IT'S always struck me as paradoxical the amount of freedom Woody Allen gives his actors. If they screw up they're off the set, but the fact remains that his directorial method allows his players to improvise, and find their own path to a scene's set-down conclusion. The end result, at best, is stylised, neat, and dense with clinchingly funny one-liners. Somehow you expect him to be more proprietorial,

for his professionalism and stand-up comedy background to result in a more rigid text-respectful approach.

Perhaps his prolific and confident clarity allows this relaxation, because he ultimately calls the shots, his vision is as tough and impermeable as John Wayne in a shoot-out - though the focus of attention is the well-read towering wimp under the saloon-bar table. The artist-Allen knows that insecure agonising is the comic subject matter - never the directorial state. Talking of the famous custodial wrangling with his ex-love Mia Farrow, with its abuse claims and high-profile domestic warfare - on Radio 2's The Directors series this week - he made it clear that even in the midst of this nightmare there was no purgatorial chronic angst. He listed his output during this period: his claims of detachment - the lawyers were seeing to these things, his life continued normally - were insistent.

Like the novelist Philip Roth, who similarly dismisses the simplistic sleuthing which finds

autobiographical parallels everywhere, Allen's appalled response to the world's prurient interest in his private life, and its relish in spotting the non-fictional source, can appear disingenuous. While every writer used their personal history as copy - it is ultimately all he has - Allen's fictional self, played by himself, with his real-life partners in the cast, is so convincingly fleshed out, that it is hardly surprising the lines get blurred.

What matters, though, is his brilliant mocking focus on the self-obsessed search for personal identity - through relationships and therapy, Manhattan, Annie Hall, or surreally dipping into make-believe alternatives, Play It Again Sam, Purple Rose of Cairo, Woody Allen makes ludicrous our terrified grandiose search for happiness, but we are comforted by seeing him up there, screwing up on our behalf. We emphasise with the wimp who mostly cannot get love right, who gets older and stayed neurotic; he retains our deep interest.

One extract from a routine shows his life flashing before him, before imminent death.

With a terrible dawning realisation - as images of country childhood and visits to the general store to buy Emmy Lou a piece of gingham takes shape - it occurs to him that it's the wrong life he's watching. This ain't the New York Jewish boy's flashback, and the audience roars at the incongruity of the details - partly at the joyous absurdity of the sentimental cliche gone wrong and partly because of their felt knowledge of his past. The applause is for the man who has convinced them about precisely who he is, and no disclaimers will change that.