The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 30

ml Write a story for The Dark Room by Andrzej Klimowski Episode Breathing lessons Klimowski's strip and win a weekend for two in Prague and Gold Card entry to the London Film Festival Adam Sweeting A Guardian! Faber and FaberLondon Film Festival prize competition THE GUARDIAN, with the publishers Faber and Faber and the organisers of the 38th London Film Festival, is challenging readers to provide a 150-word story outline for a wordless strip by the artist Andrzej Klimowski. The first frames appear on the right. Further frames will be published over the following three Saturdays. You'll need to see all four episodes before you enter. The closing date will be Thursday October 20.

We'll give the address for entries with the final episode on October 15. The top prize, donated by Faber, is a weekend for two in Prague on a date to be chosen by the winner. Plus Gold Card admission to anything "or everything (except the opening and closing galas) at the London Film Festival, which runs from November 3 to November 20. Other prizes will include 50-worth of Faber film or other books selected by six runners-up. And 25 runners- never get rid of, even if you play Chris De Burgh records very loud all day long.

The increase in central heating and double glazing (explained a Cambridge boffin) has made most homes warmfer and more humid, offering conditions in which the noisome dust-mite can thrive as never before. The cure might have been proscribed by Mrs Bridges in Upstairs Downstairs sleep with the window open and make sure the bed is properly aired. So much for biotechnology. If there's no cure for asthma, deception and money can often be the keys to a good education. Class Action (C4) investigated the ways in which parents across the country inveigle their children into over-subscribed schools with the best academic records.

They give false addresses, or they buy second homes inside the desired catchment area and then sell them when their child leaves school. Some of them even live in tents or on boats or offer bribes. Schools, it seems, frequently turn a blind eye, probably because they regard affluent parents who are determined that their offspring should be high achievers as their ideal clientele. In a perverse way, it was quite encouraging to sec the efforts being made to give the yoot'a decent leg-up. The Prime Minister would no doubt be delighted to see concerned citizens doing their utmost to ensure that their kids don't end up joining the notorious legions of illiterate yobs.

On the other band, the fact that so many parents live in terror of incarcerating their children in appalling comprcliensives is a national disgrace. ITS Mm up will get pairs of tickets to LFF screenings. Klimowski's graphic novel, The Depository: A Dream Book, is published by Faber this week. He talks about its creation in the interview that appears below. Graphic world without words ASTHMA has never been the kind of fashionable disease that inspires rock stars and royalty to queue up to raise funds to fight it, but A Breath Of Fresh Air (BBC2) argued that Britain is in the grip of a costly and dangerous epidemic.

One estimate put the annual cost of treating asthma at over a billion pounds. A National Asthma Campaign spokeswoman protested that there is no "national strategy" for asthma research or education, and declared herself eager to fight for the "rights" of sufferers. Was she suggesting that asthma victims are in some way deprived of their civil liberties? Bizarre notion. Anyway, while the remorseless proliferation of cars and their bronchial unfriendly emissions has played its part in doubling the number of asthma sufferers over the last 15 years, this doesn't explain why wildest Norfolk has become an asthma black-spot. The Woodward family, for example, moved to Norfolk from the midlands.

Anticipating cleaner air and healthier living, they were aghast to find several family members succumbing to asthma for the first time in their lives. Anything and everything could be to blame photochemical smog, ground-level ozone, paint, shellfish, flour, countless moulds and pollens But the chief culprit may turn out to be the dust-mite, one household guest you can CLASSICAL Gurrelieder Birmingham Andrew Clements IN ANY decade the number of performances of Schocnberg's Gurrelieder can normally be counted on the fingers of one hand, so it has been a real treat to have the chance of two. equally impressive accounts within a couple ot months. Andrew Davis launched this year's Proms with the gargantuan score back in July, and on Wednesday it opened the CBSO's new season, in a performance of astonishing clarity under Simon Rattle. Because of the sheer scale of the undertaking the massive chorus, the orchestra with septuple wind and brass and roster of heavy-duty soloists Gurrelieder is usually heard in huge spaces, with correspondingly resonant acoustics.

