Theatre

ROBERT TANITCH dodges the severed heads and wounded bodies in a history cycle that takes in four of the Bard's bloodiest plays.

ORIGINALLY staged in 1988, Hapgood remains one of Tom Stoppard's least well-known plays. This could have something to do with it also being one of his most incomprehensible. He extensively revised it before it was staged on Broadway in 1994, but large sections of it still lack coherent dramatic purpose.

FRANZ Lehar's operetta - frothy fin de siecle escapism - was premiered in Vienna in 1905 and its huge success was repeated all over the world.

HAROLD Pinter's play opened on Monday May 19 1958 at the Lyric, Hammersmith and closed that same Saturday, having been damned by all the daily critics.

GORDON PARSONS comes face to face with the uncomfortable mysogynistic thrust of the Bard's most controversial work.

MARGARET Mitchell's popular novel of the American civil war, a glorification of the south and an elegy to it, was published in 1936 and sold 1.38 million copies. It remained on the bestseller list for two years and won the Pulitzer Prize.

IN 1798, Joanna Baillie published three "plays of passions." Two were comedies on love and one was a tragedy based on hatred. They were received with enormous enthusiasm by Sir Walter Scott, William Wordsworth and Lord Byron.

MARTIN Crimp's new play is not easy to follow. In the opening scene, a man and his wife are clearly under intense pressure and having great difficulty communicating with each other.

SUSAN DARLINGTON examines the blurred moral ground in a clever tale about one man's journey from jobless migrant to gangmaster.

WOMEN actors are always complaining, quite rightly too, that there are more roles for men than there are for women.