... Playdays: Sing a Song of Sixpence Leicester/Touring It is hard to imagine that there is much of a market in the theatre for stringing together nursery rhymes. How wrong can you be? On this occasion, hundreds of children and parents had flocked to the De Montfort Hall--in a testament, perhaps, to the strength and popularity of the television show Playdays. But if audiences expect the stage ...

... Madama Butterfly Glasgow/Touring Opera on a Shoestring is at its inventive best in this new production, here staged at the Citizens' Theatre. Subtle and fierce, this Butterfly features some wonderful singing, and a dramatic presentation unfettered by fussy staging. Loma Rushton absolutely sings out of her skin in the title role, using all the power and delicacy in her range to make the ...

... The Merry Wives of Windsor Cambridge The brainchild of Dr David Crilly of Anglia Polytechnic University, the annual Shakespeare Festival in Cambridge offers straightforward traditional productions in college gardens. And as a Windsor forest, Girton College makes a fair approximation. Shakespeare's pot-boiler has no great poetry and seems cob bled together, yet much of it works as archetypal ...

... Alice through the Looking Glass Dublin Peacock Partners, a new initiative at the National Theatre, Dublin, is inviting outside independent companies to use the facilities and expertise available at the Peacock Theatre. This particular partnership has brought the Sligobased Blue Raincoat Theatre company to per form its successful production of Alice in Wonderland and premiere a new ...

... A Skull in Connemara Manchester/Touring Public parks usually house family- geared productions like Robin Hood or Alice in Wonderland. But Rocket Theatre Company has added a new dimension to open air productions with Martin McDonagh's macabre tale performed in Heaton Park. The content of this adult entertainment is dark, the humour black, and the language frank. The scene is set when a lone ...

... Pygmalion Greenwich Playhouse Even those who have never encountered George Bernard Shaw's tale of Cockney flower-seller Eliza, transformed for a bet by phonetic expert Higgins into an eloquent duchess, will no doubt be familiar with its many incarnations, especially as Lerner and Loewe's 1956 musical My Fair Lady. Surely, then, this production by Greenwich Playhouse's resi dent Galleon ...

... Ken Campbell's History of Comedy Part One: Ventriloquism Cottesloe Only for one small segment of this monologue does Ken Campbell attempt to ventriloquise and he openly admits his ineptitude at the art form. Closer to stand-up than theatre, his brief history of ventril oquism is a homage but also a springboard into his own observations, reminiscences and anecdotes. The exaggerated, contorted ...

... Spectacular show of force Stratford-upon-Avon Henry V Soldiering dominates Edward Hall's spectacular production of Henry V at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, the last and most brilliant in the sequence of the four Histories. Exploding shells and ingeniously simulated landing craft mark Agincourt as a modem battle waged by the English in combat clothes and the French in riot gear, but the ...

... The Bongo Club The NeoJuturists live dangerously. Not content with their daily attempt to perform 30 short plays in 60 minutes in a sequence dictated by the audience they throw a dice at the end of each night to determine the number of new plays they will write for the following night. Which makes each night a unique production and demands impeccable teamwork and timing from the company. And ...

... Hill Street Theatre The New Seekers, bondage, whip ping and a sexually driven desire for women's high heels are the perversi ties which Negative Equity bring to this adaptation of Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch's novel for the stage. In a highly physical perfor mance, it is the whipping of Peter Machen by Rebekah Fortune that remains imprinted on the memory. Mostly from the knowledge that it will ...

... Arcimboldo 2000 Edinburgh International Festival: Edinburgh Festival Theatre Pergolesi's Stabat Mater fades out of earshot, yet Netherlands Dance Theatre's Bella Figura is still being danced, a silent and beautiful pas de deux that burns itself into the memory. That silence hung in the Festival Theatre as the stage dark ened and the curtain dropped, and remained even when the house- lights ...

... John Moloney Assembly Rooms Stand-up comedy has. in the dapper John Moloney, one of its more brazen exponents. Dry and deadpan of delivery, he divides his act into three, starting with a whirl wind ten minutes of mordant jokes with punchlines. Sixty six in all, he claims once they are done, and no cow is too sacred, or joke too old to be sacrificed at his altar of fun. But it is the next 40 ...