... DEAR DAD AND GOSSIP STUDENTS of Glasgow's School of Drama presented Alan Poolman's historical play Dear Dad and Gossip recently as part of Strath clyde University's January Festival, at the university's Assembly Hall. The play, in which the cast ap pears as actors playing the given characters, is about the reign ot James I of England (James VI of Scotland) from the time, in 1603, when he ...

... Streamers LIVERPOOL DROP EVERYTHING. Get out your superlatives and go and see Streamers. Seldom does a play hit an audience with such a high emotional blast that the nerves are tingling from the first to the last moment, but Leslie Lawton's tender and soaring production of David Rabe's Broadway hit receiving its British premiere at the Liverpool Playhouse sends one away mentally winded. ...

... Gone in lanuary YOUNG VIC STUDIO DANNIE ABSE has written a self- proclaimed sad comedy in Gone in January which was premiered at the Young Vic's studio theatre on January 31. Wry it most certainly is; indeed, there are moments when matters on stage are so much awry that it is difficult to sort out the psychological from the verbal en tanglements. Yet we are concerned with only four people ...

... An Ideal Husband GREENWICH Opened February 2 FOR a blackmailer. Oscar Wilde's Mrs Cheveley has the sort of IQ that can only betoken disappointment in her chosen career. Imagine a woman, whose mind any case runs so very much on what she wears, being fool enough to adorn herself in polite society with a bracelet she has pinched from a very pillar of that selfsame elite some years before! How ...

... ONLY MEN SHAVE A ZANY guy. John Dowie. His sense of humour is incredibly wideranging. from the slapstick to the subtle, the lavatorial to the sexual, the harmless to the sick, the sidesplitting to the downright boring. Underneath it all, he is very pndearine with a sort of Kenny Everett appeal and in the intimate (or to be honest, cramped) Bush Theatre where he is currently per forming his ...

... MURDER AMONG FRIENDS A NEW play for British audiences. Murder Among Friends by Bob Barry, is having a successful premiere at the Churchill, Bromley, playing to good houses. I round it a better-than-average thriller, but cannot see the justifica tion for it being described as 'a com edy thriller.' It has some witticisms and sardonic humour, but that doesn't make it a 'comedy-thriller.' It is ...

... HUCKLEBERRY FINN MARK TWAIN is not an easy writer to transmogrify into a musical, for he combines folksy or sophisticated humour with an occasional vicious macabre twist, and Huckleberry Finn premiered at Southend had a cast of over 40. mainly amateurs, which indicates its main market as its attractions include many solos for the stock characters, including an Uncle Tom. melodic numbers ...

... LOOK BACK IN ANGER GRADUATING students on the one-year Mountview Theatre School course designed for those with previous training or experience put themselves-- or rather, were put by director Bill Wiesner-- through a difficult culminating production at the end of the Christmas term. Look Back in Anger is a play about young people but it is a play much rooted in the malaises of this country (so ...

... 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 ...