The Play’s the Thing

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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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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Stories to make you laugh and cry

WELSH storyteller Shon-Dale Jones is back on tour with a new show, Stories From An Invisible Town, starting at Weston-super-Mare, with dates in Salisbury, Bristol, Plymouth and Bath. On Tuesday 23rd September Shôn Dale-Jones is first and foremost a storyteller. He’s honest, inventive, and deeply human … curious, restless, wide-eyed, offbeat and resonant. His work…

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Jane Eyre – the untold story

CHARLOTTE Bronte’s Jane Eyre is one of the most famous, widely raid and critically acclaimed novels in the English language – it is also one of the most frequently adapted for stage and screen. A new play by Live Wire and Rough House theatre takes a different approach comes to the West Country on tour…

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Tired All the Time

WHEN actors Poppy Hardwicke and Lauren Mooney set out to tell a story about chronic fatigue, a condition they both live with, they called their performance Tired All The Time – it’s hard to think of a more appropriate name for the work they produced during a three-day R&D residency at Poole’s Lighthouse arts centre….

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Beckett black comedy at the Ustinov

SAMUEL Beckett’s black comedy masterpiece Endgame comes to the stage of Bath’s Ustinov Studio from 4th September to 4th October. The new production is directed by Lindsay Posner, and stars Douglas Hodge and Mathew Horn as Hamm and Clov, with Selina Cadell and Clive Francis as the wildly eccentric parents. In a bare room, Hamm,…

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Going Haywire at the Barn

FANS of The Archers, the world’s longest-running radio soap opera, will be beating a path to Cirencester’s adventurous Barn Theatre from 1st September to 1st October, when the intimate venue stages the world premiere of Haywire, a comedy that celebrates the “not-so-everyday story of how The Archers was born.” Written by Tim Stimpson, and directed…

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The Forest of Arden in Bath

RALPH Fiennes, artistic director of Bath Theatre Royal’s 2025 summer season, turns from acting in Grace Pervades to directing, Shakespeare’s As You Like It, at the theatre from 15th August to 6th September. One of the most delightful romatic comedies, it is set in the Forest of Arden, where love is always in the air….

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Inside Out – celebrating Dorset’s landscape

THE ancient coastal town of Christchurch, the deep woods of Moors Valley and the dramatic ruins of Corfe Castle provide the backdrop and venues for events and installations across Dorset at this year’s Inside OutDorset festival, which runs from 12th to 21st September across the county. The biennial event is an international outdoor arts festival,…

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Hamilton at Plymouth

LIN-Manuel Miranda’s multi award-winning Hamilton is touring comes to Plymouth Theatre Royal on its first UK tour, for a six-week season that runs to Saturday 6th September. Hamilton is the story of one of America’s Founding Fathers, Alexander Hamilton, an immigrant from the West Indies who became George Washington’s right-hand man during the Revolutionary War…

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