North K 7 3 A 2 A 9 7 6 A K 9 6 West Q 9 8 6 Q J 8 7 K Q J 4 3 East J K 6 Q J 8 4 2 10 8 7 5 2 South A 10 5 4 2 10 9 5 4 3 10 5 3  WestNorthEastSouth No1DNo1S No2NTNo4H No4SNoNo No
Even if you do not agree with the bidding, you will certainly admire the play.
West led the queen of clubs, and declarer won in dummy, discarding a diamond from the closed hand, and immediately led the ace and another heart.
East won with the king and returned a second club to dummy's king, with South discarding a second diamond from hand.
Now came the key play of the king of spades.
When the jack appeared from East, declarer ruffed a club and ruffed a heart in dummy.
She was now in complete control.
The ace of diamonds and another club ruff were followed by a second heart ruff in dummy, leaving the following position:
North   9 7 6  West Q 9 8    East   Q J 8  South A 10 10  
Declarer now had a complete count of West's hand.
She led a losing diamond from dummy, on which she discarded the winning heart from the closed hand, and West was forced to ruff and concede the last two tricks.
South's well-timed play had produced an overtrick on a hand on which a number of declarers actually went down in four spades, and, not surprisingly, the Israeli pair collected a complete ' top '.
PAGE
Havel, the young playwright in the late 1960s A writer still?.
IS CZECHOSLOVAKIA likely to gain a president in Vaclav Havel and lose a dramatist?
It seems unlikely.
One of the striking things about Havel is his commitment to drama over the past quarter-century and his insistence, in the period immediately before the Czech revolution, that he was first and foremost a writer.
I had occasion in late October to present a brief profile of Havel as a preface to a Radio 4 presentation of his latest play, Redevelopment.
In the course of it Edward Lucas, a BBC Prague correspondent, asked Havel directly if he wanted to be president.
He said that he could not imagine conditions arising that would make it possible, stressed the collective nature of the democratic movement and said ' I can not forever play this dual role of amateur politician and writer. '
Earlier this summer he similarly told the Observer's Mark Frankland ' The more I am forced to be active in politics, the more I enjoy doing theatre. '
History moves fast these days.
But what persuades me that we have not heard the last of Havel the writer is that he combines a total commitment to social freedom and individual responsibility with an extraordinary ironic detachment.
In both his plays and essays  recently issued in paperback by Faber under the title Living In Truth  he shows a remarkable gift for analysing the dilemmas of the dissident in a repressive society.
He is both participant and observer: ' a sceptical, sober, anti-Utopian, understated mind ' (in his own words) confronting the business of opposing state power with rueful self-awareness.
Havel is now in the seat of power; but I can not imagine he has lost his central European gift for irony.
At first, I suspect, we got Havel wrong in this country: on the strength of an early play like The Memorandum (1965) we pigeonholed him as an Absurdist along with Beckett and Ionesco.
In that early work, memorably presented on TV and radio, we see a monolithic state organisation attempting to replace the existing vernacular with a synthetic language, Ptydepe, that will iron out the ambiguities and imprecisions of everyday speech.
But where true Absurdism, as Vera Blackwell pointed out, posited a meaningless universe, Havel's aim was' the improvement of man's lot through the improvement of man's institutions. '
Havel has written constantly about the oppressive nature of Communist bureaucracy.
But in recent years his plays have been more about the paradoxical nature of dissidence itself: the emotional turbulence of the authority given the individual as a public spokesman, and about the fact that one of the worst features of any totalitarian system is the need to conform to other people's expectations.
Havel explored the dilemmas of the dissident with wry comedy in The Vanek Plays (Audience, Protest and Private View) written in the mid-70s.
In the best of them, Audience, Havel capitalises on his own experience of working in a brewery at Trutnov stacking empty beer barrels.
In the play we see Vanek (a lightly disguised version of Havel) summoned for an interview by the brewery's lager-swilling Head Maltster.
He finds that he is being offered a simple trade-off: a comfortable job as a stock-checker if he will provide incriminating information about himself which the Maltster can then pass on to the Party.
The sting lies in the tail when Vanek bends his principles to accommodate his desperate interrogator.
