... Bolton 'One Enchanted Evening' THERE was a television drama event a year or two ago about a smart dinner party where the guests, got up to kill, were eating and drinking elegantly and making conversation on a phoney sophisticated level about books, plays, concerts, friends, while a television set in the corner spurted out pictures of violence in Vietnam. The intrusion, though apparantly ...

... COVENT GARDEN COMMUNITY AT THE Jackson's Lane Communily Centre in Highgate was a wealth of puppetry and the Covent Garden Community Theatre Company. This group performs at certain times of the year in pubs in its area, but this spring has agreed to visit other parts of London, although the show remains one with a strong local flavour. The Wizard of Odds has been written by Richard Robinson ...

... Sadler's Wells 'David and Goliath' CHOREOGRAPHED jointly by Robert North and Wayne Sleep, the London Contemporary Dance Theatre's David and Goliath was given its first performance on November 25 at Sadler's Wells. On the second night, Wayne Sleep's role of David was danced by Ross McKim, a member of the com pany and, like Robert North, the possessor of a useful classical technique. The ...

... WHAT THE BUTLER SAW MAURICE STEWART'S production for RADA of Joe Orton's What the Butler Saw made of the play a gloriously updated Feydeau farce, with the mistaken identities, cross purposes, double takes, despairing gestures, and burstings-in on incriminating scenes getting faster aiiu lunouser until me wnole thing got completely out of hand with pistols going off left right and centre. ...

... New control from Thorn-- Scene Setters J A NEW lighting control called Scene Setters will be the highlight of an exhibition to be staged next week by the Theatre Lighting divi sion of Thorn Lighting The exhibition takes place at Thorn House, Upper St Martin's Lane, London from January 30 Febru ary 3 inclusive. The new control combines the compactness and versatility of the QT 120 with the 240 ...

... Theatre of Puppets THE FAUSTUS legend tends to stick in British theatre minds as something shared fairly evenly between Marlowe's play and Gounod's opera. Yet under the folktales and the supernatural fantasies is a memory of a real person and it may be this tinge of reality which has ensured the survival ot the story. Marlowe having written his version in collaboration, throwing in for good ...

... Buster SKIMMING the surface of Buster Keaton's long life and works, Jane McCulloch and Donald Fraser's Buster, a musical tribute to a great artist of the silent screen at the Old Vic raises scores of questions it doesn't allow itself time to answer. Houdini called him Buster, we're told --'but not why, nor how they met; Buster broke his leg making this film, runs the script but ...

... Julius Caesar MODERN-DRESS Shakespeare is something of a National Youth Theatre speciality and Michael Croft has so produced Julius Caesar several times before. In the latest NYT revival at the Shaw Theatre, we have modern dress with a vengeance--this is the world of guerilla fighting and punk rock hooliganism with nobility of purpose fading a good way into the shadows behind political ...

... Catchpenny Twist IN THE opening scenes of Catchpenny Twist, Desmond Cave and Raymond Hardie are two ex-schoolmasters earning a precarious living writing death ballads to order for slain IRA men. Stewart Parker's play loosely traces their career from Belfast to Dublin to London, as they flee a death threat of their own and try to make it in the pop music business. Despite their protests ...

... JOINT STOCK A Mad World, My Masters BARRIEKEEFFE'SA Mad World, My Masters (now at the Round House, following its May run at the Young Vic) is not for those who like a play to be a cohesive whole, nor for those who have no weakness for melodrama or pantomime: it's a positive ragbag of unrelated snippets of implausible human behaviour, put across in the most extravagant vein that springs to ...

... NATIONAL YOUTH THEATRE Good Lads at Heart SIX YEARS after its first production by the National Youth Theatre, Peter Terson's Good Lads at Heart is back in their repertoire and will be taken to New York next year in this revised production by Michael Croft and Graham Chinn. With a confrontation seating plan, the Round House Downstairs makes an admir able venue for the story of one ...

... For the West ROYAL COURT THEATRE UPSTAIRS PRESIDENT Field Marshal Idi Amin is dreaming that --assisted by his British aide-de-camp and former commanding officer Major Amos Todd --he is conducting a diplomatic interview with a pinstriped. Government-White-Paper- orientated Scot and a scrupulously self-effacing oriental of almost impenetrable nationality. The dream continues more or less ...