As for that event being live you could say that what is magical and memorable about the experience is the fugitive way

As for that event being "live", you could say that what is magical and memorable about the experience is the fugitive way the ghosts of the hotel's past are summoned up in the non-life of its present.A bell-boy in green uniform is glimpsed in an almost subliminal flash several flights above the stunning wrought-iron stairway. Instead of the strong sense of group identity you're supposed to feel as an audience at a live event, you're tremendously conscious here of being on your own, since each performance is for one person only and people are admitted at a rate that rules out contact. This is the team that reversed all one's expectations of a night out in the West End when they transformed the Garrick Theatre into a planked- over, dust-sheet-shrouded, candle-lit arena for the 20 minutes of Beckett's Footfalls with Fiona Shaw pacing up and down the platform built near the bow of the dress circle. In the St Pancras Project it's the nature of theatrical experience that gets mysteriously inverted. Parting the cobwebs now come Deborah Warner and designer Hildegard Bechtler who, for LIFT '95 are inviting you to take A Fantastical Walk, on a route mapped out by them, through the derelict magnificence of the four-storey building. Room service might leave something to be desired, though, since Gilbert Scott's massive Gothic edifice, a monument to the Victorian railway age, ceased to function in 1935. The place is spectacularly filthy from top to bottom and there would be no problem about having it all to yourselves.

It occurred to me, while I was wandering around it, that the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras would be the perfect spot for a dirty weekend, in more senses than one. But being French, Catholic, criminal and gay - the four worst things les rosbifs can imagine - his hideously beautiful talent has never been properly acknowledged on these shores.ROGER CLARKE. He was an intensely moral immoralist and a natural transgressive who favoured violent antagonism to structured reasoning. But Genet's books are great, carnivorous flowers; they describe things never described before. He might imagine sex with Hitler or create the first drag-queen character in French fiction. From airless cells to Marseilles docksides, a hidden world comes forth.Genet was a macho slut who conducted his life in a cloud of criminal musk.

Edmund White supposes this is partly because French argot, which doesn't date, is always translated into British slang, which does. If we had a Genet of our own, he wouldn't be marching with Ian McKellen - except to throw a brick at him. Genet believed in revolution, not respectable integration.Genet was a consummate artist of the dangerous and taboo, highly thought- of in most countries - except England. He observed with disgust that the rioting students in Paris in 1968 had seized theatres rather than a TV station. "Theatre only had any meaning for him," says his biographer Edmund White, "if it was to expose the theatrical powerplay of banks, courts and government." In later life, Genet wrote little, growing absorbed in the struggle of the PLO and the Black Panthers in the USA. If we had a Genet of our own in Wormwood Scrubs, you can be sure that the British government would be arguing that he was a good reason for the abolition of the Arts Council and that his sentence should be increased, not reduced, as an "example". Eschewing previous homosexual themes, his plays concerned racism and colonialism Then theatre began to bore him. His stories of pullulating, fetishistic desire between male prison inmates convulsed the likes of Sartre and Cocteau with admiration, and a presidential decree, no less, was signed to release him from the life sentence he was then serving In the 1950s he turned to writing plays He directed a brilliant short film, Un Chant d'Amour.