Mandy Patinkin live is so distracted and distracting that it takes a while to notice the voice Maybe we’ve got used to

Mandy Patinkin live is so distracted and distracting that it takes a while to notice the voice Maybe we’ve got used to it. Cut to “You Could Drive a Person Crazy” taken a little more literally than Mr Sondheim (or Steve, as Patinkin’s new album has it) can ever have dreamt. Then a quick sprint to the piano for “The Wrong-note Rag”, and then something about a tisket, a tasket and a yellow basket involving a megaphone and a New York traffic cop. Come to think of it, isn’t that what he is in this life? He comes on strong, he comes on singing. “Please play for me that sweet melody…” – and before you know it, we’re joining in with every “doodle do do” We, an English audience Please.

Then it’s into the comic voice-twister – every Russian composer you’ve ever heard of and a few you haven’t in a haemorrhage of squeaks and glottal stops replete with minimalist cossack footwork. Mandy Patinkin brings his own flower arrangements to the empty shell of the Almeida. There’s a chair, an upright piano, a very capable pianist name of Paul Ford But otherwise, Mandy Patinkin just brings Mandy Patinkin. He looks real casual about it – casual pants, casual black T- shirt, a pair of sneakers Nothing fancy – just me, folks No microphones, no electronic enhancements – just me, folks All of me Love me or leave me

In another life, Mandy Patinkin was a Vaudevillian Song and dance man. Kundera is still a fearless writer, utterly contemptuous of the novelist’s highway code. But on the road, he’s safe as houses.n `Slowness’ is published by Faber & Faber, pounds 12.99 on Monday.

Of one thing we can be sure: he won’t go the way his main characters do in The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality, casually killed off by the author in a chance car crash Slowness begins with the Kunderas motoring to the chateau. Kundera is at the wheel and Vera is pointing out, “Every 50 minutes, someone dies on the road in France.” A car broils and curses behind them, unable to overtake. It was in this country that translation’s original sin was committed on The Joke, when a publisher reorganised and cut chapters; in a rip-snorting letter to the TLS, Kundera renounced his authorship, and the publisher promptly made good its error.The last uncertainty of Kundera’s biography is the manner of his passing. And it’s his Frenchness that makes him so enigmatic to readers in this country where, among living authors, the Czechs sell much better than the French. Kundera gives no sign of having read anyone English apart from Sterne and Rushdie – hardly our most characteristic novelists. He was granted French nationality two years later, and now tends to regard the French translations of his novels as official versions.

He speaks of his defection to French as an affair of the heart. “In my relations with it, I imagine myself as a boy of 14, desperately in love with Greta Garbo.” Between 1985 and 1987, he revised personally all French translations of his works. Driven by the same avian instinct to protect his body of work, after 1989 he soberly republished one novel a year in Czech, unlike most other unbanned authors who hastily flooded the market.Kundera chose exile in France because, he has written, “It is here that I was understood earlier and better than elsewhere.” After 1968, the majority of supportive letters he received had a French postmark. When Gallimard published The Book of Laughter and Forgetting in 1979, the Czechoslovak regime revoked his citizenship. In 1977, the Kunderas moved into the apartment off the Rue de Rennes that they still occupy. The author has kept his head down and tried to parry prurient interest from those who see him merely as a dissident.

Without paying too much attention, I noticed that the corporation had moved its head office from one part of Nottinghamshire to another, in Derbyshire, and that it was extending its operations into Belgium. All seemed auspicious.Then, on Wednesday, the bombshell: the corporation had collapsed, and the Serious Fraud Office was about to launch an investigation into its affairs. At least, I thought, my bird exists: even if the firm has gone under, my ostrich must still be around. To make certain, I sped across to Brookfield Farm.Sure enough, the paddocks were pullulating with ostriches, some travelling at high speed as the mating urge took hold Vince looked very much himself in a smart blue overall.