... Mate! COMEDY Opened December 12 OLIVIA, the slim blonde heroine of C. Scott Forbes's Mate! at the Comedy, is avid for men. She has around in her smart London flat her former husband. Henry, Mark, a young disco club tycoon, and Colin, a book publisher. Shall she marry Mark or Colin? Henry is her sultant on tne mailer, anu inc piay is concerned with his activites in this rOle. You would ...

... A Night With Dame Edna PICCADILLY Opened December 13 BARRY HUMPHRIES, to judge by the opening night response to his A Night with Dame Edna at the Piccadilly, has moved into the comedy superstar bracket, almost entirely on the strength of his creation Edna Everage, that middle-aged globetrotting Australian lady, who says what she thinks and embodies wnat Barry Humphries obviously believes ...

... A Respectable Wedding OPEN SPACE BRECHT'S A Respectable Wedding is an early one-act play which, in Jean Benedetti's translation at any rate, comes over as more searingly savage that the colder denunciations of society which followed it; it is cruel and it has no heart. The British premiere at the Open Space is directed Dy mine Ockrent and has an extremely com plicated set not to mention ...

... A Mackintosh Experience EDINBURGH THE MOST INFORMATIVE and attractive feature of A Mackintosh Experience is undoubtedly the setting. That is, if one is allowed to call the illuminated screen pictures of garden produce and flowers, of shapes and the reduction or distillation of shapes, part of the setting. At the Lyceum Little Theatre, Edinburgh, this educative tribute to an architect, whose ...

... THE MILLIONAIRESS at THE HAYMARKET Opened December 14 WRITTEN IN 1935, The Millionairess betrays the fact that by then, after over 40 years of plays. Shaw was beginning to run out of ideas. Some of his favourite hobby horses, some of which are in evidence in the currently-running The Philanderer, were in process of being recycled, including digs at the law and the medical profession and ...

... Positive Solo Ms Noh ACTION SPACE IT TOOK SOME time to determine exactly where the strength of Caroline Noll's particular talents lay to encourage her to present her one- person show Positively Solo Ms. Noh at Action Space. Her entrance was not auspicious., nor was the disjointed script promising indi cating only an intention t>- dabble at ideas; but when she sat down at the piano and sang, ...

... Ladiespeak and Greek Tragedy ACTION SPACE NANCY COLE'S Ladiespeak, part of a double bill in the Action Space season of new works, was an unusual and strangely riveting experience. One woman performing three monologues against a black brick background without the aid of props couia nave Deen dull es pecially when each monologue con sisted of a woman railing against or reminiscing about her ...

... SARATOGA at THE ALDWYCH Peter Hepple reviews Opened December 21 SARATOGA, first produced in New York in 1870 and adapted for England under the title Brighton four years later, is of interest more as a rarely-seen example of early American theatre than for its intrinsic merits but provides a happy seasonal entertainment hv the RSC in a stylish production by Ronald Eyre. High-society ...

... Troubadour CAMBRIDGE Opened December 19 AS WELL AS BEING about love, Troubadour is obviously a labour of love, a carefully researched musical on a subject of greater historical and sociological importance than might at First appear, how the mediaeval concept of courtly love, epitomised by the troubadours fluenced the relationships between men and women and still survives, though some ...

... Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat BROMLEY BRASH, VIVID and fast-moving are the main qualities at the Churchill. Bromley, for Worthing's Connaught Theatre version of the popular Joseph and the Amazing Technico lor Dreamcoat. Nicolas Young's presentation locates performances in a playground over-run by youngsters with nowhere better to go and devoid of initiative and imagination. ...

... Herod NATIONAL Opened December 1 1 MUSIC AND THE theatre of belief have natural affinities, as Britten (the Church parables) and Maxwell Davies (the St Magnus variations) have well demonstrated. But, as is proper for a piece devised for performance in the National Theatre's most flexible space, Paul Mill's neroa wiuiastwcaiimiovui; 3f plainsong by Harrison Birtwistle md Dominic Muldowney ...

... Bozo YOUNG VIC STUDIO THE AMERICAN DREAM, as we have all been told many times before, has gone very sour. The latest manifestation is at the Young Vic Studio, in the shape of the world premiere of Jamie Reid's Bozo. The word is apparently slang for a fool or a clown, and one can readily understand why Harry's family so regard him he's the archetypical drop-out. The word has also been ...