This is the story of three Londoners who have decided to take on the West End musical mafia to prove there are living alternatives to Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber; to fight the recession with one of the great palliatives, escapist entertainment; and to spend the money of one of them in so doing. The unlikely trio are Alan Davies, ex-docker turned auctioneer, John Asquith, spiritual healer and breathing teacher, and Jesse Carr-Martindale, former infantry officer and erstwhile owner of London’s first floating nightclub.

It all started in 1989 with John and Jesse writing a musical called Convention and peforming it a deux in the sitting room of Richard Branson’s former house in Spain. John then performed it in its entirety to Alan in the back of his car on the way back from Maidstone, and Alan decided he had a hit on his backseat. So Alan, who had never done anything like this before and cannot afford to indulge in a spot of financial ruin, emptied his pockets in the pursuit of fame, fortune and a West End transfer. It will cost £2 million to put on the full musical, and he’s met all the costs of his dream to date. ‘How much have I put into it?’ says Alan. ‘‘There’s ‘no stopping. It’s all ‘going now.’

Extraordinarily, he has paid £30,000 to hire The Bloomsbury Theatre tonight and tomorrow to do a showcase when they look for angels. (It has capacity for 600 people which he’s nearly filled.) But he has met other costs inventively. Having received a quote of £19,000 for scenery, they decided to make their own. ‘It’s all hands ‘to the pump,’ says Alan. ‘Before you go can you help us paint a car for the stage?’ Meanwhile John has enticed a cast of 35 ‘mostly West End’ professionals (including P.P Arnold, who sang formerly with Tina Turner) and 15 helpers to offer their skills free for a month. And they have been rehearsing small scenes in the flats of the cast, scattered round London. ‘Mobile rehearsals, a moving studio,’ says Jesse, pucker voiced.

What’s it about? Convention is a love story which takes place during the sales meeting convention for a multi-national life assurance company. ‘A romance with complications,’ adds Jesse, who wrote Dempsey and Makepeace and much of The Bill, and created the story.

John, who breathlessly describes himself as a dancer, stage technician and voice trainer who has written 19 pieces for the stage, produced, choreographed, directed shows and worked in cabaret, wrote the music and lyrics.

He is also a chairman of the National Federation of Spiritual Healers. ‘The healer becomes attuned to a higher energy source. You can call it white light, healing energy or God’s love,’ he says. ‘It’s like putting a jump lead on a car so that the patient gets a boost.’

Still, it’s a tricky business producing a hit musical. Why do they think they are in with a big chance? ‘Because it’s better than anything I’ve seen in the West End,’ says Alan. The others nod vigorously.

The philosopher proposes marriage publicly to the masseuse he met 24 hours previously. Amanda, a creative soul on the dole, cries with anguish in front of near-strangers then recites John Donne. And Adrian, a venture capitalist and closet harmonica player, sings a sentimental Swedish song. The course leader says you can have whatever you can imagine. So we scream, sing and improvise.

This is The Mastery, an Actors’ Institute weekend course where you learn to express your creativity. Most of the aspiring poets and musicians (chartered accountants to travel agents) haven’t performed before. But we’ve all learned a two-minute piece.

We wear name laqels in true self-development seminar style and go into the hall where fruit and fruit teas are laid out next to the notice board with a card saying: ‘Wanted. New home for 2 terrapins.’

Veronica ‘Ronnie’ Roberts, actress and management trainer, is the course leader and turns out to be insightful and brave. (The course is confidential, so the other names have been changed.) This is not the National Theatre, she says, but a place to take risks.

Seventeen participants and 10 helpers listen attentively, with recycled notebooks on their knees. Why are we here? One person is ‘here to change’, another to ‘gain confidence’ and another to ‘be a better performer’. The helpers introduce themselves. Marco, an actor and Buddhist; Cynthia, who interprets sign language . . .

Now it’s our turn to tell the group about ourselves. Fear of humiliation rears its head. ‘Breathe and dare to make eye contact,’ Ronnie implores, for the first of five million times. The atmosphere becomes confessional. Andrew, a former surveyor, reveals that he had an affair while he was married. When he’s through, the audience claps acknowledgement. Clarissa is shy and a senior civil servant. She recently did a leadership course – potholing, climbing rocks – and feels born again. More clapping. Clive, the philosopher, doesn’t like telling the truth and is a compulsive smiler and yawner. Clap, clap. There are tears and laughter until 1.30am. Homework is to write three goals for the weekend and spend five minutes looking in the mirror. Next morning, participants say they haven’t slept. Too excited. Up drinking tea and coffee and chatting. They feel energised, I feel tired.

