The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 16

The Ai THE OBSERVER REVIEW. 27 AUGUST 167 SOUTHERN DISCOMFORT Laying into Rome byJ.M. CAMERON 16 by MALGOIiM MUGGERIDGE PAOti RLNSEt4.RJD ON VATICAN by Pan! Blanshard (Alien and Unwin 36s) 3l i Edith Evans in The Whisperers see below. SULTRY September night in a enall Mississippi town. Neon-Agos flicker around the seedy little cafe' where a soda-jerk idly snaps it-flies with an elastic band.

A patrolman bubbling at his straw Bnishes his drink, drives on down silent, glittering streets, pauses CMitsjde a window where a naked girl languorously airs her body, and finally comes to the dark alleyway where a prominent citizea lies with his head beaten in. Never taken a homicide picture before, ion? the blasd police chief arriving on the scene asks a flurried young photographer and yithin minutes a coloured man waiting at the railway station has jjeen hustled in for murder. This isn't as you might imagine a pene from 'Hurry Otto Breminger's 142-minute Deep South ita-and-colour spectacular, which has tpnk way down this column like cold met pudding. It is the opening equence of a brilliantly moody, Stilrlcy little thriller called In The Heat Of The Night (Leicester Square Jheatre), which is undeniably a colour problem picture but doesn't make a meal of iL What did you hit him with asks the hectoring police chief (Rod Bteiger). Hit whom? asks the Coloured suspect (Sidney Poitier) with Studied grammatical accuracy, before flitely whipping out his policeman's idge and introducing himself as irgil Tibbs, No.

1 Homicide Expert 5n leave from Philadelphia. And before long he is sniffing out the facts with the maddening flair and iiplomb of a Sherlock Holmes. The locals don't like it, of course, Snd the bovine, gum-chewing Steiger, 3fho resents the intruder but crossly realises that he can't quite do without Jus help, becomes a 6ort of muscle-Ban Dr Watson, always on hand to iale his sassy black Sherlock out of trouble with the town hotheads. Their relationship is cunningly built up as mutual irritant in Stirling Silli-jbant's coolly witty script. Nono that for you, hey Virgil? asks $teiger as they pass a field of iploured cotton-pickers; and Poitier's Sisdain to answer is a sign that after squalor around her and living a life of arrange, private illumination.

But it really requires a 'Bresson to paint an inner world so precisely that it becomes exterior. Bryan Forbes settles for a literal approach, so that what we get is a mad old lady surrounded by welfare Workers and slum neighbours who have all the two dimensional crudity of Dickon sian grotesques. BDrEtlGS by PROFESSORSMinrSrtcrf late-Victorian dissidents Brad? laugh. Annie Besant and- Madame Blavatsky; Fr Tyrrell; Stewart Headlam and R. J.

Campbell; Frederic: iHarrison. jYionctrre tonway, stanton con ana trie ineffable W. etc. -is- very much "So iny taste, and anyway highly apposite today. We, after all have' reaped where.

these worthies sowed the citadel of Victorian orthodoxy they attacked and captured we have sacked, and now it stands all deserted and desolate, windows broken and-doors hanging on their hinges, filled 'only with the dying echoes of voices, some episcopal, still fatuously proclaiming the coming of a kingdom of heaven on earth. What a theme I It cannot be pretended that Professor Smith does anything like justice to its macabre possibilities, but he has patiently and skilfully assembled a great deal of relevant information, arranged it and refrained from all but. the sparest comment. Such studies are per haps better done by an- Ameri can (the author is Professor ot Theatre Arts at Pennsylvania State University) than by one of us natives. Occasional glimpses of the obvious and factual overloading are compensated for by a prevailing temper of objectivity and coolness.

As Professor Smith shows, tho assault on the citadel of Victorian orthodoxy was many pronged. Thus Bradlaugh and Holyoake. later joined by Annie Besant, took care of the atheist commandos who landed by parachute behind the enemy lines. Even then there were plenty of fifth-columnists among the beneficed clergy to enjoy undei-mining the Athanasian Creed' they were obliged to recite on Sundays. It is a curious fact that, as I have frequently had occasion to observe, clergymen seem often to have a natural aptitude tor atheism.

