JURASSIC Fields, a feel-good family festival billed as the “the jewel in the crown of a West Dorset summer of sounds,” returns to West Bay for a packed weekend of great music and food, from 14th to 16th August. With camping right next door to the West Bay Fields festival site, just a short walk…
BURTON Bradstock’s arts festival is renowned for the wide spectrum of music played by ensembles and soloists, led by violinist and artistic director David Juritz, alongside an exhibition of West Country arts, ceramics and crafts in the historic village hall. This year’s 44th annual festival runs from 15th to 23rd August. The majority of the…
THE third summer rep season at the Marine Theatre, Lyme Regis, begins on Thursday 23rd July, with the thriller The Late Edwina Black. Meanwhile, about 25 miles west along the Jurassic Coast, Sidmouth’s Manor Pavilion Theatre is already well into its three-month summer season. The repertory theatre programme, often in a seaside theatre, used to…
COVENT Garden Dance this year celebrates its 20th anniversary of presenting world-class ballet and dance. Since 2009 it has produced Ballet Under the Stars, the “Glyndebourne of dance”, a highly anticipated date in the south Wiltshire calendar, in the beautiful 17th century Dutch walled garden at Hatch House near Tisbury. This year’s Ballet at Hatch,…
THE 2026 Dorset Opera Festival brings one of the great tragic dramas of the repertoire to the stage of the Coade Hall at Bryanston School, and the return of a favourite comic opera from 21st to 25th July. There are performances of Saint-Saens’ Samson et Dalila on Wednesday 22nd and Thursday 23rd at 7pm, and…
IFORD Opera – now If Opera – celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, from 6th to 16th August, returning for a second year to Church Farm, Wingfield, near Bradford-on-Avon, with a programme which combines wit, tragic drama, Viennese sparkle, baroque boozing and the golden age of jazz and swing. The opening night, Thursday 6th August,…
CERNE Abbas, with its (in)famous chalk giant, has for 35 years been the setting for one of the region’s most delightful boutique chamber music festivals. This July, founder, Dorset-born clarinettist Richard Hosford brings a group of internationally renowned musicians back to the village for three concerts in the historic St Mary’s Church. Originally based around…
FROME celebrates the 25th anniversary of its multi-arts festival this year – and the festival opens on 3rd July, just two days after the funeral of Martin Bax, the actor, former town and district councillor and mayor, who became one of Frome’s most loved and valued citizens. A former actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company, Martin…
BEST-selling novelist, playwright and scriptwriter Chris Chibnall is one of the big draws at this year’s 29th Beaminster Festival. One of Dorset’s prettiest towns has an eclectic and stimulating programme, from 27th June to 5th July, including Chris Chibnall, superstar folk duo Kathryn Roberts and Sean Lakeman, actress and singer Lucy Stevens as the great…
JULIUS Caesar is centre stage at Grange Opera Festival, where Sarah Brady (pictured) captures the magnetic power of Cleopatra. Christian Curnyn, well-known to local opera lovers from the former Iford Opera Festival (near Bath), conducts his Early Opera Company to accompany the singers, led by countertenor Tim Mead, as Caesar. One of Handel’s most popular…