SALISBURY Playhouse’s artistic director Gareth Machin has been working on his adaptation of J Meade Falkner’s Moonfleet for more than three years, making changes even up to the opening night on 19th April. The resulting show, with its music by Russell Hepplewhite, is a triumph. Perhaps it is particularly effective for an audience familiar with…
I HAVE just spent a couple of days with 17 of my school friends, girls/women I have know for upwards of 60 years, all now retired except me. “Why are you still working” they said. “I am passionate about live performances. I love the theatre. I really would miss it, and I keep being asked…
THERE are said to be only seven plots* – but writers, poets, playwrights and novelists have worked an almost limitless number of variations, and few have done it with more energy and saucy humour than the 14th century Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio. The Decameron, a collection of 100 stories, mostly funny and often quite scurrilous,…
RONALD Harwood’s 1999 play Quartet took on a new lease of life when Dustin Hoffman directed a film based on the play in 2012. Now back on the stage, the play completes a tour at Bath Theatre Royal. until 21st April. Set in the panelled music room of a large country house in Kent, it’s…
ANGEL Exit, set up in Dorset by Tamsin Fessey after her graduation from the celebrated French drama school Lecoq, has established itself as an exciting experimental physical theatre company. Perhaps its most experimental work is The Drive, currently on tour and featuring Tamsin and her co-director Lynne Forbes. They not only play the two characters…
FRIEDRICH Schiller’s play Mary Stuart could hardly be more timely than in a mid-Brexit Britain teetering on an uncertain future with the threats of religious fanaticism and mindless violence filling our consciousness. Robert Icke’s stunning production for the Almeida, centering on and amplifying an imagined meeting between English Queen Elizabeth I and her cousin Mary…
TWO of the silliest musical tales ever put on stage get a rousing, vivacious and thoroughly enjoyable performance by Milborne Port Opera in the company’s annual spring show at the village hall. Fresh from their triumph in the 2017 Giant Coarse Acting Festival with a 15-minute masterpiece of country house mayhem, MPO is performing an…
THE world thankfully has many fine string quartets and a vast repertoire to draw on. To raise the profile of a relatively young professional quartet above those of its many excellent rivals, it is important to programme the concert with imagination and care and through the works to show and say something of real value….
TREVOR Nunn’s first production at Bath Theatre Royal’s Ustinov Studio is causing excitement in the theatre world – a world premiere of a play written 118 years ago by one of the greatest writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Harley Granville Barker’s early work, in a draft form, was found at the…
I LAST saw Kneehigh at its tent base The Asylum, in the home county of Cornwall, in Midnight’s Pumpkin, the crazy adaptation of Cinderella, aimed at folk of all ages, and before that my experience had been outdoors in a couple of villages in Dorset, so I knew roughly what to expect, and was intrigued…