Ultimately though, this Wilde’s spirit of resilience and new-found frankness are touchingly persuasive.At the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Canadian newcomer Janet Munsil’s Smoking with Lulu, we find another legendary playhouse creature – the critic Kenneth Tynan (reincarnated by Peter Eyre). He’s engaged in a peculiarly intimate interview with his long-standing fantasy woman, Louise Brooks. She was the sexy, hedonistic and strong-willed silent movie star who played the wanton Lulu in G W Pabst’s 1928 film, Pandora’s Box. Soon after that she vanished from the scene, supposedly refusing to service lecherous Hollywood producers who didn’t take her fancy.Munsil’s vision is loosely based on Tynan’s enamoured profile of Brooks, printed in the New Yorker in 1979, just a year before he died of emphysema. The Kansas-born silver screen beauty was, by the time Tynan met her, a bedridden septuagenarian being slowly destroyed by the same disease.Munsil’s script drifts along rather formlessly and the dream sequences – wherein Tynan imagines having a kinky affair with the young Brooks (Sophie Millett) – are underdeveloped. Yet the clips of Brooks’s vintage films, flickering on a giant screen behind him, are arrestingly erotic.

Eyre is slightly too woebegone and low on charisma, but he has a lovely mellifluousness and gentle warmth. And Barlow is a wonderfully game old bird: comically cranky, tetchy, witty and still sexually outré. She’s no-nonsense, dismissing Tynan’s eulogies whilst, nevertheless, shifting from wariness to something approaching unspoken love.Directed in the WYP’s studio space by David Giles, this is a quietly poignant, amusing and mournful play that perceives how professional meetings become entangled with personal attractions and which muses on the difference between media icons and their imperfect real lives.’The Duchess Of Malfi’: Barbican Theatre, EC2 (020 7638 8891), to 18 November; ‘In Extremis’/'De Profundis’: Royal National Theatre Cottesloe, SE1 (020 7452 3000), to 16 December; ‘Smoking with Lulu’: West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds (0113 213 7700), to 2 December. An unknown, hand-written poem by Ted Hughes, the late Poet Laureate, is to be auctioned to raise funds to fight the disease that killed him. An unknown, hand-written poem by Ted Hughes, the late Poet Laureate, is to be auctioned to raise funds to fight the disease that killed him.
The poem has been donated to the Cancer Research Campaign (CRC) by Keith Sagar, Hughes’s biographer, who was given it by the poet more than 20 years ago.Called “Knave of Clubs”, the poem is about Hercules, the mythical hero who undertook 12 astonishing labours, and his wife, Hebe, the daughter of Zeus and renowned for her youth and vigour. Hughes originally called it “King of Clubs” but crossed it out on the manuscript.Mr Sagar enclosed the poem, which he had kept with a number of other manuscripts and letters, after he was asked to “personalise” a copy of his biography for the charity auction.He was given it in 1979 as he was leaving Hughes’s Devon home after a visit. “Ted had his hand in his pocket and he fished it out with a bit of crumpled paper.

He opened it and saw what it was – a little poem – and said, ‘Oh, you might find this quite amusing,’ and gave it to me. I read it and handed it back and he said, ‘Keep it, it’s only a little bagatelle’.”It is not known how much the poem, with Mr Sagar’s biography, might fetch. Earlier this year, a brief poem written by Hughes on the back of a chocolate wrapper was sold for £575. But the CRC is hoping that the lot might make at least £1,000 for its cause.Mr Sagar said: “There is a published poem of this title, but this is nothing to do with that. It is a little comic poem which has never been published, which makes it very much more valuable.”He obviously didn’t think it important enough to be concerned about publishing it, but it’s a characteristic bit of Hughes’s humour. “Hughes was ill with colon cancer for 18 months before his death two years ago.His final work, a play based on Alcestis by Euripides, returns to the figure of Hercules.

The play was premiered by the Northern Broadsides theatre company and is currently on tour.Other items in the CRC sale, at the Royal College of Art, London, on 22 November, include signed editions of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter book, Goblet of Fire, and of Maeve Binchy’s Scarlet Feather.. Some small independent publishers claim they are facing bankruptcy after the giant bookseller Waterstone’s demanded huge new discounts from them. Some small independent publishers claim they are facing bankruptcy after the giant bookseller Waterstone’s demanded huge new discounts from them.
The chain stunned smaller publishers by giving them just one week to accept new terms and conditions, including a 50 per cent discount on the cover price of any book stocked by Waterstone’s.The move could wipe out some publishers’ profit margins and threaten their livelihoods, as some had previously offered small discounts or none at all. “Potentially this could change the face of publishing,” said one, who was afraid to be named. “I do think a lot of people will go out of business.”The move comes in the wake of increasing turmoil at Waterstone’s, with significant staff losses and problems with the distribution of Christmas books.