... Macbeth ALEXANDRA PALACE THERE WAS a yellow flag flying from the topmost tier of the half-size reconstruction of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre at Alexandra Palace. It didn't denote that the place was in quarantine, suffering from the plague, though from the absence of spectators it could well have been. The fluttering pennant indicated, as in Tudor times, that a play would be performed on ...

... Battersea Blues LATCHMERE BAD PLAYS on the fringe are legion. But Terry Gilbert's Battersea Blues is good, very good, because it sets out to be fast and funny and succeeds in being just that. If Hampstead is the London setting where the trendies usually live, he makes a transplant south of the river to Battersea, utilising all the current jokes from Filofaxes to Jeffrey Archer, edging in ...

... Baby Baby Kings Head Theatre Ci ub THE SCARLET Theatre Company create their productions through a process of devising and improvising upon a theme, working with the writer to build a script through rehearsal. Baby Baby is the result of a collaboration by the core company, Grainne Byme, Sophia Lovell Smith and Maggi Morrison, with the writer, Anne Caulfield, and the director Birte Pedersen. ...

... Dames At Sea Oldham GEORGE Haimsohn and Robin Miller have written a delightful pastiche of the Hollywood musical in Dames At Sea at the Oldham Coliseum and part of its success lies in the naive charm of those vintage years captured affectionately by Jim Wise's nostalgic music. The small cast of six play roles familiar to everyone who fondly remembers the traditional plot of finding a bam and ...

... Romeo And Juliet BIRMINGHAM At the first schools matinee of Birmingham Royal Ballet's 'new' Romeo and Juliet--in Kenneth MacMillan's familiar 1965 Royal Ballet version, newly designed by Paul Andrews--when Romeo (Joseph Cipolla rejected the challenge to a dual from Tybalt (Even Williams) the young audience was held in thrall. For at this performance's most forcefully dramatic moment, as ...

... The Return Of Ulysses ENO ENO's revival of its 1989 production of Monteverdi's The Return Of Ulysses is not a happy occasion. David Freeman's staging oscillates between the banal and the moving, though even the dodgier moments might have been overcome by stronger casting. David Roger's clever design makes for fluidity of narrative, areas of con current action often throwing up significant ...

... Eugene Onegin Haslemere PUSHKIN'S poem classic Yevgeny Onegin was a natural for Tchaikovsky's music. As he composed his fifth opera he clearly saw the potential of the letter scene which it is said he wrote first. It depicts the heroine in her most emotional state and the beauty of the composer's music in that long passage fully justified his use of the Russian's poetry. After a very poor ...

... Don-ing an ideal accent PETER HEPPLE sees Liverpool meet Naples LYTTELTON Napoli Milionaria IT HAS taken the National a long time to find another play by Eduardo de Filippo to follow Saturday, Sunday, Monday, but Napoli Milionaria looks set to repeat the other's success and may even be a better play. Set again in Naples, it predicates by 40 years the theme of Alan Ayck- bourn's A Small Family ...

... Notre Dame OXFORD NOTRE Dame, a new musical, or rather musical thriller, was premiered in workshop form at the Old Fire Station Studio Theatre, Oxford and a veritable Tosca of musicals it turned out to be. Gone are the cats, the trains, the chess-board and the phantom; here we have torture, a flogging, a hanging and a presumed suicide, all well inside two hours. Based on the novel by Victor ...

... Magic Box BATTERSEA ARTS CENTRE THIS apparently aimless and artless short dialogue, written by Bertie, who plays the role of a cross-drcsser Claire, has something of the charm of an early hand-held camera surrealist short movie. Claire admonishes himself for neglecting to paint his fingernails and opens up a box, on a tablctop, which contains the head of his chum and confidante Thud (Helen ...

... Moliere NOTTINGHAM WITH the twin benefits of a synopsis and a very direct style of acting, this all-Russian play is surprisingly easy to follow, especially in the more active first part. In parallel with difficulties in his own time (and since) in Russia, Mikhail Bulgakov's play covers Moliere's last ten years. when his struggle with Church and State to pro duce his satire Tartuffe, ...

... Ambition pays off in Hoffman's masterpiece ROH Tales Of Hoffman OFFENBACH'S 1860 masterpiece--his biggest and most ambitious stage work--follows previous work based upon Hoffman's stories. Here the protagonist is the self-deluding lovestruck poet, unable to distinguish between the real and the fantastic. sung here by Alfredo Kraus making his debut in the role the singer, who ought to be ...