THE first major revival of the musical version of Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman comes to Bristol Old Vic from 29th April to 16th May, and to Southampton’s Mayflower Theatre from 2nd to 6th June. Set in an Argentinian prison, Molina, imprisoned for his homosexuality, is put in a cell with political prisoner…
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…
MARK Leipacher’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr Ripley has already been on a lengthy journey before its arrival in Salisbury – from where the intention is a (well-deserved) West End run. This Faction production started life in 2015. Plans were scuppered by COVID, and it re-appeared, with a new cast, in 2025….
“ALL life is here,” as the saying goes, and probably nowhere is this more true than in a weekly art class, the setting for a new play by two Dorset writers, which gets its premiere with Dorchester Drama at Dorchester Arts on 1st to 3rd May. Life Class, by local writers Vince Jones and James…
SHAFTESBURY Food Festival returns over the May bank holiday weekend with a programme that ranges from a food trail visiting some of the area’s most interesting food producers and businesses to demonstrations by former MasterChef winners and finalists – appropriate timing as the competition returns with its new presenters, Grace Dent and Anna Haugh. Once…
PERFORMANCE poet Luke Wright has taken his own story of adoption and turned it into a show that is part stand-up and part poetry. Later Life Letter, an evening of warm and honest thoughts, with poems, jokes and some music, returns to the south west from 23rd April to 25th April. Luke shares the story…
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…
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…
AN Englishman’s home is his castle, the saying goes, and if your dream castle is kitted out in the colours and decor of the 1950s, so what? That is how Judy and Johnny have chosen to live, in a marriage built around a fifties fantasy of pre-tech perfection. Laura Wade’s brilliantly funny but occasionally scarily…
BRIDPORT’s atmospheric Electric Palace continues a season celebrating a centenary of cinema on Thursday 30th April, musician and film historian Neil Brand marks the centenary of Laurel and Hardy’s 1926 movie debut, 45 Minutes from Hollywood – the following year they became an official comedy partnership.
VETERAN actor,David Westhead, takes on the challenge of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, in a new production coming to Tobacco Factory Theatres in Bedminster, Bristol, on 27th and 28th April. Krapp’s Last Tape is a journey through an old man’s life, filled with hilarious memories and hopes for the future, coupled with the mourning of…
IF you put the names Alan Bennett, Nick Hytner, Ralph Fiennes, Roger Album. Simon Russell-Beale … and Elgar … together and give them a good shake, you would probably come up with The Choral, a quintessential English film, with charm, music, love lost and found and a soul-stirring musical backdrop. Add in the First World…
THE new exhibition at Salisbury Museum, in the Cathedral Close, is Un/Common People: Folk Culture in Wessex, runs to Sunday 10th May. Celebrating the rich folk art, traditions and seasonal customs of Wessex, the exhibition explores how folk culture has been shaped by communities past and present. Created by and for the people, folk culture…