The Independent from London, Greater London, England • 34

THE HKPEWHIT SECTION TWO 5 SEPTBUKR 1996 6 'The Sandman' is a comic that sells a million a year, even to people who don't In the world of comics, Neil Gaiman is as successful as anyone alive. He didn't mean to be. In 1987, when he was invited to write a monthly comic called The Sandman for DC, Superman's corporate home, all the then 27-year-old from Sussex wanted to do was tell stories. So he made his hero the Sandman the King of Stories, the mythical Lord of Dreams. From this simple beginning.

The Sandman grew. By the time its 75th and final issue was published in April, it had become an epic, sprawl In it, Gaiman had told tales of every sort There were stories of writers driven mad by ideas and mothers driven mad by grief; tricked gods and retired devils; speaking pumpkins and dreaming cities. Spinning these tales around the fortunes of the Sandman himself, a black-eyed, fallible immortal, Gaiman rooted his imaginings in human frailty. His comics asked why we died (one character decided not to die, and didn't). Restless, Gaiman picked different artists for each facet of his story, in styles from the cartoonish to the elegant His readers were equally diverse.

Half were women (while most mainstream comics cater for boys), many were in their twenties, many read no other comics at all. Some felt a personal relationship to The Sandman, and to Gaiman. And there were hundreds of thousands of them. There were other good comics being published. None of them had The Sandman's appeal.

It was a phenomenon that no one could fathom. When the stones were collected in books, an even stranger thing occurred. Literary figures high and low, not noted comics fans, adored them. "Sandman is a comic-strip for intellectuals," Norman Mailer thundered Stephen King calleri it "a treasure house of Pulitzer Prize judge Frank McConnell cursed Gaiman's nationality, his bar to nomination. And as Gaiman's acclaim grew, so did his audience.

The Sandman sold 12 million a year. By its end, Gaiman sold more comics than Superman. He had become quietly famous, powernil DC ended 7fe Sandman at his request, with regret His displeasure was worth more to mem than a million lost sales. Other, more experimental comics (Violent Cases, Mr Punch) have sold well, adding to his status. He has toured America like a rock star, Internet subscribers feverishly if he is God.

The Sandman is to be filmed by Pulp Fiction co-writer Roger Avary. And Neil Gaiman has had enough. Tm the comics writer that people who don't read comics have heard of," he says, poised on an armchair in a Notting Hill office. "I didn't like it. It made me pleased that Sandman was coming to an end.

I think I got out just in time." What Gaiman has had enough of is the place where The Sandman has put him. He knows that there are other writers in comics as good as he is, who've been denied his freakish critical acclaim. And he feels, on the other hand, that his success has left him taken for granted inside comics' narrow world. He compares himself with Nick "Three Oscars" Parks, once thought of as an interesting animator, now too famous to be thought of at all. By some trick of fate, Gaiman's name has come to dwarf the medium he works in.

He footnotes EayeDunaway may have been done out of diva status by losing the role of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, but afl things come to those who wait Our Eaye, no stranger to larger-than-life portrayals (think Mommie Dearest), will play Maria Callas in the film of Terrence McNally's Tony award-winning play Masterclass. Theatre BhMbytfaeSa Royal National Theatre from a case of scientific fraud and the play is not above a little trickery itself in that, for much of the first half of Ron Daniels' absorbing production, you are fed to beheve that tins deception will be the central focus of the work. In fact, it's what the response to the fraud reveals that is me real heart of the piece. Christopher (Duncan Bell), the scientist who fakes a break- entipeputionee energyjs an enigmatic blank and of much less thematic importance than Douglas Hodge's Al, a blokey Christopher, stalling for time with the fake sun-battery, is on tiie brink of a genuine find. This woukl bring in millions and save her own research facilities.

However, her lapse ends up producing directly the opposite result It aU makes for a thought-provoking evening but not one without niggles and irritations. Al's predselevel of scientific cleverness seems to suffer convenient fluctuations for the sake of the plot There's a perfectly dreadful character, a nubile history researcher who becomes a PR back, who is there for no better reason than to have things explained to her in layman's terms and make your average cardboard cut-out look rounded. And, as a narrative device, Al's bizarre habit of keeping mementoes of all his experiences in polytbene bags, which he fishes out of lockers to show us, makes him look less like a scientist than a frustrated modern artist with an eye on the Turner Prize. In rep at the Cottesloe. Booking to 21 Oct 0171-928 2252 fmluvum Banc la Tour John Haynes The narrator-hero of Banded by the Sun, the latest work from Stephen Poliakoff, warns -us at the start, with a defensive snigger, that he will always have the last word.

But in fact the play, gives the final say to another character who ends the piece on a call for "patience" an appropriate conclusion to a drama mat looks at how pure research and long-distance creativity in university science departments are now at risk in the market-driven, management-led ethos of our times. The department under scrutiny here is offered, therefore, as a. metaphor for the general lowering of values which Poliakoff perceives in our culture, a metaphor designed to be all the more telling because (it's implied) you would expect science to be the last bastion of resistance to such contamination. Banded by the Sun takes off headof department not because of his so-so talent but because of his management skills. Exposing Christopher is both the "making" of Al and, by an ironic route, the un-making of the department Metamorphosing into a celebrity author of pop bestsellers that capitalise on the exposure by fomenting a suspicion of experts, Al also gets elected onto the key committee that grades scientific departments.

This is bad news for Frances de la Tour's dryly-amused, wistful, high-minded Elinor, a scientist at work on some profound project that can't show short-term results. Al, her former pupil, hero-worships her, untiC that is, he asks her advice about exposing the fraud, and she disappoints him by teding him to do nothing. She already suspects that Al will become a department-cutter and so gambles on the hope mat.