... Bull's Eyes: the Selected Memoirs of Peter Bull, edited by Sheridan Morlcy (Robin dark, £9.95) Peter Bull, who died in 1984, was what one could call a character. Of huge girth, with a face that seemed to go very well with his surname, he was an actor that everyone knew by sight, but he never took his profession with undue seriousness, describing himself as the least dedicated actor I know. ...

... ON TOUR The Diary of Anne Frank SO INTENSE is the empathy created with the audience and the nerve- wracked occupents of the concealed Amsterdam attic in North Bank Productions prsentation of The Diary of Anne Frank that a shiver of shock ran through the audience when a clumsy move by Peter Van Daan (Gareth Owen triggered off an unwelcome crash in the tension filled atmosphere. The finely ...

... I BOLTON Watching JIM HITCHMOUGH'S play was the springboard for four television series. He writes in the programme that this production is 95 per cent the original stage version. This Watching is brasher than the homogenised television series with a lot more swearing and curses thrown in. However, it has sit-com written all over it. The gags come at a pace which is more familiar to television ...

... I HARLOW The White Mountain THE PEOPLE of Harlow are fortunate to have such an excellent permanent professional touring company as TheatreVan to serve their community. ror their current tour they have chosen a play by Jonathon Ncsle which, I understand, was originally written for about 25 performers. For TheatreVan it has been adapted for a cast of five with music specially written by Michael ...

... Paradise NOTTINGHAM THIS IS a big, sprawling coproduction by Nottingham Playhouse with the author's own Meeting Ground Theatre. It uses every echoing inch ol floor space and fills it with theatrical effect. It is boldly conceived and imaginatively staged. And yet Stephen Lowe's musical melodrama is finally disappointing. It's billed as The Love of Spies in the Age of Revolution, and that it ...

... John Brown's Body GLASGOW THE INARTICULATE voice of the oppressed masses, women and children cruelly exploited in horrendous conditions in the coal mines and the factories, the burgeoning power exerted by callous industrialists over their workers, the development of the industrial revolution and the spread of ism, the surge of socialism and the powerful voice of its pioneer heroes those are ...

... Observe the sons of Ulster marching towards the Somme BELFAST IN LATTER years, the Protestant community of Northern Ireland has not received particularly sympathetic treatment by Irish playwrights. Habitually presented as bluff, bi goted, narrow-minded and uncul tured, the traditional stereotype of the 'Northern Prod' has been far from flattering. Not until the emergence of writers like ...

... The Tokyo Trip CUMBERNAULD HILARY Maclean's near 21-year-old Christine in The Tokyo Trip by Stephen Greenhorn at the Cumbernauld Theatre has a winning smile and winsome ways which mist over the strong willed woman wedded to her working class roots and love of home and family. The point driven home is that, in spite of all today's hi-tech industry, the more things change the more they remain ...

... Strained by silence EDINBURGH Kiss of the Spiderwoman MANUEL Puig's concentrated drama is given a sweaty, atmospheric staging by Theatre Workshop Company. Confined in a scant space representing the Buenos Aires prison cell, the two actors sit or stalk around their beds, like dogs on invisible chains. Alongside and behind their cell is a tangle of metal struts, used to acrobatic effect by a ...

... The Sound Of Music BOURNEMOUTH BUT how can they possibly portray the mountains on a stage? enquired one of those folk who have spent much of their lives watching time and again the 20th Century-Fox movie of Rodgers and Hammerstein's The Sound of Music. That the Todd- AO aerial photography of Salzburg made such a considerable contribution to the screen's 1966 blockbuster is reason enough ...

... The Karen Casey Show BLACKPOOL JUST as pantomimes are supposed to give youngsters their first taste of live theatre, so Karen Casey's second successive summer season seems designed to whet their appetites for fully fledged floorshows. Housed in the Pleasure Beach Ocean Suite and priced at just a cou ple of pounds for adults (children under 1 6 free) it is a perfectly pitched, budget conscious ...

... Icetravaganza GREAT YARMOUTH THE CYNICS will no doubt claim that, in choosing to stage Icetravaganza' at his Hippodrome theatre, Peter Jay has taken the easy option and avoided the traditional wrath incurred by the animal rights brigade against putting on a summer circus. But then a cynic, as Oscar so memorably remarked, is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. ...