Shall I ever forget conducting one round an anti-God museum in Moscow, and noting the positive rapture with which he greeted each exhibit purporting to demonstrate the absurdity of everything he profess sedly believed in? Bright-eyed whiskered men in clerical collars, then, took the lead in proclaiming that Christ's king- Festival draught of FQR the English, though not for the American, reader there something a bit portentous about the title of this book. Mr Blanshard is very well known in the United States for a number of books on Catholicism and its political implications. He has, reasonably enough, been worried the political role of the Catholic Church in the very free and open society of America and his worries bave been shared by many other Americans, some Catholics included. But in his earlier books, such as Freedom and Catholic his reasonable worries have tended to merge into a belief in a conspiratorial theory of history in which the Catholic Church has played the part of Jews, Freemasons and Jesuits in the theories of others; and have been expounded in what one can oniy describe as an intolerably Philistine style. Mr Blanshard has been more, impressed by tho proceedings of ti second Vatican Council than one would have thought possible.

Ho is now prepared to allow mat there are positively valuable trends in Catholicism. He takes a special pride in the line taken by the American bishop on such matters as civil liberty and anti-semitism. He even tells us mat they blossomed forth in the true American spirit and chides them fox failing to realise that rhey represented the foremost Catholic nation in the But on the whole he is still pretty angry with Catholicism and looks upon the late Roman proceedings as no more man an ambiguous beginning of amendment of life. KB tells tu quite openly in Preface that- one of his purposes is to appraise the Council in the light of traditional American democratic He sees nothing odd or questionable in having such a purpose. He would find out what was odd about it if he were to ask any American Protestant or Jewish theologian; for they would be bound to say that if there is anything Christianity or Judaism at all, then it is American democracy that comes under theological judgment One is entitled to say that Catholicism or any other kind of theistic belief is false and socially pernicious, and from this standpoint to judge the work of the Council simply as an important happening of our day.

But Mr Blanshard so confuses the values of American democracy with an extreme liberal Protestantism (the only kind of Christianity he finds at all sympathetic) that he is always judging the events of the Council by standards that are implicitly theological For this he is extremely ill-equipped. For example, he quotes as a 'correct summary" a story from the Herald Tribune to the effect that 'stressing devotion to Mary is criticised by Protestant and Orthodox Churches alike. This must mean that he has never looked at an Orthodox liturgical text and that he is totally unfa miliar with the devotional life of Orthodox Christians. Again, he seems to think that the dogma of transubstantiation Implies belief in 'an alleged miracle for which there is no chemical THERE are several gross howfc.ii. My favourite is his contention that there is no evidence in the New Testament that Jesus had ever heard of the Assumption.

Incidentally, he doesn't know what the dogma of the Assumption is, for he defines it as the dogma that at the time of Mary's death her soul was received directly into But even on his definition his statement about the New Testament evidence is weird. But lot us all be grateful, to quo to a characteristic sentence from Mr Blanshard's conclusion, that sound institutional forms of welfare co-1 operation among all faiths are today springing Up in part as a result of the Council. It would bo nice, though, to have good look at the traditional values of American democracy at the same time. After all, if we may raise the question of the war in Vietnam, it is the.comment upon it of Cardinal Spellman that is in the American tradition, that of Pope Paul, mercifully, in a tradition that was old when the Pilgrim Fathers not that Mr Blanshard would have liked them very much landed. kan'occasion Annie Besariti of the sexual a founder revolution.

good' Graham Greene plot, ending "widx her suicide in the British Museum Reading Room a perfect tiie daughter 1 IUO Another -'fascinating figure in Professor' Smitii'santirroguea' gal- a seai. What a stupendous thing to be I But more than that his series in the Pall Mall Gazette, The Maiden Tributeijof exposing the sale of young girls for immoral purposes, which held, all London spellbound' with salacious awe, and, of course, sent the Gazette's circulation soaring up, was the forerunner of a whole new lucrative vein of journalism. Every time I read on a. poster about how some newspaper has felt bound to expose such or such hidden vicious practices, metaphorically speaking, tip my hat in Stead's direction. The good man, as I have read, grew ever more crazy with the passing years, adopting the curious fancy of naming the typists in his office after Charles ITs mistresses.

