My son, the 'failed' comedian

When Aaron Barschak applied to study at drama school in New York, he had to answer the question "Why do you wish to become an actor?" on a form designed to weed out candidates before they got to audition. His answer was: "I do not wish to become an actor. I have been an actor all my life. I wish to become a better actor." The wit and the slight subversion of his reply got him an instant interview.

Ten years after graduating from the Neighbourhood Playhouse School of Theatre in central Manhattan, Barschak has all the fame and the attention he's craved since he was a boy. It crashed over him like a tidal wave last Sunday morning, as news of his extraordinary coup at Prince William's 21st birthday party hit the early bulletins. It was Barschak, of course - or the Comedy Terrorist as he likes to be known - who gatecrashed proceedings at Windsor Castle dressed as Osama bin Laden in drag, found his way to the stage where the Prince was addressing his guests, and hijacked the evening with a song, a crude gesture or two, and a congratulatory kiss for the birthday boy. His stunt has since been described as the most spectacular royal security breach in more than 20 years. Initially arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism
Act, he is now facing a single charge of burglary - though he claims he stole nothing - and is scheduled to return to Belgravia police station early next month.

Since Sunday Barschak has been milking his spot in the limelight for all it's worth. "Why not?" says his father Fred, "when he's been waiting and striving so long." Yesterday, Aaron spent several hours closeted with TV's celebrity confessor and the royal family's bête noire, Martin Bashir, for an ITV news special. He has already accepted an invitation - irony of ironies - to a glittering summer party hosted by society magazine Tatler, whose guest list will surely overlap to some extent with that of the 21-year-old Prince.

His stand-up show at this year's Edinburgh Festival, meanwhile, is gaining pre-publicity of the kind Perrier Award winners can only dream. They are not bad spoils for an act of reckless stupidity undertaken, by his own admission, on the spur of the moment and in the heat of the night.

It is testament to Barschak's comic originality that those who know him well are not particularly surprised by his exploits. This was a stunt entirely in keeping with the "zany" misfit described by his friends. It was not malevolent, they say, nor pointedly anti-monarchist - it was just horribly ill-judged. That Sunday morning, his father Fred switched on the Ceefax text service to read the news; saw that someone, then unnamed, had commandeered the stage at Windsor Castle, and immediately "recognised the technique as Aaron's. I hoped it wasn't true," he says, "and then a journalist rang to ask me whether I was his father. Nothing has been the same since."

In person the Comedy Terrorist is ebullient, strongly opinionated and a little dishevelled of appearance. He is always scrupulously honest, say his friends - occasionally to the point of social dysfunction. Where other people might tell a white lie, in other words, Aaron Barschak will say exactly what he thinks and damn the consequences. It goes without saying that he is not the most mature 36-year-old in the world, and that his style of stunt-comedy often borders on the deeply offensive. He has indeed been an actor all his life, says his father, but on a stage professionally limited, so far, to London's fringe theatre circuit. He still lacks a theatrical agent. "It's been very frustrating for him," says Fred. "Aaron is certainly an unconventional person, but he's also a very disciplined person when it comes to what he loves, which is acting and comedy. That's his world."

Quite how he formed "that world" is as intriguing as the furore surrounding Prince William's birthday. For, say those who know the family well, the daunting presence of his father - a gregarious intellectual, successful businessman and often wildly amusing raconteur - looms large over Aaron Barschak and goes some way to explain the eccentric path he has chosen in life.

Aaron was born in London and named after his grandfather, who was a smart hotelier and kosher restaurateur in Thirties Vienna. The burden of their history weighs heavy on the Barschak family, for obvious reasons. When Aaron's father Fred was seven years old he watched the torching of the synagogue opposite the Barschak hotel in Vienna, and was shortly after put on one of the trains to England known as kindertransport. He reached the city of Hull alone in 1939, and was unofficially adopted by a Yorkshire couple who managed to speak to both his parents on the telephone before they were removed to Sobibor - one of the Nazi death camps. Fred lost his whole family to Sobibor.

"Aaron was named after my father," says Fred now, an urbane 72-year-old who still speaks with a mild Viennese accent. "I don't know how much my father would have approved of him, but still ... It's a different world now. We all carry the baggage of Vienna, if you like. You can't help that - it's even right that we should."

Fred did astonishingly well at school as a refugee child in England, and eventually won a place at Queen's College, Oxford, to read law. Sometimes, says a close friend, the success of the first generation becomes a burden to the children of the second. Aaron himself has alluded to his father's easy passage into conventional English society compared with his own less-orthodox route. "My father had done so well," he has said, "and I did not want to fail or do badly in comparison."

He was, nevertheless, raised in a solidly middle-class home, first in west London then in Golders Green, and educated at the £8,000 a year City of London school. Fred turned his back on the law and profitably invested in property instead. Aaron was a precocious lad at first, and his father delights in telling anecdotes from those early years. It was a close-knit family - and still is, say friends - but his father was disappointed by Aaron's decision to skip university: "He could still go one day," he says, hopefully. Aaron implies that his father's academic achievements leave little room for him to make his own mark in the same field, however.

After a brief period spent working with his father in the family property business, during which tempers often frayed and sparks flew, Aaron decided, like many a young person before him, to hit the trail to South America. He wanted to get out of a rut in London, says his father, and perhaps also to remove himself from a difficult working relationship before it did real damage to his family. Aaron made a base in Bolivia and travelled widely but he rarely contacted the family and effectively disappeared for months at a time. His vanishing act distressed his parents and his younger sister Tamara, now a 33-year-old assistant film producer.

Fred approaches the subject gingerly. "It was a difficult part of our lives," he says. "It was hard to get him back. We asked a man who had written a book about people who vanish in South America to help us, and he did. I don't think it really worked out for Aaron in Bolivia." Was he depressed, or ill? Did he get involved in a cult? "No, nothing like that at all. I don't think he gets depressed. It's difficult for me to talk about. To me, he's like a rubber ball. He always bounces back."

Aaron spent four years in South America, and then went on to a new dream - drama school in New York. For his audition piece, he was asked to film a three-minute performance of a classic text of his choice, says his dad. Ever the non-conformist, Aaron dressed up as a very old man, took a camera to Willesden Jewish cemetery and sat among the tombstones reciting what his father calls "his favourite text, lines he knows almost by heart" - the Book of Ecclesiastes. Again Aaron's idiosyncratic approach won him instant reward and he was immediately offered a place at the school. Aaron has since settled back in London, to his unique life of comedy terrorism. He watches football at Tottenham Hotspur avidly, but does not attend synagogue. He is not a "depressed nutter", as some of the more lurid stories this week have charged, yet he is clearly an exhibitionist with a truly bizarre sense of humour.

His father is glad that Aaron has since apologised to the royal family for his unscheduled appearance at Prince William's birthday bash. "I admire his courage, and I admire his capacity to make other people laugh," he says. "But I do not admire Aaron's judgment. I also think people are entitled to their privacy, even the royal family." You get the impression that Fred is excruciatingly embarrassed by his son's very public performance - as, any father would be - yet his loyalty prevents him from saying so. It is a not a situation, however, with which the Windsors themselves are entirely unfamiliar.