... The Patriot Game DUBLIN ANOTHER reheated Irish stew is served up in the Peacock Theatre's production of Tom Murphy's The Patriot Game. The unbroadcast 1965 television play imposes, like its big brother upstairs, a contemporary mindset on old guard Ideals. Here the concept is a bunch of actors sitting around a seedy rehearsal hall performing historic tableaux seemingly from a book called The ...

... Baby Baby Kings Head Theatre Ci ub THE SCARLET Theatre Company create their productions through a process of devising and improvising upon a theme, working with the writer to build a script through rehearsal. Baby Baby is the result of a collaboration by the core company, Grainne Byme, Sophia Lovell Smith and Maggi Morrison, with the writer, Anne Caulfield, and the director Birte Pedersen. ...

... Dames At Sea Oldham GEORGE Haimsohn and Robin Miller have written a delightful pastiche of the Hollywood musical in Dames At Sea at the Oldham Coliseum and part of its success lies in the naive charm of those vintage years captured affectionately by Jim Wise's nostalgic music. The small cast of six play roles familiar to everyone who fondly remembers the traditional plot of finding a bam and ...

... Romeo And Juliet BIRMINGHAM At the first schools matinee of Birmingham Royal Ballet's 'new' Romeo and Juliet--in Kenneth MacMillan's familiar 1965 Royal Ballet version, newly designed by Paul Andrews--when Romeo (Joseph Cipolla rejected the challenge to a dual from Tybalt (Even Williams) the young audience was held in thrall. For at this performance's most forcefully dramatic moment, as ...

... The Return Of Ulysses ENO ENO's revival of its 1989 production of Monteverdi's The Return Of Ulysses is not a happy occasion. David Freeman's staging oscillates between the banal and the moving, though even the dodgier moments might have been overcome by stronger casting. David Roger's clever design makes for fluidity of narrative, areas of con current action often throwing up significant ...

... Eugene Onegin Haslemere PUSHKIN'S poem classic Yevgeny Onegin was a natural for Tchaikovsky's music. As he composed his fifth opera he clearly saw the potential of the letter scene which it is said he wrote first. It depicts the heroine in her most emotional state and the beauty of the composer's music in that long passage fully justified his use of the Russian's poetry. After a very poor ...

... Doctor Faust us Hammersmith THE COMMONWEALTH Theatre Company--in effect Artistic Directors Max Hafler and Tony Hegarty--have gone out on a limb with Marlowe's play by shearing it to the bare essentials so that the poetry comes across loud and clear without being obscured by any irrelevancies of production. Max Hafler plays the title role and looks younger than the often border- ing-on-middle ...

... As You Like It Greenwich AS WELL as this revival, As You Like It can be seen this year at Regent's Park as well as at Stratford-on-Avon so it looks very much as though it is one of 1992's set books. Greenwich's production was one of the first in the field and seemed on paper to have a lot going for it the director, James Robert Carson, is a former Scottish Arts Council trainee who has worked ...

... Simplicity reaps dividends Barbican Pit 'Tis Pity She's A Whore WE HAVE become so accustomed to the RSC's unearthing neglected plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries at the Stratford Swan (where this production by David Leveaux in fact first saw the light of day last year) that it comes as something of a surprise to leam that the rediscovery of Ford's play about incest is due to the last of the ...

... Polygraph Glasgow POLYGRAPH, as presented by Robert Lepage's Theatre Repere of Quebec City, turned out to be a riv eting theatrical experience, not so much for the dramatic performances of the three strong cast which were in all truth most impressive but for the brilliantly innovative special effects and settings which were so profoundly effective. In a series of film-like sequences, ...

... Making the connection Sadler's Wells La Fille Mal Gardee WITH the version of La Fille Mai Gardee shown by Ballet du Rhin, we find ourselves caught in a time-cycle in which both coincidence and com-monaliry feature. This production, by Swedish choreographer-historian Ivo Cramer, was made in 1989 for the Ballets de Nantes (where the Ballet du Rhin's director Jean-Paul Gravier was then in ...

... SiqNora Joyce New End Theatre IN 1904 AT the age of 20 a young chambermaid, Nora Barnacle, leaves Ireland to wander Europe with James Joyce. Years later when she returns to Ireland her mother says to her, You've travelled far Nora Barnacle, but you've lost yourself somewhere. The Irish Company's production, directed by Deb Jones, explores this journey in an attempt to evaluate exactly what ...