... Senior minister enters Equity card dispute By JEREMY JEHU WOULD-BE actors have been told by a senior Government minister how they can use the law to force a way through Equity's controversial entry controls. Drama school graduates and working non-Equity performers who claim they are being kept out of the acting profes sion because they have never been offered any of the jobs in provincial ...

... Royal Ballet director clamps down on discipline THE NEW director of the Royal Ballet has issued a stern warning that discipline within the ranks is to be a prime concern for the future. Announcing plans for his first season in charge of the company, Anthony Dowell said: There is a young breed of dancer that questions everything, which is not a bad thing. But question ing discipline is bad, ...

... Carmen ROYAL OPERA COVENT Garden's revival of Michael Geliot's vividly naturalistic production of Carmen, staged by Mike Ashman, again delivered to us much of the riches of Bizet's score, whose familiarity, under dozens of repetitions, never diminishes the appeal of its dramatic, melodious freshness, its atmospheric colouring, and its creation, witn Meilhac and Halevy's masterly col ...

... VILLAGE THEATRE Listen Do You Wanna Know a Secret? AS THE title suggests, this new production from the Inner City company is set in the sixties. But this is not the swinging sixties now remembered with so much affectionate nostalgia. This is the sixties of the Profumo affair and the moors murders, of ruined lives and lives prematurely ended. The play interweaves the stones of two women, ...

... Boy Friend's lost charm WESTCLIFF The Boy Friend THE BOY Friend is apastiche. It is not a parody. Sandy Wilson's twenties musical of the fifties, which Vida Hope described as witty, elegant, charming and tender, is in danger of losing many of those qualities in the present production by Christopher Dunham at The Palace Theatre, Westcliff. There is much to admire and enioy; but it is an ...

... Aunt Dan and Lemon ROYAL COURT GETTING to grips with Wallace Shawn's Aunt Dan and Lemon is like trying to recollect one of those dinner party conversations that sounded interesting at the time. It is not, I fancy, the kind of play to entice British audiences, in as much as it is not about people but what two people think, the characters of the title Aunt Dan, a diminutive, feisty figure ...

... Bosom pals on a wing and a prayer Peter Hepple on Howard Goodall's tribute to the WAAFs PLAYHOUSE Girlfriends IF MUSIC were all that it took to make a musical, Howard Goodall would be up there alongside Sondheim, for he is a real musician. Although much of the music and the fine choral writing is reminiscent of his previous show The Hired Man, Goodall is a developing composer with a large ...

... The Cocoa Party DRILL HALI CONCERNED with fathers and stepfathers and which of the two the children should be loyal to, and, indeed, the whole question of the patriarchal system, Ruth Dunlap Bartlett's thirty-year-old play is, nevertheless, even more relevant today than when first written. Indeed, with broken marriages a growing trend, Bartlett's finely wrought play is definitely one for our ...

... These dames ain't dumb Ann Nugent on super human energy at Riverside Studios DANCE UMBRELLA Bartok/Aantekingen POSSIBLY Rosas, seen on the second evening of Dance Umbrella, will by the end of six weeks turn out to have been the single most striking production of the festival. For what gives the production-- with choreography by the Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, and danced ...

... Colvin resignation forces Edinburgh to reorganise BY KARTAL YASMINE ONE OF THE most important co-ordinators of the Edinburgh Festival, associate director Sheila Colvin, is to leave, and discussions are already underway to establish how the management team should oe re-organisea in oraer to cope with her departure. Colvin has been at the Festival for the last ten years and has been the right ...

... Missing Persons THE WEST End's longest running production ever. The Mousetrap, is planning a major celebration to mark its 15,000th performance next month, when it is hoped all the leading ladies ever to have appeared in the show will be present. Producer Sir Peter Saundcrs success fully organised a similar celebration to mark the show's 21st anniversary, but this time not even Equity has been ...

... Making the most of the Max factor Peter Hepple on a production that's better by design OLD VIC The Tempest IT IS meant as no criticism of Jonathan Miller, whose choices of production for his first season at the Old Vic have been tempting if not invariably successful, that his discovery of the year has been designer Richard Hudson, whose work has previously chiefly been known to opera lovers. ...