... '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 ...

... 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 ...