... Murder Among Friends COMEDY Opened February 21 THERE WAS a time when the murder mystery had a basis of plausibility. You had the crime, a housefull of suspects and a policeman who pointed out the slip we had all overlooked. But nowadays authors set themselves impossibilities and do their best to talk their way out of them, witness Murder Among Friends, in which two out of the three ...

... Outside the Whale BUSH INSIDE the protects you from reality. The metaphor is drawn, of course, from the Biblical reference and it neatly summarises the childlike condition of Lilly Wakely (Tammy Ustinov) and Bazz Whitby (Godfrey Jackman) in Robert Holman's admirable side the Whale. Lilly is the wife of the packer of books (in the days when it was not just into a Jiffy Bag and on ...

... Bodies HAMPSTEAD Opened February 20 BODIES, if I have James saunders correctly, may be the title for his play but not the subject thereof Robin Lefevre's production for the Hampstead Theatre follows that of Sam Walters for the Richmond Fringe nearly a year ago. As designed by Tanya McCallin, it is V1 pace set for the first half has very little to do with the demands of the second. There ...

... 'THE REAR COLUMN' AT THE GLOBE Anne Morley-Priestman reviews Opened February 22 IT WOULD perhaps be uncharitable to say of Simon Gray's The Rear Column that it has sought to preempt the territory covered in Journey's End. Like that play, it is about men under stress, in what might be called a war situation; that it takes too long to take flight could well be Utxausc wc rvi iw inuici ...

... We Love You PEOPLE do most things in life for a complication of reasons. That in cludes setting up in the punk-rock business, whether as performer or management. It is an interesting thesis on which to build a play, but Doug Lucie's We Love You at the Round House Downstairs is not quite original enough to make all its points as sharply as required. The story is about The Filth at its point ...

... THE BRINK THE first play, The Brink. by Atholl Hay at the Lyceum Little Theatre, is a sad, drab piece of work about life -- or more precisely the life that four students are leading in a poorly-furnished slovenly flat. There are three men and a girl and they are unkempt and foul-mouthed and they present a casual approach to living which is something of a pose. Their talk is mindless ...

... The Kingdom of Earth BRISTOL THE British premiere of a Tennessee Williams play is a feather in the cap for any provincial repertory company, and the Bristol Old Vic rises to the occasion quite magnificently with Mike Newell's production of The Kingdom of Earth at the New Vic studio. The play is so compellingly writ ten, and embraces so many of the playwright's familiar themes, that it is ...

... Streamers ROUND HOUSE IT WASN'T pretty, but it was excellent. Streamers, imported from Liverpool and currently at the Round House induced more shades of emotion from its audience than is often possible. 1965, an Army barracks in Virginia, three uneasy recruits and the blood bath that ensues, as they try to cope with Army pressures and each other. The dorm sharers, Richie, an indeterminate ...

... Antony and Cleopatra OLD VIC THE Prospect Theatre Company's current production of Antony and Cleopatra is an exquisite and powerful one, designed to indulge its audience in the delights of sight and sound. The intense feuding between John Turner's angry Antony and Terence Wilton's Caesar is captured with pathos and thunderous conviction. As Antony loses his power hold, belief in his own ...

... One Penny for Israel ALMOST FREE Opened February 21 ITS VERY difficult to immediately follow a success such as Wolf Man- kowitz's The Irish Hebrew Lesson with another, and Laurence Collinson's One Penny for Israel at the Almost Free doesn't manage it. Yet this 40-minute play, second in the series dealing with Prejudice and its Responses, is important in its less dramatic way. The ...

... The Bear; The Kreutzer Sonata ROYAL COURT Opened February 21 l wu YtAKb separate tne writing ot Chekhov's The Bear and Tolstoi's The Kreutzer Sonata. Both have a double concern for the relationship between male and female, be it the large-scale war between the sexes or the more intimate duel between a man and a woman. N. F. Simpson has made the version of Chekhov's one-act drama and Peter ...

... Lady Harry SAVOY Ooened February 23 IN ITS EFFORTS to find something distinctive to attract the punters, the theatre is taking some strange paths, and in Lady Harry we have a fresh genre. the homosexual- psychological-comedy-thriller, presumably on the principle of catering for all tastes in the same play. man Krasna, wno snouiu nave known better, wrote it, and in fair ness to him one ...