... 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 ...

... Nuns embarrassing pupils AMBASSADORS The Actor's Nightmare/Sister Mary Iqnatius A DOUBLE bill by an American writer, Christopher Durang, brings Maria Aitken to the Ambassadors in a number of parts, as several actresses in The Actor's Nightmare and as a nun in Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You. The first play has Walter Plinge coming upon a stage he knows not of, and being ...

... OVAL HOUSE Poppies POPPIES IS a masterful and interesting play by Noel Greig. It is about homosexuality, death and war- witn a good deal of humour thrown in. Having said that, however, it is a play with a message and therefore not purely entertainment. It begins with two old men (Robin Samson and Ralph Smith) having a picnic on a hill overlooking London. The tension of the situation is not ...

... NEW END Love Matters AN AMUSING, light-hearted collection of songs about all aspects of love. Love happy, love sad, love adulterous, love homosexual, love betrayed A trifle saccharine, but often entertaining. Though Cass Allen's lyrics are speckled with the inevitable groaners (You're gone I'm all alone there's enough wit to carry the evening through. I particularly enjoyed her Sondheim spoof ...

... Steaming WHEN IT concentrates on the comic, this Htlwards-Macl.iam.moir production of Nell Dunn's Steaming is very good indeed. Barbara Brennan makes a marvellous Josie, lull of erotic exuberance and streetwise know how. Li/ Davis gives a line, often moving performance as the slow-witted Dawn, and Anna Heffernan is excellent as her mother. It's when the two middle-class characters Nancy ...

... Neglected Crusoe KENT OPERA Robinson Crusoe IT IS AMAZING that an opera of the calibre of Offenbach's best work should have only been performed professionally twice. Robinson Crusoe, which was successfully staged by Opera Rara during the Camden Festival 10 years ago, did not arouse sufficient interest to ensure other companies giving it an airing. It is to be hoped that Kent Opera's superb ...

... METROPOLITAN OPFRA Les Mamelles de Tiresias THE METROPOLITAN Opera certainly outdid itself with its centennial celebration concerts a marathon lasting eight hours. TV viewers could see for themselves what a fantastic array of talent nearly 100 international singers had been assembled. There were incongruities David Hockney's set for Les Mamelles de Tiresias making a very odd background for ...

... Most profitable cash crop ROYAL COURT The Grass Widow ONE HAS the mischievous impression that Snoo Wilson might have thought of the title of his play The Grass Widow before he actually wrote it. It seems almost too apt for this story of the wife of a recently-deceased marijuana farmer who turns up in one of the remoter parts of California to claim her inheritance, and Finds there an ...

... 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 ...