He went down with the Titanic, continuing heroically to sing a hymn when the other passengers had taken to the boats. To judge from their sayings and writings, these bizarre and endlessly diverting prophets of tho bravo new world were more eager than wise, but Thomas Davidson, in whose rooms the Fellowship of the New Life Was founded, appears to have been an exception. In 1890 he Wrote that the only beneficial result ho expected from Socialism was that 1 it will finally make clear, even to the blindest and most prejudiced, that no measure of success is to be hoped for from any economic reform, which has not for its presupposition an ethical If, he concluded, State Socialism or nationalism were the law of the land tomorrow (and it may be so before many tomorrows are over), and men were no. more ethical than they are today, selfishness would find means' to exploit arid oppress ignorance, simple honesty and unselfishness, as much as it does now, if not more. How right he wasl X.

H. FioMxtv in his recent Ford lectures, explained once more, patiently, that a Whig and a Tory Party did exist under Queen Anne, whether professional historians like it or not, and now Holmes has proved this up to the hilt, indeed, up to the pomrnard. We hope it is work that will not need to be done again. Despite the contrary influence of Court and Country, relationship and place. Members of Parliament under Anne were grouped into, parties, and accepted this fact Indeed, he goes so far as to say mat tile Whigs of the.

age of Anns achieved not only an unbroken unity of front but an underlying solidarity of purposo which was not to bo approached again by any political party in Britain until well into the nineteenth, and possibly not equalled in the twentieth. The great -popularity of Trevelyan's England Under Queen Anne and of Winston Churchill's the fact that a professional politician like Michael Foot thought it worth while to. write a book about It all, show that Queen Anne's reign is far from dead. And those who are not interested (and why should they be 7) in the historiographical questions posed here; will still plunge with zest into this detailed and sensitive account of a world as uninhibited as any that has ever been. An nrasitin which Queen Anne's not dead Warren Sylvester Smith public ownership of the means of production if not specifically mentioned in the Sermon oh the Mount, was clearly implied in the' obligation ito love our neighbours as ourselves.

Ah Thrwe- Rthi'rjil She Ji'tl -A and Abides of Love which were to usher in a golden age when war, money, matrimony and all other human ills would have been aboh'shed-where are they Audi robust VOTces William Morris. Edward Caroen- ter, Walt Whitman, little Swin burne even whatever has become of them? ALAS, their cause has triumphed a too well; yesterday's becomes today's orthodoxy. If the Fellowship of-thelfew. Life needed tboeidismed' by i jffessor SfflrHfro'nWahSpS't total oblivion, me'Fabian'iSiociety, one" of 'has; flourished' mightily, helping to bring to pass; if not a golden age, at any rate the Wilson Government As for the robust voices they nowadays are heard in unlikely places like Canterbury Cathedral and the House of Lords old Walt, who once roared so npn-sensically across the Potomac, finds himself, as it were, attired in lawn sleeves, and even manages to gain a. hearing among the Ecumenical Fathers in Rome, Italy.

Annie Besant and Bradlaugh, having, disposed of the Deity, turned their attention to another cause pregnant with future possibilities birth controL They launched the first public campaign for it, and, despite Bradlaugb's immense respectability, and Mrs Besant's immense high-mirKled-ness, might legitimately be regarded as among the sexual revolution's founding fathers. It- would be nice to think that a hipster delegation will day' lay some flowers on their tombs and suck JUSD blotting-paper in memory of th'em; A more blithe prophet in the same cause was Edward Aveling, Marx's son-in-law and the original of Shaw's Louis Dubedat Unlike Bradlaugh, he practised what he preached, and provides one of the early prototypes of the egghead Lotharios of our time who play so important a role in contemporary fictions The relations between him and Eleanor Marx would make a by J. P. KENYON BRITISH POLITICS IN THE AGE OF ANNE by Geoffrey Holmes (Macmallan 84s) and Tory, which strove for political supremacy at Westminster and from time to time formed Ministries, though nobody would insist that a party chieftain's authority was anywhere near as absolute as that of the Prime Minister or the Leader of the Opposition today, just as nobody would suppose that Anne had as little political power as Elizabeth H. Unfortunately, this simple truth was obscured by the revisionist historians of the forties, led by Robert Walcott, who used the detailed biographical techniques applied by Sir Lewis Namier to the Augustan calm of the 1750s to argue that parties under Queen Anne were' a literary my sponsored by-Swift and Addison? Oust as: the parties; of the 1760s had been formed in the agile Celtic brain of Burke).

