“ALL life is here,” as the saying goes, and probably nowhere is this more true than in a weekly art class, the setting for a new play by two Dorset writers, which gets its premiere with Dorchester Drama at Dorchester Arts on 1st to 3rd May. Life Class, by local writers Vince Jones and James…
AN Englishman’s home is his castle, the saying goes, and if your dream castle is kitted out in the colours and decor of the 1950s, so what? That is how Judy and Johnny have chosen to live, in a marriage built around a fifties fantasy of pre-tech perfection. Laura Wade’s brilliantly funny but occasionally scarily…
THE new Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Reverend Sarah Mullally, made a classic pilgrimage from London to Canterbury before her recent installation as the Anglican church’s first female archbishop. Hopefully she had some entertaining moments amid the serious intent of her journey, but it’s doubtful she had quite the rumbustious time that Chaucer’s pilgrims enjoyed…
RICHARD Brinsley Sheridan’s timeless comedy The Rivals was given the One Man Two Guvnors treatment by Richard Bean for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and now the updated version comes to Frome’s Merlin Theatre from 16th to 18th April. Frome Drama is celebrating its 80th anniversary this year, and the play by Bean and co writer…
HOW many of us have met someone on holiday who we have hit it off with? We exchange addresses or emails, and probably never hear from them again. Or perhaps you do go and visit them – and it all goes swimmingly and 30 years on, you are still good friends. That’s the positive story…
ALAN Bennett’s 1984 film A Private Function has become a icon of British comedy, delighting successive generations with its gentle but unflinching look at life after the war and petty small town cliques and jealousies. In 2011, Cameron Mackintosh commissioned George Stiles and Anthony Drewe to create a musical from the tale, and Betty Blue…
DORSET’s county town has many things going for it, but theatrically it is a national record-breaker. There have been seven community plays and now Dorchester Community Plays Association is looking forward to an eighth. Meanwhile, there is a nostalgic weekend ahead, from 27th to 29th March, with a look back at the fifth community play,…
RICHARD Harris’s comedy Outside Edge is next on stage at Studio Theatre’s base in Ashley Road, Salisbury, from 23rd to 28th March. Directed by Colin Hayman, this very English story is all about summer, the sound of leather on willow, cricket teas, assembling a team each week, the constant threat of rain, and of course,…
ROBERT Louis Stevenson spent some years living in Westbourne, then an affluent suburb of Bournemouth, and it was here that he wrote the novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. So it is appropriate for the town’s Palace Court Theatre to be the venue for a striking reimagining of this famous thriller,…
SIMON Stephens’ play The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time has been hailed as the most popular murder mystery of the 21st century. Now the play comes to Strode Theatre in Street in a production by Street Theatre, from 18th to 21st March. Based on Mark Haddon’s novel of the same name, it’s…