Olga Ivanovna is animated, clever, pretty, passionate and trapped in a small town, in a country that views another state, and another language, as holding the key to all elements of high culture. What is she to do? She twirls, she glows, she leaps around, collecting every visiting “star”, every scrap of local talent, shining desperately as the life of every party.

You might remember the actress Amy Stratton from Brookside and Coronation Street (as Jenny Gibson and Davina Dawes respectively, so I’m told), but at the Union Theatre in Southwark now she is Olga, a spectacular, sparkling, but oh-so-fragile Olga.

And she’s the undoubted shining light of an ambitious production, The Little Dressmaker, which Linnie Redman has adapted from Chekhov’s short story “The Grasshopper”. This is commonly presented as a morality tale about the dangers of thoughtless following of emotion, but, taking a feminist slant on the story, my sympathies are with Olga.

Perhaps the men in the town have few opportunities, certainly there are few for her friend “the Musician”, played here in a technically virtuoso performance by David Laughton (on piano, violin, squeeze-box and balalaika). Despite his skills, he is reduced to camp posturing and disappointed flouncing, but how much fewer are the chances for women?READ MORE

Of course the Guardian has not been able to resist making it into a joke, but it makes perfect sense: San Francisco is planning to use dog faeces to generate energy. The city already recycles 60 per cent of its waste, but plans to further reduce the total by 75 per cent by 2010. Four per cent of the residential waste now is dog faeces, so this is obviously a problem to address.

Sunset Scavenger will place biodegradable bags and what are tastefully called dog-waste carts in a popular San Francisco dog park. The dog poo will then be put into a methane digester, where bacteria will eat away at it for two weeks before it turns into methane gas. The gas can then be used to power appliances such as cookers and heaters that currently run on natural gas. It can also be used to generate electricity.

Of course it is a gift to cartoonists, but it also sounds perfectly sensible to me, particularly having just been down to Regent’s Park, where I noticed what someone was complaining about in the local paper – dog-owners who “scoop the poop”, then dump the plastic bag on the spot. Of course you couldn’t collect all dog faeces, but I’d bet the daily quantity across Regent’s Park would be quite significant. And a lot of it already goes into specially designated bins.
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There seems to be some confusion about when it started – according to Green Party sources it is today – but anyway, finally London is getting some (reasonably) green buses, which arehybrids that run a lot of the time on battery power. When running on diesel, they are charging the battery and braking also helps to charge it.

Get a pension, they say. Invest for the future. We’re making it simple, they say.

Ha, I say.

The Independent was in the process of changing pensions schemes when I left. I went with the new one, because there was supposed to be extra back-pay paid into it. Whether or not I got that money who knows; it all got so complicated I gave up worrying about it.

So I’m with the new scheme, and I continue that as a stakeholder pension, contributing a modest amount myself each month.

But the money from the old scheme was not – for reasons I’ve given up trying to obtain – paid into the new one. So I’ve already got one scheme, my ex-Times one sitting around (which I haven’t heard from for a couple of years – must chase that down), and I think I might as well amalgamate these two newest ones, to make it easier to keep track of them, and hopefully ensure I’m not paying too much in fees.

Current tally of phone calls: eight; current tally of letters: six. Have I managed to transfer the money yet? No.

Got to write another letter.

Grrrrrr!

… although I doubt you’ll have to think long and hard, to find a topic appropriate for International Blog Against Sexism Day. Whether you vent your speen on the subject just about every day (like me), or usually fume in silence, this is a day to put your heart where your brain is …

And the day – March 8. International Women’s Day, of course. But you knew that.

Men are particularly encouraged to participate.

Dry, serious scholarship, disapassionate criticism – that’s the theory of research and reviewing of the arts. But emotion it seems, is breaking out all over.

First, a German academic has claimed that not only does she know with certainty what Shakespeare looked like, she also knows how he died.

Prof Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel said she could prove that there were at least four surviving portraits of the playwright. … Startlingly, she said swellings close to Shakespeare’s left eye, which she says are clear in several of the contested portraits, are evidence that he had lymph cancer. By dating the portraits, she said, it was likely that he had suffered for around 15 years in increasing pain and died from it.

Now of course, what Shakespeare looked like on one level doesn’t matter one jot, but there is human curiosity – and an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery opening soon, which happens to claim that only one of the portraits is actually of the bard.

So distinctly unacademic language – “rubbish” is not usually an academic word, at least in reference to a scholar’s work.

Then in Germany, a critic has been punished for a nasty review by having a dead swan dumped in his lap. After this his notes were snatched and he was chased from the theatre in the middle of the performance, in fear at the least of his bodily integrity.

The unfortunate critic, Gerhard Stadelmaier, of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, became a target because of his old-fashioned ideas about how theatre should be staged.
“This rubbish theatre has gone too far,” he said yesterday. “It is robbing us of our imaginations. When blood is called for you do not have to squirt syrup. Sex and desire do not have to be made flesh. You don’t have to show everything, but you do have to act.”

The actor claimed that he was merely trying to involve the audience.

I hereby put it on notice that although I’m a theatre critic, I’ll pass on the swans, or even sparrows, thanks.