What Havel wittily shows is the kind of Catch-22 situation faced by a dissident in a despotism: whether to cling fiercely to your own moral integrity (thereby landing others in the shit) or whether to conform and perpetuate a corrupt system.
EVEN after nearly four years in prison (where, characteristically, he turned the permitted weekly letter to his wife into philosophical essays) Havel was able to dramatise the dissident's dilemma with a mixture of recollected pain and resilient humour.
Largo Desolato, written in the early 80s is about the difficulty of being a moral hero in an immoral society.
Havel's protagonist is a philosopher caught in a double bind.
He has offended the state with a work called The Ontology of the Human Self and an openly provocative paper (much as Havel himself did with his Open Letter to President Husak of 1975).
But his simple desire for seclusion is imperilled by a succession of visitors.
On the one hand, two fans from a papermill implore him to become a dissident figurehead: on the other hand, two state policmen want him to sign a document denying authorship of the original article.
One sympathises with Havel's predicament.
At the same time the play leaves a key question tantalisingly unresolved: whether, in a repressive state, one can seek freedom for oneself without seeking it for others.
And this raises the question of whether Havel's talent had begun to be affected by the nervous strain of writing under surveillance and of not having seen any of his work performed since 1969.
Any fears, however, that Havel's talent might be going off were for me resolved by the broadcast version of Redevelopment, given a dramatised reading by the RSC in February under the title Slum Clearance.
This is a major work: a dense, multi-layered allegory with its roots firmly in reality.
It is set in a medieval castle in a historic town in Eastern Europe.
Supervised by a state functionary (with a sqeaking shoe) and led by an emotionally-chaotic project director, a group of architects struggle to come up with a high-rise building scheme that will destroy the ancient town's character and, incidentally, clear away its slums.
On the realistic level, the play is about a universal architectural dilemma: how to achieve a balance between conservation and civic improvement.
But it also works as a political metaphor about the whimsical arbitrariness of autocracy with the architects first working under strict supervision and then being granted an illusory whiff of freedom.
This is vintage Havel: creating a work that is both specific and universal, tragic and comic.
It leaves me speculating that Havel the artist is unlikely to be displaced by Havel the politican.
For the moment, he obviously has more urgent tasks than writing plays.
But he is unlikely to be satisfied forever with the illusion of power.
Michael Billington t
Where all the nuts are Trumps Gumpets.
By Beverly Pagram GUMNUTLAND  twinned with Willesden Junction, says the sign over the platform.
The station master is wearing a hat shaped like a cucumber.
There's a small green dog asleep in the ticket office.
Gumnutland is on a branch line at Wanneroo, near Perth in Western Australia.
None of its inhabitants is more than three inches high.
Made of eucalyptus gumnuts, banksia nuts, dried wildflower petals and seedpods, these homuncules would have confounded Gulliver.
They throng the streets and mini-timbered buildings of Gumnutland in their hundreds.
Beside the chuffing narrow gauge train, travel-weary ' Gumpets' wait with their titchy acorn prams and seed-case luggage.
There are swarms of Gumpets going to school, to the office, to the bank, waiting outside the grocers' for cut-price Cadbury's Fruit &amp; Nut.
This remarkable scene is the showpiece of a workshop-museum and export business called The Gumnut Factory.
It has become such an attraction that local tour operators are beating a path to its door.
Perth is proud of its image as a breeding ground for don't-take-no-for-an-answer entrepreneurs.
It's not surprising, therefore, that a 33-year-old former London motor mechanic has turned a A$200 garden shed operation into an expanding enterprise with a A$250,000 per year turnover.
What is extraordinary is that Chris Trump is raking it in with nature table whimsy, rather than oil, beer, or newspapers.
In Perth souvenir shops, Gumpets are elbowing their way on to the shelves alongside the stock-in-trade plywood boomer angs, mallee-root ornamental clocks and kangaroo-skin sporrans.
Recently Trump has sold three Gumnut Factory shop franchises  two to New South Wales tourist outlets and one to a Californian company.
Consignments of his nutty bushwackers are on their way to UK gift shops to compete with fir-cones in frocks and teasel mice.
This Trumping of the souvenir market goes back to a boyhood in Portsmouth and a hobby of collecting shells and making creatures out of them.
