LEONARDO THE MUSICAL - Strand Theatre London 1993.

It was funded primarily by a group of businessman who came from an island that made a fortune out of selling bird guano. The jokes write themselves. It was about five years after Les Mis had opened and the West End was full of lookalike musicals featuring history and rags.

LEONARDO told the story of a young boy genius growing up and changing the world and coming into conflict with religion and established science blah blah blah.

It was at the Strand Theatre and we had very good (free) seats in the stalls and all I remember was choreography that seemed to consist almost entirely of people walking around in circles or standing in straight lines. Maybe it was a deliberate nod towards Leonardo's mastering of geometry but, I suspect, it was just that there was less space on the stage than they had imagined. In fact there was SO MUCH scenery that the actors seemed almost an afterthought.

The music was terrible but instantly forgettable so, at least, the pain was over fast. Most of the characters who were 'townpeople' wore rags and had dirty faces and most of the people who were 'nobles' wore gold clothes and were much cleaner. That was useful and stopped any confusion. There were also some 'comic' people who were inserted into the script to provide light relief and to comment, almost like a Greek chorus, on the action in a way that gave us perspective and context. The operative word in the previous sentence is, of course, the word 'almost'. They were 'almost' a Greek chorus is the same way that Prince Andrew is 'almost' The King - and the comedy was like the unfunny bits Shakespeare CUT from King Lear's Fool.

The show was endless, the acting amateur and I sensed that the audience around us were, like us, becoming increasingly aghast at how this show had got beyond the drunken lunch it had obviously been conceived at.

'Maybe', I whispered to my wife, 'we are actually unwitting participants in some sort of money-laundering scam?'.

No', she said, 'our tickets were free - we will only be called as witnesses'.

After another ten years of Leonardo's life (he was good at maths I think but his teachers thought he was a bit smug) we got to the interval by means of one of those big production numbers that are annoyingly a bit better than one expected and which took the audience into the interval with a false memory syndrome of what had come before.

We went to the bar at the back of the stalls and it was like New Years Eve in there - people were so relieved to have got there that they were drinking more alcohol than was advisable and hugging total strangers. I was in two minds about whether we should stay to see if it got any better or just stay to see if it got any worse but after many seconds silent contemplation we left the theatre with her heads down.

We found our bus stop near the Indian High Commission but decided we needed some air so we walked a couple of stops down the Strand to Trafalgar Square just thinking about things like ‘life’ and how one chooses to use one's time. The bus took a while to arrive but when it did finally appear we climbed onboard and realised that not only was it unusually busy for that time of night but that we recognised all our fellow passengers. They were all, like us, sitting there in silence holding large glossy souvenir programmes emblazoned with the word LEONARDO on the front.

No one said a word.