... 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, ...

... The Best of Radio Active EDINBURGH RADIO ACTIVE, at the King's Theatre, Edinburgh, fail in making the transition from the Festival Fringe where, according to reports, the team sparkled in last year's Festival. Their performance on the first night took place before an audience which had difficulty in filling one-third of the stalls. That audience was rapturous about the performance of four men ...

... A Criminal Suggestion FATHERHEAD PHILIP GUARD'S A Criminal Sug gestion is two for the price of one with a wordy and interesting medical discus sion wrapped up in a spine-chilling thriller. Both aspects were well received at the Thorndike, Leatherhead premiere. The basic discussion is about vivisection as a doctor/scientist researches in his Suffolk home for a diabetes cure. He sees no moral ...

... Heartbreak House MANCHESTER IT HAS taken a long time for Manchester's Royal Exchange Company to get round to a Shaw play, but on the evidence of the current production of Heartbreak House the wait has been well worth while. The oddly assorted members of the Shotover family engage in long and sometimes apparently inconsequential conversation and there is bitterness, if not tragedy, lurking ...

... An updated Restoration comedy COVENTRY She Would If She Could MICHAEL BOYD's production is full of inventive ideas, not the least being his main theme of using Etheredge's Restoration comedy to reflect back to us the sour face of our own permissive society. The aristocrats and dandies ol London in the 1680s become the trendy academics of Coventry in the 1980s, with a class structure of ...

... Plunging into Romantic period NOTTINGHAM Mary Stuart NOTTINGHAM PLAYHOUSE has plunged into the Romantic period with Srhiller'* Marv Sruart. Having to contend with the recent rerun of television's Elizabeth R, it keeps away from its Shakespearean milieu by putting it into late 18th century costume. The tough domestic plotting of Elizabeth's court thus takes on the more subtle gloss of ...