Now it’s time to relate what happened while looking in the mirror. ‘I looked in my eyes and saw all the pain,’ says one. ‘I looked at my mouth and saw a hard line.’

‘The first thing I noticed,’ says another, ‘was that I assumed I was going to look very ugly.’

A management consultant says her goal is to make a speech in front of 400 people. A girl in apres-ski boots and flowery shirt says she’d like to learn to cope with her emotions. And John is ‘up for a row with anyone who wants one’.

Next we take one corner and call it Love, another Anger and another Need. Participants stand in each and express the feeling of that corner to participants in the other two. In the Anger corner you see contorted faces, screaming and stomping. ‘I L-O-V-E you,’ responds the man, down on his knee in the Love corner, crying. ‘I need more love in my life.’

‘Why don’t you listen to me. I neeeeeed you,’ a woman shrieks to him from the Need corner. Ronnie encourages and motivates. Which results in more happy-clappy people. More tears. And more recycled Kleenex.

‘Keith, I feel you’re dead inside,’ says Ronnie, kindly. He agrees. Ronnie works with him, coaxing and challenging like a shrink on holiday. Later Keith, a Jesus Christ lookalike, looks as if he’s been born again. ‘A minor miracle,’ he says.

Now what do we want to communicate in the two-minute pieces we have prepared? Someone wants to express her sensuality; another her lovability. What does Adam want to do? ‘Two poems. One God one. Another lust and gutter job.’ He farts creatively.

A girl in purple leggings and political T-shirt recites Jack Kerouac. ‘Doing this is very scary,’ she says, trembling. Next Susie, resonant and powerful and in platform shoes and green jeans, sings an aria from La Boheme, in Italian.

The venture capitalist is on the floor expressing the defiance of someone on skid row. Carl recites Louis MacNeice: ‘I’m not yet born . . .’ And the gay guy curtsies after his performance. The pieces these amateurs produce are heartfelt and inspiring.

On Sunday, the room is filled with beaming faces. Ronnie has drawn out of people what didn’t seem possible. Strangers have gelled and there is a feeling of possibilities.

So it’s time to get physical with Gary . . . with Marilyn Monroe exercises, Bette Davis muscular stretches and exercises other classes don’t reach – including a crotch exercise. They once had a nun in a tracksuit on the course who laughed so much that she wet herself.

Then we do improvisations: one group enacts being a pizza, others act out their goals. Someone says he loves shouting. Another enjoys being a fool. The participants agree to meet again in three weeks, stating what they want to achieve before then. Andrew holds a magic wand and says he wants to book a flight to Swaziland to see his aunt. Sebastian wants to become a garden designer and recite his poems publicly: ‘Thank you for helping me believe in myself.’

It’s an intensive, personal workshop. Participants talk about having changed their lives. Faces show relief. It’s emotionally draining, moving, poignant and supportive. Like a marathon therapy session crossed with an improvisation workshop. Very Me Generation. Very New York. Very good. Oh, and I sang Blue Moon to 30 people. Next stop the Royal Albert Hall. * The Mastery takes place approximately every three weeks and costs £195. Telephone 071 251 8178.

Whether you want to improve your improvisation techniques or unleash the exhibitionist within, The Mastery encourages shameless self-expression. drops her inhibitions and opens her heart, lungs, mind and wallet.

It’s being billed as ‘the dance event of the century’, the first big arena ballet. The largest stage in Europe for leaping to music will be erected. For the Royal Albert Hall is to hold one of the most ambitious dance events when 160 Bolshoi artists pirouette into Kensington in January for a five-week £3 million season.

Behind it is the chief executive of the Royal Albert Hall, Patrick Deuchar. ‘It’s never been done before,’ he says. ‘But I’m convinced dance can be presented in arena format. As certain as Harvey Goldsmith was that it could be done for opera.’

He’s sitting in his office in the hall, a building that boasts five ghosts and a bedroom on the premises for him. ‘It’s the first ever ballet season hosted in the hall, choreographed specially,’ he resumes, peering through his arena-sized spectacles and pouring tea. He’s been wanting to do dance ever since he started at the hall three years ago. ‘It’ll be very accessible to people who don’t normally consider ballet.’

He’s been married twice, has two children by his first wife and a baby by his current girlfriend. She’s actress Liz Robertson, widow (eighth wife) of composer Alan Jay Lerner.

Deuchar came to the Albert Hall via school at Christ’s Hospital in Sussex, agricultural college, agricultural journalism, and promoting professional tennis tournaments around the world.

‘The Royal Opera House is the only place where ballet can be performed properly. Outrageously, it has to share its space with another art form.’ He doesn’t want to turn the RAH into London’s dance house. But he does want to see annual dance seasons there. Luckily he has another 895 years’ lease on the building.

