... Ken Webster GREAT YARMOUTH POLITICIAN Harold Wilson was always a sly old devil. Whenever he want ed to beat journalists over the head with a point dear to his heart, he'd pref ace by saying, I think I mentioned this at the Brighton Conference. Wily Wilson was from Yorkshire, of course, and so is hypnotist Ken Webster (well as near as damn it.) So it came as no surprise to those of us who ...

... Don't Dress For Dinner BOURNEMOUTH ROBIN Hawdon's adaptation of the Marc Camoletti farce Don't Dress for Dinner is jam-packed with laughter opportunities and the star-studded cast in this Mark Fumess/Paul Elliott production at The Pier Theatre exploits them with predictable expertise. The hilanously implausible scenario has husband Bernard, who intends taking advantage of wife Jacqueline's ...

... Central WM Club/Trades Club BLACKPOOL WITH admission prices about the price of a pint and the price of a pint considerably cheaper than some town centre pubs, it's hardly surprising that Blackpool's social club summer shows are enjoying a bumper season. Blackpool Central WM Club on Kent Road boasts the kind of cabaret room many a major venue would do well to emulate and this year it has rung ...

... The Comedy Of Errors BATH THE ENGLISH Shakespeare Company may be employing a guest director for the first lime, but Glen Walford has splendidly upheld the reputation it established with The Wars of the Roses for innovative and challenging theatre. Ine former Liverpool Everyman artistic director has discovered a whole skein of new threads with which to parcel up one of Shakespeare's more ...

... The Mirror BORDERS FESTIVAL PULLING strands from the substantial yarns of Sir Walter Scott, The Mirror, by the Rideout company weaves a lighthearted entertainment of mildy mysterious episodes. Despite dexterous work from the adapter and director, Anne Plenderleith, it is not a seamless drama, but three staunchly separate stones, interspersed with deli cious clarsach music by Elspeth Smellie ...

... Waving At The Tide EDINBURGH AMBITIOUS and unusual. The Kosch's collaboration with visual artists, Robert Callender and Elizabeth Ogilvic, poet Roger McGough, composer Howard J Davidson, and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, is a welcome and intelligent respite from the infectious pantomime silliness which has the country in its thrall this month. Diving off from the atmospheric art of Callender ...

... Have You Anything to Declare? MANCHESTER MANCHESTER'S Royal Exchange Theatre Company are ending their season with as lively and entertaining a production as one is likely to see on the English stage. This is Have You Anything To Declare? by Belgian author M. A. Hennequin. It has been adapted and translated by Robert Cogo-Fawcett the company's finance manager, and resident artistic ...

... The Lion in Winter CANTERBURY THE LION in Winter, the stage version of that stunning film by James Goldman, is Brian Rawlinson's choice of production to usher in the Marlowe Theatre's summer season. And it's a good choice. This updated history play contains conflict enough to satisfy Machiavelli, as well as being funny. The performance rests or falls on Henry, the old lion himself, here ...

... Marat Sade BELFAST THE LYRIC Players Theatre staged as its end of season production Marat Sade. The performers were young students at the Lyric Drama Studio and so good were they that it is difficult to realise that they were young people learning the art of acting. Yet on second thoughts perhaps only a young company could have become so absolutely involved in the various scenes of the play; ...

... Boeing Boeing EXETER THE SUMMER SEASON at the Northcott Theatre Exeter begins with a revival of that classic comedy of the student of form and the air line hostesses, Boeing Boeing which opened on July 10 and runs until August 9. For a play that is now 18 years old it holds its humour well, although in the present decade when comedy is more abrasive than it used to be, the characters need to ...

... Joycemen DUBLIN THE PROGRAMME notes for Joycemen include a 1904 map of Dublin which shows the points in the city in which the 13 vignettes from the work of James Joyce take place. Joycemen is performed and de vised by Eamon Morrissey, and he presents it in the traditional Irish storyteller format. The characters are taken from Ulysses, and Mor rissey keeps them in the author's chronology ...

... Postcards In A Glass CARDIFF MADNESS lies at the heart of the latest Cardiff Laboratory Theatre presentation--the bizarre, the fanciful, the evocative, the illogical, the nightmarish. It provides a jumping -off point for theatrical realisation of the physical actions in disturbed minds, and the fantasies they may stimulate in the minds of onlookers. After all, asylum tours were once part of ...