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…
MARK Leipacher’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr Ripley has already been on a lengthy journey before its arrival in Salisbury – from where the intention is a (well-deserved) West End run. This Faction production started life in 2015. Plans were scuppered by COVID, and it re-appeared, with a new cast, in 2025….
HOW a play written to fill a 70-seat theatre over the Christmas period, with such a restricted budget that four actors at most could be employed, turned into the second longest continuous London presentation, (13,232 performances and only The Mousetrap can boast a longer run) is quite a story in itself. That’s the history of…
HURN Court Opera was founded in 2017 by Lynton Atkinson, with the mission of giving emerging singers a chance of professional performances, and bringing high class opera to audiences across the region, not only at affordable prices but with the added bonus of seeing young stars in the making. And that is certainly true with…
SHERIDAN’S wonderful comedy The Rivals, origin of Mrs Malaprop and regularly described as “timeless” proves its versatile longevity in Jack Absolute Flies Again, a new Battle of Britain-set adaptation by Richard Bean, who re-wrote Goldoni as One Man, Two Guvnors, and actor Oliver Chris. It is a marvellously inventive reworking, set at Malaprop House, where…
GOODNESS, life is complicated these days, isn’t it? Increasing numbers of people question their identities, finding much on-line support for dual, triple or even multiple personalities. Theatre goers support horror rom coms that give that extra live edge to the oft-viewed favourite movies. And we all have to face the issues that social media and…
WHEN Stephen Moffatt’s play The Unfriend opened at Chichester’s Minerva Studio in 2019, Joe Biden was the US President and Trump was a ghastly memory, subject of conversations on cruise liners between Peter and Debbie, British parents of teenage children, and Elsa, a charismatic Coloradan with a rather peculiar past. Mark Gatiss made his stage…
THE indisputable star of MPO Musical Theatre’s production of Betty Blue Eyes at Milborne Port village hall is Betty herself – and that’s just as it should be. There is a great song entitled Steal the Pig in Stiles and Drewe’s musical version of Alan Bennett’s 1984 film A Private Function, and the endlessly inventive…
LIKE Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, who explained her origins as “I’spect I grow’d’, so Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s show has also grown. Written as a 15-minute pop cantata for Colet Court School in London, it developed into a full scale musical that has endeared itself to the public for more than 50…
CHRISTY Lefteri’s bestselling book The Beekeeper of Aleppo is a story of our times – a chronicle of the lives of a handful of Syrian and other refugees seeking asylum in the famously civilised and welcoming United Kingdom. Now adapted for the stage by Nesrin Alrefaai and Matthew Spangler, it is in Bath until Easter…