Picture that over-sized meat abattoir, Wembley Arena. People are eating toffee popcorn instead of doing drugs.

White jean-beclad thirtysomethings are sipping beer out of plastic bottles. And nobody is smoking in the no smoking auditorium. The only sniff of something really way out here are the neon exit signs. This is the first night of sex queen Cher’s two-night stand in Wembley. Cher has 15 gold albums, has had 46 top-100 hits, and has received an Academy Award for her performance in Moonstruck.

She also has a tattoo on her left buttock and the sort of figure that could sell a Volvo to a rock star.

The arena is filled with around 8,000 fans. Tame heavy metal guys ‘with long hair and Cher clones on their arms. And corporate businessmen. Waiting for the woman who became a household name a quarter of a century ago and hasn’t been with a man of her own age or older for almost as long. The half Armenian and Cherokee Indian, born Cherilyn Sarkisian, who has recreated herself so many times.

As the star comes in at 9.10, the crowd in the centre of the amphitheatre stands up with screams and claps. Wearing Tina Turner-esque red hair, black thigh-length jacket and black drainpipes, she belts out: ‘I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.’

The woman who sometimes bares her bottom in fishnet stands in an enchanted gothic forest with a wind machine blowing her wig. ‘I’m glad to be back. Who’d have thought I’d have been back and grown lovely red hair?’ says the 46-year-old who has had surgery on her nose and breasts and looks younger every year.

The under-dressed rock siren with the wig stylist reappears for the next item in high black-leather boots, a cobweb body – another minimal creation of costumier Bob Mackie – and black leather jacket to match her now black hair.

Now it’s 9.40 and she’s in sprayed-on lace hot pants and bodice. A handful of people are standing, waggling their bodies and clapping. One Cher clone in a stars and stripes shirt dances, as if to a mirror. Cher and cher alike.

She goes for a break.

Downstairs ‘official franchise vendors’ sell £22 Love Hurts (the name of her current album) tracksuit pants and £4 Cher (in lace camisole) posters. Upstairs the audience is treated to her more celluloid version. Tearful extracts from Mask, then the Witches of Eastwick.

Now she’s in Moonstruck, and a yelp goes up.

She reappears in front of her screen persona in white Snow Queen outfit. Her mostly white audience tap their feet. Minutes later she’s in a harem outfit. The crowd behave like nuns in a brothel.

Madonna or Prince would create an atmosphere. But Cher singing this sort of motorway music to middle-of-the-road types doesn’t even get a traffic jam.

Her fans stand up towards the end. They even clap, the closest she gets to audience participation, when she sings: ‘If I could turn back time’. There are cries, whistles and screams of encore.

But you can count the people who are really jiving on one hand. And they all look like Cher.

It’s very brutal and violent with executions and torture. ‘But kids love that. It’s a family show,’ says Jeremy Isaacs, director general of the Royal Opera House and former chief executive of Channel 4. He’s talking about Puccini’s opera, Turandot. The first time ever that the Royal Opera House is staging an opera at Wembley Arena.

‘It’ll bring opera to people who don’t normally go, many of whom have heard the tune the BBC plastered all over their World Cup coverage,’ he says. ‘They can have popcorn and a terrific time.’

During the course of our interview, Isaacs spoke of his impressive artistic achievements and the problems that have beset him at the Opera House. Revealingly, he also talked for the first time of his brother’s assassination at the hands of terrorists, the painful death of his first wife, his remarkable parents and his childhood. This from a man who is notoriously private about his family.

He is sitting in his voluminous office wearing a jazzy tie and socks that don’t match. Nearby is his bright plastic dispenser of chocolate Smarties (all eaten) – at Channel 4 he kept a bowl of jelly beans – and a John Glashan Spectator cartoon of Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel. ‘I don’t like it either,’ the Pope is saying to some religious chappie. ‘But it’s too late to get someone else.’

Isaacs is not tall, and has a strong face with a prominent nose, wavy grey hair and small brown eyes, with the aura of somebody powerful in an understated way. He takes himself seriously for the purposes of the interview – which he doesn’t like doing – but off tape there are flashes of humour and geniality. One imagines a kindly, sensitive, quiet and gentle soul, but also one who wants his own way, doesn’t suffer fools, finds criticism hard to bear and has a bruised self-esteem. Known as someone who likes a drink, one can also imagine him eating emotionally.

The first of the two tragedies in his life came on 4 July 1975, when his brother Michael and sister-in-law were killed by a PLO bomb in Jerusalem. ‘I saw the television news at Thames and thought ‘hmm’, and went home after work. At about six o’clock a relative came to tell me that they’d heard on the phone that among the dead were my brother and his wife. My brother was unhappy in this country and had emigrated to Israel where he was very fulfilled and content. They had two children.

