Literature: Sic benefit

Last year, in the Purcell Room, a New Yorker called Heather Woodbury enacted, for four nights in a row, eight chapters of her "performance novel" entitled What Ever. It sounded like just the sort of faddy art form that someone from the Big Apple would try to spring on us - and Woodbury's voice had to strain extra hard to fill the empty expanses that so eloquently testified to Londoners' innate scepticism. It turned out to be their loss: Woodbury's multi-layered narrative was populated by hundreds of characters, all pulsing with a gently comic, occasionally surreal, always memorable energy. (Clove, the rave addict haunted by the ghost of Kurt Cobain, still springs to mind, months on.)

Steve Tasane (right), a 34-year-old poet from Deptford, wasn't aware that this strange literary hybrid - part theatrical monologue, part Dickensian reading, part modern folk tale - had already been tried over here. But his own "performance novel-in-progress", Sic, which he is airing on Monday, directly confronts the old saying that there is nothing new under the sun. With Greenwich Park as the millennial backdrop to the action, in which two cartoon-like serial killers Mickey and Minnie go on the rampage, the work samples with the irreverence of pop, cutting up everything from Mills & Boon and Irvine Welsh to Shakespeare and Sherlock Holmes (in one chapter, Trainspotting's Begbie, who is re-imagined as a thuggish cop, takes a leaf out of Conan Doyle's book in a cocaine feeding-frenzy). "The subtext is that literature can often be routine," Tasane says. "Culture can appear to renew itself, but it's simply going through the same old cycles."

Tasane, who has been performing his poetry on the London circuit for seven years, has a manic, often splenetic delivery which should ensure that this post-modern farrago stands up well on stage. If you remain battled, the critic George Steiner is on hand this week to help steer a course through the 20th-century's choppier cultural waters. His "Sounding the Century" lecture will boldly encompass everything from the death of tragedy to the effect of new technology on literature.

`Sic', Man in the Moon, London, SW3 (0181-691 0531) 16 Feb, 8pm, pounds 6/pounds 4; George Steiner with Bryan Appleyard, QEH, London, SE1 (0171-960 4242) 7.30pm, 18 Feb, pounds 7 (pounds 4)