Andrew Sachs plays Einstein in a new two-part documentary. James Rampton met him

About 30 years ago I conceived a great desire to write a play like one of Tom Stoppard's plays. I know exactly when it happened. It happened just as I was coming out of the first Stoppard play I had ever seen. It happened again the next time, just as I was coming out of the second Stoppard play I saw. It grew to be a habit after a while - in fact, eventually I started getting the urge to write plays like Stoppard's just before I went into new plays by Stoppard.

The only film star I ever really wanted to look like was Jean- Paul Belmondo. I went through a phase of trying to walk like Brando and sneer like Paul Newman (or was it the other way round?) but the only film out of which I came determined to change my whole appearance was A Bout de Souffle, with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, in which Belmondo plays a glamorous small-time crook who wanted to look like Humphrey Bogart.

The elements look similar: a time-scheme that hops back and forth between a historical period and the near-present; a story of literary / biographical detection in which one of the pleasures comes from watching how our myopic contemporaries misinterpret the past; and a mood that aims at emotional poignancy as well as intellectual playfulness. Indian Ink could, for all the world, be Tom Stoppard's Raj rehash of his highly successful Arcadia. Except that you wouldn't have to be much of a literary sleuth to ascertain that the new work is based on a radio play (In the Native State) which pre-dates Arcadia. And you wouldn't have to be much of a drama critic to realise fairly quickly that Indian Ink is inferior to both.

Ever since `The Good Life', the entire male population has been in love with Felicity Kendal. Her latest part strips her of her clothes, but not her squeaky-clean image. Georgina Brown met her

Can quantum physics be staged? Clare Bayley sees the appliance of theatrical science

The most popular film-maker in history got into history, and stayed popular. Glyndebourne rose again, handsomely. Pop ate itself, but survived. Steve Coogan was everywhere, and so was Hugh Grant; only one of them is praised here. The theatre had a thin time, but television drama serials made up for it. People defined themselves on Mondays at 9pm: were you for `Cracker' or `Chuzzlewit'? And again on Saturdays at 8pm: did you really believe that a 14m-1 shot would win?(Or did you do it for love of the arts?) It wasn't the best of years, but it had its moments. And here they are, in the fourth annual `IoS' Awards

A NAME TO DROP MORE than any other modern critic, with the possible exception of Pauline Kael, who wrote about film for the New Yorker, Kenneth Tynan gets quoted by other critics. A computer search in the Independent on Sunday library revealed that his name has cropped up in national newspapers 11 times this month alone. This is partly because James Kelman won the Booker prize with a novel full of profanities and, as everyone knows, Tynan was the first person to say f--- on television. But Tynan is frequently quoted on all sorts of non- profane matters too.

IN THE last 30 years, Michael Powell has gone from ostracism to apotheosis, from rejection as a pornographer (the first critical consensus on his 1960

A FEW weeks ago the French government made the headlines after deciding on a policy of ethnic cleansing. It wasn't ethnic cleansing on the Serbian scale. Nobody was killed and nobody was left starving. It was simply an act of linguistic cleansing. The French announced their decision to protect their language by putting severe restrictions on the import of Anglo-Saxon expressions, and moments later hordes of displaced idioms and homeless American business phrases were fleeing across the French border, dazed and desperate.

Asked by the press corps to give his opinion on the moon landings, Wernher Von Braun replied, 'I think it is equal in significance to that moment in evolution when aquatic life came crawling up on the land.' Well, every proud father is entitled to say a few daft things about his baby, but in July 1969 very few people were feeling cynical enough to jeer at Von Braun's hyperbole; in fact, most of the attendant journalists cheered his words. Yet that cheer did not find any rousing echo in the sublunary world of the arts.

The first ever radio play was set down a coal-mine during a blackout. Alan Drury, literature manager of BBC Radio Drama, thinks writers have moved on since then. 'We've learned that radio drama is not a stage play with the lights off,' he tells a group of would-be radio dramatists at Fen Farm, the remote and beautiful Norfolk writers' centre. Writers as diverse as Tom Stoppard, Ray Bradbury, Angela Carter and, of course, Dylan Thomas have extended the limits of the medium - if only to keep up with Light Entertainment. After all, if Light Entertainment has in the past successfully foisted on listeners the logical absurdity of radio ventriloquists, tap dancers and conjurors ('There's nothing up my sleeves - take my word for it'), anything is possible.

LEHAR: The Merry Widow

'SOME people love having their picture taken,' says James Hunkin. 'It's like going to the hairdresser's - all that attention.' But for a photographer who has spent eight years specialising in portraits of theatre people, he follows this up with a strange confession: most actors and actresses are no good at just being themselves in front of a camera. You wouldn't know it from his work: Hunkin's limpid, lucid portrayals are successful enough to hang in the National Portrait Gallery. The fruits of his latest project, a year spent photographing leading members and associates of the National Theatre, are no exception. Particularly revelatory are the portraits of Tom Stoppard - who turns an unambiguously Byronic profile to the camera - and a gentle, perplexed Alan Bennett (right). How does he do it? Hunkin says he's good at tailoring his personality to suit that of his sitter; but he also uses the dance teacher Rudolf Laban's theories of movement to 'read' people physically and gain an insight into their characters. Considering that Laban is one of the gurus of modern theatre, Hunkin obviously tailors his theories to suit his sitters, too. ('In the Wings: Photographs by James F Hunkin', National Theatre, SE1, 071-633 0880, Mon to 6 Aug.)