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Boeing Boeing is a new production of a French farce dating from the sixties (and filmed a couple of times). Bernard (Roger Allam) lives in a Parisian apartment, and at the play's start we meet him with glamourous TWA air stewardess Gloria (Tamsin Outhwaite). But he has a secret. Aided and abetted by his world weary maid (Frances de la Tour) he is also betrothed to Gretchen of Luthansa (Michelle Gomez) and Gabriella of Alitalia (Daisy Beaumont). And as in the best of farces, circumstances come together when Bernard's old friend from the provinces Robert (Mark Rylance) arrives in town for a few days.

Rylance gives Robert a Welsh accent to accentuate his naivety - he hails from Aix-en-Provence - and his character soon finds himself close to a nervous breakdown but at the same time excited as the doors duly slam all around him.

The standout performance, however, has to be Michelle Gomez's Gretchen who has the most ridiculously over the top accent since Allo Allo, but she's fantastic at the same time.

Overall, this is thoroughly stupid fare, but an entertaining way to pass a Saturday evening - especially if you've just seen England lose dismally in Ireland on TV.

To the Red Rose Comedy Club to see Alex Horne perfom When In Rome, an attempt to get more of us speaking Latin. Of course, I passed my O Level in Latin many moons ago (Grade C), so this wasn't strictly necessary for me, but I went along.

We got there early to get some food and sat right at the front. This was obviously going to be a slideshow/Powerpoint led piece so there'd be no danger sitting right up front would there? OK, OK. If you sit in the front row at a comedy show, you've got a good idea of what's coming.

The show's in two halves with the first being largely straightforward stand-up. There's very little Latin. And, yes, we got picked on (for having popped out for some ice-cream from the corner shop across the way for dessert). During the interval, Alex's personal assistant, Tim, handed out Latin exams for us to complete. If I'm not mistaken, these were hot off a hidden laser printer and incorporated the name of a fellow front-row sittee. But mainly these were to gather names to incorporate into the second half of the show. Considering that this was to be Powerpoint based, there was no real reason for them to need to spend most of the interval tinkering with the "presentation".

Actually, I've got to say that I was very impressed with what they did with it. The show was constructed along the lines of a Fighting Fantasy Book. At each point you could make a choice - the audience had been divided into boys and girls (or puella and puellae). Xavier got chosen and boys' team captain, and was given a headband to wear.

The finale involved a Latin tug of war. I helped the boys win with a late "Quod Erat Demonstratum" and "Et tu Brute" (really!). I can't give away the ending.

Very good fun. And worth catching at the Soho Theatre in a week or so's time, as the tour concludes.

Last week, just after (re-)opening night, I got to see Christian Slater reprise his role in the stage adaptation of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. To many people, it's hard to get beyond Jack Nicholson's screen version of it from 1978. That's not such a great problem for me, as it's simply many years since I've seen the film version, and I've never been a colossal Nicholson fan.

I'd previously seen a production of the play version of Kesey's novel at the Theatre Royal Bath back at the end of the eighties (try as I might, I can't find any details on the web, which is a shame since I can't remember who played lead character McMurphy).

In this production, McMurphy's played by Slater who seems to revel in the role, while the evil Nurse Ratched is played by Alex Kingston. This was a better staging of the play than the Bath version, with the simple set dominated by the glass booth from where drugs are dispensed and Ratched controls procedings via a microphone.

Some of my companions were disappointed by Kingston's portayal of Ratched, since she's altogether more attractive than she was in the film, and wears bright scarlet lipstick. But this is completely right as far as I was concerned since her sexless life revolves around dominating these troubled men. She enjoys the power that she has. Her pressed crinoline uniform and bright lipstick are well placed.

Overall, it's an entertaining evening at the theatre. As always there's a slight issue with the mainly British cast all adopting American accents with varying degrees of believability, but overall it works well.

So where do we begin with Ducktastic? It's a new play written by the guys who wrote The Play What I Wrote about Morecombe and Wise. It revolves around someone who was previously "the biggest breakfast time magician on the Vegas strip" and who performs magic with a duck flavour (not in the Chinese "duck" sense, since the birds at this performance are, for the most part, alive).

Incorporated into the play are audience participation moments that actually scared me stupid since my free ticket, courtesy of some rubber ducks found floating in a fountain in Leicester Square on Monday morning, saw me seated in the front row.

We then end up in a world of stage magic and a duck called Daphne who might actually be able to do real magic. There's a romance blossoming between a theatre late-comer and one of the ushers.

There are puns aplenty, and corny jokes that make you wince rather than laugh.

And there are songs - they finish on the big glitzy number "Duck Knows".

All in all it makes for one of the strangest evenings in the West End I've ever had. They're still in preview, so with luck some of the jokes can be tied down a bit more, since they don't "hit" quite as much as they might, but I'm not complaining that much.

It's ages since I last went to the theatre, and that would have almost certainly been a freebie from my friend Simon who works for a theatre marketing company.

Yesterday, I read an interview with Richard Griffith in The Observer. He's in a new play called Heroes, a translation by Tom Stoppard of a French play originally called The Wind in the Poplars by Gerald Sibleyras. So being nearby at lunchtime I went in and bought a ticket, thinking that they might be cheap while this production is in preview. They aren't.

But don't let the ticket prices put you off, as this is a wonderful play. It's funny that it's on at the Wyndhams Theatre, home until relatively recently of another three piece, Art. The three players this time are three ex-WWI servicemen in a retirement home played by Ken Stott, Richard Griffith and John Hurt. There, they live a life full of nothing as they each have their own neuroses - real or imagined - to battle with. Slowly, they put together a plan to escape their presumed misery.

To say much more would be a shame, but given the calibre of the man who translated the work, expect some sparkling dialogue. Oh, and there's also a dog.

Incidentally, should you want to save yourself a few pennies when you see this play, you might consider reading this article published in today's Telegraph, an extract of which makes up the bulk of the programme. Now I know that theatre programmes are never exactly value for money, but just reprinting a newspaper interview is a little poor.

On my way home, I had the delightful pleasure to share a train carriage, for a short distance, with someone who'd make Waynetta Slob look like someone you'd want to take home to meet your mum. Now Richard Griffith is a big fellow. A very big fellow. She was bigger. Now I'm not being sizeist, but when a fellow passenger asked to sit down where she had her bag, she gave him a dirty look and let him know that a friend was getting on at the next stop. He ignored this and sat down.

I got off at the next stop, but I saw her colleague get on and feared for the life of the chap who was sitting with them in the four-seat grouping. There simply wasn't going to be room for all three of them. Incidentally the two larger people both worked for the rail company. Obviously the company in question doesn't have a corporate gym membership.