The only dialogue should be with bullets, he was quoted as saying shortly before the verdict was announced.Although the men now face execution by firing squad, they have a possible avenue of reprieve in a pardon from the relatives of those they are convicted of killing. The leader of the kidnappers, 28-year-old Zein Al- Abdeen Al-Mehdar - who claimed he seized the tourists to avenge the deaths of Iraqi civilians in last December's US and British air strikes - called on Arabs to rise up and confront the Western powers. The fourth victim, Andrew Thirsk, 35, had emigrated to Australia from Surrey.Since last August armed kidnap in Yemen has carried a mandatory death penalty in an attempt to discourage casual kidnapping of foreigners by tribesmen for ransom. The remainder of the defendants, most of whom were tried in absentia, have been acquitted. The Britons killed were Margaret Whitehouse, 52, a teacher from Hampshire, Ruth Williamson, 34, an NHS training consultant from Edinburgh, and Peter Rowe, 60, a maths lecturer from Durham. Of the five men in custody, two Yemenis and an Algerian were sentenced to death, while another has been sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Yemeni lawyers warned, however, that the men could still walk free. THREE ISLAMIST militants were sentenced to death in Yemen yesterday for the kidnap and murder of a group of Western tourists, four of whom - three Britons and an Australian - were killed in a gun battle when troops staged a rescue mission. There is a brilliant work about the malign effects on young minds of a charismatic Fascist teacher, but it's not Aunt Dan, it's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.. The one essential difference between the Nazis and other people, she insists, is that the former did not fool themselves with any fantasies about compassion.The questions the play addresses are: what draws intellectuals to extreme right-wing positions and why is it easier for the right to seduce people by making a show of being more "honest" with themselves than liberals? It's a trick they pull off by obscuring the fact that "honesty" is not a self-sufficient virtue.Exploring these matters, the play certainly exerts a powerful grip and Cairns's incisively acted production is immensely skilful, with its revolving scrim that provides a milky, shifting barrier between present and past, its dreamy snatches of death- loving late Romantic music and its kinky red-lit scenes involving a party girl whose recognition of the necessity for violence (she strangles one of her tricks during a sex game) erotically stimulates Dan.Finally, though, Shawn's constitutional inability to think in anything but extremes leaves me dissatisfied with both drama and argument. The proceedings include a lengthy defence of the Vietnam policies of Henry Kissinger which is delivered by Richardson with a hilariously obsessive dogmatism and a God-give-me- patience incredulity that anyone cannot see what a selfless angel he is in agreeing to use force so that other people don't have to.It ends, after she has died, with Lemon, in a quietly deranged echo of her style of logic, defending the Nazi extermination of the Jews to the audience.

The drama focuses on the intense and warping relationship between a susceptible young girl, Lemon, and Aunt Dan (commandingly played by Richardson), who was a charismatic right-wing American friend of her parents and an Oxford don.The piece is cast as a memory play with Glenne Headly's Lemon, now a listless solitary, subsisting on a meagre private income, revisiting scenes from her childhood like an outsider. One of her most recent appearances was at the National in Wallace Shawn's The Designated Mourner, a paranoid apocalyptic vision of an America where the elite had been overthrown in a violent uprising, prompting the query: how, in such circumstances, would the old wealth-buttressed cultural values survive, if at all? Richardson returns now, bringing her distinctively disturbed authority and troubling translucence to Tom Cairns's compelling and stylish revival of an earlier 1985 play by Shawn, Aunt Dan and Lemon. Here, the scenario is less luridly conceived but the questions raised are just as sensationally couched. MIRANDA RICHARDSON makes rare, but always striking forays on to the English stage these days. But how poignant to find there are no measurable figures for videos, home computers and CD players, none of which existed However did we live before them?.