... Turning the spotlight on variety's high-flyers COMPILED BY PETER HEPPLE Emerson and Jayne is one of the best remembered acts of the variety era. The most distinctive of specialities, it featured a man and woman who were obviously top-flight dancers in their easternflavoured routines, but what made it special was the element of illusion incorporated into the act, which culminated with the ...

... Girls who want to have fun COMPILED BY PETER HEPPLE Stephen M Silverman has done us something of a service by reminding us that female comedy in America has always been several jumps ahead of Britain. Right from the early days of the silent screen there have been comediennes like Polly Moran Louise Fazenda and the great Mabel Normand. The arrival of talkies produced a dazzling new crop, ...

... ORCHESTRAL MOVES It is strange that while books about individuals usually have a fair degree of interest, those about organisations do not. Edmund Pirouet has made an excellent job of Heard Melodies Are Sweet (Book Guild, £18.95), which is a history of the London Philharmonic Orchestra. But it is the personalities who are really absorbing, notably Sir Thomas Beecham, who founded the LPO. ...

... FIFTIES THROWBACK It is right that theatre in the fifties should be reassessed and that Look Back in Anger should not be regarded as the seminal play that ushered in a theatrical revolution. In fact, John Osbome's play, while still interesting, by no means comes across as a classic by today's standards. Far more important, and first seen here in the fifties before Look Back in Anger, was ...

... Playwright's biography is mind over matter COMPILED BY PETER HEPPLE If there was ever a playwright in whom art and life were equated it was Eugene O'Neill. Most of the events of his life, marriages, parenthood, childhood, education, early manhood, are in his plays. So too are the drinking, whoring, illnesses, infidelities, and appetite for the seamy side of life that characterised his ...