LIKE most people, I first came upon Grease when the now legendary film starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John arrived like a bursting meteor of energy in 1978. Big impression as it made, I never expected to find it gathering big audiences in the theatre, well over half of whom were not even born when…
MANY of the speakers at this year’s Wells Festival of Literature, from 15th to 23rd October, are literally or metaphorically at home in Somerset but the event has a world-wide reach, not only via the internet but also in the home countries of the festival competition entrants. Somerset is the base or inspiration for speakers…
MERE Literary Festival is back this year, from 11th to 15th October, after the 2020 Covid cancellation, and the programme has talks and events for all ages and tastes. From a child’s delight in tiny woodlice to the horrors of chemical weapons, from the fascinating secrets of Deepest Wiltshire to the very public scandals that…
THE latest talk in the Help Our Planet series at the Marine Theatre, Lyme Regis, focuses on the return of beavers to English rivers for the first time in many centuries. Rewilder, farmer and conservationist Derek Gow’s HOP talk, on Tuesday 12th October at 7pm, is called Bringing Back the Beaver and its Pals. Gow has…
TENEBRAE, one of the world’s leading chamber choirs comes to Dorchester’s St Mary’s Church on Wednesday 6th October, at 7.30pm with a concert that explors the poignant repertoire of repentence expressed in music. The choir, directed by its founder Nigel Short, will be joined for Drop, Drop Slow Tears, by the saxophonist Christian Forshaw. The…
UPWEY’s late medieval parish church of St Laurence, near the village’s famous Wishing Well, is a new venue for Concerts in the West, when flautist Emma Halnan and the Eblana String Trio end their four-concert tour on Sunday 3rd October. The group will be playing an imaginative mixture of quartets by Mozart, Beethoven, Viotti and…
STURMINSTER Newton’s adventurous Rural Redemption Theatre Company is staging a new play, A Woodland Plot at at Stour Connect Centre, Stour View Close, from 30th September to 2nd October. Written and directed by Craig White, the play focuses on Sam and Malcolm, who both love woodlands for very different reasons. When their paths cross, dark…
DIRECTOR Ian White, a life-long lover of the theatre and Shakespeare’s Scottish play in particular, sees the Macbeths as a couple with “a mature and successful marriage” – indeed the only one in the canon. As such, he says, the guilt and the blame for the murderous tyranny that they unleash has to be shared….
WORSHIPPERS at the church of St Mary, on the outskirts of Kilmington just north of Stourhead, walk weekly over the site of a heinous crime committed in Tudor times. Audiences at the three performances of Murder Most Foul have a clearer idea of the story behind the murders of William Hartgill and his son John,…
IT would be hard to imagine a more perfect setting for baroque opera than the Italianate cloister in the beautiful Harold Peto-designed gardens of Iford Manor near Bradford-on-Avon. Over the years, the cloister and the gardens were the setting for operas from every period, jazz, folk and world music, picnic proms and more. It was…