... Dames at Sea KINGSTON DAMES AT SEA is the eleventh production by Kingston Overground theatre in a most successful first year at its new theatre in Ashdown Road, and the 80th since it first opened in the town in June 1974. Nearly 3,000 new members joined in 1977 and artistic director Alan Bryce is now looking ahead to a permanent home in Kingston before the mid- 1980s. In Dames at Sea ...

... The Point MERMAID Opened December 27 EVEN if one is not quite certain what they are, a number of changes have taken place in Harry Nilsson's The Point since the original production last Christmas, and not, one fears, necessarily for the better. It is perhaps a slicker, funnier show, with all technical systems at go, these being extremely elaborate and em ploying film and slide ...

... CANDIDA AS A wife fed on the diet of her husband's metaphors and preaching, Bernard Shaw's Candida needs an amount of serenity and maturity in performance. Ana Lorneua McMinn in David Perry's production for RADA pro vided both in an intelligent perform ance. In the Rev James Morell, the busband for whom so much is and has been sacrificed, a hollow laugh and empty bonhomie are not ...

... PRETTY UGLY WE ARE what the media makes us. It's not a new theme in young people's theatre these days, as fringe companies rush to capture the heretofore neglected 13 to 17 age range. Fashions in pop music, in clothes, in food and drink rush at the young consumer in a kaleidoscope of change with one aim the jingle of the cash till. Pretty Ugly has been devised by the Women's Theatre Group ...

... SOON MAYBE BOOGIE INCUBUS have joined the theatre groups making capital out of neo- fascism. Their current show is a musical Soon Maybe Boogie about two generations of Brownshirts, Blackshirts or whatever the colour may be it has what I presume to be highly significant lyrics, but that's pretty useless if you cannot catch more than the occasional word be cause of the amplification past my ...

... YOUR PLACE OR MINE? ROYCE RYTON's latest piece Your Place or Mine? playing at Kingston Overground is a fun play, pure and simple. It is a two-hander with boy meeting girl at a party and girl re plying Yours to the question in the title. Back at the flat, he wants to get on with the agenda but she is a good girl from Surbiton with religious scruples and prays on her knees to prove it. This ...

... VOICES PACKED houses seem to have greeted all the theatre events in the Women's Festival '77 at Action Space. Certainly there was a large, attentive and responsive audience for the British premiere of Voices by Susan Griffin; it won an Emmy TV award in the States and has been staged, broadcast and televised there. As directed by Kate Crutchley, the five women sit scat tered amid the ...

... An Inspector Calls SHAW Opened January 16 BUILT LIKE a well-engineered detective story, the plot of J B Priestley's An Inspector Calls holds together this somewhat mystical moral tale and makes it all seem credible. Memories of the Old Vic production of 30 years ago, with its starry cast headed by Ralph Richardson, make the present com pany at the Shaw a trifle underpow ered, though James ...

... Cabaret MONTROUS REGIMENT MONSTROUS REGIMENT-- militant but nice with it, is a company of nine sisters plus two men thrown in for equality, committed to improving the status of women. In Floorshow, directed by David Bradford at Stratford East recently, it left no male dominated stone un turned, but projected anxious messages of grim protest with such humorous candour, and tongue in ...

... SPELLBOUND ADULT illiteracy is a problem in this country recently and deservedly given publicity and incurring sympathy through a controlled period of emphasis in the media. To the best of my knowledge, however, only one of those theatre groups usually set together under the adjective miueo nas lacKiea me issue in dramatic form. This is Common Stock with Spellbound. Alan Passes' script is ...

... We All Fall Up ROBIN WHITEMAN has apparently written the first part of a trilogy in We All Fall Up which Box Theatre Company premiered at the Round House Downstairs recently. Un happily. I left not in the least anti cipating with pleasure the next in stalments but rather recalling the murkier days of the fringe theatre movement way back in the Sixties. One can only call this retrograde ...

... Summit Conference GLASGOW WITH Summit Conference, Robert David MacDonald's brilliantly challenging sixth play, the Glasgow Citizens Company has struck a rich vein of dramatic gold, to top the news that the District Council is to stump up the first instalment of £500,000 from the Common Good Fund for the re- equipment of its beautiful, century- old Victorian home in the former Gorbals ...