This new orthodoxy, because it ultra-modern and. had a strongwhiff of SfliaoKjgical it, wasiopeirted tosecla found astonishing. COCHRANE. CHA 7040. N.Y.T.

UGGEH ZAGGER. Eva. 7.30. Thun 2.30. FORTUNE.

"Tern 2238. 8.0. Sat. 5.15 A S-30. PRUNELLA DEREK COLIN SCALES FOWLDS CAMPBELL THE PROMISE byAIekaci Arbuzov Directed by.

Frank Hauser. So good, and so moving Sunday "Tunes. Voted by the London Critics THE BEST NEW FOREIGN PLAY OF THE YEAR. GARRICK BRIAN RIX Theatre ot Laughter (Tern 4601) Ev 8 2.45 Sat 3.45 8.30 UPROAR IN THE HOUSE Nn Wk. Stand by your Bedouin 1 Wfc after rtot Sletpln Wires Lie AN HILARIOUS HAT TRICK GLOBE.

(Ger 1592.) Evenings at 8.15. Sat 6.0 and 8.40. Mats Wed. 2.30 GERALD BELINDA' WILLIAM FLOOD CARROLL FRANKXYN There's a Girl in my Soup Smash Hit Comedy by. Terence Frisbr SPLENDID ENTERTAINMENT D.

Ex. NOW IN ITS SECOND YEAR' I HAYMAHKET THEATRE. WHI 9832. Opens Sept. 7 Ralph Angela Thome Jack GwOlim.

Karin PriscBla Monn. Geonrey Whitehead In THE MERCHANT OF VENICE Now at NEW THEATRE OXFORD (Copltnncd on. Pate IT) OCT. 16 ISA to do what his conscience says is right and you know, too, that the good but temporarily distracted heroine will have a chango of heart because she really did love her old black mammy. It would be nice to add that Premlnger directs it all with the flair which made The Cardinal so enjoyable in spite of everything, but he doesn't.

The whole thing remains a lumbering, antiquated melodrama, put together in the sort of crudely opportunistic style which alternates scenes of the rich folks parading in a stately mansion with shots of the poor sitting down to their humble board, while thumping mood music underlines the contrast. Jane Fonda, Michael Caine, Burgess Meredith and Diahann Carroll are among the actors who do what they can. Another disappointment is Bryan Forties's The Whisperers (Odeon, Marble Arch), a clumsy adaptation of the Robert Niccdson novel about an old woman locked up in her private world of obsessions and delusions of grandeur, which looks rather like a great performance in search of a film. Edith Evans gives intimations of real magnificence as she shuffles about total seLf-absorplion, a disreputable old bundle oblivious to the bearded Balkan bounder or one of our little yellow friends' renting their spare room, was seen recently on television, and remains little more than a skilful but forced exercise in escalating hysteria. 'Nathan and Tabileth' Is better: a study in the polar cold and stupor of extreme age, when the mind has withered to the single tense and rudimentary syntax of Dr Seuss's children's books.

It's finely acted by June Jago and Robert Bernal as the senile pair, beautifully framed by Harry Waist-nage in a cramped cage of snowy, translucent screens which mirror their shrunken consciousness and the half-reality of the world outside, and imaginatively directed by James Roose Evans. But it's oddly un-moving observed with fascinated precision rather than profound feeling. The result is telling but bleak as one middle-aged lady observed on the way out, it should carry an certificate excluding anyone over 65. On the Fringe, it appears a year of boldly adventurous near-misses -many more new plays than usual, but nothing to match last year's discovery of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are The Oxford Theatre Group have come up with another fantastic comedy of ideas. Avalanche, Your Slip is Showing by Chris Miller.

This juggles with a fair amount of N. F. Simpsonish wit the subjects of population-explosion (the wife of a battery-chicken farmer gives birth to 51 siblings at once), bureaucracy, planning and pepple-versus-progress. But it fails to keep mem all in the air at once, and lapses in the second half into a disorganised facetiousnesi whose only unity is the cheerful ruth-lessness of a time of life at which birth, marriage and death seem almost equally academic The most professional student offerings, as last year, come from the University of Southern California drama school, 57 of whose members have once more chartered a flight to display their accumulated wares at tho Pollock HalL They've an imposing programme a gripping documentary about Lincoln's assassination in the morning, chamber-operas in the afternoon, Who's Afraid of Virginia in the early evening and, at 10.30, a slightly abridged version of SADLER'S WELLS. 01-337 1672.

