Javier Conde, the clean-cut young father of Estrella's expected first child, is a matador. Their union, via a huge Granada wedding, with coach-and-horses and blanket media coverage, has formed a new pinnacle in the long-standing liaison between flamenco and the corrida. From the pre-War friendships of Pepe Marchena and La Ni?e los Pei?with the toreros Jos?nd Rafael El Gallo, to the ring-side serenades of El Camaron to the 1980s gypsy matador Rafael de Paula, flamenco and the toros have gone hand in hand, and ceremonial cattle slaughter has followed cante jondo through the prism of Lorca and Hemingway into not only entertainment, but also into art.Sitting entwined on the Barcelona hotel lounge sofa, Estrella and her handsome young husband talk reverentially of the mutual influences of their art and passion, and the way that both cross themselves before going out to perform. For a moment, the familiar trappings of Euro-success, the record company executives and the press managers cease to impose their uniformity, and Estrella seems truly exotic.'My Songs and a Poem' is out now on Real World/Virgin.

The South Bank's Discovering Handel series is developing into something of a beauty parade of our best period performers. They closed, however, with a Dixit Dominus – that extraordinary half-hour of impetuous apostrophes, marmoreal contrasts, poignant respites and fugal rampages – of mourning excitement. But then what other young composer in history ever declared their genius with more flamboyance than Handel did here at glorious 22?. There was quite a queue of young people begging for returns for the Young Vic's Doctor Faustus (which has its press night on Monday) when I visited the theatre last week. He is the damned spirit summoned from hell by this intellectual overreacher, and who officiates over the contract whereby the hero mortgages his soul in return for 24 years of blasphemously invulnerable life.It's fascinating, we agree, that – rather as Wittgenstein and Hitler overlapped at the same school – Hamlet and Faustus could conceivably have brushed shoulders in the university corridors Over to you, Tom Stoppard. McCabe says that, in rehearsal, they have come to realise that the hero's deep journey is one of learning too late what it means to have a soul.

Some might argue that this already makes the myth seem rather dated. In the age of cloning and genetic engineering, the concept of a "soul" is about as meaningful to some people as retaining a belief in socialism. Oscar Wilde's great title The Soul of Man Under Socialism would, on their reckoning, have the same sort of past-it ring as, say, "Dentistry in the Days Before Anaesthetic".But not all of us have given up on the idea that there is something within us that could be bartered away at a terrible price. (When you hear a scientist like Stephen Hawking talk of a time coming when we will know "the mind of God", you don't need to be a very lapsed Catholic like me to imagine a whiff of brimstone in the air.) There is also an inherent fascination in the scenario of seeming to have got "everything" for nothing, then having to concede that it has cost not less than truly everything.