... Dealer's Choice Belfast Patrick Marber's award-winning play may be nearly five years old but its Northern Ireland premiere, by Prime Cut Productions, breezes into the Lyric like a breath of fresh air Not that the air is exactly fresh around its ensemble of six characters, whose existences revolve around nail-biting poker games played out in the gloomy basement of a London restaurant. Each ...

... The Rivals Basingstoke Director Alasdair Ramsay and designer Elroy Ashmore have done to Sheridan's play what many try to do to Shakespeare and fail. To inject some variation into a well tried and tested play is always a risk and to mix tradition with contemporary art is often an interesting combination. Costumes are traditional, but with a quirky addition. Each character wears the bouffant ...

... Snapshots Manchester Sibling rivalry taken to the extreme and viewed through a series of snapshots is the main theme of this new work at the Royal Exchange Theatre. Written by Fiona Padfield, it is an adult play which concerns two sisters. Catherine and Lian. They are embroiled in a confused relationship of love and hate. Jessica Lloyd and Amy Marston give fine performances as the sisters, ...

... The Flag Chelmsford/Touring Alex Ferguson's free adaptation of Robert Shaw's post-First World War novel is Northern Touring Theatre Company's spring show. As Ferguson notes, Britain had then become a vast psychiatric ward, through which the victims of Armageddon wandered raving neglected, unknown, until they died. A seven-strong cast play out the drama on Cath Young's bleak scaffolding ...

... Bath The Free State Janet Suzman's play at the Theatre Royal, in which she stars, as well as co-directing with Martin L Platt, is described as a South African response to The Cherry Orchard. It is actually a close adaptation, transposed to South Africa with inserted sequences of political discussion to illuminate the play's application to its new setting. The Ranevskys are now liberal white ...

... Taut study of sexual ethics Edinburgh Parsifal Scottish Opera has created a magnificent version of Wagner's work, the first in Scotland for 30 years. Director Silviu Purcarete has organised a stately, timeless feel to the production, but the real applause should go to music director Richard Armstrong whose conducting brings the opera to life. As the stage fades from grey to reveal the ...

... Light Almeida Theatre de Complicite's staging of Torgny Lindgren's novel is, as is its wont, company-created under the direction of Simon McBurney, who also composed the text with Matthew Broughton. i lie resuu is a uufisiaiiuy inventive but sprawling and tonally uncertain work repeatedly in danger of losing its way and its audience. A plague-decimated medieval village is left with no ties to ...

... Road to Heaven Lyric, Hammersmith The therapeutic properties of showbusiness have never been better demonstrated than by this show at the Lyric, in which the youngest performer is in the late sixties and the eldest nudeine 90. It began life in a low-income meal site for the elderly in North ampton, Massachusetts, created by Bob Cilman as a diversion for the old folk, something in which they ...

... Worthy display of family strife York Behind the Scenes at the Museum This first stage version at the Theatre Royal of Kate Atkinson's highly acclaimed novel could hardly have a better home. The story, telling the turbulent and dysfunctional family history of character Ruby Lennox, is set in York, which also happens to be Atkinson's birthplace. Bryony Lavery's adaptation and Damian Cruden's ...

... The Cinnamon Veil Cochrane Presented with the chance to blend the rampages of proto-colonialism with Oriental fables, Sara Clifford has woven together an intriguing array of elements in this play, produced by Theatre Melange. Her ingenious allegory pits Vasco da Gama (Eliot Giuralarocca) against Sinbad the Sailor (Abi Gouhad) in a race around the Indian Ocean to be first to discover the ...

... Harrv and Me Croydon TV land fast, brash, self- absorbed and oblivious to reality. Ray Goodenough, the producer of The Harry Harrod Show, is the epitome of the programme he is so desperate to save. The critics hate the show, guests hate the show and even the production team hates the show. Ray (Ian Saville) will not be beaten. In a frenetic opening of bad tempers, profanity and spot on ...

... Hopeless Games Belfast Festival The vibrant dance-pictures created by the five dancers of the Russo-Geiman company Do/Fabrik are one minute lyrical, fluid, joyous and life-enhancing, the next violent, grotesque, jagged and macabre. I his was the Tirst time that the collaboration between Potsdam's Fabrik Theatre and the Do-Theatre from St Petersburg had come to Northern Ireland, but the ...