... Land Rover Social Club BIRMINGHAM By BARRY BALMAYNE A HUGE £5000 prize money tag spread over four acts was all the enticement needed to fill a full bill of heats since June at Birmingham's Land Rover Social Club in Solihull. We must pay tribute to Land Rover, supported by the Birmingham bvening Mail, tor providing this vehicle for acts to be seen in the excellent sur roundings of a theatre ...

... Day Two STRATFORD-UPON-AVON By BARRY BALMAYNE TUESDAY'S afternoon section was opened by The New Care Bears Magic Show which gave us a brief and limited presentation. I would liked to have seen more than one bear, but in the short time allowed it projected just why this highly colourful fun with magic show is so very popu lar. Comedy showband Hello packed a lot of material into their spot ...

... A world where fear is the key The Birthday Party SHARED EXPERIENCE THEATREGOERS have been speculating about the meaning of Pinter's The Birthday Party ever since the late fifties, but would that other plays from that era still stand up as such good pieces of theatre. Pinter, though only 60, is already recognised as a classic dramatist, a master not only of guage but of suspense and atmo ...

... This Other Eden SOHO POLY JONATHAN Moore's new play is an interesting but unfocussed affair, dealing with an Irish family stranded in England, and during its impressive opening 30 minutes it concentrates upon the isolated mother (well played by Maggie Shevlin). She is a kind of Gaelic Shirley Valentine, an sion reinforced when, at the opening of the second act, she appears in a scarlet ...

... Ludlam's monster PETER HEPPLE on a play that is a real turkey AMBASSADORS The Mystery Of Irma Vep THE REPUTATION of the late Charles Ludlam as a leading theatrical theorist and innovator is greatly inflated if The Mystery of Irma Vep is anything to go by. This is the kind of show which university theatre groups are inclined to Dut on at the Edinburgh Fringe as the result of watching too ...

... Phoenix Dance Company SADLER'S WELLS AFTER nearly a decade of work as an all-male small-scale group Phoenix Dance Company last year rc-organiscd itself to undertake middle-scale work with ten dancers, four of them female. The dancers are black, but do not specialise in what might be termed black dance for they are highly trained modem dancer- sand capable of tackle a versatile repertory. The ...

... The Green Man BBC1 BY ITS very nature, television is the medium least suited to conveying things of a spooky and supernatural order. All the more reason, then, to applaud Elijah Moshinsky's startling and engrossing three-pan film based on the novel by Kingsley Amis. In the opening scene of episode unc, in which the branches of a tree literally and bloodily embedded them selves in the body of a ...

... She Play-Dancing In The Dark CHANNEL 4 ATIMA Srivastava's 15 minute playlet, opening the She Play series, was stylish and darkly ironic. Its first scene seemed to describe the tentative beginnings of courtship rituals. Girl meets boy; in turn, each is teas- ingly aggressive while coyly giving the come-on. But this courtship is doomed to fail: the boy reveals that he is HIV Positive. Angie, ...

... Fair-ground attraction MOIRA PETTY on another brotherly-love drama ITV Coasting THIS VERITY Lambert production takes the somewhat hackneyed formula of two brothers on the run and fashions from it a light drama with a genuine charm, which at times verges on the whimsical. Two brothers, Eddy (Peter Howitt) and Mike (James Purefoy) escape from trouble in London and find refuge with their ...

... Hamlet LYTTLETON FIRST seen in Rumania in 1985, theatre audiences there inevitably identified the oppressive regime of the Player King Claudius (Ion Cocieru) with the dictator Ceausescu, and immediately after the revolution Hamlet (Ion Caramitru) became vice president. The set (Dan Jitianu) and costumes (Juliana Mantoc and Niculae Ularu) are sub-Ruritanian, a blend of late 19th century ...

... Blood Wedding BLOOMSBURY AN ARRESTING production of Lorca's 1933 play, a curious mix of the lyrical, the fantastic, and the tragic- the first play in his great trilogy dealing with the passions and frustrations of the peasantry. Ably directed by Edward Wilson, this translation by Michael Dewell and Carmen Zapata captures the simplicity of the poetic language used, and the ballad elements ...

... Lost horizons PETER HEPPLE on the man who would be king of his own castle GARRICK Fences WITH Fences, which won a Tony award in 1987, August Wilson, whose plays Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and Joe Turner's Come and Gone dealt with quite specific areas of black American experience with a historic background, launched himself into drama on a scale akin to that of Arthur Miller or even Ibsen. ...