But Symphony Hall can cope with mas sive walls of sounds; Kattle had gone for maximum clarity by having all the doors to the halls resonating chamber closed and it was a revelation to hear so much of the work's inner detail. Gurrelieder was Schoenbere's rite of passage, the work in VERONICA HORWELL enters the dream world of the artist Andrzej Klimowski, whose wordless novel is published this week wordless dream-book novel, as a strip cartoon, one frame a page. Shan't tell you the plot, can't tell you the plot, because viewers must infer it for themselves. It looks like the storyboard he had understood that there, not here, was the place where he could use his talent. Through the seventies, he did.

Poland, then, had a certain visual background to life, just as we have advertising only ideas and feelings, not objects, were the consumables, sold especially through theatre and movie posters. Even a big lump of Hollywood tat, like The Omen, was re-postered in Poland. By Klimowski, in fact who gave the devil's child back all its European ancestry. The child Damicn is naked, prick evident. A winged, clawed demon obliterates his head.

The image shocks. It has an antique heritage of vileness the movie never understood. It is early, and also perfect, Klimowski: an assembly of photographic and archival visuals, parts of which Andrzej Klimowski in his studio PHOTOGRAPH: FRANK MARTIN he tutored at the Royal College ofArt. Stand by any bookshop shelf of modern novels, and a sensation of slight uneasiness emanates from his jackets. They don't upset, but they do disturb.

They soften you up for what's inside. Now what's inside is his own artwork: The Depository, a bulging ophthalmologists' eyeballs; skulls ziggurats; dismembered torsos often, in origin, the photographed body of his wife Oanusia. Lazily described as Gothic, but actually closer to Jacobean that image world of sex, silver and death they're his own invention, though now used by his many imitators, some of whom on parade MICHAEL BILLINGTON on the first public staging of The Children's Hour in Britain False pretences IN POLAND, you can be a grafik. It doesn't mean graphic designer and it doesn't mean illustrator. It doesn't translate as a job description.

A grafik is an artist who devises the heraldry of ideas, who makes visible the mood of now. Any technique will do. Any mass-printed medium, as long as it meets your eyes everywhere: posters, book wrappers, magazine covers. Omnipresent, yet not quite seen when new. Only later, when the mood of now has become period decor, will it really be looked at.

Andrzej Klimowski is grafik. Even though he's not in Poland any more. He was an emigre's child who made his way from his home in Britain to Warsaw, to study, with a British Council grant. That sentence is the right way around Privates IT WAS a curious scene. Squashed together behind a long table covered with a white cloth sat five formally dressed men and a power-suited woman.

They looked a little as if they were re-enacting the Last Supper in a cut-price, agitprop satire at a fringe venue. The setting was the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, last Wednesday. The audi TIM ROBBINS "Hugely me Loen Brother's stops your breath" 'HE TIMES are enlarged or miniaturised or change texture abruptly. It's like a movie jump-cut, but within a single, still frame. And the head is transmuted into a secret.

Klimowski does that even with the faces he permits you to sec. He's in the masquerading game. He also takes risks. Grafik is a profession, and he had an eminent future in Poland. Eminence is not his style.

So he fled back to London 14 years ago, to be serially broke ever since. To scrabble through Pentagram and Faber and Faber for the creation ofbookjackets especially for Milan Kundera's-works; to be practically the house-artist for post-modernism Andrzej and get him to do a quick page to illustrate You've viewed the contents of his emblem book: eyes great followed, I could hardly find a member of the ICA's staff who was not worried by the implications of this alliance. Why has the ICA hunted down Toshiba? Not because they see them as natural bedfellows. No, the reason is simple. They need the money and can't think of any other way of getting it.

