I don’t have a single favourite piece of music , but Stokowski’s precis of Wagner’s Parsifal had a massive effect on me when I was a teenager. Their rock-chick antics – duelling guitars, sarcastic Satanic gestures – reinvest cliches with energy and spontaneity And isn’t that what pop’s all about?. Donnelly’s honeyed voice unfurls on the acoustic-guitar solo “Sweet Ride”, and then it’s back to basics. Feverishly strumming, the two women rest their heads on each other’s shoulders during the hit single “Feed the Tree” After all, it’s exhausting being this good Belly play a tight, perfectly crafted set. But combined with heavy-duty instrumentals that rock out and feed back, her melodies-through-the-mayhem ensure songs both hummable and powerful.A new track, “Lilith”, starts ethereally, and Edwards clasps her hands in mock prayer. Another familiar, though less austere, television face, Lesley Joseph, better known as Dorien in the BBC1 comedy series Birds of a Feather, plays the matchmaker Frosine, and Simon Coates, fresh from Cheek by Jowl’s controversial all-male production of As You Like It, plays Valere.n Continues to 16 September Booking: 01243 784437.

It’s an absolute obsession with some people.”Richardson, returning to the stage for the first time in 14 years after a distinguished career in television, gives a great performance and one that is frequently hilarious as, for example, in the sequence when – blinded by spectacles he doesn’t need in an effort to appear older to a girl he’s been told goes for antediluvian men – he flounders down a staircase in ancient top hat and tails (or rather tail), waving his cane about like some chaotic cross between Fred Astaire and Oedipus at Colonus.The supreme assurance of Richardson’s comic timing seems to have infected the whole of this breezily confident production which appears, like the audience, to be having itself a ball. Everything is subordinated to the war effort, a fact that Richardson conveys with a casual, elating comic lack of consciousness about ordinary human feeling (on being told he’ll survive his children and grandchildren, he mutters “O good” with the off-hand satisfaction of someone hearing of a slight rise in his shares) and the blinkered belligerence of the kind of obsessive who unconsciously attributes his own fixation to the rest of the world “It’s always money, money. You could mistake this measure, and the cyclist who has to generate electricity holed up in a cupboard, for environmental friendliness, were it not for the superglued-on ornaments, chained-up furniture and a burglar-alarm system that would daunt Heath Robinson.With the demeanour of a moustached, irascible colonel, Richardson plays Harpagon as a chap who knows there’s a war on: the enemy, the rest of mankind; their objective, to get their hands on his money box. Indeed, for several minutes, no intelligible word is spoken, as we follow Ian Richardson’s sublimely funny miser through his early morning rituals in a mansion that’s an Arctic temple of paranoid cost-cutting.
Wearing a characteristically nicked Hotel George V towelling robe, he brews his coffee by painstakingly pouring the contents of his hot-water bottle into the pot. Not that there aren’t some excellent verbal jokes in Ranjit Bolt’s clever, agile adaptation – Harpagon’s Freudian pratfall, for example, when trying to prevent his son from presenting a young woman with pearls: “They belonged to your mother of blessed money – memory.” It’s just that for the stone- deaf, there would be rich compensations. I’ve been hard put to muster more than a dutiful smile at the three productions of the piece I’ve seen previously.

But this splendidly cast version recognises that, for all the play’s sharp satirical insight into the skinflint mind, the comedy bounds along as a collection of quite broad routines that need exuberant reinvention and physical embellishing. Nicholas Broadhurst’s inspired modern dress revival of The Miser at Chichester Festival Theatre pays Moliere the highest respect in not treating him with curatorial reverence. Some excuse for not knowing these Americans then, perhaps, but a splendid sculpture, a spiral construction, by Gabo’s brother Pevsner and a fine painting by Kurt Schwitters, the collagist of genius who died in poverty in England just after the war, confirm that memory of cultural isolation from which it took us a decade to recover.n ‘1945: the End of the War’, continues to 16 Sept Details on 0171-629 7578. Looking again at the Juda gallery’s show, the sense of how ignorant we were in London in that insular period is underlined by the splendid appearance of some of the best works by Pollock, Hofmann, David Smith and Rothko. John Craxton showed there and a skinny young man called George Melly pottered around, but its usual fare of surrealist art was somewhat remote for most people at that time – perhaps it seemed too frivolous. Wildenstein put on the odd blazing Topolski show, marvellous and terrible, and Mme Jaray in Brook Street exhibited exotic works by the French primitives Bombois, Vivin and Bauchant – and Emil Nolde, an artist also shown by the small Mayor Gallery at the time, with Mir, Klee and Picasso.Apart from the Lefevre, our liveliest centre was probably the London Gallery, backed by the surrealist ELT Mesens and Roland Penrose.