... London SW1X 8ED, £6.75) An interesting and straightforward detailed history of the Arts Theatre, now perhaps not in the mainstream of the theatre but in the post-war years, under the guidance of Alec Clunes, an immensely important playhouse which was almost, in effect, a miniature National Theatre. It was, moreover, the theatre in which the National's present director made his first impact ...

... end, but the present one is far from being, in the words of the Scriptures, a weariness of the flesh. For one thing, the author tries hard though not very successfully to be impartial in judging his hero--or, more exactly, in letting the documents he has assembled and translated speak for themselves. The result is staggering and highly enjoyable throughout. It does not greatly alter the ...

... truth be said that pantomime is the only branch of the theatre which is always changing and yet somehow stays the same. Gerald Frow's book investigates the origins, chronicles the changes, but as one reaches the end one realises that it is a type of theatre in which the audience, not the author, is the most important factor. It started, of course, with the cam- media deli arte, an audience ...

... who achieved a respectable reputation at the Salon, but whose main interest was in costume. His volume Le Costume historique, published just over a hundred years ago, contained no less than 500 plates, of which an astonishing 300 were in full colour. This book contains 92 of them, slightly larger in size than the originals, and covers the period from the ninth century to the early 1800s, the ...

... first published 20 years ago which lists, first by titles and then by authors, those books and plays which reached the screen (now including the television screen) between 1928 the birth of talking pictures and the present day. Particularly useful when it comes to detecting those novels which changed their name en route to the screen. ...

... Day made the last of her 39 films, and in every one of them she had a starring role. But one would have to be a dyed-in-the-wool fan, which Eric Braun obviously is, to remember the names of more than half a dozen of them. Yet there is no douot sne does linger in the memory, but more, I would suggest, because of her singing, for her records are still played on the easy listening stations ...

... publishers claim, this is the successor to Ephraim Katz's International Encyclopaedia, last revised ten years ago. In that time, hun dreds of new actors and directors have arrived on the scene, and this book, compiled by the head of Baseline, which has a database of over 750,000 entries, contin ually updated, is obvi ously much more con temporary. It is also rather more arty than its ...

... examples of artspeak, leading one to the conclusion that the arts is still using words of the early eighties, or has set its face against such terms as can-do and enterprise cul ture, even though more and more arts organisations are having to observe (hem. Computer technology seems to be providing many of the new words, but show business, certainly in the pop sector, is playing its part, ...

... critical biogra phy of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell is taken from Orton's own laconic comment when magistrates imposed short prison sentences on the pair for stealing and defacing library books. The playwright's characteristic hon esty and cleverness make one pause, for not a word is mentioned in court about matters sexual and one wonders if it was an expression of homosexual paranoia which ...

... States to discover that the really big star from this side of the Atlantic, as far as the Americans are concerned, is Benny Hill, whose shows are regularly shown and re-shown on television stations across the country. But it should be no surprise, because, almost alone among British comedians, Benny Hill spotted the potentialities of television, tailored his own material, most of which he ...

... Level-headed Lulu will never be a has-been VW^ W Lohi: Her Autobiography (Grafton Books, £7.95) Lulu is one of the best examples of a sixties star who has survived, not in her case by continually trading on past glories but by developing her range, so that currently, for instance, she is proving a very worthy Miss Adelaide in Guys and Dolls at the Prince of Wales. Somehow, however, she has ...

... dramatists rather than engaging at length the vexed and complex question of what kind of genre farce is. Aldous Huxley once suggested that Tradedy is the farce that involves our sympathies; farce, the tragedy that happens to outsiders, which is a neat summing-up. In his erudite and intelli gent essay, Feydeau and the farcical imperative, Michael R Booth contests Eric Bentley's famous view ...