JANE LAPOTAIRE AT BLOCKLEY CHURCH: Following her stunning success at the Stratford Poetry Festival in August, Jane Lapotaire once again enthralled a capacity audience with a solo performance of poetry, prose, and a dash of music in a programme, centred around the subject of Christmas, in Blockley Church last Sunday. This was a star performance from a great actress at the top of her powers after fighting to recover from a major, incapacitating brain haemorrhage nearly two years ago. Thankfully, that illness can be safely consigned to history as this subtle, moving and comic display of the actors' craft demonstrated. To box the compass between the deeply touching the bawdy, the funny, and laced with some knock out one-liners and snatches of song, and including (I kid you not) a spellbinding, dead serious history of the Yule Log, is the achievement of a consummate artist. Repeatedly throughout the two hours of rapt attention in the church, the audience roared their approval. The whole evening was a joy on every front: the audience was royally entertained; the North Cotswold Voluntary Help Centre, for whose benefit the evening was organised, gained an invaluable £1,000; and Jane had recovered. Let us now see this fine actress back in her rightful place on the stages of our leading theatres, thrilling us in the great roles that are hers again for the taking.