... HARLOW The Three Musketeers PHIL WOODS has adapted Dumas classic adventure story with a tongue-in- cheek afection which is slightly reminiscent of the Lester films. And director Alan Cohen and designer Peter Ling certainly demonstrate that small can also be magnificent. This, to sum it up, is what community theatre should be. It's fun, it's very well acted, it's extremely imaginative, and it ...

... Lunacy and clarity creating a balance OVAL HOUSE Going Away For Good LUCY IS Going Away For Good she has been committed to a mental asylum and this short play (one-and-a- half hours) shows how she reacts to that committal. It is a confusing play, at first intriguing but by the end rather pointless. Lucy enacts her nightmares using dolls which come to life as the asylum warden, her father, ...

... BRIDGE LANE The Durhess rvf Malfi THIS IS an attractive production of The Duchess of Malfi in modern (fifties style) dress, directed by Jonathan P. Holloway. The set and costumes, designed by Charlotie Humpston, give the atmosphere of a Marlowe detective movie, which unfortunatetly is lost in the complexities of the story. Not an easy play, the Red Shift Theatre Company do a good job. The ...

... NORWOOD A Day at the Opera and a Night at the Races SLAPSTICK OF the Marx Brothers genre is unique and sadly missed these days by the many who enthused over their antics. For them it is good news that a new play with their fast-moving humour has just had its premiere at the tiny Bell Theatre in London's Norwood. The ambitious South London Theatre Centre running it has now been established 16 ...

... ALBANY EMPIRE Othello and the Cunning Whore of Venice GORDON MCDONALD'S new work for the Combination is a deliciously gooey mesh of intrigue and assassination. Iago's treachery is well to the fore and Desdemona's part is enhanced to make her the whore of his title. Of course the point is she is not a whore and Othello's unwillingness to unmask Iago as the devil he really is makes his fall from ...

... KING'S HEAD The Harrv Lime Stories AT THE King's Head The Harry Lime Stories were good on atmosphere, on arch Americanisms and gangster warfare, but low on intrigue. Intrigue was there, of course, but not so that you'ld want to linger on it, not in the way of Graham Greene. Naturally there was that most whistlable of tunes to give it all credence, but do you know Greene's name never came up! ...

... Isolation A-Z THEATRE For Three-Stilling THE A-Z Theatre presents two plays by Bernard Rudden in the Nethcrbox Theatre called For Three and Stilling which are examples of the Theatre of the Absurd. Whatever virtue they have is due to the idiosyncracy of the playwright and something to the design of May Eakin and the lighting of David O'Neill. There is a remoteness about the set and its ...

... Love Songs NORTHERN BALLET THEATRE THE 150TH anniversary of the birth of the composer Brahms is being celebrated by Northern Ballet Theatre with the performace of a new work Love Songs. Specially commissioned from Andre Prokovsky, who has choreographed several previous works for the company, it received its premiere in the opera theatre of the Royal Northern College of Music. The music is ...

... Good, but could do better DANCE UMBRELLA Spiked Sonata EXTEMPORARY DANCE Theatre is still streets ahead of our other small dance companies, both in its thinking and its physical manifestations. Even so the performance at Riverside for the Dance Umbrella made me want to mark it down with a B+ : that is to say good, but could do better. It is a question ot energy combined with realisation, ...

... GATE Heart of Darkness JOHN TORDOFl- and Philip Cade- have managed to get something of the very essence as well as dramatic impulse into their version of Joseph Conrad's great novel, Heart ol Darkness, a one-man production al the Gate Theatre, Notting Hill Gate, with Tordoff himself as the performer. The strange, wild story, which grew from Conrad's voyage on the steamer he commanded to the ...

... Wringing best out of a custard pie plot BLACKPOOL Don't Start Without Me BLACKPOOL'S Grand Theatre welcomed back its season of visiting theatre groups with a comedy as subtle -and apparently appealing- as a seaside postcard, Joyce Rayburn's Don't Start Without Me. Set in a house divided into two flats the top occupied by drippy Norman (David Janson) and the bottom by dishier Eric (Paul ...

... Body and Soul WATFORD THEOLOGY IS not a fashionable subject for British dramatists, though its practitioners are a different matter. Roy Kendalls play is likely to attract an audience for whom the debates of the Church of England synod are, at best, of mere academic interest. But his subject matter is of relevance to the whole of ecumenically motivated Christendom. It is presumably ...