POLICE hunting the Mardi Gra bomber were last night still questioning a man arrested close to a supermarket in west London. The man was arrested on alleged firearms offences following a car chase. He had earlier been spotted acting suspiciously by officers in West Ruislip.
A suspect package seen being left by the man close to the South Ruislip Tube station was destroyed by the bomb squad in a controlled explosion. I really do think it is politically immature at this stage to talk about deadlock.”Later SDLP deputy leader Seamus Mallon said the shape of agreement envisaged by some was not balanced as far as nationalists were concerned, warning that final agreement would be very difficult to reach unless nationalist aspirations were satisfied.l Tony Blair last night held a working dinner with Irish premier Bertie Ahern at Downing Street in an attempt to narrow the gap between the parties over the Northern Ireland peace process.Mr Blair was seeking to reach a compromise over the cross-border “implementation” bodies which are being resisted by the Ulster Unionist leader, David Trimble, who met Mr Blair at the weekend.The Finucane case, page 8. HERALDING a historic breakthrough in the Stormont multi-party talks, Northern Ireland Secretary Dr Mo Mowlam yesterday announced that because so much progress had been made the final deadline had been advanced to today. She then collapsed in a fit of giggles as reporters gaped in incredulous silence before they realised that this was an April fool joke and joined in the laughter.
The surrealistic moment provided some relief from the steadily intensifying discussions, which Dr Mowlam characterised as tough but positive in the lead up to the 9 April talks deadline.

She remained determinedly optimistic, declaring: “I believe we are going to get there.”At intervals during the day, various participants emerged from the talks’ building to deliver media soundbites, evidently designed primarily to assure their supporters that they were in the process of driving the hardest possible deal.The most effective early soundbite of the day came from Ulster Unionist party deputy leader John Taylor, who declared the talks deadlocked, announcing that there could be no real negotiations on other issues until Dublin showed that it was serious on the issue of amending articles 2 and 3 of the Irish constitution.Dublin responded sharply, with junior foreign affairs minister, Liz O’Donnell, describing Mr Taylor’s comments as “particularly unhelpful at this late stage in the negotiations”.Saying he was attempting to extract one aspect and make it a pre-condition over other aspects of the negotiations, she added: “That is not the way we are going to resolve our differences. By contrast, there’s far too little left to be deduced between the lines in Friel’s dramatisation of the preparing for, and aftermath to, a bibulous lunch party at the dilapidated bill-ridden manse Tom shares with his wryly wise wife, Daisy (Geraldine James, excellent, the most glowingly beautiful go-to-seed incipient alcoholic you’re ever likely to see.Gawn Grainger and Sorcha Cusack are wonderfully wasp-ish as the successful popular novelist and wife, a double act of veiled mutual recrimination that is now Canaries-bound on the proceeds of his manuscript sell-up.This is the kind of play where Daisy’s mother (Margaret Tyzack) is established as a doctor principally so that strangers can unload their nervous breakdown stories on her. Visiting his long-institutionalised daughter, Brigitte – a young woman who sways, open-mouthed and beyond communication, on her bed – brilliant Niall Buggy’s shabby teddy bear of a Tom rattles off reams of cod father gossip, its ludicrous fancifulness, and the fact that he casts his daughter as the silent stooge in a tenderly gruesome comedy routine, indicative of despairing paternal love.To secure a better private hospital for this unreachable creature might be one good reason for selling his papers, the monetary value of which escalates when it emerges that he has the manuscripts of two unpublished pornographic novels he wrote in a fury of inspiration just after the adolescent Brigitte was taken into care.Why then exactly, and why pornography in a career otherwise marked (held back even) by integrity? The play seems to be resistant about the murky background to this more out of periodic forgetfulness than a desire for Chekhovian ubiquity. Like Aristocrats and Dancing at Lughnasa, this is one of Friel’s tragi-comical homage’s to Chekhov – a kind of octet, played under a slowly westering sun, whose separate voices of defeat and disappointment interweave involvingly in Robert Lefevre’s superlatively acted production.
The play begins and ends, though, more in the world of Peter Nichols’ A Day In The Death of Joe Egg. The posthumous torment for this category of the damned will be to wade endlessly through the mountain of false conjecture and interpretation that the hacks of academe proceed to base upon such a trove.

Better to be an enigma that’s compellingly ajar than a misread open book. On the other hand, the temptations to flog off one’s literary dirty laundry can be powerful, as we see from the experience of Tom Connolly, the novelist at the heart of Give Me Your Answer, Do!, a new play by the great , but latterly below-par Irish dramatist, Brian Friel. But it is still extremely rare to find black actors in major roles unless the part is racially identified.The debate around this is nothing new, so much so that people like Cross have given up discussing it at conference level. “All these discussions about integrated casting are filled by reasonably liberal-minded people who are already doing it.

The day that Adrian Noble turns up to a conference on black theatre will be the day we can really have a debate.”. A SPECIAL circle of hell may well be reserved for writers who sell their papers – every faltering first draft, every sordid scrap of correspondence, every slip of the pen and rejection slip – to an American university archive. Despite being the sole reason to see The Goodbye Girl, his very good reviews never mentioned that he was a black actor in a role created on film by white Richard Dreyfus. Leading young people’s theatre specialists like Theatre Centre and Red Ladder have actively worked on the principle for so long that it is absolutely taken for granted.Then there are the stand-outs like Gary Wilmot. CVs of young black actors make for highly depressing reading. If you’re a woman you’ll have played hookers; if you’re a man, you’ll have played pimps.Integrated casting remains a dream for most actors There are exceptions.