... Tale of Two Cities NORTHAMPTON NORTHAMPTON'S Royal Theatre has an outstanding pedigree when it comes to productions of Charles Dickens adaptations. Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol number amongst highly memorable productions to come from this small provincial theatre. The latest Dickens is a Tale of Two Cities adapted for the stage by David Horlock. Directed by the Royal's artis tic ...

... Prick Song for the New Leviathan OLD RED LION PLAIN Clothes Productions invited James Stock to write a new play for production at the Old Red Lion Theatre and Stock's unusual title A Prick Song for the New Leviathan mirrors the chaos of the setting in the aftermath of the 1650 revolution in England.. In the wake of the Civil War, with the king beheaded and the churches stripped of their ...

... Pericles LEICESTER PERHAPS Victorian prudishness and its hangover has something to do with the fact that Pericles is one of the least performed of Shakespeare's works. This wasn't always the case, though, and in the Bard's time it had great success at the Globe Theatre where a bit of spice always went down well. With incest, love, an ancient Greek hit-man, a shipwreck, treachery and a wife and ...

... A winning stroke BASINGSTOKE The Cat And The Canary WHO would have thought that Ian Mullins would sign off after eight seasons as Horseshoe's artistic director with a show so monumentally typical as this? John Willard's antique Gothic comedy-thriller is pure essence of Mullins: lightweight, light-hearted escapism with a good, if undemanding pedigree and sure crowd-pleasing qualities. In ...

... Cabaret YORK THE YORK Theatre Royal Company, with its first musical for four years (except for Christmas shows), has met the special demands of Cabaret with considerable success. Director Michael Winter brought in Dudley Stevens as the Emcee who runs the tawdry revels in a low night club in Berlin in about 1930, and howls his welcome to thus un ashamed market-place of sex, tearing the ...

... Up in Sweden KING'S HEAD IT IS OFTEN SAID that the weakest pan of any woman writer's created people concerns her male characters. Pam Jems, who has put before us so many rounded women, now turns her scalpel onto male flesh and minds, in a one-act play. It begins with the airy conversation of a group of Swedish boys on the brink of adult life and ends with a ritual of violence. We know that ...

... Sound Out INTERIM LITERATE OR PRIMITIVE society and that is something in which we all live one way or another is based upon communication through words. In Terry Ruane's play, the first written about deafness by a deaf person and designed to be performed as much for hearing as for deaf audiences, Gavin loses his hearing at the age of 21. The play takes us through the next six months of his ...

... Ulysses TRIPLE ACTION THEATRE THE OTHER THEATRE season, at St Luke's, Exeter, suddenly sprang into life this year, with full houses for most events. Of the groups on view only one (7:84) was in any way connected with realistic theatre. The most successful of the rest was Triple Action with Ulysses, although there were serious Haws with the production and the idea seemed way off beam. But, ...

... This Jockey Drives Late Nights STRATFORD EAST TOLSTOY'S grim rural domestic drama The Power of Darkness is translated into urban Northern Eng land lower class life by Henry Livings in 'This Jockey Drives Late Nights, the latest production at the Royal, Stratford East. It is a sorry tale in which evil is firmly wrought, hearts are unfeeling or at best harsh and sexual emotion is hurtling ...

... The Happy Haven RICHMOND THE RICHMOND Fringe Theatre's current presentation at the Orange Tree (until November 22) is a revival of John Arden's The Happy Haven, a comedy about life in an old people's home which he wrote in collaboration with Margarette D'Arcy. i iiv. i'iuuuwuuii iOJiti nun ...

... A gem of imagination RSC All's Well That Ends Well WHAT A GEM for the handsome new RSC setting at the Barbican is Trevor Nunn's production of All's Well That Ends Well, now at Stratford-upon-Avon. Here i> a masterpiece of interpretation and staging, aglow with dramatic felicities, imagination and richness of characterisation The strange, darkling, difficult work now seems plain under Nunn's ...

... The Last Elephant BUSH THE LAST Elephant, at the Bush, is a first stage effort by Stephen Davis, a television writer, in which he looks at an old culture and modern carry-ons through a blending of brisk, bright comedy and bizarre happenings. An unsuccessful anthropologist, Edward Rumsey talks and reads a lot but so far has been unable to get anything of his own published. His wife, Victoria, ...