I've never read Angela Carter's novel so I don't know how true Nights at the Circus is to either its narrative or its spirit but I do know that the dramatization of the book by Fourth Monkey is worth an hour or so of the fringegoers time.

It's a lively rumbustious piece in which the young actors bring convincingly to life the characters and animals of the circus.  The clowns are suitably tortured behind their jolly masks, the tigers pad around their wary watchers and arouse amazement and fear in equal measure when they dance on their hind legs, the chimps chatter as they swing their bodies along arms trailing close to the ground and the ringmaster struts and bellows pet pig under his arm.  There are lovely production moments; from the opening in which the clowns pop up out of the portmanteaux strewn around the stage to the rail crash in Siberia.  What's it telling us?  I don't know.  I'll try reading the novel to find out.

Thanks to my fellow theatregoer I know that Morning  is a portrayal of disaffected modern youth in all its self-obsessed, antisocial and unempathetic glory.  Well I guess if you go off to the woods with your chum and your boyfriend, the two of you toy with him, you batter him to death and then pop round round to his house to see his mum you are all of those nasty things and more.  Great production though.

You couldn't describe Karl Lagerfield as disaffected although he certainly comes across as a weirdo, albeit a loveable one, in a film running in the Fashion Festival that shows the last few days of the build up to a catwalk show in Milan. It's joyous and controlled mayhem around Karl the queen bee sitting stock still and occasionally flourishing a black leather demi gloved hand to condemn an outfit to oblivion or to produce a sketchy sketch that must be turned into a heavenly garment overnight.

He's unperturbed by the turmoil since, as he declares, he has the temperament of a professional killer.  What a hoot and what great fun.