‘They left the children with her mother on a Friday morning to go and do some shopping, and 20 minutes later there was a loud bang and they were both dead from a bomb that had been put behind a refrigerator at a traffic light.’

Isaacs went to Hove that evening to tell his parents what had happened. ‘I caught the train with Tamara (his first wife), and I rang the bell and they opened the door. Of course, they always knew when I was coming to see them. On this occasion they were aghast to see me. They knew something was wrong. They went into the sitting-room and sat down and I told them what had happened.

‘My father gave a howl of pain and grief like a wounded animal. I’ll never forget the noise that he made, and my mother clutched the arms of her chair. With tears streaming down her face, she said, ‘Isidore, we must go on’. I thought that was staggering and wonderful. Really she was saying to him, ‘Don’t let this crack you’. It didn’t mean she wasn’t distraught with grief, but she knew she had to find the strength to go on.’

Isaacs grips his hand in a fighting fist, choking back emotion. ‘That’s what I get from my parents,’ he says, punching the air.

The second tragedy to befall him was the death of his South African-born wife Tamara, whom he met after studying at Oxford. ‘I was very happily married for 28 years. Then in 1986, Tamara died of cancer. I coped by hurling myself the more into this and other things. I think one of the reasons that I left broadcasting was that Tamara’s death was the end of a great chapter in my life.’ He sounds choked and his sadness is palpable. ‘I partly put in for the job of director general at the BBC because I think she would have wanted me to.’

What of his relationship with his parents? His father – ‘quiet, courteous, scholarly, self-fulfilled’, in his words – was a jeweller who left school at 14. His mother, a formidable woman, was a doctor to the tenement tenants in the Gorbals and helped sustain the family during the 1930s slump. This helps one understand the radical, slightly Leftish and pugnacious tendencies for which Isaacs was renowned in broadcasting. >From his parents, he says he inherited enjoying being at home, and a liking for paintings, travel, celebrations and small parties.

Isaacs recalls a happy childhood. But, aged seven, along with his two younger brothers, he became a wartime evacuee, sent to the country for five years. ‘That was pretty traumatic. There was a sense of loss and being cut off from our parents. It severed bonds at an early age that took some repairing later.’

He was an achiever who did well at school and then won an exhibition to Oxford, where he got a second in Greats. He played cricket, football, joined the Labour Club and was president of the Oxford Union. ‘Maybe it had something to do with being Jewish in Scotland. One felt one had something to prove,’ he has said.

Director generalship of the BBC, to his mind the heights of broadcasting, would have been such validation. When he didn’t get the job, he sold the family home, left broadcasting and married Gillian Widdicombe, now arts editor of the Observer. ‘I began again, in a way.’

Both Isaacs’s children have now left home. ‘I don’t see a great deal of them. Yeah, I get on pretty well with them.’ He is also happily remarried. ‘I’m the marrying type, really. If you’re with someone you love, it’s bound to help both of you. Gillian is pretty tough, you know. She has her very sound and strong critical opinions. I don’t want to hear too many of her home truths at 11.30 at night.’

He must mentally compare his wives and still feel grief. ‘Wounds heal, wounds heal,’ he says, sadly. ‘I’m grateful for it rather than mourning it. Of course I still think of my first wife. But ‘the past is a different country’ . . .’

The country in which he now resides is the Opera House. Isaacs, appointed there in 1985, has been assailed on all sides. ‘There hasn’t been never-ending criticism,’ he says. ‘There has been lots of lovely praise, though the newspapers don’t remember it. This season has had a terrific critical response.’ He fidgets and fiddles and coughs, and sometimes stutters ever so slightly.

Isaacs has been attacked for his policies, financial strategies and productions, and has suffered ongoing financial difficulties, dissent and problems of morale. He has alternately been accused of alienating Government, Arts Council, sponsors, the Press and even the opera-going public.

Most recently, there was a debilitating industrial dispute, just settled, which lost £580,000 at the box office. Meanwhile, the Covent Garden deficit approaches a projected £3 million and prices for seats have become astronomical. Publicly, Isaacs’s response to criticism has been to emphasise the artistic quality of the productions.

‘I don’t feel we have cracked it here (cough) but I feel pretty pleased with what has happened since I have been here (cough),’ he says. He then talks seamlessly, bemoaning his ‘wholly inadequate public funding’ and defending himself artistically against critics of his three companies. ‘I can never say, ‘I’m going to spend the next three months or even three weeks or even three days going into rehearsal, watching what we do, seeing if my ear or eye can help improve things’. Because every single day one is wrestling with accounts. People shouldn’t be in that hand-to-mouth situation. One’s colleagues abroad can’t understand how we stick it or achieve what we do.’

