... Money, Money, Money! Poole After a five year absence, the summer season has been reinstated at Poole Arts Centre's Towngate Theatre. Historically, the venue, which flourishes from September to June, has a poor record of holidaytime business due to the lack of tion for visitors to the town. The challenge is formidable but this production from John Warwick Associates, presented Tuesdays to ...

... Maybellene-- The Living Fashion Doll Pleasance Wade through the dark sea of black-garbed media wannabes in the Pleasance courtyard and there in a tent in the corner you will stumble across an oasis of colour. Here you may purchase a ticket to camp heaven in the form of two 15-minute shows featuring a human head stuck through a black backdrop on to the dancing body of a barely two-foot high ...

... White Men with Weapons Pleasance Armed with just a script, a lone performer takes on the entire army of pre-Mandela South Africa as writer and actor Greig Coetzee attacks both flanks of a hellish boot camp for training teenagers to kill rebels in the desert. There are the staff: a captain instructing how to fill forms in tripli cate, a mad Anglican chaplain, an NCO who swears fluently in ...

... Splendour (and Outside a Crowd is Listening) Traverse This is another triumph for Paines Plough, beautifully played by an exceptional cast and directed with empathic precision by Vicky Featherstone. Abi Morgan's play centres on a defining moment in an unspecified dictatorship. The gener al has fled, leaving his vain wife Micheline (Mary Cunningham) and her traumatised best friend Genevieve ...

... Cock-Tales Hill Street Theatre Phil is a well-to-do businessman without hang-ups about being a homosexual, having always had his parents' and friends' acceptance. Yet he is unfulfilled, unable to commit, and compulsively indulging in The problem starts when the newly-discovered thrill of sado masochism, provided by exception ally dislikable Steve (credit to Alan Fellows), begins to permeate ...

... Nicholas Parsons' Happy Hour Pleasance There is something heartwarming about Nicholas Parsons dragging the bright, young things of this year's festival on to his Happy Hour to talk about, or perform excerpts from, their shows. What a marvellous chap, ladies and gentleman, as he might say. Not that Parsons doesn t have his say. There is a ten-minute slot at the start when he tries out some ...

... Far-reaching impression Traverse Further Than the Furthest Thing Zinnie Harris' excellent new play-- based loosely on the events behind the evacuation of the tiny Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha in the early sixties-- painfully captures the point at which a self-sufficient community is wrenched into the modem world of business and mass-communication. Crudely speaking, the play contrasts ...

... if I Were Me Assembly Rooms Gay Marshall is a charming lady, i all expressive eyes, big smile and engaging chat. But it takes more than this to make a good show. Here, she talks to us as she prepares backstage for her performance, sharing her troubles and angst as an American actress in Paris. Illustrating her performance with big show songs, she displays her Broadway credentials, but one ...

... Jeff Green Assembly Rooms There should be a law against Jeff Green. In fact, there probably is The 1873 Limitation of Rumpled Twinkliness (Unrepentant) Act, which no one ever got round This is Green's ninth festival, and far from losing his way as he grows older, Green just rolls up his sleeves and turns another year's experience into beautifully observed anecdotes. He is warm as he decon ...

... Eternal Peace Asylum Augustine's Zimbabwe's brilliant multiracial group Over the Edge returns to the Fringe with an unflinching look at the current state of the country. Businessman James (Kevin Hanssen), learning that war veterans have driven his father from the family farm, has to find a lot of money to save his company after nervous European backers pull the plug. As the political system ...

... Alone It Stands Traverse Five actors, one actress 62 characters on an empty set; and it works for every minute of it. The play written and directed by the awardwinning Irish director John Breen marks the 22nd anniversary of Limerick rugby club's historic victory against the invincible New Zealand All Blacks. Whether or not you are a rugby fan, The Yew Tree and Island Theatre Company's ...

... A Doll's House Royal Lyceum Who better to turn to for a bench- manVsetting production of Ibsen than the Norwegian National Theatre? Not that this Doll's House, directed by Kjetil Bang- Hansen and starring Anneke von der Lippe as Nora, is a museum piece, but one that speaks directly to the 21st century. Bang-Hansen and von der Lippe's only updating is to the depths and nuances of Nora's ...