... Rock Garden 'What' I'M NOT AT ALL certain what extremes of emotional reaction in the audience Paul Marcus and Colin Ludlow were attempting to produce with their What at the Rock Garden on February 1, but they were successful in driving four members of at least one audience away. I stayed, determined to discover what the many surprises and. it is hoped, some delightful ones were ...

... Bush 'German Skerries' THE BUSH Theatre's commissioned play by Robert Holman German Skerries turns out to be a winner. It runs for about an hour and a half, concentrating on four precise times in a 1 9-day period, high on a cliff jutting out into the North Sea at Teesside. There are four and they could so easily be types, mouthpieces for the author's theo ries rather than flesh-and-blood ...

... Richmond Fringe The Island' JAMES SAUNDERS' latest play at the Orange Tree, Richmond, is an odd mixture of nonsensical comedy; and philosophising, a sexy variation on Robinson Crusoe and The Admirable Crichton, with a dash or two of Huxley and Orwell for good measure. Womankind has how to reproduce herself without male intervention (though the lower orders of mammals are not as self ...

... Drury Lane 'A Chorus Line' I HAVE an inestimable advantage over every other critic in London in that I never saw A Chorus Line before. Some years ago I had the pleasure of Donna McKechnie's Company and wot a performance. to quote Sid Field, which makes it easy for me to why such another outsize talent as Elizabeth Seal might have tilted dangerously the fine balance of this latest All ...

... Soho Poly 'Gimme Shelter' TWO SHORT PLAYS by Barrie Keeffe. Gem and Gotcha, have now been summed-up in a third. Getaway, and the completed trilogy is currently on show at the Soho Poly under the collective title Gimme Shelter Both Gem and Gotcha are familiar from lunchtime perfor mances. The first deals with Kev, an extrovert young trades unionist who makes a token stand against ...

... 'STRAWBERRY FIELDS' AT THE COTTESLOE Opened April 5 LIKE. tne Beatles song from which it takes its title, Stephen Poliakoff's new play is about a dream, a dream of an England free from motorways (and, even more important, motorway service areas), redevelopment schemes and high-rise flats. But whereas the Beatles sang about the psychedelic sixties, Poliakoff is a young man of the sordid ...

... The Memorandum RICHMOND FRINGE VACLAV HAVEL'S The Memorandum is both a biting satire on bureaucracy and its gobbledygook and on the politically repressive society of the playwright's own country, Czechoslovakia. Richmond Fringe presented it at the Orange Tree in a translation by Vera well. well directed by iam waiters; a petition for Havel's release from the prison in which he has been ...

... ACTORS COMPANY IN , most of John Osborne's forecasts for this country, symbolised in the death of the music hall, have by now more or less come true. Perhaps because of this, the Actors' Company production at Wimbledon seemed somewhat thin, as though this most recent revival has had an injection of water rather than blood. The substance is still there, of course, and the message in ...

... OMNIBUS THEATRE A PRODUCTION does not get off to a good start when the curtain goes up as many minutes late (20) as there are people in the audience. But the quiet sincerity of the Omnibus Theatre Company's production of Dennis Potter's . performed at St Andrew's Methodist Church, Ladbrooke Grove, soon won its small audience's attention and held it apart, that is, from the times when the ...

... The Mersey Ferry Boat Show' BY A charter of 1330 granted by Edward III to the Priory of Birkenhead, the monks and their successors, in perpetuity, should have unhindered passage across the raging stream, the River Mersey. So began 600 years of Liverpool's celebrated ferryboat history, now honoured and mourned (for by 1978 Liverpool and the Cheshire peninsu la will be accessible only by ...

... BRIGHTON ACTORS WORKSHOP WIFE-SWAPPING might not at first thought seem to be a very original idea for a new comedy, but handled with skill and good-humour by David Cregan in his play Liebes traume at the Marlborough Lunchtime Theatre at Brighton one's doubts are soon swept aside by his hilanous tale of two pairs who set out to prove that four's company. The plan works well enough for one ...

... 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 ...