And the personal toll of such unremitting pressure? ‘If you ask why the job sometimes threatens to get me down, it’s because the financial problems never go away, never let up. I don’t think I’m tetchy or aggressive. I’m my old ebullient self. But the problems here are very wearing and unceasing. I grit my teeth, but it’s difficult to see an end to them.’

Would he rather do something else? ‘No, this is a wonderful job,’ he says, with broadcasterly exuberance. ‘It is hugely demanding, taxing and very difficult. I enjoy it. But I don’t want to do it forever – and they may not want to keep me.’

He’s 59 years old. ‘I think I’ll retire at 65, if I last that long. I enjoy being busy. But already I dream about reading (political biographies and history), walking and seeing the world. Of doing different things, daft ideas which won’t happen.’

He has worked seven-day weeks at various stages during his career. A perfectionist, wanting to make sure that every single frame in his film was exactly as it should be. (He spent 30 years in broadcasting and misses being engaged in the world on a broader front.) He might make television programmes again, but he doesn’t want another job in television. (He claims to have got over his upset at Michael Grade being appointed to succeed him at Channel 4.) ‘I had lunch the other day with Michael Checkland, director general of the BBC. I told him this has been the hardest grind I’ve ever encountered. But I’m glad I came here and didn’t get his job. I think that may have been too much for me. It’s a hell of a job.’

One suspects Isaacs would have punched his fist in the air, and had a jolly good go.

I’m en route to hear Pavarotti in Pavarotti City, Hyde Park. O Paradiso. Opera buffs cross oceans to listen to him. But will the power of that single human voice send ripples across the Serpentine? And will there be a sing-along?

I brave forth, being stabbed with brollies and thinking of the 10 miles of cable the organisers said they used and the 50,000 ice-creams they anticipated selling. All this for the so-called man of the people – 100,000 of them (and most of them in anoraks) as it turns out.

The ground is strewn with bedraggled people wearing black dustbin bags and media people bearing portable phones. There are also a few City suits. Mrs Cartwright, modelling a noir trash-can liner, had arrived the night before from Shrewsbury. ‘We saw him this afternoon when he practised. He was marvellous. Mind you, we’re not going to see him now’ – she gestures to the crowds. Mr and Mrs Cheeseman, 68 and 72, sit on the damp grass. ‘We’d have come here in the snow.’

The splendid pink, red and columned stage stands beneath a grey sky – 70 feet wide and 200 tonnes of Greek (pop-gone-rococo-style) theatre. It’s 5.30 pm – and the crowds at the front are as thick as at a pop concert. Above a helicopter hovers and speakers hang suspended from cranes. There are also three 30 ft Starvision screens and an Oriental wholefood bar (among others) which seems to have attracted a fair crowd.

John Major arrives on the screen, with a brolly crumpling over him. Then Charles and Diana arrive. She appears to be wearing an umbrella. The atmosphere becomes wet and expectant.

Now it’s 7 pm. The great signor, the wow-ee vocal artist, The Voice with the massive midriff is about to appear. This is the loudest man in London, the maestro, a natural phenomenon and the best tenor in the world . . . and to herald his arrival, the heavens open.

I’m as close to the stage as I can get, about a quarter of a mile away, I fancy. And there I am, waiting in the drenching rain looking at shoulders and umbrellas, corporate and otherwise. It’s like standing under an overflowing drainpipe while people start to look as if they’ve been in a communal carwash.

There are claps and cheers – so apparently He’s arrived. ‘I’m not sure the acoustics are very good,’ says Jackie Rennie, who types for Kenneth Baker and wears a PVC mac, standing in the al fresco crush bar. Something to do with the ceiling, perhaps? ‘He’s lost his voice,’ says somebody else. And it’s true, you can hardly hear him.

Ten people sit under a home-made plastic tent, occasionally coming up for air. Now the rain has let up. ‘Down, down, down,’ howls the crowd – talking about the view-obstructing brollies. Now I push forwards, up closer to the place where they say things like ‘Shhh’ – and don’t talk while he sings. Ahhhh, Puccini.

The big voice fills the big space marvellously. Here, I hear the tenor of the century – unique, strong and honeyed – issuing through speakers at the back that don’t synchronise with those at the front.

Then Pavarotti says: ‘I ‘ave never seen a woman like that. I would like to dedicate this to Lady Diana.’ At least, that’s what it sounded like. The teenagers around me are drinking Pils and saying ‘Go on Placido’ and ‘In’t he fat?’

The park is starting to smell of damp jumpers but there’s excitement in the air. A cry goes up with O Sole Mio, the ice-cream cornetto song – one feels the raspberry ripple of enjoyment in the crowd.

