THE Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen is not generally considered a barrel of laughs – “grim up north” would be the usual opinion, but when Cornwall’s inventive Miracle Theatre gets hold of a classic there is usually a comic twist or two, as Artsreach audiences will find when A Comedy of Terrors comes to Ibberton village…
WAITRESS – the musical comes back to Bristol Hippodrome on 4th August as part of its tenth anniversary tour. Dorset residents were the first in the country to see the 2007 film on which it is based, written by Adrienne Shelly and previewed at the late lamented Screen Bites food film festival. Shelly, who also…
CO-INCIDING with the school summer holidays, John Godber’s popular comedy Teechers returns to the Theatre Royal Bath, from Tuesday 28th July to Saturday 1st August, in a new post-Covid version. Originally written in 1987, Teechers was first performed by the Hull Truck Theatre Company at the 1987 Edinburgh Festival. It rapidly became an audience favourite,…
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…
ANDY Morton, the director of this year’s Dorset Opera Festival production of L’Elisir d’Amore, was born and brought up in Sherborne, where his father was a teacher. It was as a teenager at Sherborne School he first came into contact with opera, joining the chorus of Dorset Opera then run by Patrick Shelley. After studies,…
THE tragic sinking of the Titanic is one of the best-known stories in maritime history – but how much do we know about the people who survived from the lower decks? A remarkable one-man play, coming to Dorchester Arts at the Corn Exchange on Tuesday 14th July at 7.30pm, tells the story of a stoker…
A MERE mention of the name Mrs Danvers ends a shard of ice down the spines of most fans of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. That’s if you only know her as the terrifying housekeeper of Manderley. Find out more in a new one-woman play, Becoming Mrs Danvers, at Bridport Arts Centre on Saturday 18th July,…
THE Jurassic coast can now boast a second summer play festival – just a few miles east of Sidmouth, with its Manor Pavilion summer season, the Marine Theatre at Lyme Regis welcomes the return of the professional Gilroy Theatre Company, with a season of five plays, from 28th July to 28th August. The first is…
GRAHAM Greene had a dry sense of humour, never better shown than in Our Man In Havana, which has been adapted for the stage by the actor and writer Clive Francis. The new comedy of a vacuum cleaner salesman caught up in espionage in pre-revolutionary Cuba comes to Salisbury Playhouse from 14th to 18th July…
THREE acclaimed actors – Toby Stephens, Amanda Abbington and Noah Valentine – play the leading roles in Peter Shaffer’s dark, probing masterpiece, Equus, which comes to Bath Theatre Royal from Tuesday 14th to Saturday 25th July, in a production directed by Lindsay Posner, which received rave reviews when it premiered at the Menier Chocolate Factory….