MADONNA is a contradiction. "There is nothing new under the sun," says the programme's first bon mot, portentously quoting from Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament.

Yet she has broken barrier after barrier, sometimes of taste and decency, while inventing the pop video and the song-and-dance cabaret concert that everyone, from Whitney to Britney, Kylie to Christina Aguilera, has cloned.

Perhaps she feels the limitations of format and age - she was 46 yesterday - and has concluded the best advice is to Re-invent Yourself (the Madonna manifesto, sorry, programme's closing statement). Staying one step ahead, as Michael Jackson has found, becomes increasingly difficult and this tour comes in the wake of the flop American Life album.

The Re-invention Tour finds adopted Londoner Madonna taking herself very seriously, on a soul-food diet of yoga and the Kabbalah credo, for much of the slickly-packaged 24-song cycle on stage and screen. She opens on screen, the less harsh, more tricksy medium in which she still excels, depicting two women, one trapped by wealth, the other by mental illness, in The Beast Within (for which she goes Bible-bashing from Ecclesiastes again). Trapped by wealth? She doesn't have to charge £150 for the ringside seats or £20 for a programme or play the priMadonna by coming on an hour later than the printed starting time of 8pm.

If you could freeze one moment, where Madonna is still Madonna Ciccone not Madonna Kebab, it would be her entry. Ascending from beneath the floor - hell not heaven, please note - in Hollywood showgirl attire of thigh-high boots and glittery top, she adopts the yoga crab position (the one flash of Madonna cleavage all night) to sing Vogue. Her dancers - gorgeous men for the pink-pound boys, and not so pretty girls, but softer toned than Madonna - join her in Louis XIV's court, and suddenly she speeds across a conveyor belt. Old and new Madonna in excelsis. However, the contradictions keep surfacing: the world's biggest solo star needs props: dancers, trapeze artists, the video screens, or her plaything of the moment, the guitar, where once her stage finger work was so much more daring.

When singing alone, she is exposed in Frozen and in particular John Lennon's Imagine, whose hippy, possession-free theme runs directly opposite to the sentiments of Material Girl, here sung in the military fatigues that had just accompanied her simplistic assault on George Bush in American Life. (Leave the politics to Steve Earle).

In Don't Tell Me, as in The Beast Within, she reveals her latest re-invention, vulnerability, as she proclaims no mother****** will tell her when to stop. Is it fake or real? Who knows, because the biggest cheers come when Madonna and smile, Madonna and sexy fun, are reunited at last in the kilts-and-bagpipe reinvention of Into The Groove and the finale of Holiday, back where she first invented herself in 1983.

Updated: 11:55 Tuesday, August 17, 2004