IT'S your worst nightmare.

Standing on stage to address the WI - and stripped down to your underpants.

And that's just one of the rungs on Mark Melon's descent into madness in Simon Gray's new play The Holy Terror...

The confessional Gray's chosen for his central character is the public speaker's platform and, from this perspective, we share the twitches, the writhing and the abuse - physical and verbal -that mark this king of the publishing jungle's path from bonking to full-blown bonkers.

Melon - a remarkable tour de force by Simon Callow - is the man who brings 1980s-style market forces to the genteel world of book production and turns gold into dross.

As he transforms every human emotion into a mass-selling opportunity or, through grotesque jokes, carves a brutal way through relationships, he is transfigured by the conviction that his wife (the gently compassionate Geraldine Alexander) has a lover.

Under Laurence Boswell's sure direction, the monstrous central character teeters on the edge of caricature but always manages to remain sufficiently believable to tug the emotions.

And there's a strong team of support too with Robert Soans, as Gladstone, to represent the disappearing world of respectable publishing; Tom Beard, in an extraordinary number of guises, as a splendid counterfoil with a range of wannabe-writers including a hilarious Glaswegian; Beverley Klein a delight as Gladys Powers, the dominatrix in shabby clothing; Lydia Fox and Matt Canavan.

The Holy Terror caused a few sharp intakes of breath for its f******* and its clothes-shedding from the Malvern audience - but they were all back again after the interval, which is more than Mark Melon could say about his WI audience in Chichester or was it Cheltenham or Chipping Sodbury....? LG