Thousands of farmers routinely demonstrate against a US firm, WR Grace, for “genetic colonialism”. The firm’s sin was to patent a method of preserving extract from the neem tree, which Indians have used for thousands of years for everything from a pesticide to toothbrushes. Mr Borel is very much alive, working as a manager in Limoges. The mayor and council officials, discussing at the mairie on the corner of the square arrangements for the day’s Senate elections, watched in horror as residents ducked into doorways The fire brigade arrived unarmed, and stood by helplessly. Further up the street, a 15-year-old boy out buying the morning baguettes was killed instantly. He hardly ever mentioned Eric to his friends.Alan was still asleep when Eric turned up His mother came to the door, then went back to wake her son The conversation between the two boys was very short.

Theirs was an unequal relationship: Eric, a shy boy who did not look others in the eye, confided in Alan, but Alan, more self-assured, moved effortlessly in a wider circle of friends. As she entered the kitchen, she was killed by a single bullet to the head. Nothing has been ruled out at this stage.”Ministers are expected to prepare the ground before the Tory party conference next month, when the Foreign Secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, will face grass- roots demands for withdrawal from the convention.The Government believes that Britain may have some power to change the remit of the court, as a founder-signatory of the 1948 Convention on Human Rights, which established it. Her husky-voiced rendering of “Send in the Clowns” is the most moving I’ve ever heard.Playing Dench’s ancient Norn-courtesan of a mother, Sian Phillips looks as though she has stepped out of a painting by Munch. Calling for a toast in a special dessert wine “that is said to possess the power to open the eyes of even the blindest among us…”, she adds to the impression that that unsettlingly suspended Scandinavian night in Act 2 has its affinities with A Midsummer Night’s Dream as well as Chekhov. With wonderful use of scrim and revolve and the Olivier’s vast distances, Mathias’s excellently acted production gives you a haunting sense of its mysterious enchantments.

PTIt’s still the only musical I know to begin with a vocal warm- up Atmospheric, and necessary. Sondheim’s relationship with voices was always, to say the least, ambivalent. There are moments in this fascinating and lovely score which border on the unsingable – deliberately so in the case of Henrik Egerman’s tortured soliloquy “Later” (high Bs impossibly placed). But that trinity of numbers (“Now”, “Later”, “Soon”) is a very tall order indeed. Perhaps Sondheim really is an instrumental composer who happens to write musical comedy (I’ve no doubt he’d love to have been Ravel – Jonathan Tunick’s elegant and piquant orchestrations keep promising us the “Fairy Garden” from Ma Mere l’Oye).But let’s not get too hung up on how strong Sean Mathias’s production is vocally. In an ideal world we’d have a Henrik as good as Brendan O’Hea but with a ringing high tenor truly to crown the climax of “A Weekend in the Country”; we’d have a Petra as engaging as Issy van Randwyck with the dead-centred belt-voice that “The Miller’s Son” demands but that she lacks.

In an ideal world…But when the book is as good as Hugh Wheeler’s, it’s amazing how playing it for real, for truth, how treating it as a serious play with songs carries all before it That’s the real strength of this revival. Judi Dench in “Send in the Clowns” (heart-breakingly cynical) feels definitive; and Patricia Hodge’s involvement with the lyric of “Every Day a Little Death” supports and enriches her wavering line. The ravishing middle-eight (or is it middle-sixteen?) of that number is a priceless example of Sondheim at his most tantalisingly transient. You crave the reprise but he leaves you feeling hungry.As ever, the wide, open spaces of the Olivier stage are a bit of a mixed blessing Intimacy is a challenge. “A Weekend in the Country”, one of the great ensembles of musical comedy, is too diffuse – no impact, no uplift until its final chord.