OPERA ia English. Eveolnzs at 7.30. Tuesday SAMSON DELILAH Wed. Sc FA Orphcm In the Underworld. Thun.

ClDdereBa. Sat. Tbe Mask Role. ROYAL FESTIVAL HALL. WAT 3191.

Evs. 7.45. Sau. 4.30 4 S. LONDON'S FESTIVAL BALLET (until Scot.

2) THE SLEEPING BEAUTY ID ila entirety. Now nroduclion. 76 lo 2B6. ROYAL FESTIVAL HALL WAT 3191. Sept 4 10 16.

Evgs, 7.45. Sau 4.30 .0. JOSE GRECO bis SPANISH BALLET with Co. o( 50, ADELPHL Tern 7611. En 7.30.

Thar 3.0. Sau 5.30 B.30. 2nd Great Year. JOE BROWN, ANNA NEAGLE. HY HAZELL.

DEREK NIMMO. CHARLIE GIRL LONDON'S HAPPIEST MUSICAL. a long line of films in which he has been re'quired to do little but dispense humble charm, be has found a part in which be can live a little, matching resentment with resentment. But what really matters about (he film is its feeling for the bizarre, ordinary detail of the little Southern town: the heat, the dirt, the wicket-gate that sticks and the air-conditioning that doesn't work the prissy undertaker worrying because a Negro wants to use his wash-basin. Above all, this is a real cameraman's film, shot tn bright, hard colours which glitter like jewels.

Meaning no disrespect to director Norman Jewison, one suspects that when (for instance) a fugitive heads for the bridge which will take him. to safety across 'the State line, it was cameraman Haskell Welder's idea to pull back for the stunning long shot of the tiny running figure dwarfed on the bridge where a police car waits to head him off. One can certainly recognise Welder's hand in the weirdly beautiful compositions and juxtapositions which stud the film here and there almost like abstract paintings. All problems Yt. When Otto Praminger makes a' problem film, on the other hand, he really makes a problem film, and Hurry Sundown (Plaza), set in Georgia in 1 946 and dealing with the attempts of ruthless land-grabbers to dispossess a Negro smallholder, has the lot Not only blaok-ibaiters and biack-lovers, but a judge prejudiced to the point of imbecility, a consciencefui white minister serving his black brethren, a traumadsed child who screams all the time because his daddy once tied him up in his cot, and enough rampant sex to keep a stud farm busy for months.

This is the sort of film in which the good people are very, very good, and the bad ones just plain horrid. You recognise the hero because he gazes at his son, pauses for a count of three, and solemnly intones A man's got persed, the core of the play became a kind of Carry On, Mechanicals," dominated by Jim Dale in Rockerish leather and cycling-helmet. Even more than last year's Winter's he carried the evening, leaping about the stage with tireless energy, transposing the Elizabethan humour of his lines into contemporary terms with marvellous immediacy. Evidently he is a personality and talent large enough to take Shakespeare in his stride. So far, I'm afraid, he seems the only unqualified justification for the Pop approach to the bard.

Badly dated At the Lyceum, the Haizlip-Stoiber company's American production of O'Neill's Emperor Jones had to be carried by a personality of equal magnitude. As a piece of theatre, tho play's fairly indestructible; but its exploration of Negro racial memory has dated badly. Gene Frartkel's production has some handsome abstract effects and splendid dancing, but it destroys the play's simple, superb shape by wilfully ignoring the direction for a steady, rising throb of the off-stage tom-toms. Their drumming fluctuates arbitrarily the mounting, Bolero style excitement of the manhunt is thrown away. Fortunately, James Earl Jones gathers together the dissipated unity of the evening by his sheer magnetism as the fleeing tyrant TaU, commanding-eyed, with a voice as deep as his glistening chest, he gives the Festival its most powerful single moment: swinging bloodily by his heels at the final curtain, like a huge, speared beast The most highbrow official offering is the Hampstead Theatre Club's double bill by Barry Bermange, Nathan and TabUeth and Oldenberg, at the Church Hill Theatre.

