotic vein and with various ethnic connotations, Arab and Indian religious cultures as well as Christian, with even a dramatisation of the Koran. In mid-December the artistic director of the company, Mario Martone, was scheduled to stage a play called The Ten Commandments which is not, as one might suspect, a homage to Hebrew culture (or to Cecil B.De Mille) but to Martone's own Neapolitan roots as the piece was a late work by the great Neapolitan vaudeville artist and dramatist Raffaele Viviani (1888-1950). It is made up of ten sketches of various length set in the back alleys of Naples, which as in Keislowsky's famous Decalogue films are each dedicated to a commandment.

In early November, however, Martone hit the headlines by announcing his resignation as artistic director after only two of the three seasons for which he had been appointed by the Mayor of Rome. He asked that his departure be delayed until after the first night of this Viviani production. The theatre's board with which he had been in continual conflict over administrative and artistic choices, seemed pleased to accept his resignation, piqued also by the fact that the resignation letter was addressed to Mayor Rutelli, chairman of the board. Italian politics are inevitably involved. Of Rome's three institutional bodies who control the theatre's funding, two (Region and Province)are now in the hands of the Berlusconi Centre-Right people while Mayor Rutelli is about to resign himself to stand as candidate for Premier of the Centre-Left coalition at the 2001 Italian general elections.

It seems like an epilogue to Eduardo De Filippo's play. The choice of Martone, a Neapolitan avantgardist director and filmmaker, has been controversial from the start. Personally, I was an admirer of Martone early theatre work in Naples and I was impressed too by his films especially his most recent, Teatro di Guerra which I consider the best film about theatre seen anywhere since Louis Malle's Vanya on 42nd Street. Without questioning Martone's talents or the suitability of bringing more experimental work into a public theatre's programme, it has nevertheless seemed questionable that a company which depends on public funding and also subscriptions from a majority of traditionally inclined theatregoers should only offer experimental work.

The administrators have also made an issue of the fact that box office has been low, not so much because Martone, fair enough, offered reduction facilities to young audiences but because many of the experimental offerings didn't attract even their interest. A typical example was The Grail staged by Venice Biennale theatre director Giorgio Barberio Corsetti. The problem of accommodating experimentation with tradition is common to institutional companies all over the world. The Italian theatre has no equivalent to West End transfers to boost its finances. As I pointed out last year, Martone's off-beat production of Oedipus Rex was presented at the company's main theatre, the splendid 18th century Argentina, where he tore out the seats from the auditorium where the action was divided with the stage, leaving a limited number of seats available in the tiers of boxes. Now, at last, the Teatro di Roma has its own experimental space which city finances have taken a lease on. It is a former industrial complex on the Tiber banks at Greenwich-like distance from city centre. The 'India', as it is called, has already been used for several events, culminating in October with a Scenes from Hamlet divided into three separate 'plays' performed over three weeks but which I succeeded in seeing all together in a one-off eight-hour Sunday marathon.

Co-produced with the Fabbricone of Prato where the first two parts were staged in 1998 and 1999, the third part was premiered at the India space together with the revival of the other two. Director Federico Tiezzi uses various Italian translations ranging from the earliest in print dated 1814, used in the act one scene at the court which is modelled on the 1912 production at the Moscow Arts designed by Craig and directed by Stanislavsky which Tiezzi says represented the two extremes of theatrical style destined to dominate the 20th century, Naturalism and Experimentation. Other translations include the controversial but - in my view - excellent ultra-modern one done by Gerardo Guerreri in the early 1960s for Zeffirelli's production with Giorgio Albertazzi. Now using this version, Hamlet repeats the O, that this too too solid flesh would melt.....soliloquy that he'd spoken in the other translation in the previous scene and hears Horatio telling him about the Ghost (who is always heard with the listeners stretched out on the floor in a trance). In the last part the First Gravedigger will speak in Sicilian dialect, a variation on the Neapolitan of the Guerrieri-Zeffirelli version. Over the three parts the audience is often asked to move from one room to another which is a bit irritating even if the younger people seemed to enjoy this immensely. Admittedly, it became visually rewarding when we were moved from drab rostrum viewing to an enchanted Indian garden, or into a wheat field where after (sic) Ophelia's madness and death, we hear Hamlet deliver To be or not to be', both these scenes in a new translation by the contemporary poet Mario Luzi.

Among other innovations which Tiezzi introduces are the casting of actresses for Horatio (Emanuela Villagrossi) and Polonius (Marion D'Amburgo, wearing vivacious masks). Hamlet is played by Roberto Trifiro who has more charisma and contemporary feel than the actor seen last year in Carlo Cecchi's similarly disjointed production from Palermo, also hosted at the India . Disconcerted though one might be as always when Shakespeare is a pretext for a director's own fantasy, as this long performance proceeds one realises that it is not so much a re-write or a pretentious interpretation as a personal perusal of Shakespeare's Hamlet as a drama teacher might examine it but using theatrical rather than academic techniques. This becomes particularly evident once the First Player makes his appearance (and appropriately enough he will deliver the 'Speak the speech I pray you', as director of the 'play within the play'). Inevitably, the third part is the most effectively 'theatrical', also because the actor playing the First Player is a sophisticated Italian cabaret performance artist, Sandro Lombardi, who is a genuine entertainer. The speech he recites in Spanish for Hamlet when the players arrive is significantly from Calderon's Life Is A Dream. Hamlet, after all, is playacting throughout, even in Shakespeare's original. A pot-pourri of theatrical styles and moods as well as of translations from different periods climaxes after Hamlet's death (in a duel with Laertes on a billiard table) with the operatic finale, the opening of the back doors to the 'stage' of the Danish court where we see Fortinbras and his soldiers dressed in Che Guevara gear arrive noisily in the garden outside in jeeps. Incidentally, the book from which Hamlet had been reading 'words, words, words' was in fact Che's handbook for guerilla warfare. The Che myth is thus revisited alongside Hamlet's.

