... Senior minister enters Equity card dispute By JEREMY JEHU WOULD-BE actors have been told by a senior Government minister how they can use the law to force a way through Equity's controversial entry controls. Drama school graduates and working non-Equity performers who claim they are being kept out of the acting profes sion because they have never been offered any of the jobs in provincial ...

... Royal Ballet director clamps down on discipline THE NEW director of the Royal Ballet has issued a stern warning that discipline within the ranks is to be a prime concern for the future. Announcing plans for his first season in charge of the company, Anthony Dowell said: There is a young breed of dancer that questions everything, which is not a bad thing. But question ing discipline is bad, ...

... Carmen ROYAL OPERA COVENT Garden's revival of Michael Geliot's vividly naturalistic production of Carmen, staged by Mike Ashman, again delivered to us much of the riches of Bizet's score, whose familiarity, under dozens of repetitions, never diminishes the appeal of its dramatic, melodious freshness, its atmospheric colouring, and its creation, witn Meilhac and Halevy's masterly col ...

... VILLAGE THEATRE Listen Do You Wanna Know a Secret? AS THE title suggests, this new production from the Inner City company is set in the sixties. But this is not the swinging sixties now remembered with so much affectionate nostalgia. This is the sixties of the Profumo affair and the moors murders, of ruined lives and lives prematurely ended. The play interweaves the stones of two women, ...

... Boy Friend's lost charm WESTCLIFF The Boy Friend THE BOY Friend is apastiche. It is not a parody. Sandy Wilson's twenties musical of the fifties, which Vida Hope described as witty, elegant, charming and tender, is in danger of losing many of those qualities in the present production by Christopher Dunham at The Palace Theatre, Westcliff. There is much to admire and enioy; but it is an ...

... Aunt Dan and Lemon ROYAL COURT GETTING to grips with Wallace Shawn's Aunt Dan and Lemon is like trying to recollect one of those dinner party conversations that sounded interesting at the time. It is not, I fancy, the kind of play to entice British audiences, in as much as it is not about people but what two people think, the characters of the title Aunt Dan, a diminutive, feisty figure ...

... Bosom pals on a wing and a prayer Peter Hepple on Howard Goodall's tribute to the WAAFs PLAYHOUSE Girlfriends IF MUSIC were all that it took to make a musical, Howard Goodall would be up there alongside Sondheim, for he is a real musician. Although much of the music and the fine choral writing is reminiscent of his previous show The Hired Man, Goodall is a developing composer with a large ...

... The Cocoa Party DRILL HALI CONCERNED with fathers and stepfathers and which of the two the children should be loyal to, and, indeed, the whole question of the patriarchal system, Ruth Dunlap Bartlett's thirty-year-old play is, nevertheless, even more relevant today than when first written. Indeed, with broken marriages a growing trend, Bartlett's finely wrought play is definitely one for our ...

... These dames ain't dumb Ann Nugent on super human energy at Riverside Studios DANCE UMBRELLA Bartok/Aantekingen POSSIBLY Rosas, seen on the second evening of Dance Umbrella, will by the end of six weeks turn out to have been the single most striking production of the festival. For what gives the production-- with choreography by the Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, and danced ...

... Role models VAUDEVILLE Reflected Glory RONALD Harwood's new play poses the question of whether an author is entitled to ransack his family's lives to provide material for a stage work, a matter which is presumably of particular significance to him, because he himself did so in Another Time. He also, of course, used personal ence, though not on a tamuy level, m his most successful play. The ...

... The Virtuoso BARBICAN PIT THE Swan at Stratford, where this production was first presented last year, was built to show there is a rich seam of English dramatic literature quite apart from Shakespeare. Greedily, one is always hoping the RSC are going to uncover there another Congreve or Wilde, though the chances of a further Way of the World or Importance of Being Earnest languishing ...

... John Mills Entertainments TORQUAY By DAVID LOWE RAIN LEAKING through from the roof and onto the stage; freezing temperatures in the auditorium and dressing rooms, and a request by the promoter of the event for a portable stage extension, denied because of lack of advance notice despite the promoter having offered a team of his own staff to assist in the assembly of the unit. These ...