(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

Watch the whole programme - 24 May 2002

MARK LAWSON:
Madonna in Up For Grabs. Obviously she greatly wants to be a stage actress. Is she?

MIRANDA SAWYER:
No. She is acted off the stage. But that doesn't mean it's not an entertaining evening. I thought for a terrible play with a wooden performance by the central actress, it was much better than I thought it was going to be.

I thought I would be cringing all the way through, and you don't. The best things about it are the set, which is a futuristic thing that moves around, and Sian Thomas, one of the people trying to buy the art.

Madonna is OK, but two-dimensional, surrounded by others who can act. She does well, but you kind of feel that, if Zoe Ball had the part, she would have done as well as Madonna. She's no stage actress, I'm afraid.

MARK LAWSON:
John Carey, I thought the strongest reaction from the audience was when any line in her script contradicted our public image of her. If she said, "I need money," or, "I am not sexually adventurous," the audience seemed to take it as irony.

JOHN CAREY:
It made a curious evening in the theatre. The play seemed to be forgotten. The audience was very strange, bellowing with pleasure whenever she said anything, so that she seemed to be apart from the rest of the actors, who just dropped in to the play occasionally.

She seemed wooden, her delivery was very flat. She couldn't make you believe what you had to believe. She had to make you believe she was young, penniless, and loved looking at great art. You didn't believe any of those things.

Miranda said it's a bad play. It's not very good, but it would have been better with a young, vulnerable person who could act that part. She couldn't act it.

MARK LAWSON:
We reviewed on this programme her last concert tour, and we were about two miles back and you saw her on screens, mainly. There is an astonishing intimacy here, that you are watching one of the most famous women in the world, if not THE most, and you are very close to her. It's a huge gamble she's taking.

BONNIE GREER:
Two things happened for me that I didn't expect to happen. One was that I liked her. She has an incredible vulnerability, the kind that Marilyn Monroe sort of had. I found myself thinking I would love to see her doing Bus Stop, or something like that. She is very vulnerable.

I have never seen anyone on stage before who had NO stage presence. Some people have bad stage presence, but she has none. It was fascinating, because this is the most famous woman in the world. How is it possible that there is this incredible sort of void around her?

It has to go down to the fact that Madonna - and I'm putting it now for the rest of my life in quotes - is an "act". An "act" can't actually act.

And her director let her down. Boswell used to be an interesting director on the fringe and now he is the director of the stars. He should have taken the vulnerability which is there, and helped her through that performance.

She does have a possibility to be on stage, but she is not going to be able to do it unless she lets go of this persona that she has created, that we have bought. What fascinated me is what is driving this person to want to actually get up there to do this. It is incredibly revealing.

MIRANDA SAWYER:
You can see her panicking.

MARK LAWSON:
That's the vulnerability. It's fear, isn't it?

MIRANDA SAWYER:
Yes. She has to have an argument with her husband, and she threw her book down. It missed obviously where it was meant to go. It was meant to land on top of the table. It fell to the floor. You could see her looking in panic.

JOHN CAREY:
The direction of the play was bad, not only in relation to her. It seemed to me it was a much better play than it seemed to be.

If you think of the art expert, Dawn, who talks about her wasted life, with no opinions, all second-hand. That's a tragic part, and it was just played for laughs. If you think of the lesbian, Mindy, the same thing. A touching part sent up.

MARK LAWSON:
It is an Australian play. What it's partly about is how Australia is becoming more like America. Now she's transferred it to America, it becomes a play about how America is becoming more like America!

JOHN CAREY:
The sense of humour is terrible. It's pretty insulting to be asked to laugh...

BONNIE GREER:
People think you go on stage and you pretend, that you put on make-up and shout and scream and go up there to hide. Actually, you hide in real life. On the stage, you are real.

What we saw was a real human being up there, a very fragile human being, and she was exposed, in that sense.

MARK LAWSON:
That's what I found interesting. It tells you a lot about the rock business, that you realise how much is production, how much is how far we are away from them.

MIRANDA SAWYER:
What is interesting is, if you look at her videos, she is really good at acting within her videos. She is quite good in Desperately Seeking Susan and Evita. She knows how to work a camera and act in that way. Within the stage, she is lost.

BONNIE GREER:
The stage is the most naked place you can possibly be. This is an example of it. It's naked.

MARK LAWSON:
It's a remarkable paradox. A bad evening in the theatre, but we wouldn't have not been there for anything.