... 'Rib' that irritates WHEN A NEW theatre company is founded with the avowed aim of staging the works of one particular dramatist, it is natural to expect great things of playwright, director and cast. Alas, the first presentation of the New Company at the Act Inn on February 5 Rib by Tim Rose Price amounts to an evening of im mense irritation. The irritation is largely because it all ...

... Hyde Park THE QUALITY of performance put together by the new Joint Stock Theatre Group in The Speakers, now in the middle of a short tour is high enough to make one anxious to see them work with material of more dramatic substance. Based on a book by Heath cote Williams which mixes documentary with fiction in an account of public utterances and private lives in the shadowy world of Hyde ...

... Hugh Lloyd, playing Buttons for the first time in his life, broke all pantomime records at Lewisham Concert Hall with Cinderella. When it ended its run on Saturday, February 2, the show had been seen by 51,000 people. Hugh is fitting in a brief visit to his mother in Chester before going to Newquay to start H pre-production work on the summer Ushow which he will be presenting in ...

... Interesting, entertaining, but DAVID MERCER'S new play, Duck Song. presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych, is on the surface interesting and entertaining, but, as it deals with momentous matters, one must probe below the surface; only to find very little there. Our world may have a good appearance in many ways, despite obvious upheavals, and human beings are perhaps not ...

... 'Double Double' JAMES SAUNDERS' one-act play Double Double, which has joined Adrian Mitchell's Mind Your Head at the Shaw, is set in a garage canteen, where bus transport employees gather for food and talk. This is a very funny work, with keenly observed and beautifully drawn characters, and dialogue which, as it reveals present feeling and thought, vividly mirrors the life of the ...

... 'Hasty Heart' revival THE SCOTS have a reputation for being dour and independent, but added to these, would it be possible to have a man who was also cold, rather insensitive to the feelings of others and very stubborn? This is the part that Richard Todd plays in The Hasty Heart by John Patrick, who wrote it in 1944. and the fact that Mr Patrick is a US citizen could have something to do ...

... SPECTRES OF MIDDLE-AGE IN 'CHEZ NOUS' by R.B. Marriott IN CHEZ NOUS, Peter Nichols' new play, at the Globe, Dick and Diana, on the strength of money brought in by Dick's best-selling book on child care and treatment, have bought an old house and its big bam in the Dordogne region of France. They are joined by old friends, Phil and Liz. All are in early middle-age, apparently happy and ...

... Waltz of the Toreadors' is a reminder of a lost art By Lisa Gordon Smith IT IS HARD to realise that it is eighteen years this month since Anouilh's The Waltz of the Toreadors was first seen in London but the revival at the Hay market on February 14 proves it to have lost none of its impact and freshness and serves by contrast to demons trate that valid dramatic writ ing has become ...

... Melville comedy ALAN MELVILLE may have another hit to his credit, if audience reaction to the Northampton Repertory premiere of his comedy Oops is any criterion. Melville himself is appearing as guest artist in this production. Witty dialogue, abounding in topical allusions, is the hall mark of the new comedy, based on the French farce Tchao by Marc-Gilbert Sauvajon. Some of the scenes, ...

... OUTRAGEOUS absurdity, the ridiculous become the normal, is as difficult to present on the stage as high comedy, and like high comedy, must succeed entirely if it is to satisfy at all. Ronald Eyre has gone in for outrageous absurdity in Something's Burning, at the Mermaid. The setting is a country police station in a country which is beset by spies and counter spies, police as spies and ...

... DURING The Game's A Bogey, given its premiere at Aberdeen Arts Centre on February 9, one of the lines from Scottish revolutionary John MacLean stresses the necessity of squaring the emotions with the intellect. And it is a pity that author John McGrath had not done just that in this, his latest work, sub titled The John MacLean Show. This is the second production by his group, the 7:84 ...

... 'Woyzeck' in two parts WOYZECK, the real life story of a beautiful little murder, is Thea- tremakers' first offering under Finlay Welsh's direction at Stirling's MacRobert Centre, and a welcome return to the company's better form. Georg Buchner's unfinished text of 1836 deals with an inarticulate and deranged Polish soldier, who murders his faithless mistress. The crime, seen from outside ...