EMMA Rice’s musical adaptation of Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers was one of the victims of COVID, opening in Bristol in autumn 2019. After a stop in Devon, the planned tour was scuppered. Now, happily, it is back on the road – refined, framed and better than ever, starting a new nine-venue tour at Bath. The…
BATH Literature Festival has a powerful programme with thoughtful speakers tackling a vast range of subjects from the big issues of the day to characters from ancient myths. This year’s festival runs from Saturday 16th to Sunday 24th May, and brings some of today’s leading writers to the city. Along with the bestsellers and the…
PRIMARY school aged children in around the south west have a chance to experience live music, when the BSO’s Explore the Orchestra tour visits Poole Lighthouse on 19th and 20th May. With the addition of a digital concert, broadcast live from Poole’s Lighthouse arts centre in May, the project enables thousands of young people to…
COMING to Swindon’s Arts Centre on 20th May, Emily Davis will be taking her audience on a journey through original songs, sharp satire and a Welsh woman’s take on everything from spreadsheets to self-discovery. Following her success at the Edinburgh Fringe, Emily sets sail with her funny, uplifting one-woman musical comedy, Blodwen Rocks the Boat,…
AS you probably know, the jealous Iago in Shakespeare’s play Othello had about as much acquaintance with truth as does the world’s currently most recognisable man. Iago’s lies drove the misled and abject Othello to murder his wife, and the plot revolved around a handkerchief. But it wouldn’t have played out that way were it…
BATH’s Party in the City, the opening night of the flour weeks of Bath Festivals, on Friday 15th May from 5pm, is the biggest free multi-venue event in the south west, attracting thousands of music lovers to enjoy live music in 50 venues, including the city’s leading music venues, as well as pubs, clubs, churches,…
THE Greenwich Trio come to Dorset and Somerset for the May series of Concerts in the West, with recitals at Bridport arts centre on Friday 15th May at 11.30am, Ilminster arts centre that evening at 7.30pm and Crewkerne Dance House on Saturday at 7.30. Formed in London in 2006, and marking their 20th anniversary this…
CANADIAN First Nation Diyet has a fascinating background which includes Japanese and Scottish roots. This multi-cultural background influence the music she sings with her band Love Soldiers, who have two dates with Artsreach, at Cranborne’s Cecil Memorial Hall on Friday 15th May at 7.30pm, and the Comrades Hall at Broadwindsor on Saturday 16th at 8pm….
FORTY years ago, actors Roger Rees and Rick Elice wrote the “romantic-thriller” Double Double, in the same year that the film Down and Out in Beverley Hills was released. Both feature a rough sleeper who comes into a family home and upends the status quo. But Double Double, revived at Cirencester’s Barn Theatre until 28th…
IT’s the sound of the prison that gets to you first, and that sound lasts through the interval and to the end, obliterated only by the songs. This new joint production of Kiss of the Spider Woman by Leicester’s Curve, Bristol Old Vic and Southampton Mayflower arrives on our stages as the world moves further…
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…
PHIL Beer, multi-instrumentalist and best known as half of the hugely popular folk duo Show of Hands, is currently pursuing his own musical thing, with gigs in the south and west between now and late October. Phil is in our region on Friday 22nd May at Bridgwater Arts Centre, Saturday 23rd May, at Sixpenny Handley…
ROGER Fry, painter and member of the Bloomsbury Group, is celebrated in a new exhibition at the Museum of Somerset,Taunton, on until 4th July. A Life in Art: Roger Fry is a major new exhibition exploring the life, work and influence of one of the most important figures in 20th century British art. The exhibition…
IF you hear the name E Nesbit, you picture the cosy period charm of The Railway Children – but writing as Edith, Nesbit had a dark side, which is explored in an evening of horror story-telling at the Marine Theatre, Lyme Regis, on Friday 15th May at 7.30pm. Following the success of The Masks of…
WHO were the first women in the country to be paid equal wages for doing the same job as men? ATTAgirl if you know – because it was the female members of the Air Transport Auxiliary, a civilian organisation formed to ferry warplanes between factories, maintenance units and frontline squadrons. The largely unknown history of…
IN recent years, Mary Anning, the remarkable fossil hunter of Lyme Regis, has been celebrated in print, on stage and on screen – even as a prototype lesbian. But the character remains both enduringly fascinating and slightly elusive. Now a new one-woman play, coming to Dorchester Arts at the Corn Exchange on Thursday 14th May…
FOR nearly 50 years, the Tannahill Weavers have brought the traditional music of their native Scotland to audiences all over the world. On the eve of releasing their 20th album, the Tannies come to Dorchester Arts at the Corn Exchange on Saturday 16th May. When they appeared at Glasgow’s famous Celtic Connections festival, a presenter…
JANET Street-Porter is on a national tour, returning to our region on Wednesday 13th May for the final date of the tour at Plough Arts Centre, Torrington. She first hit the newspaper stands, and then the airwaves and television screens, there were many who didn’t like her accent, her voice or her take-no-prisoner attitudes. Opinionated…
A FALCON, a contemporary take on a Shakespearean tragedy and a celebration of one of the greatest singer-songwriters provide the picks of spring and early summer for Moviola audiences. Laden with awards, the film adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 acclaimed novel, Hamnet, focuses on William Shakespeare’s wife Agnes, an unconventional Tudor woman, with a mysterious…
JUST a year on since the first beavers were released into the wild at Studland, the natural eco engineers have been transforming woodland, dramatically reshaping part of the local landscape and turning a previously dense area of woodland into a thriving wildlife-rich wetland. The pair have built an extensive dam which has slowed the flow…