' When I came here with my parents in 1974 and saw that most of the ' Australian ' souvenirs were imported from Hong Kong and the Philippines, I decided to try and break into the market, ' he recalled.
Retail outlets and distributors alike told him where to stick his gumnuts.
The Small Business Advice Bureau said there was not much call for banksia-blossom owls.
But by 1979 he was selling enough stock from his Mum's garden shed to move into the Wanneroo premises.
Also in the pipeline is an Australian children's TV series based on Gumnut Factory Folk Tales (written, illustrated and published by Chris Trump, A$7.95).
Cynics might observe that Trump is exploiting his relationship with wee George and Gertie Gumnut et al.
In fact he takes his role as guardian of these fey fellahin so seriously that perhaps one should regard him as the Brobdingnagian Mayor of Gumnutland.
The Gumnut Factory is at 30 Prindiville Drive, Wangara Centre, WA 6065.
Feature Tours, Australian Pacific and Bus Australia all make regular visits.
Where brass makes music Critic's choice Music..
By Gerald Larner FOLLOWERS of the BBC Philharmonic  that small but discriminating section of the concert audience in the North-west  will have noticed a peculiarly high proportion of works featuring solo trumpet in the orchestra's current programmes.
Earlier this month Elgar Howarth conducted the BBC PO in Christopher Sansom's Invisible Cities for trumpet and trombone and orchestra, with Hakan Hardenberger and Christian Lindberg.
In the RNCM on Friday they are playing Sir Peter Maxwell Davies's Trumpet Concerto, with Hakan Hardenberger as soloist.
In Studio 7 on January 11 they are playing Michael Blake Watkins's Trumpet Concerto, again with Hakan Hardenberger.
The reason behind this concentrated specialist activity is that Hardenberger, Howarth, and the BBC PO are making a record of the Maxwell Davies and Blake Watkins concertos together with Harrison Birtwistle's Endless Parade, which last they performed so well and so memorably at York University last season.
For Hardenberger  the brilliant young Swedish trumpeter for whom the Birtwistle and the Blake Watkins pieces were written and who would have commissioned the Maxwell Davies if John Wallace hadn't go there first  it is an exciting project.
' To me these three pieces are possibly better than anything written for my instrument. '
What anything?,
I asked, desperately trying to think of great composers who have written great trumpet concertos.
' Yes, although the Haydn can possibly compete. '
The point is that it has taken players like Wallace and Hardenberger to contradict the cliches about the limitations of the instrument and to prove how flexible it really is.
Indeed, with what he callls its' huge range of expression ' as well as its power to fill even the largest concert hall, Hardenberger feels that the trumpet is a particularly valuable instrument for the contemporary composer.
He points to the three British works in the recording project to demonstrate what variety it has to offer  the ' hard black-and-white ' sound of the Birtwistle, the comparitively florid ' flute or clarinet-like writing ' in the Maxwell Davies Concerto, the ' very expansive ' trumpet part in the Blake Watkins, which is a ' wonderfully lyrical work without being sweet or silly in any way. '
Hardenberger is particularly happy that his partners in the concerts and in the recording are Elgar Howarth and the BBC Philharmonic.
Howarth, a fellow student of Birtwistle and Maxwell Davies (who wrote the Trumpet Sonata, Op.1, for him) in Manchester in the 1950s, is himself a trumpet player as well as a specialist conductor of contemporary music.
Hardenberger also recalls that the BBC PO's York performance of Endless Parade  a work so difficult in its string scoring that two or three other orchestras have actually refused to play it with him  is the best he has taken part in so far.
I get the impression that, of the three, Hardenberger's favourite is the Blake Watkins Concerto, which he considers' very English, more traditional perhaps but without being in any way limited.
The orchestration is wonderful and there is an absolutely beautiful trumpet part. '
On the other hand, he says, ' I feel such an enormous amount of emotion in all three pieces.
It's not really up to me to judge that they are the best ever.
But we shall see in 200 years if I am right. '
Trumpeter as soloist...
Hakam Hardenbergher: see Critic's choice THIS CAPTION FOR N-WEST TABLOID
Robert Hands and Tracey Childs in a musical treatment of Great Expectations; Liverpool Playhouse: see Theatre PAGE