Needs must when the devil drives. A big lie is stalking the arts world. Business sponsorship, arts managers are saying, is just wonderful. The fact of the matter is that they are devoting nd PAUL NEWMAN "Hollywood has returned to its golden years with this delicious comedy that reeks of class Mli.y MIKROK Classic Opera Tour which he discharged his responsibilities to 19th-century romanticism. Under Kattle all those facets Wagner, Mahler, Strauss came into sharp focus, so that his reading collected together all these various leave-takings to create the prism through which Schoen-berg glimpsed the future.

With the CBSO on superb responsive form, and the combined choruses of" the CBSO and the I'hilharmionia welded into a formidable unit the impact was never in doubt. But in a work that ideally requires top-rank Wagnerian soloists compromises are always going to be made: Rattle had Rita Hunter as Tove and John Mitchinson as Waldemar, whose intelligent handling of the text was always a fascination in itself. Brian Bannatyne-Scott was flic Feasant, Christine Cairns an urgent Wooddove. while Ian Caley made a sharply characterised cameo out of the Fool's Song. The Speaker's part is traditionally taken by a veteran Wagnerian; this time Franz Ma.tira gave real dramatic potency to the Wild Hunt, perhaps the most extraordinary section of an always remarkable experience.

I I Further performance of Gurrelieder in Symphony Hall tonight. Box-office: 021-212 3333 A UTAl 17026 HOLIDAYS ence for the event was in for a surprise: Mik Flood, the ICA's director, tucked away at one end of the line up, announced a sponsorship by the Japanese company, Toshiba, worth Y.500,000 over three years. It is remarkable for the cause of business sponsorship of the arts. The country's leading avant-garde arts organisation is Unking its name with a manufacturer of (among other things) equipment for nuclear power stations. Who would have thought it? At the reception which JENNIFER JASON LEIGH 'k "rtKU for a silent film: the adventures of pretty, naked creatures, the pages of open books their wings.

They were created as a logo for an international literary festival in London. The festival didn't happen. The logos flitted on through Klimowski's mind, and sketchbooks. He had a total block on words, but the inky sequences flowed. Halfway through, he slipped into Faber and Faber and said I ve come not about jackets, but, um, contents.

(He's slight and shy.) He knew they were taking him seriously when they "called in the accountant who calculated how much the paper would cost. Triumph of the grafik. The Depository: A dream book by Andrzej Klimowski is published by Faber and Faber. 7.99 in the third act makes a vital point about the way false accusation debases language as Karen says to her disenchanted fiance "every word has a new meaning" she gradually turns it into a play about sexual guilt. Lesbianism is simply a metaphor in the first two acts; in the third act it becomes the issue but one which Hellman evades through an improbable death.

For all its imperfections, the play is still worth reviving as an historical document; astonishingly, this is its first public performance on a British stage. And Howard Davics's production shrewdly binds it together by emphasising, rather than downplaying, its melodramatic aspects. Jason Carr's music underscores the action at critical moments, lightning plays outside the windows of Mrs Til-ford's penthouse apartment and Ashley Martin-Davis's set shows the schoolroom itself finally stripped to a bare, bleak barn. The acting is also first-rate. Harriet Walter makes Karen an instinctively tactile person, constantly caressing her pupils and partner, who in the last act shrinks nervously from Karen's touch: a perfect way of conveying the inhibitions of social pressure.

Clare Higgins also carefully prepares the ground for Martha's final coming-out by seeming lazily relaxed with Karen and still' with tension whenever her fiance appears. And there is sterling support from Emily Watson as the evil pupil actually the play's most interesting character from Gillian Barge as her stately, pcarl-en-crustcd gran and from Alison Fiskc as the berouged ex-actress who has the unmistakable whiff of number-two tours. The pre sentation is immaculate; but it can't disguise Hellman's di lemma as to whether she is writing about a society that is guilty of witch-hunting the innocent or of ingrained sexual intolerance. At the National Theatre, Lyttelton (071-928-2252). large amounts of time chasing after the private sector because the Government and the funding agencies have told them to.

