... Revival of pure artifice YOUNG VIC The Duenna LIKE MANY another show. The Duenna was written in a hurry to stave of financial disaster and triumphed because of it. Sheridan took one of the oldest plots in the book- mistaken identity- threw in traditional bits of business, dashed off some lyrics which his father-in-law set to music and came up with the most consistently successful musical ...

... Carmen's childish Buster OVAL HOUSE The Human Mop BUSTER KEATON *as a child-like person or so we arc told during ihis very short production about his life. Carmen Lynn plays him as such using mime, still photographs and an excellent piano accompaniment (Richard McLaughlini which is all the more impressive, as the music has been specially written for the show. The show can last as long as one ...

... JEANETTA COCHRANE Oscar INTERVUE IS a company made up of medical students from London University who write and present an annual revue. This year's offering was supposed to centre round the dicta of Oscar Wilde but what this has got to do with a punk-haired band, Star Wars or football hooligans, I can't imagine. The eleven contributing writers must be a group of avid television- watchers as ...

... WESTCLIFF Separate Tables SEPARATE TABLES is a play of two parts but Terence Rattigan certainly did nut intend them to be as different as in this production when he wrote them 40 vears ago. I The play consists of two stories set in a Bournemouth residential hotel during the early 1950s. Despite the brilliant character studies it has become somewhat dated. I The first story concerns a former ...

... FFDS Top Girls FOR THE second production in their new season Leeds Playhouse presents the regional premiere of Caryl Churchill's play Top Girls, directed with great skill by lohn Harrison. The play purports to examine the plight of women in a male-dominated world, but it actually seems to suggest that any woman who reaches a top position in the commercial jungle becomes every bit as much of ...

... Royal Variety for a hypochondriac prince! GLYNDEBOURNE The Love for Three Oranges SITTING WITH around 800 schoolchildren for an opera performance at Glyndebourne is quite an experience, and immensely enjoyable because of their attentive appreciation and enthusiasm. Not that they go unprepared, for the Kent and East Sussex children attending the special week of performances by Glyndebourne ...

... Dressing up COCKPIT THE 1982 Theatre Company's contribution to the September in the Pink gay festival was a potted montage of male homosexual writing from the 17th century to the present day. Pouting and posing in Georgian garb and through to the simple tee shirt of Edmund White's America, the group's selection of prose provided some explanation for the horror of today's 'closet queen'. Is the ...

... Not Much To Ask GLASGOW MELANCHOLY IS at the heart and centre of the Patsy Rodenburg play Not Much to Ask based on Charlotte Bronte's autobiographical novel Villette and presented by the Graeae Theatre Company at the Third Eye Centre. It is the melancholy role of the stranger in a strange land, isolated by language and the indifference of people, so well depicted by Yvonne Poulson as Lucy ...

... La Cenerentola THE ANNUAL visit by Glyndebourne Touring Opera is a major event at several regional theatres and now this year, for the first time, the week of previews at Glyndebourne itself has developed into the opening week of the tour. Touring requirements have necesitated a certain amount of simplification in the staging but, where La Cenerentola is concerned, this proves to be an ...

... CARDIFF The Cloggies OUT OF the pages of Privatt Eye and on to the world stage lurched Lancashie's legendary clog-dancing formation team, the Cloggies, surrounded as ever by their almost inpenetrablc alcoholic haze. CArtoonist Bill Tidy's heavy-booted distinctly-working-class group of male chauvinists are sent off to the Strichtenslein Folk Dancing Festival in an attempt to win for Britain the ...

... Spies in suburbia LYRIC Pack of Lies BASED ON the true story of Gordon Lonsdale and Helen and Peter Kroger, convicted of spying for the Russians in 1961, Hugh Whitemore's Pack of Lies, at the Lyric, focuses on a suburban couple who, friends of the Krogers, became involved when members of the Secret Service use their Ruislip home as a base for investigation. Police investigations can be ...

... Marshmallow luxury ALBERY Lovers Dancing CHARLES DYER usually comes up with something fresh and individual, and so it is with Lovers Dancing, at the Albery. He has two couples, Alicia and Albert, George and Cheryl, celebrating an anniversary of the occasion when a silver cup was won at some kind of Come Dancing contest. All are middle-aged; Albert is a chemist with a modest shop of his own ...