The smaller roles are also strongly played, especially Phillips Peak as the bushy-tailed young neighbour.Perhaps it is our enhanced sense of Hester's options which means her plight does not approach the tragic. But, if it were Drama School she went on to, she would be lucky to find work so absorbing.To 13 Dec Box office: 0161-833 9833Jeffrey Wainwright. Maybe in his speech recommending duty and will, Thomas Wheatley allows us to keep too many of our preconceptions about William, but he is still roundly and sympathetically played. That she has found sexual expression through Freddie is powerfully apparent here, but at the price of every other attenuation.However, Marianne Elliott - whose direction goes from strength to strength at the Exchange - also draws playing from her male principals which shows the play's enduring strength to lie in its balance. Her reduced circumstances are baldly evoked in Geraldine Pilgrim's set in which the familiar bedsit dowdiness is fenced in by the naked skeleton of the house's copper gas pipes. Seemingly her theatricality brings her dangerously close to appearing shallow, but, as with Ibsen's Nora, her extroversion is the beating of a personality against confinement. Freddie complains that her attempted suicide is "dramatising", and, as we come to know Wooldridge's impulsive, extravagant swoops and turns - her full, red skirt swirling about her (especially as she determines to turn on the gas again) - we all but agree.But her gestures are the more desperately pronounced because their cramped rented rooms do not allow her the one thing William did provide: a social stage on which to express herself, the one thing from their life together she misses.

In Susan Wooldridge's increasingly vivid portrayal, what she craves might be described as a sense of drama. Nevertheless we should not be too brisk, for the emotional knotting of Hester, her lawyer husband Sir William, and the ex-fighter ace Freddie for whom she left him, cannot be loosed by a spot of educational counselling.Both men offer her something, but neither of them enough despite how she clings to the feckless Freddie. Since men in neither of their ordained roles - solid husband, exciting lover - have been able to fulfil her, she would re-make her own life among the diligent, determined class of modern mature students. Both exes might even attend her graduation.That such a future is only faintly discernible for the heroine of Terence Rattigan's play is the most palpable sign of how it has dated since 1952. With lines like "You can't count on a royal family to solve your problems", turns out to be topical as well as mythical.Anthony Arblaster. The Deep Blue Sea The Royal Exchange, Manchester Nowadays of course Hester Collyer would go to Art College. Kathryn Evans makes an entertaining witch, and Linzi Hateley shows immaculate style and timing as Red Riding Hood.

But this is above all an ensemble show, with a cast full of vivid characters.Kerryson missed a chance, though, of turning the two gormless princes into scions of the House of Windsor. It's a complex work to stage, but the Haymarket production meets all its demands with bewitching ease and confidence. But it also packs a genuinely powerful moral and emotional punch.All this is admirably realized in Paul Kerryson's committed and carefully detailed production at the Leicester Haymarket. It is the latest in the impressive series of Sondheim revivals he has staged there since 1992. It has all the wit and marvellous sets of rhymes we have come to expect from Sondheim and his partners It has a scintillating score.

He was unceremoniously shunted upstairs and retirement into TV punditry beckoned.Now Wednesday have given him another chance and the majority of supporters, remembering the elan his team played with, have forgiven his abrupt departure. "Careful the things you say/Children will listen" sings the witch-mother, whose imprisonment of her daughter predictably fails to stop her marrying one of the two twittish princes. And it is about the cruelty and darkness lurking in so many popular fairy tales. As the crisis deepens in Act Two, and the baker's wife is killed by a vengeful giant, the cast sings that "no one is alone", and discover that no one can fairly be made a scapegoat for what has happened.