BATH Literature Festival has announced its first event, a pre-festival evening with historian Tom Holland, co-host of the hit podcast The Rest is History, at Bath Forum on Friday 22nd May at 7pm. Travel back to the Roman Empire as Tom Holland celebrates his translation for Penguin Classics of Suetonius’s influential Lives of the Twelve Caesars….
JANET Street-Porter is on a national tour, returning to our region on Wednesday 13th May for the final date of the tour at Plough Arts Centre, Torrington. She first hit the newspaper stands, and then the airwaves and television screens, there were many who didn’t like her accent, her voice or her take-no-prisoner attitudes. Opinionated…
A FALCON, a contemporary take on a Shakespearean tragedy and a celebration of one of the greatest singer-songwriters provide the picks of spring and early summer for Moviola audiences. Laden with awards, the film adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 acclaimed novel, Hamnet, focuses on William Shakespeare’s wife Agnes, an unconventional Tudor woman, with a mysterious…
IT’s the sound of the prison that gets to you first, and that sound lasts through the interval and to the end, obliterated only by the songs. This new joint production of Kiss of the Spider Woman by Leicester’s Curve, Bristol Old Vic and Southampton Mayflower arrives on our stages as the world moves further…
THE ever-adventurous Barn Theatre at Cirencester is staging a revival of Double Double, a clever story of power, love and illusion. First produced in 1986 at London’s Fortune Theatre, the play is at the Barn until 30th May. Weeks before his 37th birthday, Philippa’s husband Richard dies. But the terms of his inheritance required that…
EMMA Rice, acclaimed former artistic director of Kneehigh Theatre and Shakespeare’s Globe, brings her Frome-based Emma Rice Company in her own adaptation and production of Malory Towers, to Bath Theatre Royal from Friday 1st to Saturday 9th May, ahead of a national tour. First staged in Bristol in 2019, this brilliant staging of a favourite…
SPITFIRE Girls, Katherine Senior’s dramatised story of the Second World War female pioneers who flew Spitfires, is back on tour, coming to Salisbury Playhouse from 5th to 9th May. Inspired by remarkable true events, Tilted Wig’s production, which began as a co-production with MAST Studio in Southampton, opens on New Year’s Eve, 1959. Decades after…
LAURA Wade’s “radical reimagining” of Somerset Maugham’s 1926 play The Constant Wife opened at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford last year, and is now on a UK tour that will end with performances on a Cunard transatlantic crossing on the Queen Mary 2. The tour is at Poole’s Lighthouse this week, moving on to Malvern…
MARK Leipacher’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr Ripley has already been on a lengthy journey before its arrival in Salisbury – from where the intention is a (well-deserved) West End run. This Faction production started life in 2015. Plans were scuppered by COVID, and it re-appeared, with a new cast, in 2025….
“ALL life is here,” as the saying goes, and probably nowhere is this more true than in a weekly art class, the setting for a new play by two Dorset writers, which gets its premiere with Dorchester Drama at Dorchester Arts on 1st to 3rd May. Life Class, by local writers Vince Jones and James…