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LONDON TICKET
RELATIVE VALUES
The families that play together stay together: that at least would seem to be the thinking behind two new productions of Chekov's Three Sisters. The first, due into London and maybe even New York from Dublin's Gate Theatre, is directed by the new leader of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Adrian Noble, and stars the three daughters of Ireland's leading theatrical family, Sinead, Sorcha and Niamh Cusack. The other, due for the West End in late autumn under Thelma Holt's management, brings together Lynn and Vanessa Redgrave, acting together for the first tie in careers going back 30 years, and joining them will be Vanessa's daughter and Lynn's niece Joely Richardson. Are there any more Barrymores still around who'd like to try it for Broadway?

PRIVATE LINES
A glance at current London theatre listings indicates a West End more than usually obsessed with biographies of one kind or another: in musicals we have the lives of Buddy Holly, Martin Luther King, not to mention my own Noel & Gertie about Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence. Then there are straight plays about C.S. Lewis (Shadowlands), Clarence Darrow (Never the Sinner), journalist Jeffrey Bernard (Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell), plus two new dramas about Oscar Wilde (Diversions & Delights and Saint Oscar) and one old one by him (Salome).

PINTERESQUE
These things take a decade or so to heal, but it looks as if the quarrel which caused Harold Pinter to break off relations with the Royal National Theatre midway through Peter Hall's management there may at last be reconciled. Though Pinter always refused to discuss it (or anything about his private life, come to that) it was always believed tat he had taken offense at the publishing by Peter Hall in his diaries of details of a party which Pinter reckoned to have been private. This fall, however, the chances are that for Hall's Haymarket company, the one that has already given Broadway Dustin Hoffman in Merchant of Venice and Vanessa Redgrave in Orpheus Descending, Pinter will direct an anniversary production of The Homecoming, just 25 years after Hall gave it a London premiere at the Aldwych.

SIDE BY SIDE BY IONESCO
Thou not as yet famous for his creation of hit musicals, the late Eugene Ionesco finally  gets in front of an orchestra pit when his greatest Broadway hit, Rhinoceros, is turned this summer into a big-band show at Chichester, with Peter Hall directing. Other plans for an immensely ambitious season there include Edward Petherbridge in Graham Greene's rarely-seen Power and the Glory, Alan Howard in a long-lost Victorian melodrama, The Secret King, and Dora Bryan in Kander and Ebb's musical 70 Girls 70.

DOUBLE LEAR
While John Wood leads the summer season at the economically troubled RSC's Stratford home base with a King Lear directed by the award-winning Nicholas Hytner (he of Ghetto and Miss Saigon), Brian Cox and Ian McKellen open at the National Theatre in an immensely ambitious doubling of Lear and Richard III: Cox will be Lear and Buckingham, McKellen Richard and Goucester.

MILLER'S TALES
And the National canonization of Sondheim and Miller, prophets often without so much honor in their own native Broadway, continues space: while Sunday in the Park with George continues in the repertoire, the NT announces major revivals of The Crucible and Miller's semi-autobiographical After the Fall, this last with Michael Blakemore directing and, amazingly, a London premiere. By Sheridan Morley

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