JONATHAN Lynn’s “final chapter” in the story of Jim Hacker and Sir Humphrey Appleby, now simply titled I’m Sorry, Prime Minister, is back in Bath this week, as part of a summer national tour. Bringing the two old adversaries from the ever-popular TV sitcom up to date, the play opened in Cirencester in 2023. The…
THE Irish seem to have a closer relationship with the mystical, the spiritual … the “other side” than many nations. All the Celtic peoples have their mystical side but the Irish have held on to their mythology more, perhaps because the Romans never conquered them. Maggie O’Farrell was born in Coleraine, in Co Londonderry, and…
SITTING in a darkened room, where the preparation for an act of religious worship is mixed with the visceral fear of discovery, suddenly there’s a pounding at the door … This is a sensation that those who practise banned religions have known for millennia, often with violent, sometimes fatal, consequences. We are warlike animals and…
THE flagship event of this year’s Salisbury International Arts Festival is a challenging new production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, set in and around the brutalist 50-year-old Playhouse and the adjoining car park in the timeless hinterland of tribal feuds and retributions – and it is an astonishing achievement. This really IS what immersive theatre…
MISCHIEF Theatre, best known as the creators of The Play That Goes Wrong, are now out on the road with their first musical, a hilarious story by Jonathan Sayer and Ed Zanders, based on a number of Greek legends, telling how “acting” first started under the murderous eye of The Tyrant in ancient Greece. It…
THE impact of Martin Luther on the history of Christianity and Western Europe is huge and well-known. Perhaps slightly less familiar is his importance as a composer of religious music, sacred hymns and settings of biblical texts. One of the best-known of these is Christ lag in Todesbanden (Christ lay in death’s bonds) and this…
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…