THE ever-adventurous Barn Theatre at Cirencester is staging a revival of Double Double, a clever story of power, love and illusion. First produced in 1986 at London’s Fortune Theatre, the play is at the Barn until 30th May. Weeks before his 37th birthday, Philippa’s husband Richard dies. But the terms of his inheritance required that…
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…
SPITFIRE Girls, Katherine Senior’s dramatised story of the Second World War female pioneers who flew Spitfires, is back on tour, coming to Salisbury Playhouse from 5th to 9th May. Inspired by remarkable true events, Tilted Wig’s production, which began as a co-production with MAST Studio in Southampton, opens on New Year’s Eve, 1959. Decades after…
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…
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…
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….
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…
EMMA Rice, acclaimed former artistic director of Kneehigh Theatre and Shakespeare’s Globe, brings her Frome-based Emma Rice Company in her own adaptation and production of Malory Towers, to Bath Theatre Royal from Friday 1st to Saturday 9th May, ahead of a national tour. First staged in Bristol in 2019, this brilliant staging of a favourite…
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…
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…
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…