... To Maggie with love CHARLES SPENCER on the romantic games the Russians play QUEENS Interpreters FOLLOWING the recent summit conference and the mysterious case of the Russian defector who changed his mind, Ronald Harwood's new play could hardly have opened at a more propitious time. Much of it is set in the Foreign Office, where British and USSR offi cials are hilariously failing to reach ...

... Searing indictment of family relations NICK SMURTHWAITE applauds a monster of heroic stature RICHMOND Brotherhood WHY DO members of the same family often finish up tearing each other apart? According to one character in Brotherhood, Don Taylor's new play at the Orange Tree, Richmond, its because they care so deeply about each other. Blood ties, to his mind, inevit ably lead to blood-letting. ...

... Hitler in search of a script FALCON THEATRE The Adolf Hitler Show DAVID PARKER'S new play The Adolf Hitler Show is one of those pieces which never quite decides which j way it wants to go. It opens with a long and passionate monologue from Hitler himself, de velops into a study of a struggling, drink-sodden actor intent on playing the part of Hitler in a fringe theatre production, and ...

... CROYDON Devil's Peak IN ONE sense, Allan Leas' new play at the Warehouse is straightforward polemic against South African ideology. The playwright himself takes the part of Alvin, a young soldier who deserts the army after witnessing the murder of a whole Angolan village. The programme points out that such an attack actually happened in 1978, and that last year alone 7,000 young men failed ...

... BLOOMSBURY Joel Hall Dancers WHILE ON paper the Joel Hall Dancers suggested themselves as a company specialising in jazz and contemporary dance, the level in performance came nearer the cabaret mark. Affected more than effective, it made the Bloomsbury Theatre an odd choice of venue. The company was founded in Chica go in 1974, principally to display the choreographic talents of Joel Hall, and ...

... CHESTER Othello PHILIP PARTRIDGE, artistic director of the Chester Gateway, made a wise choice in producing Othello. It is an 'A' level set text, it is the first time it has been produced at the Gateway and Partridge directs a compe tent company which is classically stylish and worthy of Shakespeare. The production marks a forward step in the significant contribution Partridge has brought to ...

... LEEDS The Amazing Dancing Bear BARRY L. Hillman's play The Amazing Dancing Bear, which won joint first prize in the Bristol Old Vic/Harris Trust playwriting competition of 1981, is now receiving its professional premiere at the Leeds Playhouse. Although the play is far from perfect in construction, being much too exposi tory indeed at times it is more like an illustrated lecture than a ...

... Proving mime is more than a load of LeCoq ICA More Bigger Snacks Now IN THE past I have always subscribed to the Alexei Sayle Theory of Mime. Put at its most simple, this influential law suggests that if you saw someone in the street attempting to escape from an imaginary glass box or sewing their fingers together with an invisible needle you would think they were mad. But when some wbey ...

... Dreams beyond avarice PETER HEPPLE on Griff Rhys Jones' unorthodox direction of a Ben Jonson classic HAMMERSMITH The Alchemist A SHORT CUT to riches has always been part of an Englishman's dreams and the follies of those who try to find the philosopher's stone, a secret formula or a mystic symbol have never been better exposed than by Ben Jonson in his play The Alchemist. The fact that he ...

... The Maids CANAL CAFE I PREFER Jean Genet in his prose works, the brilliant, riveting Thieves Journal or the wonderful world of Our Lady of the Flowers, for exam ple; but people persist in staging his plays, the latest effort in London being The Maids by the charmingly and ridiculously named Tray, Blanche and Sweetheart Company. Weren't they the dogs that the disturbed King imagines in ...

... Scarfe paints the stage ENO Orpheus in the Underworld NOT SURPRISINGLY, English National Opera, in its revival of Orpheus in the Underworld, went all out to make it as extravagently improbable as possible in an English version by Snoo Wilson and David Poutney. Pountney's production is full of deliberate pantomicic artificialities and grounds of grotesquely distorted faces by that most ...

... PALACE WATFORD IRISH playwright Bernard Farrell has contrived a moderately successful plot for his bunch of group therapy aenis. What better way to study an array of characters than by placing them together in Suzy Berstein's encounter group where she tells them to relax, relate, communicate? There's the apparently shy and stam mering Joe, given to exaggerating; when asked what he does ...