I HAVE become so used to going to the ballet and praising the orchestra as much as, and sometimes to an even greater extent, than the dancers, that on some occasions when the dancing has been sub-standard I have contented myself by closing my eyes and enjoying the playing of the score. When that score…
ROBERT Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island is one of the earliest, and still greatest, of the pirate adventures, a genre that is now big business on film, in games and more. Ken Ludwig’s adaptation for the stage, chosen by Salisbury Studio Theatre’s youth group for the first production of 2019, sticks closely to the original, even…
JAMES Rowland, described as a writer, performer and musician, has devised a trilogy of shows about how life is wonderful and painful, and how inadequately our words describe it. Under the umbrella of Tangram Theatre, he is touring them around the country, performing in conventional theatres and village halls. The second of the solo one…
FORTUNATE audiences at Bath this week have the chance to see a remarkable performance in the stage adaptation of the film Rain Man – and it’s all the more remarkable as it’s given by an actor who knew the role of Raymond Babbitt backwards, but must have thought he’d never get the chance to play…
WAS Agatha Christie’s alter ego a creator of steamy novels? Did the legendary Hercule Poirot have a secret life as an elegant woman? Who killed Aurora Lightly? And how can four people play 12 characters? The answers may, or may not, be revealed in Crimes on the Nile, the latest spoof whodunnit from the ever-inventive…
IRA Levin’s chillingly mysterious Veronica’s Room, a stage play written and set in 1973, six years after his international success with the novel Rosemary’s Baby, filmed the following year. Such are the demands on its four actors that it is unsurprisingly rarely performed, requiring supreme versatility, incisive psychological insights and an ability to create a…
LOOKING down the names of the characters in this show, with legendary Motown recording stars like Diana Ross, Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and the Jackson Five amongst them, my companion remarked “”I know all of them but who is Berry Gordy?” And I dare say the same thought crossed the minds of many…
FROM the darkest forests of Bavaria, to the alleyways of the souks of Marrakech to the frozen wastes of Siberia to … this place … Salisbury. So begins Shivers, stories from The Book of Darkness and Light. There are few things I like better on a chilly winter’s evening than a good ghost story and…
IT’s quite an undertaking to write your first novel. It is seriously ambitious to write your first novel in your second language – and it is a remarkable achievement to establish an original voice in fiction for that most intangible of audiences, “young adults.” Peter Ursem, a Dutch-born artist who lived in Dorset for many…
IT’S oooo-arrrrrh and shiver me timbers when Paul Nicholas dons the cavalier curls and prosthetic hand of Captain Hook, the arch- baddie of Bath’s Christmas pantomime – and the children love it. Of course it all happens as the heroic Peter flies high in the sky over the stage, ready to take the Darling children…