It gets the biggest cheer and a few bravos. Then there’s a whirl of approval and clapping when we move into Nessun Dorma, the World Cup song – and huge applause before he finishes.

At 9.50 pm, people begin pushing under the plastic cordons. Then they start leap-frogging the metal barrier. The orchestra goes off. One assumes Pav has too. And a big boo goes around the park. ‘Not the best thing in the world, but good fun,’ says a soaked lady.

‘CHESS’ proclaims the huge banner outside the drab one-time cinema that is now the Playhouse theatre in Edinburgh. Scarcely noticeable beneath it, a small strip reads ‘Rudolph Nureyev’.

The audience file in, looking as if they were going to the local bistro, no one particularly glammed up for the occasion.

Inside, an usher gives me-and every other woman in the front stalls-a pink rose, to throw on stage at the end of the performance. An adolescent girl in jeans and T-shirt (no pearls and fur coats here) asks her companion: ‘Where’s the orchestra?’ There isn’t one. For the £30.75 ticket and £6 programme you get pre-recorded music, on a diabolical system. The performance is billed as part of the 16-stop Nureyev Farewell Tour, the road show which reaches Wembley Conference Centre on Friday. But what we are witnessing tonight is the pathos of The Long Goodbye, the tragedy of a legend who cannot let the final curtain fall.

Has it really come to this? Inexorably, the man who enthralled millions around the world is joining the ranks of those who destroy their own mystique. The Maria Callas, Sarah Bernhardt, Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald Club.

The first time I ever saw Nureyev, he was in the Russian Orthodox Church in Kensington. The incense burned, people chanted gloriously and he paraded in an ankle-grazing sable coat. He had that distinctive haughty tread and trademark cap pulled over his thick brows and dark eyes.

This was the international superstar incarnate; defiant, handsome, magisterial, proud, temperamental. And now here he was playing in a provincial theatre in Edinburgh. It was a bleak, undecorative and charmless affair.

In Sunderland, on the opening of the tour five days ago, 50 fans demanded their money back. His performance at Liverpool was described by critics as lacklustre. ‘Nureyev leaves them shouting for less,’ said the headlines. Here in Edinburgh, there were 700 tickets still on sale the night before. During the performance, there are rows of empty seats at the front. But where is Nureyev? Ah, yes. He comes on just before the interval. He does no solos and after a little exertion in The Lesson, the fiery Tartar sits breathless. Sweat pours off him. He is in constant pain and virtually disabled by a calcium spur on his heel. He’s 53 years old and for more than 20 years has performed a near-masochistic 250 performances a year. His body has grown weary, his stamina nigh gone.

Tonight he is no longer playing virtuoso roles, but ones which depend on dramatic presence. Imperiously, he milks the audience for applause and to be fair he still has a fading sexual charisma and compelling stage presence, but it is based on an association with the glorious past, not the now. What he is now doing is really low grade theatre. The soundtrack crackles dismally out of the PA, ugly great speakers set to the fore of a space that has no stage set and no design to relieve it. It is as alluring as a school hall on a Sunday night at midnight. The whole evening grows artistically like . . . like . . . well, like something thrown together by the promoters for the sole purpose of spinning a fast buck.

So there we sit with our pink roses. If they are meant to be thrown to the maestro, nobody does.

So why does he do it? Not for money, ambition or fame. ‘I am a dancer. I am a dancer. Maybe I am the dancer,’ he once said. There is a demon inside him. He is simply a man obsessed; one consumed by a passion; one for whom dancing is the focus of life.

He is also a man who has always fought against critics, competitors, his own muscles and even gravity. He is a warrior who has the will to fight-even when he is losing. He won’t give in to loneliness, old age or infirmity. At the end of the evening, the audience dutifully claps. But there is none of the foot-stamping or whistling that denotes serious approval. A girl in the stalls calls ‘Bravo!’ Nureyev’s eyes light up as he hears it, the single voice in the dark. A lone cheer that is of little cheer. Where is the retinue of yesteryear? The fans straining at the police cordons? The autograph hunters? Gone are the nights of 89 curtain calls. As the performance ends, those watching file out. Many leave before the applause is through.

The dancers’ hero bids farewell DANCERS lost their most formidable champion last night when Wayne Eagling gave his final performance for the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden. Flowers cascaded from the balcony, and bouquets materialised from both sides of the stage, as he blew a departing kiss to the cheering audience and turned to snap the assembled company behind him for his family album. His talents as dancer, choreographer and fighter for dancers’ rights were generously acknowledged by Mr Jeremy Isaacs, the general director of the Royal Opera House, who found him a testing adversary during the dancers’ strike in 1989.

