THOSE of us of “a certain age” who remember Arthur Penn’s iconic 1967 film of Bonnie and Clyde, starring a never-better Warren Beatty and a brilliant Faye Dunaway, are bound to look forward to the award-winning musical version – coming to Bath Theatre Royal from 30th April to 4th May – with a mixture of…
EVEN lifelong opera-lovers can sometimes feel dispirited. Opera survives on the support, generosity and love of a generation born within 20 years of the war – anyone looking around them in the stalls, or the grand tier, or the balcony or, frankly, even the amphitheatre of the Royal Opera House might be forgiven for wondering where…
BATH Gilbert & Sullivan Society pays tribute to a great British tradition in its spring show, an Old Time Music Hall, at the Mission Theatre from Wednesday 24th to Friday 26th April at 7.30pm, with a Saturday matinee at 2pm. Much-loved for their regular G&S productions, the multi-award winning Bath society has also staged popular…
ONE of Alan Ayckbourn’s most popular plays, A Chorus of Disapproval, comes to Salisbury Playhouse from 30th April to 18th May, with previews from 25th April. Directed by Gareth Machin, the artistic director of Wiltshire Creative, the large cast features Damian Humbley as the hapless central character, Guy, and Robert Bowman, seen last year in…
WE Brits really do love our murder mysteries, and now Salisbury’s Studio Theatre has found an ancient Agatha Christie that tells a rather different story, but with all the essential elements thrown in, all ready for a two-week sell-out staging. The provenance of Love from a Stranger is a bit of a mystery in itself,…
IN the mid 1990s, a survey of the most performed plays in the UK named John Godber as the third most popular playwright behind Shakespeare and Alan Ayckbourn. By comparison with the Bard of Avon, who still remains unchallenged at the head of affairs, and Alan Ayckbourn, although not quite as popular as he once…
THE 2024 Bath Festival, running from Friday 17th to Sunday 26th May, will take audiences on an astonishing and exciting journey through some of today’s most exciting writers, challenging thinkers, hilarious comedians and brilliant musicians, with subjects that range from the climate crisis to silent horror classic Nosferatu, from the Sky at Night presenter Dr…
DORSET artist Gary Cook has spent much of the past year sketching in the landscape around the Daylesford estate on the Cotswolds, and the results can be seen in a new exhibition, ReWolding, at Daylesford from 16th to 29th April, capturing the unique atmosphere and beauty of this area of sweeping hills, wooded valleys and…
THE iconoclastic Living Spit, led by Stu McLoughlin, now sadly without the late Howard Coggins, tackles one of the greatest stories of all – The Passion, in their latest show, touring this spring, with performances continuing at the Blakehay Theatre at Weston-super-Mare from 25th to 27th April, The Theatre Shop at Clevedon from 29th April…
A GENEROUS legacy has helped the National Trust to plant 5,000 trees as part of two new hedgerows on the Golden Cap Estate on Dorset’s Jurassic coast near Morcomeblake. Once established, the new hedges will become crucial wildlife corridors, absorb carbon, create shelter and provide a food source for a wide variety of birds, mammals…
THE distinguished conductor Mark Wigglesworth has been announced as the new chief conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. He will take up the role at the start of the orchestra’s 2024-25 season in September, when Kirill Karabits, the BSO’s inspiring chief conductor for the past 15 years, becomes Conductor Laureate and artistic director of the…
HIGH ropes experts have installed cameras on the cliffs near the National Trust’s Dancing Ledge in Purbeck to monitor the last known nesting site for puffins on the mainland of southern England. It is hoped that the cameras will reveal why these iconic birds are on the verge of extinction. In the early 1900s, puffins…
YOU probably know that rice is grown in Europe – mainly in Italy. Carnaroli, arborio and vialone are three varieties of rice which are used for risotto and are readily available in good food shops and supermarkets. You might think that was “European rice” – but in fact European rice is something different, grown in…
TINY Clouds Hill, near Wareham, where TE Lawrence – Lawrence of Arabia – lived in the 1930s, is now open for the 2024 season. A previously undiscovered photograph shows one of the families who previously lived in the remote cottage – and gives an insight into its appearance before Lawrence. One of the National Trust’s…
BATH Theatre Royal has announced a season of plays next summer, in which the actor will star in David Hare’s Grace Pervades, and will direct Harriet Walter and Gloria Obianyo in Shakespeare’s As You Like it. Booking opens for both on Wednesday 27th March (if you are an Associate member) or, for Friends, it’s Friday…
BRISTOL Hippodrome is one of four regional theatres chosen to host a tour of Player Kings, director Robert Icke’s adaptation of King Henry IV parts 1 and 2, starring Sir Ian McKellen as Falstaff. The nearly four-hour reworking of the two plays will be at Bristol from 3rd to 6th July, following the end of…
A SHAFTESBURY bookshop, which specialises in nature writing, has been named as the best independent book retailer in the South West. FOLDE Dorset has won the British Book Awards Independent Bookshop of the Year competition for the South West, organised by The Bookseller magazine and judged by a prestigious panel of industry specialists, authors, journalists…
PLAYWRIGHTS Ian Hislop and Nick Newman took the script that they part-wrote for the Hollywood film A Bunch of Amateurs, starring Burt Reynolds, and turned it into a stage play, which has been chosen as the spring production for Frome Drama Club, at the Merlin Theatre from 25th to 27th April. The two hugely talented…
NOEL Coward’s Still Life, better known as the stiff-lipped weepie Brief Encounter, focuses on genteel star-crossed lovers Alec and Laura, thrown together when she gets a sooty smut caught in her eye on a railway station. In the film, their love is a tragically doomed affair, but in this more nuanced adaptation by Dorchester Drama…
THE summer 2024 exhibition at Salisbury Cathedral explores our relationship with the earth at a time of environmental crisis and change. Opening to coincide with World Earth Day (22nd April), the exhibition runs to 6th October and includes works inside the cathedral, in the cloisters and on the lawns. The background to Our Earth, curated…
SALISBURY Cathedral has a week-long festival in May to mark the centenary of one of the major figures of late 19th and early 20th century English music, Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. The festival, from Monday 6th to Sunday 12th May, will include concerts and music by Stanford within the cathedral services. Nowadays, Stanford is largely…
TIMES Radio presenter and political columnist Matt Chorley is looking forward to the general election and he wants to share his thoughts and expertise with audiences across the country, including the Marine Theatre at Lyme Regis, where he will perform his show, Poll Dancer, on Friday 26th April. Drawing on his own two decades of…
BRIDPORT hosts the country’s only film festival which celebrates the art of adapting the written word for the silver screen. This year, From Page to Screen runs at the arts centre, with more than 20 films, from 24th to 28th April. The guest curator is Rebecca Lenkiewicz, who wrote the screenplay for She Said and…
THE story of Nicholas Winton, a man who helped to rescue hundreds of Jewish children from Czechoslovakia on the eve of the Second World War, is told in the film One Life, starring Anthony Hopkins as Winton in later life and Johnny Flynn as the young stockbroker and humanitarian. The film is the most popular…
THE programming at Messums West, the gallery and art centre in the ancient tithe barn at Tisbury, gets ever more adventurous, with a collaboration this year with Salisbury International Arts Festival and a two-month sound installation, created by Orlando Gough and Alastair Goolden, which draws its inspiration, in part from the river Nadder. Running from…
THE brilliant and multi-award-winning Constellations, by Nick Payne, is the spring production at the Barn Theatre, in Cirencester, from Friday 29th March to Saturday 18th May. Described as a high-concept romance, “a Sliding Doors to the power of 100”, Constellations is a drama about time and memory, about death and grief and the power of…