The Arts Section

Calamity Jane, Bristol Hippodrome

MORE contradictory stories and legends – including how she acquired the nickname of Calamity Jane – have probably been told about Martha Jane Canary than of any other frontierswoman of the second half of the 19th century. Thanks to Jean Arthur’s portrayal in Cecil B DeMille’s The Plainsman, and the wonderfully effervescent Doris Day, in…

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Starter for Ten, Bristol Old Vic and touring

FOR many years, one of the great teats a group of us enjoyed was to go on Shrove Tuesday to a friend’s  house to enjoy home-made pancakes. Good cook as she was, we were never offered the first pancake made, because she said it was never up to the standard of those that followed.  Anyone…

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Live music for everyone

BOURNEMOUTH Symphony Orchestra’s chief conductor Mark Wigglesworth will be conducting 22 performances across the new 2025-26 season, which takes the region’s major orchestra to venues in major towns and smaller centres including Bristol, Exeter, Sherborne and Taunton, as well as its home at Poole’s Lighthouse arts centre, where the season opens on Wednesday 1st October….

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Mitsu Trio on short tour

THE Mitsu Trio come to Dorset and Somerset on Friday 26th and Saturday 27th September for the first dates in the autumn season of Concerts in the West. The series, as always, begins at Bridport Arts Centre, with a coffee-time concert, at 11.30am, followed by Ilminster Arts Centre that evening and The Dance House at…

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Artist in residence’s surreal whimsy by the sea

ILLUSTRATOR Gabrielle Parker’s delightful, surreal and whimsical creations will be celebrated at this year’s Arts by the Sea, the South West’s biggest free celebration of art, culture, people and place, returning to Bournemouth from Friday 26th to Sunday 28th September. Gabrielle Parker, the 2025 Artist in Residence, is an Arts University Bournemouth graduate, who creates…

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A high-spirited heroine

JANE Austen’s millions of fans tend to have their favourites among her heroines – for many it will be Elizabeth Bennett, for some it will be Anne Elliot, but for a lot of us it is the high-spirited but often wrong-headed Emma Woodhouse. Bath Theatre Royal celebrates the Jane Austen 250th anniversary with a new…

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Endgame, Ustinov Studio, Bath

SINCE its first performances in 1957, in French and later in English, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame has been subjected to endless debate, interpretation and controversy, by academics, students, theatre-goers and critics. Regarded by many as the greatest work by the Irish Nobel literature laureate, the play was written while the writer lived in France, where the…

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Living Spit – the hits and myths

IF you are a fan of the wonderful Natalie Haynes and her standing up for the classic radio shows, the names Zeus, Hera, Aphrodite, Artemis, Apollo et al are probably familiar. This autumn, the West Country’s favourite comedy theatre company takes up the challenge … but have Living Spit bitten off more than they can…

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