‘He steadfastly championed the cause of dancers in debate and dispute with management,’ said Mr Isaacs.

‘He has fought hard for them and in spite of the spats and recriminations, he is widely respected for his experience, flair and powers of leadership.’

As a dancer, Mr Isaacs continued, Eagling ‘had a formidable technique, a handsome presence, and masculine vitality. He played every prince that ever was’.

For Eagling, who moves to Amsterdam in August to take up directorship of the Dutch National Ballet, his farewell was not an occasion to rake over old coals. ‘I told my mother that I would not say anything controversial,’ he joked.

He said: ‘I have a very warm place in my heart for this building and this House. I hope it remains one of the best in the world-along with the Dutch National.

‘After 25 years with the Royal Ballet-22 with the company and three in the school, which I hated-I’ve a lot of memories. I will miss everyone that’s around.’

He paid tribute to a long list of inspirational dancers-Rudolf Nureyev and Royal Ballet Director Anthony Dowell among them-and to choreographers like Kenneth MacMillan and Frederick Ashton.

* THE BBC is joining with the Royal Opera House, the Kirov Theatre, the Opera de Bastille and other organisations to show a new production of Prokofiev’s War and Peace by British producer Graham Vick at the Kirov this summer. Viewers will be able to see the production, which marks the centenary of the composer’s birth, relayed live from Leningrad on 14 July.

Sue Smith first went shooting 20 years ago, when she was seven. Her father, a gun-smith, took her on a duck shoot. At 10, she was giver her first gun, ‘a 28-bore, the next size up from a 410’. She went pigeon shooting.

Then she started deer-stalking. ‘I got my first roebuck at 12,’ she says. ‘I’ve got a picture of it.’ In the following years she shot fallow deer, then red stags. Now she shoots pheasant and rabbits, too.

Smith, who works for a gunsmith as a professional gun finisher, is a crack shot. She is also anti those who are anti-blood sports, although she finds their views acceptable if they are vegetarians.

‘Most of them are just rent-a-gang, student recruits paid Pounds 15 a day to disrupt things.’

To those genuinely concerned about creatures’ suffering, she says: ‘An animal in an abattoir suffers far more because it knows it is going to be killed. When you stalk a deer, for instance, it doesn’t even know you are there.’ Occasionally, she concedes, a bird gets wounded. ‘But it is picked up instantly.’

She never feels upset about killing. ‘What? With the things I have to do as part of my work? Gutting rabits, skinning them, gralloching (gutting) deer and butchering them?’ Her father has started up an oven-ready enterprise.

She derives immense pleasure fom her sports. ‘I love being in the open air and getting exercise.’ Duck shooting is her favourite.

‘It’s the atmosphere out there on the marshes, when there are just three of you shooting in the dark. It’s freezing, and then you come back to a lovely fire.’ As far as pheasant shooting is concerned, she says: ‘It’s a bit naughty, but I suppose it is the thrill of seeing them drop from the sky.’

And rabbits? ‘You sit in clumps of grass or little hollows to get out of the wind and it’s fun because of the element of surprise.

Rosemary Cleverdon, the 49-year-old Joint master of the West Street Hunt, also enjoys the element of surprise. ‘We only get about one in every 25 foxes; they’re terribly crafty.

A former secretary in South Africa, she has been hunting for 15 years. ‘It’s exciting to see a pack work their way through a wood on the line of the fox. When they find a fox, the adrenalin gets going and the chase is rather fun.’ She says it gives her something to look forward to when everyone else is dreading winter.

The haunt takes out approximately 15 1/2 couples of hounds – ‘you talk about hounds in ‘couples’ and always take out an odd number’ – twice weekly from November to mid-March. In season, she probably dedicates about 25 hours a week to hunting.

With the other two Masters, she has to ‘draw covers’ (put the hounds into woods to try to find the fox) and decide where the hunt should go. She also has to obtain permission from the farmers, build a jump occasionally, organize fundraising events, visit the kennels, exercise her horses Mish and Dudley, and go to ‘masses of meetings.’

As Joint Master of the hunt, she maintains charge of the ‘field’ when they ‘move off’ (tells them where to go), and talks their way out of sticky situations if, for example, the hounds chase sheep or go into a garden.

She is not paid for her work; she pays a subscription to the hunt and contributes towards drinks at the meet. She estimates that a season’s hunting in her area costs at least Pounds 1,000.

‘A good coat costs about Pounds 800 and you pay aroung Pounds 250 for handmade leather boots,’ she adds.

The hunt expects to kill ’10 brace of foxes’ in a season. It is, she feels, the fairest and cleanest way to keep the animals down.

