THE summer production at Shaftesbury Arts Centre will be Mack and Mabel, on stage at the Bell Street theatre from 11th to 21st July. The musical is based on the true story of the love affair between comedy silent film maker Mack Sennett and Mabel Normand, who he discovered and transformed into a famous star….
WELLS Literature Festival is always an enthralling mixture of non-fiction and fiction, poetry and politics, ecology and entertainment, and this year’s event, from 19th to 27th October is possibly the most diverse to date. Geographically the speakers will talk about Vietnam, Herzogovina, Gloucester Crescent, America, Gernika, the Middle East, Porlock, Westminster, Nicaragua, Dartmoor, the Rhine,…
DORSET-based food writer Sue Quinn has won the British Food Award in this year’s Guild of Food Writers annual awards, announced at the Holland Park Theatre in London. The award related specifically to Sue’s column for the Dorset magazine. Born in Australia, Sue Quinn began her career as a news reporter in Sydney and Canberra…
THE National Trust’s Tyntesfield is hosting a new midsummer event, an evening of music and poetry in the estate’s Victorian kitchen garden on Sunday 24th June. Tyntesfield was bought in the 1840s by the Gibbs family, who famously made their money on the trade of guano. It has been in the care of the National…
MICHELLE McCullagh, one of the country’s leading equestrian artists, who has her studio near Sturminster Newton, has work in two exhibitions in June. She has paintings in Celebrating the Turf at the Osborne Studio Gallery in Motcombe Street, Knightsbridge. The exhibition runs to 7th July. The other exhibition, Sporting House, is at the Rountree Tryon…
THREE abstract artists, Pennie Elfick, Neil Joyce and Sandra Porter share the gallery space at the Beaumont Gallery in the former steel chimney factory in Woodlands Road, Mere, from Saturday 30th June to Sunday 22nd July. In the Abstract features a range of fine art works including sculptures, paintings and charcoal drawings by the three…
THE new exhibition at The Art Stable, at Gold Hill Organic Farm, Child Okeford, is John Ridgewell, “A Quiet Surrealist,” on show from Saturday 30th June to Friday 27th July. John Ridgewell (1937-2004), was an Essex native, who studied alongside David Hockney and RB Kitaj at the Royal College of Art, before leaving to become…
THE American Museum at Bath turns the clock back more than two centuries for this year’s celebrations of Independence Day, with two weekends of living history, music and fun. The first weekend, 30th June and 1st July, will transport visitors back to 1776 with living history displays by the Crown Forces Association and the Society…
DORCHESTER’s new Shire Hall Courthouse Museum has its first temporary exhibition, Journey to Justice, telling the story of the civil rights campaign, alongside a local response piece, Radical Dorset. The new exhibition, which continues to 31st August, shines a light on the fight for justice of ordinary people, both in Dorset and in the US,…
VISITORS to Broad Chalke’s beautiful and ancient All Saints Church during the Chalke Valley History Festival can learn more about the impact of the First World War on this little Wiltshire village. There But Not There is a nationwide community project which marks the centenary of the war, with sombre installations of six-foot metal silhouettes…