JOHN Lutz’s book SWF Seeks Same, and the subsequent film, Single White Female, released in 1992, were huge hits, but I confess to neither having read the book nor seen the movie, so the discrepancies between them and the new stage version, which opened in Brighton in January and is now on stage in Bath…
ABSTRUSE politeness is a peculiarly English characteristic. You don’t want to be rude; you don’t want to offend people … The tangle you can get in, when trying not to say something possibly hostile (but necessary) can get you into much deeper water, entangle you in ever-more convoluted rigmaroles. That, in essence, is the backbone…
SMUGGLERS, hidden treasure and ghostly apparitions – what more evocative glimpse of coastal Dorset in the 18th century. J Meade Falkner’s gothic novel was adapted for the stage in 2009 by the ever-compelling Angel Exit, and this year the company’s co-director Tamsin Fessey was invited to recreate the production with students from Arts University Bournemouth’s…
OTHELLO is not one of Shakespeare’s most frequently performed plays, and in recent years it has been condemned as racist, colonialist and generally suitable for 21st century audiences only with a black actor in the title role – and all about the men in it. American playwright Paula Vogel has taken the three women in…
EMMA Rice’s musical adaptation of Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers was one of the victims of COVID, opening in Bristol in autumn 2019. After a stop in Devon, the planned tour was scuppered. Now, happily, it is back on the road – refined, framed and better than ever, starting a new nine-venue tour at Bath. The…
WHO were the first women in the country to be paid equal wages for doing the same job as men? ATTAgirl if you know – because it was the female members of the Air Transport Auxiliary, a civilian organisation formed to ferry warplanes between factories, maintenance units and frontline squadrons. The largely unknown history of…
FORTY years ago, actors Roger Rees and Rick Elice wrote the “romantic-thriller” Double Double, in the same year that the film Down and Out in Beverley Hills was released. Both feature a rough sleeper who comes into a family home and upends the status quo. But Double Double, revived at Cirencester’s Barn Theatre until 28th…
LAURA Wade’s 2018 play Home, I’m Darling is all about keen traditionalists Judy and Johnny and their decision to sink their savings into creating the perfect 1950s home and lifestyle – only to be confronted with the expectations of the 21st century. Often hilariously funny and cinematically romantic, played on an authentically decorated set, the…
IT’s the sound of the prison that gets to you first, and that sound lasts through the interval and to the end, obliterated only by the songs. This new joint production of Kiss of the Spider Woman by Leicester’s Curve, Bristol Old Vic and Southampton Mayflower arrives on our stages as the world moves further…
LAURA Wade’s “radical reimagining” of Somerset Maugham’s 1926 play The Constant Wife opened at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford last year, and is now on a UK tour that will end with performances on a Cunard transatlantic crossing on the Queen Mary 2. The tour is at Poole’s Lighthouse this week, moving on to Malvern…