... Dolores Gray as Rose DOLORES GRAY, returning to the West End theatre for the first time since her success in Annie Get Your Gun. had a very warm reception when she opened at the Piccadilly as Rose, the ogress but pitiable mother in Gypsy, having taken the part from the great Angela Lansbury. It was a pity that enthusiasm could not con tinue to the end of the show, except in the sense of ...

... Manchester lunchtime MANCHESTER'S first lunch-time pub drama production has taken place in the wine bar of the Nag's Head, Jackson's Row. It was put on by the Manchester Drama Group, which has linked together a number of players in the city, and hopes, probably under a revised title, to stage regular productions, both at mid-day and in the early evening, in this and other pubs. The group have ...

... SWARTHMORE, LEEDS DAVID ROBERTSON is battling on at the Swarthmore Centre Studio in Woodhouse Square, Leeds, and has put on a very lively and delightful Christmas pantomime, Ali Baba and The Forty Thieves, It is a real traditional pantomime with a camel, a dame a clown (who really was a clown in his youth, touring with Bertram Mills) and a principal boy. The cast are mainly students at the ...

... lonescoon the screen THE THEATRE of the absurd is largely the theatre of Eugene lonesco. At the French Institute his influence was shown through another sphere, that of the film. La Vase was made originally for west German television; it was shot in colour in remote France and the principal actor as well as the' scriptwriter is M. lonesco. On his own admission in conversation af terwards. ...

... Well worth a rewrite IN The Red Red Robin, Glenn Chandler has written a play which, if it only had the courage of its own convictions, might very well have a longer life than that promised by its production at the Golden Lane by the amateur Limelight Players. Red Red Robin is about Christmas not the one on the greetings cards, nor even the one in medieval altar-pieces, but the one created ...

... Actors' Company are notable at the Shaw by Miles Litvinoff THE LIGHTS dimmed. Guardian readers to a man, we sat hushed in expectancy. Five silent actors confronted us, seated in a row on white pinewood seats. They began to emit strange sounds, reading from scripts. Good Heavens, I began to mutter, feverishly shuffling my programme, They don't know their lines! Can this be the final ...

... Be Prepared! RUDE JOKES about Girl Guides and being prepared probably date from the days of Baden-Powell himself. The Scout movement is, like the Church or the Monday Club, an obvious choice for satire. In Union Jack (and Bonzo), which reaches Hampstead Theatre Club by way of Edin burgh, Stanley Eveling makes the more obvious jokes with skill, and says few things besides. Despite the ...

... Cathedral multi-media REVELATIONS, the most mysterious book in the New Testament, has cried out for dramatic or film treatment and Adrian V. Benjamin's version, entitled Apocalypse, would seem to form a good basis from which to work. Described as a multi-media experience it is basically just that, part dramatised documentary, part oratorio, part ballet, part drama and all decked out with ...

... 'Hamlet' at the Howff I DONT know whether to stand up to cheer, or to lie down and boo--The Howff's ten-week season under the auspices of M.S. Productions bowed itself out with Hamlet, directed by Joseph O'Conor and John Link. They shouldn't have done it. For the in tention applause; for the execu tion silence, or rather, a query. Why this play, in this way, here? We have become ...

... Austrian bill AN AUSTRIAN Federal Theatre Parliamentary bill has reached the final stages of drafting. Austria's Minister of Education and the Arts, Dr. Fred Sinowatz, states that the presept Bundestheatrerverband (Federal Theatres Association), claimed to be the largest thea trical trust in the world, is to undergo a thorough reor ganisation. It is planned to do away with the bureaucratic ...

... THOMAS HUXLEY THOMAS HUXLEY College in Ac ton has a flourishing department of English and Drama, though it is designed to turn out teachers who speailise in the theatre, rather than actors as such. One of the lecturers, Peter Chilver, has dramatised Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir, and this was performed by a cast of both students and staff in the new lecture theatre between December 13 and 15 ...

... HOWFF THE PHANTOM CAPTAIN is back at the Howff as a late-night show with a Wild West programme called Howdy, Stranger! This is another in-joke, and not a very good one at that. The overall situ-ation is a cowboy convention held in Lon don's suburbia and attended by delegates who have never come within miles of a horse, let alone a steer. So far, very good, but it is spoiled by going on for ...