... THE current scene is fraught with grave difficulty, said Peter Cotes, speaking at a meeting of the Gallery First Nighters' Club last Sunday. A formless type ot play is being encouraged, though we are told by the new race of drama critics that these are plays of the future these arc plays of the mind.' But they are not plays of the theatre. Plays like Ross 'The Affair and The One Day of the ...

... 'T'HE dodo was a clumsy. very curious bird that couldn't get off the ground. Flight 447 Delayed (A-R November 9) was a dodo- This exercise it cannot seriously be termed a play-- was prob ably as interesting to students of television as the dodo was to ornithologists for, like the dodo, this species of television was thought to be extinct. Flight 447 was in fact, a valuable object lesson in How ...

... IF this is intended as competi tion to Tonight, then BBC- tv need have no worries. Here and Now (ARTV Monday to Friday) is a fifteen minute slot which provides ar ideal excuse to use odds and ends which don't really fit in anywhere else. In order to get a show like this going, it is necessary tc build up a team, and producei Cyril Francis is not going tc have an easy time wilh a dif ferent ...

... THE JOHNNY DARLING SHOW BRILLIANTLY satirical and fresh as airconditioning, the JOHNNY DARLING SHOW (BBC-ty November 12th) earns the highest possible praise. Original and refreshing, this was first class television enter tainment and justifies Gurney Slade in which Anthony New- ley experimented with a brand of fantasy too sophisticated for TAM. Having switched channels, Newlev flitted, like ...

... RING OUT THE BELLS ANYONE tuning into Part Three of Ring Out The Bells (ATV, December 24), might well have wondered whether the Equity Strike had forced a rebroadcast of the Morning Church Service. For tagged on to the end of a light entertainment programme embodying every conceivable Christmas cliche imaginable was the Choir of Westminster Abbey. This lavish spectacular was a pleasant ...

... A flair for the right artists INTERROGATOR TROY KENNEDY MARTIN'S excellent play The Interrogator (BBC-tv December 22) used the Cyprus of 1956 as the background to an intensely dramatic relationship between a Briton and the members of an Eoka terrorist group. Special Branch Superinten dent Farren, played with deep feeling by Bernard Lee is a feared interrogator and for the first time in his ...

... LUNCH IN THE PARK A SURPRISE ending does not justify 29 minutes of extremely slow and inconsequential dialogue in Comedy Playhouse (BBC-tv, December 22). Stanley Baxter was a War Office Clerk who, every Tuesday for the past 10 years has been lunching with a middle aged secretary (Daphne Ander son) and sharing prawn sand wiches and small talk. This Slice of Life was obviously written from ...

... Edited by Mollie Ellis Jimmy Logan, the comedian, now in revue at Newcastle Royal, appealed to Scottish viewers on BBC-TV on Sunday on behalf of the Scottish Association of Boys' Clubs. Alan Steel was one of the enter ic tainers in a show put on at the Star and Garter Home, Surrey, on January '5- ^C 0 Recently, when Lonnie Donegan, now playing Buttons in Cinderella 7* at Birmingham ...

... Theatrical Managers WE have received the following report on matters dealt with by the Council of Management of the Theatrical Managers' Association at its meeting on January 18, with the President, Charles Killick, in the chair. PARLIAMENTARY BUSINESS: Private Bills. The Private Bills introduced by local authorities had, aa usual, been carefully scrutinized by the Association's Parliamentary ...

... by Roger Fuller (Roger Fuller covered the Broadway theatre for three years for The Courier, a New Jersey paper, and is now viewing the West End theatre TO American eyes, the West End Theatre gives much less prominence to the critics than its Broadway counterpart. However, few Englishmen realise this situation is brought about by high production costs, instead of an inborn quirk in the ...

... by Claud Jenkins LET'S all go down the Strand was a song and a slogan. In the 'eighties and 'nineties when the Strand was known as Theatre Street, no less than fourteen theatres were located there or just adjacent. Visitors from the country, and all over the world crowded the pavements day and night. 1 was one of the number, firm as a schoolboy, with satchel on back, on my way to and from ...

... EIGHTEENTH century Ireland is the setting for Arthur Frewin's play, The Man in the Green Coat, which opened at the Olympia, Dublin, on Januahy 23. The hero is a good landlord, anxious to improve the lot of his tenents, one who plans to give tnem new slate-roof bouses, but in order to do this, and to build a road, be must knock down an old house which has been in possession of the same ...