The Week in the Arts
Theatre
New in London: Puppet Theatre '72, London's first festival f professional puppet theatre, opened this week and continues till March 30, with performances by various companies mornings and afternoons at Holborn Library Theatre, and afternoons and evenings at the Jeannetta Cochrane Theatre; also an exhibition, demonstrations, workshop sessions and lunchtime lectures at the Central School of Art nd Design. Details from the Jeannetta Cochrane (01-242 7040).
urrent in London: Alpha Beta, the E.A. Whitehead play with Albert Finney and Rachel Roberts as the participants n a collapsed Liverpudlian marriage, lately at the Royal ourt, moves into the Apollo, March 16; the Royal Shakespeare Company season continues till March 30 with Pinter's Old Times this week, then Albee's All Over, neither commended by our reviewer but both talking-point plays (Aldwych); the present National Theatre repertory has Peter Nichols's wry-fun-in-the-geriatric-ward, The National Health (this Friday and Saturday), and Tom Stoppard's farce-with-philosophy, Jumpers, all next week (Old Vic); the personal problems of university dons are examined in comic contexts by Simon Gray in Butley (Criterion) and Christopher Hampton in The Philanthropist (May Fair); Kenneth More plays a Labour MP with career and marital troubles in Alan Bennett's Getting On Queen's); Move Over Mrs Markham is a very funny farce (Vaudeville); and Sleuth is a cut above the average thriller, a genre whose traditions the author Anthony Shaffer doesn't take too seriously (St Martin's).
Cinema
Running and recommended: you can hardly go wrong at the Cinecenta, a four-cinema complex in Panton Street (off Leicester Square), which offers Klute and Jane Fonda's awardwinning performance, Gumshoe with Albert Finney having Bogart fantasies, A New Leaf with (and by) Mike Nichols's old partner Elaine May, and — this is the doubtful one — Straw Dogs, on which opinions widely differ; the \ iolence of Kubrick's C/ockworh Orange (Warner West End) struck critics, including ours, as more acceptably horrifying; The French Connection is fast-paced documentary-style cops-androbbers based on fact ((Carlton); Sean Connery plays 007 in Diamonds Are Forever (Odeon, Leicester Square, and New Victoria) and in a season of oldies (London Pavilion); Pasolini's version of The Decarneron isn't quite Boccaccio's but celebrates several varieties of human love with Renaissance fervour (Prince Charles); The Last Picture Show, Peter Bogdanovich's warmly-acclaimed study of Amenca the day before yesterday, will be reviewed in these pages next week (Curzon).
Television
Man Alive (BBC1, this Friday), in a special edition on 'The Question of Ulster,' flies a cross-section plane-load of ordinary people' from Northern Ireland to talk to Desmond Wilcox about life over there.
Aquarius (ITV Saturday, Scotland and Midlands, Monday) looks at the facts and fantasies surrounding Stanley Spencer, who painted the Resurrection as if it had occurred in the churchyard of his native Cookham in Berkshire, and in his time (1892-1959) was probably the most eccentric eccentric in the country.
Cover to Cover (ITV. Sunday), a lunchtime books programme, this week takes up the methods and skills of the detectivestory writer, with practitioners John Creasey, Julian Symons and Joan Fleming among those on hand to talk with frontman Bryan Magee.
Opera
Sadier's Wells Opera stage a double-bill, Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex and Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle at the Coliseum (in repertory with The Rhinegold from March 17). Oedipus Rex they have done before, though not at the Coliseum, but the Bartok, with Don Garrard and Ava June. is new to the repertoire.
Art
Oxtoby into Traffic, just opened at the Instituze of Contemporary Arts in The Mall and running until April 2, is a display of over 150 David Oxtoby drawings inspired by the music of the pop group, Traffic.
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