I found these impressive but icy. The second, about an ordinary English couple running xenophobically amok at the thought of a foreigner some rt i ALAo I Aln SIM MICHAEL DENISON DULCIE GRAY and JOHN GREGSON WHY did a tease of fishiness haunt toe week-long through the late mngginess of Edinburgh Was it the castle, swimming milkily ver the city like a Gothic folly Jn a clouded fisfabowl Or the Striped schools of exotic invaders nosing and darting up the stickle-Back reef of the Royal Mile, tsrowded sullenly by dun shoals of natives, in their protective colours of moss and rock, swarming to tponopolise their feeding-grounds? After 20 years, the Festival is still jBaddeningly chaotic and amateurish, but it's an exhilarating change from tttp smooth artistic commerce of London. In Edinburgh, art is still a visitation, a scandal, an annual, miraculous draught of fishes. The catch has been more impressive in other seasons much of last week's seeded to be thrown back to mature but, as always, it yielded a quota of fighting, full-sized mackerel. For once, a couple of them came from the official programme.

Frank Dunlop's Assembly Hall production of Midsummer Night's Dream seemed to me to be wearing the Pop Shakespeare idea a bit thin, but it kept the audience convulsed and proved the emergence of a major comic star in Jim Dale's performance as Bottom. In general, the production suffered by comparison with the pop Birmingham As You Like It' Its acting, though broader, lacked force, and its directorial invention, ingenious In itself, often worked against toe play instead of with the startling aptness of Birmingham's Carnaby Street effects. It was a clever stroke, for example, to make the forest a moving copse of fairies disguised in potted greenery and fern-baskets the audience roared as they tripped and circumvented the straggling lovers. But it took away much of the comedy of the impersonations of Wall and Moon in the playwithin-the-play. Similarly, the direction of Hywel Bennett's Puck as a busy, half -human terrier, panting shaggily after his master and lifting his leg against the living undergrowth, robbed from Snug's impersonation ct the Hon.

With most of too fairy mood dis- This, In fact, is a week for the have-nots of film-making, for the other bonne bouche is Fathom (Carl-ton), a charminE.and wholly unpreten tious thriller which makes excellent use of its sunny Spanish locations and is directed by Leslie Martinson (of Batman fame). Raquel Welch reveals a delicious sense of humour as the skv-diver innocently involved in the pursuit of an Oriental jewel, and tangles with three amiaoiy villainous or villainously amiable gentlemen (Clive Revill, Tony Fran- ciosa, Ronald Fraser), without ever being quite sure which one is the good guy. Speedboats flash in mad pursuit over blue seas, monoplanes flown by hero and heroine describe amorous circles in the sky, and the plot has enough ingenious twists to keep the good humour going right to the end. fishes Rodgers and Hart's Pal Joey, which is easuy the best late-night entertain ment in Edinburgh. Their polish and attack is wholly adult the only youthful tiling about them is their charm.

Tom Basham'a hard, bright- eyed Joey deserves singling out, as does the high-kicking, purse-lipped uladys of Joan Maguire. Off-otT-Broadway But the sensation of the Festival, deservedly, is the La Mama, troupe, invited from off-off-Broadwav bv the enterprising Traverse Theatre as part or a festival programme which mattes the omcial one look meagre Edinburgh wouldn't be itself without a scandal, and the La Mamans pro vide it with a play called Futz, attacked as pornography by the Scottish Dally Express, with urgent representations that it be banned by the local mamstracv. In fact, it's a stunningly satirical discussion of "pornography, fanner Futz, a kind of 'sick, gentle" Dog-patch Peter Grimes, heats the tempers and imaginations ot his neighbours by carrying on an idyllic love affair with his rag. Fathers paw caughters lasciviously; a mother fixated moron murders a fori who leads him on in the moonlight With a cry of 'You make my brain Futz is lynched by the community who blame him for the thoughts he pots into their heads. Like the other of their pieces I saw, a sentimental urban fantasy called Times Square, it's brilliantly performed, in a mixture of rnfanc, song and acrobatics which comes nearer to ballet than conventional La Mama's oreed is Total theatre often at the expense of spoken dialogue (audibility takes last -place in their impressive range or sktiusj, but mostly, admittedly, in the absence of dialogue worth speaking Granted the dearth of new trans atlantic playwrights of distinction, the company offer the most exciting American theatre we've seen -since the debut of.

