CHRISTMAS just wouldn’t be the same for folk fans without the traditional visit by St Agnes Fountain, the acclaimed folk group who bring their special sparkly brand of festive music to the Beehive and the David Hall this year on Thursday 10th December at Honiton, Sunday 13th at South Petherton and Tuesday 15th at Forest…
BUDAPEST, with its dramatic location on the Danube, is one of Europe’s great cities, half of the twin hearts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and a cultural Mecca with a dark and enthralling history. Perhaps its greatest period was the late 19th century and the first three decades of the 20th – the music of that…
DORCHESTER Community Plays Association is looking ahead to the next – eighth – in its record-breaking list of community plays. The next play is planned for 2029, and a first meeting to launch the project is planned for 16th January. The Dorchester Community Play Association (DCPA) has already began exploring some fascinating possibilities for the…
YOU can’t get away from the festive onslaught of Christmas gift suggestions – from starry television adverts to glossy magazine supplements, there are more ideas for presents than you can shake the proverbial stick at. But nothing beats an original object, something produced with skill and passion by a true craftsperson. Many galleries in the…
SHAFTESBURY-based musician Karen Wimhurst will be joining her Pagoda Project partners, accordionist Paul Hutchinson and fiddler and vocalist Hannah Cumming, for two performances on home turf on 19th and 20th November. They will be at Ilminster’s newest arts centre, the Millhouse, on Thursday at 8pm, and at Mere United Reformed Church on Friday at 7pm….
THE Performing Arts students at Arts University Bournemouth have two more productions between now and the end of term – Frankenstein at the Palace Court Theatre on 13th and 14th November, and Twelfth Night at their theatre on the Wallisdown Campus from 3rd to 5th December. Frankenstein is directed by Helen Watts, who adapted the…
BEAMINSTER-based chamber choir Parnham Voices will perform a programme of love songs drawn from four centuries for its autumn concert at All Saints Church, Wyke Regis, on Saturday 14th November at 7pm. The Course of True Love, conducted by Mark Burstow, who became the choir’s director earlier this year, runs from Elizabethan madrigals by Morley,…
TS Eliot’s 1937 verse play Murder in the Cathedral was created as a site-specific event, performed where the action is set, in Canterbury Cathedral. When Tom Littler, director of the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, decided on a 2026 production, he moved the setting across the road into the church of St John the Divine,…
WE are accustomed to murder mysteries where all the characters have motives for murder, but Rick Abbot’s play But Why Bump Off Barnaby?, chosen by Mere Amateur Drama Society for the next production, comes at the dastardly deed from a different angle. When Barnaby Folcey is murdered at the Marlgate Manor family gathering, it really is…
HERE are 36 productions featuring 24 traditional pantomimes and Christmas stories on offer in the south and west region this year, and the first one, Arthur, starts at Bath’s Egg on 19th November and runs to 3rd January. Again the line-up is a mixture of the familiar and the new, with several book and film…
THE country’s favourite poet, Pam Ayres, comes to Weston super Mare Playhouse on Sunday 21st November, with her latest collection, Doggedly Onwards – a Life in Poems. From an appearance on the television talent show Opportunity Knocks in 1975 to performing before the late Queen Elizabeth II, Pam Ayres has become a genuine national treasure,…
STU McLoughlin wasn’t the one who was the Living Spit of Henry VIII – that was his co-founder the late Howard Coggins. And Stu isn’t the average idea of Shakespearean hero Hamlet either, though an average is difficult to envision. But nothing ventured, he thought, and finding an obscure reference to an eggshell in Act 4…
IT could be the slogan of any local newspaper or website, but “Every story matters” is also part of the subtitle of a Dorset-set novel by the journalist Margery Hookings – Plashy Fen: In a Place This Small, Every Story Matters. Set in a fictional coastal West Dorset village, this is an affectionate and beautifully…
THOSE of us who live in Dorset and Somerset are so lucky. Not only do we live in one of the most beautiful areas of the country – relatively unspoiled, too – but we live in part of the richest food regions. The south west is justly famed for its traditional local produce – apples,…
“BEECH leaves, that yellow the noon-time, Float past like specks in the eye; I set every tree in my June time, And now they obscure the sky …” … wrote Thomas Hardy in his poem, Beech Leaves. Join folk singers and actors Tim Laycock and Alastair Braidwood at Dorchester Corn Exchange on Sunday, 15th November,…
WHEN Ayub Khan Din’s play East is East first hit the stage in 1996, it surprised audiences not only with its vivid depiction of the lives of a working class immigrant family in Salford, where seven mixed-race children, all born in the UK, battled with their Pakistani father’s dictatorial insistence on Muslim traditions, but also…
THE most infamously famous person in the world, Donald J Trump, arrives at the Ustinov Studio at Bath Theatre Royal on Friday 5th November, where he will be talking until Saturday 5th December. This entertaining portrait of the man behind the myth and his relentless quest to become the most winningest winner in history is…
