... IT MUST BE many years since I last saw Robert Helpmann trip over that imaginary doorstep in , and yet here he was again (at Sadler's Wells on May 2) as brilliantly inventive, as outrageously funny, as perfectly made up, and as genuinely moving as ever memory recalls. His Dr. Copp^lius is a classic character study; mimed with his accustomed skill and impeccably musical timing, but also ...

... Gemini; Birdscape SADLER'S WELLS ROYAL BALLET UNFORTUNATELY for David Morse, his new ballet Birdscape received its first London perform ance (Sadler's Wells, May 5) as a curtain-raiser to Glen Tetley's Gemini, a powerful work first danced here by the Australian Ballet and now in the repertoire of the Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet. Birdscape is set to Martinu's first SpaliCek suite and is ...

... 'VARIATIONS ON THE MERCHANT OF VENICE' AT THE OPEN SPACE Douglas Blake reviews Opened May 17 THE WARMEST of all possible welcomes to the new Open Space (in Euston Road just round the corner from Warren Street Underground station), for it is cosy, very comfortable and, even at a tirst visit, already like an old friend. It opened with the first performance of Variations on The Merchant of ...

... 'THE RED DOG SALOON' CONTINUING his almost obsessive concentration on American cults in general and cowboy figures in particular, writer-director Keith Wood explores an actual incident in his latest production for his Highway Shoes company, The Red Dog Saloon. at Chapter Arts Centre caram An old bar in Virginia City was refurbished in 1965 along the lines of a Wild West saloon and ...

... 'SLEEPING IT OFF' WHEN Parisian stock-broker, Riba- dier, marries a beautiful, but highly suspicious young widow Angele and carries on with another woman it's hardly surprising that trouble ensues --particularly when that master of matrimonial misunderstanding. Georges Feydeau, created the plot. Having discovered a guide book, recorded by his predecessor, on how to cover up extra-marital ...

... 'NEW REEKIE' THE basis of New Reekie by Ian Brown is the impact on one Edinburgh housewife of the smart, new way of living. It is the clash of demeanours, of kinds of talk and of forms of conduct which the play wright has selected for his humour. At the Traverse Theatre Club, where the Traverse Company is presenting the play the native audience found much to laugh at in the assault on ...

... Lionel NEW LONDON IT WOULD BE nice to say that we are on the brink of the great British musical renaissance; there have been signs in this direction over the past few months in the area of showcase performances and, for that matter, over the past few years in both regional and experimental presentations. There is also a tradition of putting good tunes to a story for which they were not ...

... The Beggar's Opera BUBBLE THEATRE COMPANY BUBBLE Theatre's 1977 season opened with The Beggar's Opera, an appropriate choice for a company actively engaged in fund-raising! Ian Milne has made a new orchestration of the Pepusch score which keeps the early 18th century flavour within a subtly updated harmonisation: it works very well with small playing forces the players also leave their ...

... 'HAPPY YELLOW' TINA BROWN'S Happy Yellow, which opened at the elegantly recarpeted Bush Theatre on May 19, is a marvellously astringent play about women. Three women, to be exact, all bouncing unhappily in the limbo land from which the only exit is middle age --there is not one of mem wno is noi rrusiraieo 10 a greater or lesser degree sexually and sublimating that and her professio- nal ...

... 'HELL'S ANGELS ON TYPEWRITERS' THE FIRST lunchtime play at the new Croydon Warehouse Theatre is a three-hander for an all-woman cast, written bv Angela Wye who, on the strength of her previous work, is both concerned for what might loosely be called the feminine condition and able to express this in validly theatrical terms. Hell's Angels on Typewriters suffers, it is true, from that bane of ...

... 'THE POKEY' THE JAIL, or pokey, in a small Texas township of 200 inhabitants is' the setting for a strange confrontation in Stephen Black's The Pokey at Soho Polv. Incarcerated therein is a volup tuous pop singer, sleeping off a heavy booze session which led to her exposing her bare backside on a public thoroughfare. Guarding her, though in a nominal sense only as the cell door is unlocked ...

... Four to One COTTESLOE SEEN last year briefly in the National Theatre's season at the Young Vic, Gawn Grainger's Four to One is obviously the type of play for which the Cottesloe was designed. We are in a pub-- somewhere in the Islington area at a guess --watching four men, in early middle age, playing pool It is apparently a regular date for David, the aggressive, rolling-stone Scots man. ...