IF, like us, you love live performance, whether it is theatre or music, you will be desperately missing it, and looking forward to a time when we can once again sit in Bristol Old Vic or Bath Theatre Royal, Poole’s Lighthouse arts centre or Salisbury Playhouse. But while they remain closed in this interminable lockdown,…
I LIKE to think I am pretty good at recycling plastic, avoiding buying things that are packaged or wrapped in plastic and reusing as much as I can. But then I look around the kitchen or even my desk and realise how difficult it is to avoid it. Pens, clip-top boxes, the computer mouse, light…
I WAS driving through nearby villages last week, and miserably missing all those posters advertising Aladdin, Sleeping Beauty, Jack and the Beanstalk, Dick Whittington (and of course Cinderella) that you’d expect to see taped to lamp-posts at this time of year. Covid-19 has scuppered all performances in early 2021, and those pantomimes have been a…
ALAN Bennett is the undoubted leader in the “talking heads” genre, and his famous monologues found a massive new audience in lockdown, performed by a new generation of actors. Of course it’s the perfect way for locked-down self-isolators to continue their thespian activities, and thanks to the fast-evolving technical developments, more or less anything is…
IN these dreadful days of mutating viruses, blocked seaports, blustering Brexit negotiators and tiered living, what we most need (apart from the certainty we can’t get) is laughter. And that’s just what Mischief Theatre is serving up on stage at Bath this Christmas. For reasons you can read elsewhere on the FTR, audiences are enjoying…
CBEEBIES original Chris Jarvis has been performing in professional pantomime since 1995, and for many years before that as an amateur. He was DETERMINED that the traditional Christmas entertainment would not be another thing to fall prey to the dreaded Covid-19, so he and a group of nine friends have devised and produced a panto…
WHEN David Mamet’s play Oleanna first appeared back in 1992, 14 years before the “Me Too” movement saw the light of social media day, it was so divisively controversial that it was even blamed for the break-up of marriages. Interestingly, as the current Lucy Bailey production in Bath proves, it has lost none of its…
Yeovil Octagon until 3rd January FOR anyone who is interested in live performance, pantomime (whether you like it or not) is synonymous with Christmas, and when theatres around the country went dark for even longer than the first lockdown, received grants from the government, reopened and then were closed again, it seemed as though…
THE worldwide effects of the Covid-19 pandemic are incalculable, and perhaps the sector worst affected in the UK is the live entertainment industry. Closed two weeks before the start of the first lockdown, and remaining closed when other businesses opened, the rules left managements scuttling for solutions to make their communal, intimate and essentially social…
JOHN Payne is one of Frome’s best known residents – active in many organisations and a prolific writer on a wide range of subjects, from William Morris to Catalonia to the city of Bath. His latest book, which he hints may be his last (but writers rarely do retire, it’s a bug that keeps on…