... Royal Ballet 'Swan Lake' IT'S TWELVE YEARS since Lynn Seymour last danced the Swan Lake Odette/Odile at Covent Gar den, and although her individuality still enriches this dual role, her dancing on January 4 was some what disappointing judged by her usual high standards. She is fluid and smooth as Odette, looking good enough to eat, and as Odile she deceived the prince most enticingly. But ...

... Sonny Hayes Magic Fantasy There is nothing like a dame Not. even at this time of year, like a pantomime one, but rather Sally Windross who is the subsidiary part of Sonny Hayes Magic Fantasy and by far the best thing about this over-long self-indulgent addition to the Cockpit's mime and visual theatre season. It is a northern-based group with in theory a very bright starting point to guy the ...

... Justin Case JUSTIN CASE, whose new one-man show Sneak Preview made up most of the second half of the Cockpit's latest mime and visual theatre festival offering, has worked with a number of small companies and ensembles as well as obviously watching both the best and the worst of his type of zany theatre of gestures, and he is not above sending up the more precious and esoteric ...

... 'THE SONS OF OEDIPUS' AT GREENWICH Opened February 3 EWAN HOOPER is right when in a programme note for The Sons of Oedipus at Greenwich, he claims Greek playscan kick you like a mule, and it is not his fault that this production turns out to have little more kick than a glass of flat beer. Translated by David Thompson from Euripides' The Phoenician Women. the play seems more than usually a ...

... Piccadilly 'Very Good Eddie' A REASONABLY PRICED ticket policy was introduced on January 31 at the Piccadilly, where Very Good. Eddie! is still enjoying its successful run. Though now over ten months old. the production has stayed surpris ingly fresh, the pre-First World War humour as artificially theatrical as ever and the cast continuing to avoid sending it up. The Jerome Kern songs on the ...

... Hounslow's new theatre HOUNSLOW has been a theatrical desert for most of its existence, ever since the courtly towns of Richmond and Windsor flowed east to meet the outgrowth of central London. It now has a professional theatre company of its own, a new co-operative called the Company of Three James Dawson, actor Anthony Homyer and advertising executive Brian Mallinson which has been ...

... 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 ...

... The Amazons ACTORS COMPANY SOME time last year, the Canonbury Tower Theatre Company unearthed a rarely revived Pinero--The Amazons,last seen in London before that in 1927. The Actors' Company has had a considerable success with its production of the same play on tour and it reached London, or at any rate the Wimble don Theatre, last week. Pinero's own description was a romantic farce, ...