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THE BRITISH road novel and movie have always suffered from an inferiority complex with respect to their beefy American cousins. Highlights this week include a silent Woyzeck from France (Purcell Rm), two sublime adult puppet shows at the ICA – a German tribute to the Dadaist Max Jacob and the haunting Tunnel Vision from the UK’s Faulty Optic – as well as the award-winning Once (right), a macabre fairytale from the possibly insane Russian clown troupe Derevo (Queen Elizabeth Hall) Give them all a big hand. Every year, the London International Mime Festival endeavours to persuade people otherwise and the 25th, starting today, is as eloquent a statement as any that “mime” is just shorthand for “brilliantly inventive theatre”. For many people, modern mime isn’t an artform, it’s a con trick, perpetrated by weirdos who daub themselves in silver paint and hang out in Covent Garden, confident that an act of self-paralysis will pull on tourists’ heart- and purse-strings. Sounds like a cue for trouble and strife, but when you know that joining the estimable Samantha Bond (who most recently played the title role in Amy’s View) are Alison Steadman (above) – emblazoned on the collective memory as Beverley in Abigail’s Party – and Julia Absolutely Fabulous Sawalha, you know you’re in for plenty of laughs, too

Vaudeville, London WC2 (0171-836 9987)
David Benedict. The meat of the play belongs in the hands of three sisters who return home after years apart.

This, her first play, did very nicely thank you, and there has been a well-received version in New York headed by Suzanne Bertish, but this new British production has proved something of a sensation on its packed-out tour The secret lies in the canny casting. Everyone gets very hot and bothered about world premieres. It’s much harder to generate excitement about second productions of new plays, but Shelagh Stephenson’s The Memory of Water is an exception. One of his last works was a portrait of the Catalan architect Antonio Gaud.Elizabeth NashJose Vela Zanetti, painter: born Milagros, Spain 27 May 1913; married Esperanza de las Cuevas (one son, one daughter); died Burgos, Spain 4 January 1999.. In 1997 he donated 57 paintings and other works to a foundation in Len that bears his name.

Mural painting has given me this discipline.”He is best known in his own country for portraits of peasants, still- lifes, Castillian landscapes and religious works. The untitled painting showed sturdy workers engaged in industry, building and farming, and remains in the ILO’s collection.Vela Zanetti returned to Spain in 1962, to the house in Milagros where he had been born, and painted all day long. “I get up at dawn to benefit from the light, and I stop painting at dusk. In 1949 he was appointed director of the Fine Arts School of Santo Domingo.

He won a John Simon Guggenheim scholarship for young Hispanic artists that enabled him to travel to New York, and he later lived in Mexico, Colombia and Switzerland.One important work painted in the Dominican Republic hung in the assembly hall of the UN’s International Labour Office in Geneva from 1959 to 1968. His death forced me to explore the limits of my abilities, to be a son worthy of his father.”Vela Zanetti settled in the Dominican Republic, where he produced hundreds of murals, of farmworkers and rural scenes, many of them on a heroic scale. His father, boss of a provincial slaughterhouse, had been shot by Fascists in 1936 in the opening days of the war, leaving a permanent scar upon the young artist. He won a public scholarship to study art in Florence in 1933, but Franco’s revolt and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War disrupted his plans, and the artist later described the years that followed as “long and full of trials”.He fled into exile in 1939. The mural, 20 metres by three, shows the ravages of war and concentration camps and depicts people pulling together to rebuild a shattered world.

Painted in blues and reddish browns, it was inaugurated in the corridor outside the UN Security Council chambers.Vela Zanetti was born in 1913 in the small northern town of Milagros, near Burgos; when he was still very young, the family moved to the provincial capital, Len, where he began artistic training. Less than a month ago, the newly restored mural was rededicated by the UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, in a ceremony attended by the artist’s son, Jose. Vela Zanetti, deeply moved by the honour, which he described as one of the great satisfactions of his life, kept photographs of the occasion beside him in his last days.
He had been chosen by the Guggenheim Foundation to create a mural for the UN on the theme of peace in an international competition in 1952. The artist was in exile at the time, and Spain under Franco was not even a member of the UN. JOSE VELA Zanetti was best known for his vast mural La Lucha del Hombre por La Paz (“Mankind’s Struggle for Peace”), created in 1953 for the United Nations headquarters in New York.