... The Memorandum RICHMOND FRINGE VACLAV HAVEL'S The Memorandum is both a biting satire on bureaucracy and its gobbledygook and on the politically repressive society of the playwright's own country, Czechoslovakia. Richmond Fringe presented it at the Orange Tree in a translation by Vera well. well directed by iam waiters; a petition for Havel's release from the prison in which he has been ...

... ACTORS COMPANY IN , most of John Osborne's forecasts for this country, symbolised in the death of the music hall, have by now more or less come true. Perhaps because of this, the Actors' Company production at Wimbledon seemed somewhat thin, as though this most recent revival has had an injection of water rather than blood. The substance is still there, of course, and the message in ...

... OMNIBUS THEATRE A PRODUCTION does not get off to a good start when the curtain goes up as many minutes late (20) as there are people in the audience. But the quiet sincerity of the Omnibus Theatre Company's production of Dennis Potter's . performed at St Andrew's Methodist Church, Ladbrooke Grove, soon won its small audience's attention and held it apart, that is, from the times when the ...

... The Mersey Ferry Boat Show' BY A charter of 1330 granted by Edward III to the Priory of Birkenhead, the monks and their successors, in perpetuity, should have unhindered passage across the raging stream, the River Mersey. So began 600 years of Liverpool's celebrated ferryboat history, now honoured and mourned (for by 1978 Liverpool and the Cheshire peninsu la will be accessible only by ...

... BRIGHTON ACTORS WORKSHOP WIFE-SWAPPING might not at first thought seem to be a very original idea for a new comedy, but handled with skill and good-humour by David Cregan in his play Liebes traume at the Marlborough Lunchtime Theatre at Brighton one's doubts are soon swept aside by his hilanous tale of two pairs who set out to prove that four's company. The plan works well enough for one ...

... MANCHESTER 'STAMPING GROUND' A NEW ballet by Jonathan Thorpe, Stamping Ground, was given its premiere by the Northern Dance Theatre in the opera theatre of the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester, on March 18. Mr. Thorpe, who is one of the Company's two ballet masters, has set his new work to the music of J. S. Bach's Suite No. 5 in C Minor for solo cello. This is a rather sombre and ...

... COVENT GARDEN 'DANCES AT A GATHERING' SNOW lay on the ground outside Covent Garden on March 19, but inside all was Spring with the Royal Ballet revival of Jerome Robbins' Dances at a Gathering. This relaxed work, set to just over an hour of unadulterated Chopin, has a freshness which never seems to stale with repetition. The choreography is essen tially classical but by no means intense, ...

... KING'S HEAD 'BLOOD KNOT' ATHOL FUGARD'S Blood Knot has been given an impressive revival at the King's Head Theatre Club in Islington. The drama of Morris Pietersen, who is white, and Zachariah Pietersen. who is black, is deeply moving. The setting, of a shack in a group of hovels near Port Elizabeth, South Africa, has been brilliantly designed by Vivienne Cart wright. Morris and Zachariah, ...

... COLLEGE THEATRE FOUR new plays and two other new works, a collector's piece of German Expressionistic theatre, and two other rarities, are added to a Chekhov and four established modern plays (by Peter Barnes, Beckett, Orton and Pinter) to provide the theatrical meat for the 21st National Student Drama Festival next month. For the first time ever in Scotland, the peripatetic Festival visits ...

... BRISTOL 'MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING' THE OXFORD and Cambridge Shakespeare Company, who have been touring annually in the United States since their inception in 1967, will this year be taking Much Ado About Nothing, directed by Elijah Moshinsky, on a six-week Atlantic excursion. The com pany, mixing a professional production team with under graduate actors and technicians, chose the Little, ...

... 'THE FAMILY DANCE' AT THE CRITERION FELICITY BROWNE'S The Family Dance, at the Criterion, is a kind of Berkshire upper- class dance of death. While an, unseen children's party is going on in the Musgrave country house--quite a large place--the adultsso called, congregate in the wide and lofty kitchen to parade their sorrows and their angers, their regrets and their frustrations. Presiding ...

... Guildford 'Banana Ridge' BEN TRAVERS was at the Guildford Yvonne Arnaud for the first night of his Banana Ridge, revived 38 years after its original presentation. This typical Travers farce also serves as a vehicle for the indefatigable Robert Morley. Although the author is enjoying a vogue amounting almost to a cult, his work in general and tnis piece in particular remain neither more ...