After seeing this somewhat startling but certainly fascinating marathon, maybe one emerges with a clearer idea of what Martone as mentor of these companies hosted by the Teatro di Roma has been proposing. Was I unfair to his Oedipus Rex operation? Or do I still feel he should have saved it for the India space and left the Argentina to more traditional fare? I'm not sure. Certainly it would be a pity for Rome to lose Martone as it would for the Milan Piccolo to lose Ronconi who is also under fire from the conservatives of Milan where all three institutional bodies are already under the control of Berlusconi's Centre-Right parties. Maybe the Teatro di Roma board should have invited Martone to remain in charge of the India space and left the Argentina to a less revolutionary management. In the end, Martone will probably go back to Naples where he has already been offered a carte blanche by the (for the moment?) still progressive administration.

JOHN SHERBOURNE
in Leeds

In the Courtyard at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Canadian playwright Janet Munsil's work Smoking with Lulu receives its European premier. Directed by David Giles it is the story of one mans obsession and two peoples' addiction. Kenneth Tynan's obsession is for silent film legend Louise Brooks, or more exactly for Lulu, the character which Brooks played in Pabst's Pandora's Box. Their shared addiction is tobacco - the hacking, coughing, raking results of which, emphysema, ultimately killed them both.

In 1987 Tynan had watched a television re run of Pandora's Box and long time dormant feelings for Lulu / Brooks were rekindled. Deciding there and then to make his fantasy the subject of, what turned out to be his final, New Yorker magazine interview (The Girl in the Black Helmet) he set about tracking down an image. What he discovered was not the beautiful, bob haired siren of the 1929 silent, black and white screen, but an arthritic 73 year old, house bound cynic who had, 'drank, smoked and fucked' Lulu into oblivion. Further more she had neither the strength nor the desire to revive her.

Kenneth Peacock Tynan was born in Birmingham in April 1927 but for ever insisted that his life only began on his first day at Magdalen College, Oxford in 1945. From there he dedicated his life and his great gifts to the written and performed word. On stage Peter Eyre, who knew Tynan well, plays him with as those who fondly remember the original enigma, startling accuracy in manner, mood and movement. Thelma Barlow is Louise. Playing a character more removed from her television roles - Coronation Street's Mavis Wilton or Dolly in Victoria Wood's Dinnerladies as this is hard to envisage. She handles it well.

Brooks lives alone in a two room apartment in Rochester, New York. Until Tynan enters her life she idles away her time waging a telephonic war of attrition with the Rochester City Library. They are not appreciative of the margin corrections and amendments which the cantankerous and foul mouthed Louise is making to their fast dwindling stock of film books. This acts as the first reminder of Lulu's lure in that, albeit half a century since Louise was Lulu, the books when returned to the shelves are stolen by devotees.

After much negotiation a mutually nervous first meeting takes place. There follows three days of interview, candour and flirtatious self examination punctuated only by cigarettes, a splendid '59 Burgundy and a respect which drifts from a hypnotic hero worship, offered by one and taken by the other to an easy two way response to honesty. However, writer Munsil has given Tynan not only Louise Brooks the contemporary font of knowledge. In the enchanting Sophie Millett she has gifted him the 1929 walking, talking, alluring original. It is to her teasing and flitting affections that Tynan keeps returning. Reality, a bed jacketed old lady with a walking stick, fantasy, French lace, silk stockings and jet, helmet hair - stand cheek by jowl.

Designer Kenneth Mellor has set Louise's bed room on a revolve, an idea which skilfully emphasises the pitiful isolation of Louise. As scenes shift, just one step down brings Tynan from the old lady's bedside to his young Lulu. While he flirts and boasts to her of his bottom spanking, hedonist qualities, far away in Rochester she remains propped up in bed, shakily topping up a wine glass, lighting another cigarette. Slowly and silently the revolve turns her back on her audience, her face into darkness. Janet Munsil has written an astute script which permits Peter Eyre not simply the opportunity to mimic Kenneth Tynan but to offer to the audience his enthusiasm, his genius, his flaws and his failings. Mic Pool, the Playhouse Associate Director responsible for creative technology has devised a most impressive sound and video package which projects crystal clear footage of Pandora's Box behind the actors. Scenes where the live action perfectly mirrors the film are particularly effective.

Smoking with Lulu is a carefully balanced mix of fact and fiction. It presents two people to whom style came as naturally as breath. They tried but failed to define a special quality just called 'IT'. They may have been unable to define it but there is absolutely no doubt that both had 'IT'.