... Cockpit Islington Dance Factory ISLINGTON Dance Factory ventured upon an ambitious programme at the Cockpit with a short fourscene dance-drama The Sea King to involve all their dancers from the tiniest to the most experienced and a selection of highly original inventions to show off the paces of the senior dancers in solos, duets or trios. Grant-aided through ILEA, the husband and wife ...

... SCOTTISH BALLET PREMIERES 'MARY' SCOTTISH Ballet are certainly adventurous and bold. The new full-length ballet Mary Queen of Scots, choreographed by the company's artistic director Peter Darrell, and given its world premiere in the elegant redecorated Theatre Royal, Glasgow, on March 3, is an bracing production with memorable blue and silver colourings, good performances by the company, ...

... Maximus 'Mates' MAXIMUS have a winner in Peter Kenna's Mates, a tersely-written Australian play on a theme not confined just to Australia. Set in a Sydney club late at night, it introduces a drag artist, his footballer lover, a man from the bush country who remembers the place when it was a brothel, and a cleaner who was formerly one of the girls there. Sexual gratification is only one ...

... Northampton 'Love Between Friends' THE HAZARDS of Platonic love are wittily explored in Donald Cotton's new play, Love Between Friends, which is having its premiere at the Northampton Repertory. Guest artists Eleanor Bron and Maurice Kaufmann endowed the comedy with much charm and vivacity in the leading parts of Liz Puncheon and Joseph Tangent. Liz and Joseph have been loving friends ...

... The National First Repertoire ON MONDAY, March 8, in the afternoon, the Lyttelton Theatre at the National Theatre opened for the first time, with an invited audience. The production was Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, directed by Peter Hall. In the evening came Ben Travers's Plunder, directed by Michael Blakemore. The repertoire, brought from the Old Vic. continued on Tuesday with Hamlet ...

... KROSS LEIGH PLAYS BOTH the short plays in the double bill, written, designed and directed by Kross Leigh as an early evening show at the Little Theatre Club for ten days from February 26, have intelligent ideas at their roots, but it soon becomes apparent that these have not been properly followed through; the characters speak but not in a communicative dialogue and they remain cardboard ...

... 'Wild Orchids' DO YOU think I meant country matters? Hamlet asked Ophelia; certainly the characters of Frank White's play Wild Orchids (which came to the Theatre at New End in a production by Gerald Chapman derived from that by Chris Parr for Lincoln's Roval) not only talk of them they do them, too. It was a tribute to the cast which opened the short run on March 3 that they kept the ...

... 'The Nose Play' SIDEWALK Theatre Company have in their current tour repertoire a delightful hour-long play for the seven-to 12 age group. The Nose Play has some interesting things to say about human vanity, the responsibility inherent in the exer cise of power, love, marriage and even cruelty to animals. There are bright costumes, designed by Luli Chapman, knockabout chases and fun, clever ...

... Personality of the week REGINALD MARSH has returned to the theatre, after making a name for himself in television, as the boot-licking, befogged PR man in The Chairman at the Globe, giving a performance of remarkable character and convic tion. He began his career on the stage in 1942, touring and work ing in repertory for two years before going to the Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon. ...

... STUDENTS LAMDA LAMDA'S production of Canterbury Tales, with the book by Martin Starkie and Nevill Coghill, the music by Richard Hill and John Hawkins, and the lyrics by Nevill Coghill. was the occasion for an impressive display of comic and musical talent from its third-year students. The fun began when Brock SeawelPs outra geously graphic but tremendously engaging Absolon bounded onstage ...

... WHAT really happened between Stella and Bill that night in Leeds' Whose story should we believe hers, his (he has two!), James's, or Harry's? Nobody knows. Harold Pinter's exercise on the impossibility of ever knowing what's going through somebody else's mind (you can't even be sure that a guest, who deliberately asks whether or not you have any olives, actually likes the wretched things!) was ...

... WEDEKIND'S Spring Awakening his portrayal of the crusning ot innocence by a particularly cruel mode of adolescence, had its fair share of innocents in RADA's recent production. There was Martin1 Harvey's Moritz, nervous, embarrassed, struggling for academic success. And Sara Mason's wistful, childlike Martha, resigned to a future of parental beatings. Imelda Staunton's Thea. pulling her skirt ...