IMAGINE a heady and provocative blend of Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Jacques Brel and Eartha Kitt … an Eastern European jazz club in the dark decades after the Second World War and the Cold War … That’s the aura created by the brilliant Moscow Drug Club, who have several local dates on their autumn tour,…
THE autumn colours are still gorgeous, but there is a real chill in the air and winter is fast upon us. Top Moviola choices for local villages and arts centres for November and December are The Christophers and My Mother’s Wedding. The Christophers, starring Sir Ian McKellen and Michaela Cole, is a black comedy directed…
MANY consider the 1985 film Back to the Future the greatest, and certainly one of the most successful, films of that genre ever made. With music from the 1950s (The Power of Love, Johnny B Goode, Earth Angel, Back in Time) to help accommodate the story going back to that period, the film – and…
FOLLOWING the closure of Taunton’s much-loved Brewhouse Theatre, Taunton Thespians have moved heir production of The Haunting of Hill House to the Queens Hall Theatre from 12th to 14th November where local theatre lovers can look forward to the spine-chilling experience of this critically acclaimed adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s gothic ghost story. Director Phil Turley…
BLUEGRASS may be most associated with the Appalachian Mountains, but its origins lie deep in the remote Celtic and ancient traditions of Britain – Scotland, Ireland, Cornwall … and the far West Country county is the home of Flats & Sharps, the internationally popular bluegrass band which is coming to Dorset for three dates with…
THREE singers and an accordionist of the Opera Cocktail ensemble from Southampton-based OperaUpClose come to Devon on 20th November and Dorset on Friday 4th and 5th December with their sparkling “jukebox” rom com. Like a classic cocktail – and West End hit jukebox musicals – it is heady and fun blend of favourite flavours, blended…
A YOUNG bassoon player from Wincanton is one of two musicians named as Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra’s next BSO Young Associates. Kamilla Kovacs (pictured right) and Bristol-based oboist Lucy Keeley will begin making music in hospitals, schools, community centres and more, when they join Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra (BSO) as BSO Young Associates this month. The Young…
IN 2018, Sally Cookson and the Bristol Old Vic company devised a play from Patrick Ness’s 2011 young adults book A Monster Calls, with Adam Peck as the “writer in the room.” They took the fantastic presence of the imaginary Monster living in the ancient yew tree and brought his intervention to vivid theatrical life….
THE life of a remarkable West Country woman, whose story deserves to be better known, will be revealed in a talk with music at Ilminster Arts Centre, on Friday 27th November. Wadham is a familiar name in education circles, locally with Wadham School at Crewkerne, and nationally with Wadham College, Oxford, the first college at…
DORCHESTER Drama tackles one of the masterpieces of the great Norwegian dramatist, Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People, updated and reimagined from 1882 to 2009. The group’s autumn production is at the Corn Exchange on Friday 20th and Saturday 21st November at 2.30pm and 7.30pm. The performers are having fun with the generally serious…
THE hugely popular Dorset folk duo Ninebarrow have a gig with Dorchester Arts at Thomas Hardye School theatre, on Saturday 14th November. The show focuses on their recent studio album, The Hour of the Blackbird, a collection of beautiful original songs. Ninebarrow – Jon Whitley and Jay La Bouchardiere – consistently delight audiences across the…
SOMERSET-based, certified organic cheesemaker Feltham’s Farm is producing its first organic cheese hamper for Christmas, bringing together some of the UK’s finest organic artisan cheeses and accompaniments to celebrate nature-friendly festive food and the farmers and makers behind it. Curated by Marcus Fergusson and Penny Nagle of Feltham’s Farm, founders of the Organic Cheesemakers’ Network,…
TWO years after featuring the work of painter Lawrence Arthurs, the Slade Centre at Gillingham has an exhibition by his late wife, Susan Williams: A Distinctive Eye, running through October and November (with a three day break to allow for a Hallowe-en event) and into December. The summer 2024 exhibition of Lawrence Arthurs’ paintings and…
FLO and Joan combine music with comedy and they are back with a new show, With Feeling, trying to take up as much of the stage and as little of your patience as possible as they use a “real band’s” set-list to write their own show – ruminating on themes such as “what is music?”…
THE region’s many literary festivals are drawing to a close, after a packed and exciting season of talks bringing authors from around the world to towns and villages in the UK. The south west region has hosted several outstanding events, ranging from the long-established with stellar line-ups to the more local, which often have delightful…
SLADERS Yard, the contemporary art gallery and cafe in West Bay, continues its 20th anniversary celebrations with a major exhibition of paintings, drawings and etchings by David Inshaw, one of the great contemporary painters of landscape, an artist who has been showing regularly at the gallery throughout those years. The solo show, At the Still…
ROMESH Ranganathan, star of countless television comedy series and and presenter of The Weakest Link, is back on the road from November with a new show, and the tour continues on Saturday 14th November at Queen’s Theatre, Barnstaple, Sunday 15th Landmark Theatre, Ilfracombe and Monday 16th, Yeovil Westlands. In the new year he will be …