... Scarborough 'Just Between Ourselves' WHEN Alan Ayckbourn's latest play, Just Between Ourselves, was given its premiere at the Library. Scarborough, on January 28. the audience was highly delighted with it. although some were heard to say that it is like a number of the playwright's earlier efforts. That may be true but it does not detract from the enjoyment one gets, for in this play Mr ...

... CENTRAL SCHOOL IMPROVISATION is a recognised form of artistic discipline in the curricula of most drama schools nowadays, but it is rare for the end product thus evolved to be put on display to the public at large. Yet that is just what happened with Something Rich and Strange. juiiiv. vi where third-year students of the Central School of Speech and Drama collaborated with the theatre design ...

... PENTAMETERS MOST of expatriate Robert Calvert's stage work so far has been with a high musical content, so it is not perhaps surprising that his short play The Stars That Play With Laughing Sam's Dice has a musical background. The rock star Jimi Hendrix, who burned himself out in the tragic pattern set by so many artists on the trapeze of success, was for a short time a paratrooper and ...

... Aldwych 'The Iceman Cometh' A DRAMA as monumental as it is magnificent. Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh. receiving its first London production for twenty years, is one of the finest things the Royal Shakespeare Company has done at the Aldwych. Everything about it, the carefully paced direction by Howard Davies. the marvellously sleazy setting by Chris Dyer, the fine ensemble playing by ...

... Greenwich 'Joan Turner Unlimited' JOAN TURNER'S latest show, Joan Turner Unlimited-, is delighting a late-night audience at the Greenwich Theatre from June 15. The woman artist who is prepared to send herself up rotten is thin on the ground, but Miss Turner cheerfully comes on in a swish of shocking pink chiffon, feathers and frills (found in Dorothy Squires' dustbin, she informs us) and ...

... Leicester 'Gunslinger' THE new sheriff solemnly takes his oath of allegiance. He pins on the shining star of office and another era in American history has begun. For the sheriff is a notorious gunman, eagerly recruited to kill his kind by townsfolk who fear him. This moment of spurious solem nity is part of Gunslinger, by Richard Crane, Fellow in Creative Writing at Leicester University, ...

... Theatre Workshop 'Rashomon' ANCIENT Japan á la mode de Stratford-atte-Bow the story we know from the film Rashomon, from traditional Japanese theatre or any of the western stage versions-- the most recent was that of the Theatre of the Deaf-- in a script by Fay and Michael Kanin and a production by David Mouchtar. Rasho mon opened at the Theatre Royal, Stratford E.15, on June 16 and ...

... 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 ...

... '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 ...

... 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 ...