‘It’s a way of conservation – it is a service for the farmers – and the fox has an equal chance. Unlike shooting, you cannot just wound the animal.

‘Fortunately,’ she says, ‘we haven’t had too much trouble for the antis.’

Betty McKeever, an 86-year-old great grandmother and Master of the Blean beagles, says she had a ‘helluva’ time with them last season.

One of them – ‘some darned chap called Hey Ho or something’ – apparently gave them an awful ‘pasting’. In the subsequent chase, a policeman broke his ankle and had to be ‘carried off the field of battle.’ One day she was arrested.

As a matter of policy, she says she won’t allow ‘fisticuffs’. One of her fellow beaglers, she explains, disguises himself as a tree and watches out for people who squirt the hounds with acid.

Despite a recent hip replacement and failing eyesight, this season she has followed the hounds, walking for more than one and a half miles and has had a ‘rippling’ time.

McKeever’s mastership dates from 1909, when her father gave her some beagles. She has been in the parish almost all her life – she now lives in a part-13th century farmhouse with a pet bat.

As Master, she is responsible or the hounds’ upkeep. ‘I feed ’em on bibles (bullocks’ stomachs).’ They hunt from September – ‘as soon as we can get on the corn land’ – until March.

mcKeever has a huntsman and two or three amateur whips on a Saturday. On thursdays, a doctor, who is ‘supposed to be the best nuclear physicist in the world or something’, hunts the pack.

It is, says McKeever, an elderly or really young person’s sport. Three gentlemen in their seventies always go out with her.

She explains her enjoyment: ‘For a kick-off, you are in different country every time: Lovely woods, huge arable lands or marsh country.’ Beagling is very social, too, she says. On Boxing Day they meet at the Brewery, ‘all free drinks’.

If beagling is made illegal, she says firmly that she will move with her pack to Ireland. She doesn’t like killing anything unnecessarily but, she says, the hares damage fruit trees and are otherwise hunted by the fox, shot or snared.

‘I never feel guilty about killing them. I don’t think they think the way Beatrix Potter made out.’

If you have not heard of Una-Mary Parker yet, you soon will have. She is currently embroiled in scandals that involve sex, drugs, fraud and embezzlement, and last week she masterminded a hijack and broke down in tears after a friend took an overdose and died. ‘I have experienced some of these things,’ explains the charity queen-turned-novelist, ‘but 90 per cent come from my imagination. ‘ They occur, in fact, in her still unfinished second novel, Scandals (her first, Riches, is due out this summer).

Una-Mary Parker, 55, is named after her aunts Una and Mary. ‘My mother thought she was being clever – but neither of them left me a bean,’ she says in her baritone voice, laughing throatily.

Until this year, Parker was the ‘unrivalled’ organizer of charity balls. She spurns the tabloid label of society queen – ‘that conjures up visions of ladies in pearls, flowered hats and print frocks’ – preferring to be called an events organizer; ‘much more professional,’ she explains. She had been Tatler’s social diarist, attending as many as five fucntions a night and acquiring a contracts book that one imagines needed to be carried on wheels. ‘After 10 years on Tatler, I thought I would have a breakdown if I had to go to another cocktail party. ‘ But film premieres, dances, fashion shows and gala exhibitions for charity were another ball game.

Parker decided to ‘major on decor’ (ballrooms transformed into jungles and deserts), and to become a stickler for detailed organization. By the time Parker hung up her ballgown, she was arranging 19 major events a year, ‘practically each one attended by a member of the Royal Family’.

Such a blue-blooded coterie was familiar to Parker. She was a debutante who did the deb scene’, and had a coming out ball. ‘I came out in 1949 in court – at a drawing-room tea party in Buckingham Palace with the then King and Queen Elizabeth. ‘ Then she married her late husband, society photographer Archie Parker – and had ‘the traditional 1,200-guest wedding reception’.

Archie Parker left Lloyds to become a protrait photographer at a time when, Parker says, it wasn’t the done thing to leave the City to become a snapper. ‘We did all the royals at Windsor and some came to our Knightsbridge studio. ‘ they also photographed showbusiness personalities and celebrities (‘we spent a weekend with Somerset Maugham’).

Parker has no regrets about leaving her charity career. ‘I had gone as far as I could in 15 years, and writing had become an obsession for me. ‘ She ‘felt a bit shy and inhibited’ – understandably since she dubs her first novel, Riches, as being the Dynasty between the sheets. Nevertheless, she sent the half-written Riches – about the different ways enormous wealth affects people – to a New York agent. ‘She said it was terrific. ‘ Parker will not reveal how much money she’ll make, saying only that ‘there are a comfortable number of noughts involved’. Small wonder that she now intends to write a novel every 15 months.