Anyone who has not been to the Abbey for a few months is in for a pleasant surprise. The auditorium has been completely revamped into one block of seating rising from the front of the stalls to the back of the old circle. It’s like the new Trafalgar Studios, only much better done, and much more comfortable.

Gone is the old torture of the blue reclining seats: welcome to cosy red comfy ones. Still, the director Fiach Mac Conghall — a man whose name is easier to say than to spell, believe me — insists that the Abbey will be moving soon to a new site. This seems a shame when they have such a nice new theatre up and running.

The first Saturday night of the Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival saw the first preview of Roddy Doyle’s contemporary West Dublin pub take on The Playboy of the Western World: mutterings already in diehard quarters about the playboy being a Nigerian son of a cocoa exporter who has not laid his da low with a loy, as in J M Synge, but pasted him prostrate with a pestle. 

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I’ve checked the weather forecast and it’s not looking good for the opening weekend of the fiftieth Dublin Theatre Festival, the oldest dedicated theatre festival in Europe and a heck of a shindig that doesn’t overwhelm you with impossible options.

For a start, the city’s fringe festival has been and gone, praise the Lord, so there is no-one pushing fly posters in your face at every second step or suggesting you  see a performance of Albanian modern dance acrobats at midnight when you’ve already sat through three plays, Glory Hallelujah.

Actually, that’s not strictly true. Some Australian aerial daredevils are climbing up walls in the docklands tomorrow night, but you’ll have to make a bit of an effort to find them. They are not so much “in yer face” as way over your heads, and that’s fine by me. I hope they stay there.

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One of the most evocative moments in Life After Scandal at Hampstead is when Edwina Currie reveals how she and John Major used to whisper to each other about their next sexual assignation while sitting on the green front bench of the House of Commons.

As befits the show, there was a lot of whispering all over the place last night. First, when Neil and Christine Hamilton arrived in the flesh to see themselves brilliantly impersonated; then when the doddery, benign old Lord Montagu of Beaulieu arrived on his sticks to do likewise.

Some celebrities weren’t even in the play, shock horror: Jemima Khan, for instance, who told me that she’s planning a verbatim show of her own — about billionaires, naturally — at the Tricycle Theatre. Jemima was on the arm of Nicolas Kent, the Tricycle director, who has put Jemima together with Gillian Slovo, one of his Guantanamo Bay theatre piece writers.

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Thursday 20th September marked What’s On Stage’s Outing to see the brand new musical - Bad Girls.

Bad Girls – The Musical is based on the initial first three series of the cult favourite hit drama. Set in the fictional HMP Larkhall, it’s the story of new idealistic Wing Governor Helen Stewart and her battles with the entrenched old guard of Officer Jim Fenner and his sidekick Sylvia Hollamby, played by the much loved Helen Fraser, who brings her character to the stage. It also follows the love story that develops between Helen and charismatic inmate Nikki Wade. Other featured characters include Shell Dockley and her runner Denny Blood, old-timer Noreen Biggs, The Two Julies and the ultimate Top Dog, King-of-Gangland’s missus, Yvonne Atkins who is played by West End leading lady, Sally Dextor.

Over 100 of you turned up at Garrick to see the evening performance collecting your free programme. After the performance we had the exclusive opportunity to meet the cast and, of course, grab your free glass of wine!! As a bonus not only did most of the cast turn up (Helen Fraser, Sally Dextor, Julie Jupp, Nicole Faraday all in attendance!) but also at the bar and mingling around was Maggie Norris (director) and Kathy Gotts  (music & lyrics) - a real treat with many of you taking the opportunity to ask questions about how Bad Girls - The Musical came about.

 The evening was fabulous with many of you staying on and chatting with the cast and creative team. With lots of chatting, picture taking and programme signing going on, a fantastic evening was had!

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 Please do comment on the outing and send in your pictures if you have any!

 Many thanks to all who came along or helped make this event a real joy.

- Ryan Woods (Sales & Marketing)

Well, I suppose we’ll get used to it, but the new statue of Laurence Olivier by the National looks more like Peter Pan than Henry V. And more or less nothing like Olivier at all. Although it’s life size, it looks small and puny and conveys nothing  of the great actor’s grandiloquence, sexiness or vitality.

At least it’s mounted on a large plinth. “Plinth Philip or Plinth Charles?” John Gielgud was reputed to have cried when assured by Peter Brook that a big golden phallus in Seneca’s Oedipus at the Old Vic would be so mounted.

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One of the greatest productions of a Eugene O’Neill play I’ve ever seen opened in Galway last night and the chances are that it will be coming to the West End fairly soon.

Garry Hynes’s revival for her Druid Theatre Company will no doubt storm the Dublin Theatre Festival in early October, and Marie Mullen’s performance as Mary Tyrone will be hailed there as the pinnacle achievement of her illustrious career.

Like Beckett, O’Neill is really an Irish writer. His play of old sorrow, “written in tears and blood,” as he said, portrays his own drug addict mother, his mean and moody actor father, his drunken elder brother and his own tormented self with terrifying candour. For most Irish Catholic families, there is nothing remarkable in this. I sometimes think that my own, for instance, makes O’Neill’s play look like a Ray Cooney farce.

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I really do hope that the forthcoming season at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, is a resounding success because the artistic director, Jonathan Kent, may have to buy some new shoes quite soon.

In today’s Telegraph interview, Kent is snapped glaring seriously from a theatre box with his left leg cocked on a gilded balcony to reveal his sole coming away from the body of his left loafer. It is a nice “poor theatre” touch in the context of London’s most gloriously baroque theatre venue.

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So with less than month to go to the Launch Night - the programme of new shows has been announced for this years event at Upstairs at the Gatehouse.

The shows are listed below in alphabetical order and details of the schedule can be found at

www.perfectpitchmusicals.com

Tickets can be booked for just £10 on 0208 340 3488 or through TicketWeb.

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One really does wonder sometimes what world Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, inhabits. The same one as us? I don’t think so. The other day — and it was bad sight of the year, frankly — he broke down and wept while apologising on our behalf for slavery. Thanks, Ken, but I’ll try and make it up to our black brothers off my own bat, if it’s all the same to you. I’d much rather have seen him apologising for bendy buses and the congestion charge.

The obscenity of Livingstone’s political posing is only matched by the stupidity of his transport policy. His ideology is rooted in the belief that we should all be on bikes, not in cars. To those of us dedicated to enlarging our carbon footprints with the aid of petrol-guzzling cars and holiday breaks on Ryan Air, this is a terrible slap in the face.

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Bad Girls — The Musical opened last night in the West End, but you won’t read any reviews until tomorrow. That’s because the producers, in their so-called wisdom, wanted the critics to experience “a real audience” on Press night, while the “gala guest night” — full of phoneys, pseuds, minor celebrities and hangers-on, as opposed to “real people,” I suppose — goes full steam ahead tonight unhampered by scruffy critics in their bad haircuts, plimsolls and Tesco bags.

Unfortunately, the “real audience” was rather thin on the ground last night. You could have shot a stag in the back section of the stalls. And as a “real audience” is untutored in the strange rituals and palaver of a Press night, many of them turned up half an hour late and started banging around in the auditorium just as the prison girls started to get down and dirty.

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