... 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 ...

... 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 ...

... Waiting for Godot Colchester A curved grey screen snakes its way at mid-height across the back wall of the Mercury stage, creating a false horizon on to which can be projected a moon and clouds. Trie bare minimalism of the set emphasises this stage's already echoing acoustic and heightens the significance or any thing on it a child's red scooter, Lucky's hat, all four bodies flat out. ...

... Accomplices Sheffield Can people still stand up for what they believe to be right or should they hide behind their net curtains and hope that the horrors on the street never invade their living room. Doreen the outstanding Anna Keaveney giving a powerful and moving performance tried to do the former and has paid for it ever since with her home constantly attacked and her family assaulted. ...

... The Lodger Lancaster Jack the Ripper's victims numbered far fewer than seen in the opening few minutes of most modem slasher movies five in total, slaughtered over a period of less than four months in 1888. Yet more than a century later he remains the most chronicled of senal killers in history. Marie Belloc Lowndes' best- selling 1913 novel on the subject inspired a Hitchcock movie but is ...