For 50 years no one has called him John and I see no reason why we should

For 50 years no one has called him John and I see no reason why we should start today. (Pause) So what was it about old Cunty that made him such an unforgettable character?"There then followed an oration that managed to cram in more uses of the C-word than you'd normally hear in an entire lifetime. As shock gave way to hysteria among the audience, it produced the most apoplectically funny 10 minutes I've ever experienced in a theatre.I was on the floor again in Stratford as Barrit recounted how, a year ago, he got a letter from a member of the public saying that his daughter had loved the sketch in Hammersmith and would he come and perform it at her 18th-birthday party in Leighton House Against his better judgement, he agreed. After all, it's one thing to do such a turn as the climax of an evening's comedy, another to do it cold."I was expecting a hundred people Instead, there were about 20, most of them grandparents. I managed to get through the first bit, took a deep breath and I swear you could have heard a pin drop You've never seen such wide eyes. And as I came down the stairs afterwards, it was like the parting of the Red Sea. One man did look over his shoulder and said 'Well done!', but that was all I got from them."Coming back to Falstaff, I ask if it's hard rehearsing the second part of a long play when the first is already up and running.

Presumably you have to adjust things in Part One in the light of what you discover in Part Two.Sometimes, Barrit says, this can result in purely technical difficulties. Anxiety about your new lines in the second half can screw up your confidence in the lines you've been delivering fine for weeks. He also feels that people who have found his Falstafftoo sympathetic thus far may change their minds when they can see the whole.Talk about the fat knight's influence on the heir to the throne raises the topic of Prince William, whom Barrit, it turns out, has met several times since Diana first took the boy backstage after Wind in the Willows. On one occasion, after a desperate surreptitious scrub, the donkey's dentures the actor wore as Bottom found their way into the royal mouth. "How's that for intimacy?" On my way home, I have a flash of inspiration. It may be too late to book Barrit and that notorious sketch for William's 18th-birthday festivities.

But just think how they would liven up the Coronation.'Henry IV' Parts One & Two are at the RSC, Stratford-upon-Avon 01789-403403. For some who has been described as one of the most important theatrical thinkers of the 20th century, Antonin Artaud has a surprisingly low profile. His writing, it is true, remains in print, some 52 years after his death; his best-known work, The Theatre and Its Double, which contains the two manifestos outlining his ideas for a Theatre of Cruelty, isn't hard to acquire. It's rare, though, to find Artaud's theories being acted out and tested or even to see his turbulent, unhappy life dramatised. For some who has been described as one of the most important theatrical thinkers of the 20th century, Antonin Artaud has a surprisingly low profile.

His writing, it is true, remains in print, some 52 years after his death; his best-known work, The Theatre and Its Double, which contains the two manifestos outlining his ideas for a Theatre of Cruelty, isn't hard to acquire. It's rare, though, to find Artaud's theories being acted out and tested or even to see his turbulent, unhappy life dramatised. His outpourings have been widely acknowledged as having influenced some of the greats of the postwar era: Jean Genet, Jean-Louis Barrault, Arthur Adamov, Fernando Arrabal and Peter Brook among them. But whereas Brook partly made his name by staging a Theatre of Cruelty festival at Lamda in 1964, you're unlikely to see today's aspiring British directors staking so immediate a claim to Artaud's legacy.Step forward Duncan Ward, an independent film-maker and avant-garde theatre pioneer who has taken it upon himself to whip our reverence back into shape. In a sidestreet near Spitalfields Market, where industrial dereliction collides with accelerating gentrification, he has installed a temporary performance space in a former fabric manufacturers to present a work entitled Last Night in the Life of Antonin Artaud. Instead of offering up precise details about the life, Ward exhilaratingly strives to convey the essence of Artaud's art, using biographical material as he sees fit. The lines are all Artaud's but the pattern in which they are arranged is an intuitive elaboration on the part of his latterday disciple.Artaud died on 4 March 1948, at the age of 51, in an asylum at Ivry, on the outskirts of Paris France where he had been a voluntary patient for two years following almost a decade of confinement at various sanatoriums. By notionally setting Last Night in the Ivry Asylum, Ward enables himself to adopt an appropriately hallucinogenic, surrealistic approach to the mise-en-scÿne.Artaud once argued with typical intensity that "The theatre cannot become itself again until it provides the audience with the truthful distillations of dreams where its taste for crime, its erotic obsessions, its savageness, its fantasies, its utopian sense of life and objects, even its cannibalism, pour out on a level that is not counterfeit and illusory, but internal." In the spartan white cell designed by James Bain Smith, the distilled dreams of the dying writer pour out in a nightmarish unravelling of the soul.Rupert Procter's feverish Artaud, who possesses the gaunt nobility of the bohemian in his youth, when he was an attractive stage and screen actor, is assaulted on all sides by grotesque figures.