And, privately, they don't much lik" it. The distaste is not universal. It particularly afies those whose work has an explicitly challenging content. Symphony orchestras, by contrast, have been long used to collaborating with the private sector and, I am told, are happy to do so. What are the pros and cons of business sponsorship? When the Conservatives came to power in 1979, Norman St John Stevas (now Lord St John of Fawsley) announced a new Government policy to encourage greater spending by the private sector on the arts.

However, he insisted as have succeeding arts ministers that sponsorship should always be the icing on the Lord Astor, a junior Heritage Minister, repeated the point at the Toshiba launch. But for many arts bodies, this is simply not the case. Sponsorship has become part of core costs. This might not matter too much, except for two things. First, businesses have no obligation to support the arts and can tum off the tap as promptly as they turned it on.

Then, as the private sector grows essential to survival, artists who are alive and kicking, and not dead and safe, fear creeping censorship. In fact, the risk of straightforward arm-twisting is exaggerated. More companies are funding the new and show that they are perfectly well able to cope with dead sheep or piled bricks. The real problem is that the arts are becoming more and more of a circus, whether it is civic celebration, swanking about British culture abroad or creating a feel-good factor for bigwigs. As far as it goes that is fine.

But creativity can also be difficult, dangerous and dark. Or, simply, as in the field of community arts, not glamorous enough to attract the moguls. The truth and the rhetoric urgently need to be re-united, so that we can go back to the days when sponsorship was a welcome add-on, not a desperate necessity. Unfortunately, there is only one means of achieving this an adequate state subsidy for the arts. But that, alas, is another story.

Anthony Everitt sSL Vmr JWlfci HOW GOOD a play is Lillian Hellmah's The Children's Hour (1934)? It certainly gained an unfair notoriety through being banned by the Lord Chamberlain. In its treatment of adolescent evil and false witness it anticipated The Bad Seed and The Crucible. It holds the attention. Yet, even in Howard Da-vies's fine revival at the Lyttel-ton, one is aware of the way Hull man lapses into melodrama at crucial moments and changes tack in the last 15 minutes. Hellman's ostensible theme is the destructive power of rumour.

Two teachers, Karen Wright and Martha Dobie, who run a private New England boarding school are falsely accused of lesbianism by a malicious pupil, Mary Tilford. Mary's charge is believed by her plutocratic grandmother, against whom the teachers bring a vain action of slander; both the school and Karen's planned marriage are ruined but finally Martha admits that she has always had a profound love for her partner. The play starts perfectly credibly. Hcllman builds up a richly plausible portrait of the boarding school in which Martha's aunt, a lapsed thespian, conducts booming lessons in verse-speaking. Even old Mrs Til-ford's moral revulsion at her granddaughter's whispered accusations seems perfectly in character for a woman of her class and type.

But, as the play gathers momentum, so Hellman falls back on melodramatic contrivance. Mary's blatant manipulation of a fellow pupil wouldn't impose on a And the last act with its confessions, rejections, gunshot and recantations is palpably over burdened. I've nothing against melodrama; but Hcllman starts naturalistically and then switches styles. That, in a way, echoes her own thematic confusion. Initially this is a play about a society which punishes the innocent by swallowing lies; the real target is American credulity and hysteria.

But although Hellman Late Availability in NovemberDecember Explore the timeless beauty of this unspoilt city Includes tickets to 2 operas and a concert Scheduled flights For full details call our Leicester office today The Latest Dazzler From the creators of 'Barton Fink' and 'Miller's Crossin UKKfllMDOTMUlOB toijnNMMJUaittlUrc ILumiereW OPBOHl GEViOY jMfagm lisaP SPECIALIST 136-140 London Road, Leicester LE2 1EN.