Miller, Williams and Albee. At tho aid of the festival they're scheduled to appear London for a fortnight at the Inter national Theatre Club in- Netting Hill. There or in Edinburgh, they should on no account be ml sum. ALDWYCH I Tern S404. RSC Ibscn'fl GHOSTS Ashcxoft a great Helen AHv LMOO.

7.3UJ. cinema LITTLE MURDERS Hilarious Et. Stan. CTu 7 JO). Stratford production ot TAMING OF THE SHREW Succeeds triumphantly Observer (W 7 30) Van bmgh'i THE RELAPSE Donald Slndcn the comic performance of the year Sun CTh iflfc 7.30).

Stratford production of AS YOU LIKE IT Dorothy Turin's Rosalind a performance to rank with her Viola D. Mill Sat 2.30 7.30). AMBASSADORS. Et. 8.

Tn. 2.45. Sata IAS. AGATHA CHRISTIE'S THE MOUSETRAP FIFTEENTH UNASHAMED YEAR 1 APOLLO Ger. 2663.

Evs S.15. Thur. 2.30. Sat 6 4 8.40. Anna MASSEY.

Ronald LEWIS. Toby ROBINS. Patrick ALLEN. THE FLIP SIDE Hush Margaret Williams's funniest comedy since The Grass is Greener E.N. Elegant, sophisticated hit." D.

Exp. Scase PRIOR LEEDS MAY MY estate sink under ground, my tenants be ruined, my family perish and myself' be damned if ever I givo you a Young Lord Powlet reply to the Tory leaders in 1710 is eloquent of the violence with which politics were conducted under Queen Anne, a violence not seen in the parliamentary arena before, even during the Great Rebellion, and certainly not since. The bloodies Revolution of 1688, by its very nature, left a legacy of suppressed passion and as well as more open discontents; this was accentuated by the uncertainty of the succession after Anne's death and the prevailing uneasiness about the future of the Church of England. Add to all this a war of unprecedented severity and expense, a general election every two or three years, and Parliament sitting for the first time in its existence for five or six months every winter, and what one historian has called tho rage of party is easily understdod. In its present form, at least, Mr Holmes's book should have been unnecessary.

Historians of the twenties and thirties, notably Trevelyan and Keith Felling, accepted the testimony of Queen Anne's contemporaries and assumed that there were two political parties in her reign. Whig COMEDY. WU 2S7B. En I 0. Sal.

3 A 8.30 JOE MELIA, ZENA WALKER A DAY IN THE DEATH OF JOE EGG A New Play by Peter Theatrical triumph E.N. Brilliant Mir. CRITERION. Whi 3216. Com.

Thnr. 7.30. Subs 7.4S. Sat 5J0. S.40.

David Storey'a KliSXUKA10I OF ARNOLD MHJDLETON DRURY LANE. Tern 8108. 7.30. Wed. 2 J.

SAT 5.30. 8.15. 2nd Year, smash Hit DORA BRYAN in HELLO DOLLY Miss Bryan makes It Heuo Dora." Tel. DUCHESS. Tern 8243.

Evs: 8.0. Wed. 3.0. Sat. 5.30 8J0.

SECOND YEAR of The bell thrUUr tar Observer. BARBARA. MURRAY In WAIT UNTIL DARK A first-rate thriller by Frederick Knott. author of Dial for Murder Telegraph. DUKE OF YORK'S.

Ocm 5122.) Eves. 8.15. Sats. 6.0 8.45. Mats.

Thur. 3.0. CELIA JOHNSON, MICHAEL HORDERN, RICHARD BRIERS. JENNIFER HILARY RELATIVELY SPEAKING by Alan Ayckboum Directed by Nigel Patrick FUN DOWN TO THE LAST DROP Times. TO LONDON TOUR GLASGOW King's Theatre, AUG.

29 MANCHESTER Opera House, SEPT. 4 EDINBURGH King's Theatre, SiElT, 11 LIVERPOOL Royal Court, SEPT. 18 Grand Theatre, SEPT. 25 OXFORD New Theatre, OCT, 2 The New Play by RONALD MILLAR from the novel by WILLIAM CLARK Directed by David TORONTO O'Keefe Centre, OPENS in the WEST END EARLY NOVEMBER.