... Equity stubs out tobacco fire EQUITY HAS extinguished hopes of a union-wide ban on members working in shows sponsored by tobacco companies. A blanket ban is the key objective of the new pcifoimm pressure group, Artists Against Smoking Sponsorship, bunched this month. But Equity's leadership, which re jected a previous call for the ban after the union's annual general meeting earner this year, ...

... Plouviez defends LTC and lashes Gubbay ANGRY EQUITY officials have defended London theatre's industrial court and slammed the'West West End producer who called the union snide and cynical. General secretary, Peter Plouviez, has hit back against harsh criticism levelled at the London Theatre Coun- cial and Equity during the row over the transfer of short-lived musical The Ratepayers' ...

... The One O'Clock World TRICYCLE THE ONE O'CLOCK World is a play of obvious interest to journalists, dealing as it does with the professional and personal activities of the team responsible for a lunchtime radio news programme. It would be instructive to discover whether it is of equal fascination to those who are not in our trade. because to a certain extent it is bound to confirm their ...

... It's My Party GREENWICH IT IS 1984 but we are harking back to the sixties in It's My Party by John Flanagan and Andrew McCuIloch, directed by Antonia Bird at Greenwich Theatre. People's lives, views and emotions are shown through the familiar device of a party, when drinks in plenty, squabbles and unexpected things bine to create atmosphere which is sloppy, tense and occasionally comic. ...

... Ghetto BERLIN THE FREIE Volksbuhne in Berlin has presented, with a widely resounding success, a new play by the Israeli dramatist Joshua Sobol. Entitled Ghetto and produced by Paul Zadek, it recalls events that actually happened in the Lithuanian town of Vilna in June 1942 under the German occupation. That city had, at the time, a fairly large Jewish population and the Ger mans, to save ...

... The Brother/The Inheritance FINBOROUGH ARMS DOMESTIC Science call themselves 'Manic Energetic Theatre' which makes their work sound modern. In fact, this mixture of physical tomfoolery and verbal dexterity has direct antecedents in the work of Chaplin, Keaton, Abbott and Costello and Morecambe and Wise, tnougn i am not suggesting uiai nicy are anywhere near as good as their cele brated ...

... Presenting 'A' team of comedy SHAFTESBURY See How They Run RAY COONEY, the director of the latest revival of See How They Run, pays tribute to its author, Philip King, as being the progenitor of the type of post-war British farce that has seldom been absent from the West End stage rlnrtiw the last 40 vears or so. And its first flowering was this piece, set in the summer of 1944, when hearts ...

... The Innocent Mistress BRISTOL MOST WRITERS are aware of the perils of printers' errors, but few can have had such a traumatic result as the mistake that plagued one of the first women playwrights, Mary Pix. For the printer who published her play The Innocent Mistress in 1697 got the text so jumbled that it has taken almost 300 years to decode what she wanted to say. A combination of ...

... Waiting for Beckett GATE PETER CAFFREY, a young Irish actor, has come to the Gate at Notting Hill Gate with his one-man Samuel Beckett production, Waiting for Beck ett, already seen in Dublin. The materiaj adapted for the stage by Jim Sheridan, the show touches on, for instance, Endgame, Krapp, Hap py Days, Malloy, and Murphy. At the outset it seems that Caffrey is merelv quoting ...

... DRAMA GROUP Sheltered Lives STANTONBURY CAMPUS LOCAL MEMORIES turned up trumps when Roy Nevitt and Roger Kitchen embarked on their latest musical documentary, Sheltered Lives. i ne iiitn piay to date tnat use team has presented using primary source material, Sheltered Lives was well within living memory. This time the North Bucks town of Wolvcrton and its tiny neighbour, New Brad well, ...

... Legato mood COVENT GARDEN Margaret Price Celebrity Concert m MARGARET Price's Celebrity Concert programme at Covent Garden was an all-German one, consisting of songs by Brahms, Strauss and Mahler, and Mozart's Kleine Deutsche Kantate. There was thus a certain monotony of language, but also some lack of contrast in mood. Apart from the alternations of andante and allegro in the Mozart, the ...

... Theatre de L'Atelier ICA AFTER A studied introduction, with the young farmer munching his way through apples and the elderly one silently looking on, the ICA's lighting dimmed and the two men went to either side of the stage to turn wheels and bring complex machinery into play. i ms turned tne vast mint-up wall ol barn frontage up and backwards to reveal the barn's interior, and as it balanced ...