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….
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…
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…
LAURA Wade’s 2018 play Home, I’m Darling is all about keen traditionalists Judy and Johnny and their decision to sink their savings into creating the perfect 1950s home and lifestyle – only to be confronted with the expectations of the 21st century. Often hilariously funny and cinematically romantic, played on an authentically decorated set, the…
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…
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…
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…
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…
BATH Literature Festival has announced its first event, a pre-festival evening with historian Tom Holland, co-host of the hit podcast The Rest is History, at Bath Forum on Friday 22nd May at 7pm. Travel back to the Roman Empire as Tom Holland celebrates his translation for Penguin Classics of Suetonius’s influential Lives of the Twelve Caesars….
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…
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…
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…