... 'LET THE GOOD STONES ROLL' AT THE AMBASSADORS Peter Hepple reviews Opened March 29 STRIPPED down to its essentials, the Rolling Stones saga is an everyday story of musical folk--five teenagers, brought together by a mutual interest in old Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters records, form a band and find success beyond their wildest dreams. If it is more than that, it is what we have made it. ...

... Zigomania BUSH THE characters in Tony Bicat's play Zigomania at the Bush Theatre are all teetering over yawning gaps which divide them--the young Englishman who is in Paris during May 1968 never really finds himself on the same wave length of political tervour as his French raries; the older generation, one an ex-Panzer transexual and the other washed up from the Resistance, can't ...

... The Homecoming OXFORD THE first prior-to-London performance of Michael Codron's revival of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming at the Oxford Playhouse on March 21, suggested that the play can still have a powerful, almost mesmeric, appeal to an audience many of whose members were young children at the time of the first production. A capacity house greeted the revival, devotedly directed by ...

... Cafe Debris MOST of my colleagues seem to have loathed Caf£ Debris at the Round House Downstairs with an all-but inexpressible repugnance. Perhaps it was just that it had tidied itself up a bit by the end of the week, but there was a certain style to this nightmare and surreal vision which made it good theatre. Michael' Matou devised, designed and directed the show which has music by Martin ...

... Open space season THE OPEN SPACE has lined up a new season which includes two new American comedies, The Ball Game, by Tom Thomas, directed by John Fortune, and Boo Hoo, by Philip Magdalany, directed by Charles Marowitz, a new adaptation by Charles Marowitz of Hedda Gabler, Brecht's comedy A Res pectable Marriage, directed by Mike Ockrent, and Ben Jonson's The Silent Woman, adapted ...

... THE SNOB THE BUBBLE Theatre Company may find that it has lost a number of followers after its latest production, a drama by Carl Sternheim called The Snob. Not that it is a bad play it is certainly interesting as a study of characters and their development. But the company did not appear to have either the actors or the director to tackle it. Presentation, on an open stage, was over-stylised ...

... THE DIVINE FLAME MUSICAL appetite can often be whetted by the aperitif of biographical information. You can. of course, get this over in the form of a programme note; most promoters do just that. You can also (and this is surely a recipe to attract music club oooiters eagy aooui a puieiumi piu- gramme of so-called difficult music or a composer whose name is some thing less than a household ...

... BRIAN AND VIV HAVE NEVER HAD SEX IF THE term had not already been pre-empted to mean something quite different, the best description of Brian and Viv Have Never Had Sex at the Round House Downstairs could well have been audio visual. Liz Goodall, Steve McCabe and Alison Stewart -Richardson have created a sort of rock opera around the fifties into sixties novelettish boy-and-girl story ...

... CAST OFF DAVID CREGAN is one of the writers particularly associated with Richmond Fringe Theatre at the Orange Tree. His latest play has 14 characters, although Sam Walters directs Cast Off very happily with only five players. It is what one might call a tragic farce-- farcical because it sends up rotten bureau cracy, big business, do-gooding and any number of sacred cows of for mula ...

... WHAT THE BUTLER SAW MAURICE STEWART'S production for RADA of Joe Orton's What the Butler Saw made of the play a gloriously updated Feydeau farce, with the mistaken identities, cross purposes, double takes, despairing gestures, and burstings-in on incriminating scenes getting faster aiiu lunouser until me wnole thing got completely out of hand with pistols going off left right and centre. ...

... New control from Thorn-- Scene Setters J A NEW lighting control called Scene Setters will be the highlight of an exhibition to be staged next week by the Theatre Lighting divi sion of Thorn Lighting The exhibition takes place at Thorn House, Upper St Martin's Lane, London from January 30 Febru ary 3 inclusive. The new control combines the compactness and versatility of the QT 120 with the 240 ...

... HARRY'S GOT PERFECT PITCH The musician with the all purpose harmonica THE name of HARRY PITCH may not so far mean a great deal to the man in the street, but the sound of Harry Pitch certainly does, for his harmonica, plaintive or swinging as the occasion demands, has been heard on dozens of TV commercials, many of which he has composed, and on themes for TV series, two of the best-known ...