RICHARD Brinsley Sheridan’s timeless comedy The Rivals was given the One Man Two Guvnors treatment by Richard Bean for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and now the updated version comes to Frome’s Merlin Theatre from 16th to 18th April. Frome Drama is celebrating its 80th anniversary this year, and the play by Bean and co writer…
HOW many of us have met someone on holiday who we have hit it off with? We exchange addresses or emails, and probably never hear from them again. Or perhaps you do go and visit them – and it all goes swimmingly and 30 years on, you are still good friends. That’s the positive story…
ALAN Bennett’s 1984 film A Private Function has become a icon of British comedy, delighting successive generations with its gentle but unflinching look at life after the war and petty small town cliques and jealousies. In 2011, Cameron Mackintosh commissioned George Stiles and Anthony Drewe to create a musical from the tale, and Betty Blue…
FOR many years, until 1989, an aunt and uncle of mine were the licensees of a pub in a small North Somerset village. Their regular customers were a microcosm of the local community – several farmers, the grave-digger, a farm labourer who was the local table skittles champion, the doctor and two hospital specialists, a…
COMPOSER Piers Kennedy has composed new works for Sarum Tenebrae: A Service of Shadows in Salisbury Cathedral on Wednesday 1st April at 7.30pm. This service with candles which are gradually extinguished, finishing in total darkness, is traditionally held during Holy Week. This year the service features a commission of nine compositions by Piers Kennedy, sung…
WATCHING Richard Harris’s cricketing farce Outside Edge 47 years after its premiere, and holding a programme that contains the message “Please be aware that Outside Edge is a classic late 20th-century comedy which reflects the language and attitudes of its time. Some audience members may find this content offensive,” I found myself asking exactly what…
THIS is the third review on the Fine Times Recorder for Simon Stephens’ stage adaptation of Mark Haddon’s best-selling book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. The first two productions were at Bath in 2015 and 2017, both on professional tours of the UK after sell-out seasons in London. This review is of…
PROFESSOR Sir Ghillean Prance, the former director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, is one of the world’s leading tropical botanists and rainforest explorers. He is also the founder of Dorset’s Help Our Planet project and HOP talks. On Thursday 26th March he will be talking at Sladers Yard gallery, West Bay, about Brazil…
DORSET’s county town has many things going for it, but theatrically it is a national record-breaker. There have been seven community plays and now Dorchester Community Plays Association is looking forward to an eighth. Meanwhile, there is a nostalgic weekend ahead, from 27th to 29th March, with a look back at the fifth community play,…
SAXOPHONIST Neil Maya comes to Bridport Electric Palace on Saturday 21st March, at 3pm and to Bridport’s Clocktower Records that evening, for two gigs that turn the clock back more than 50 years, to the ground-breaking era of jazz funk. The two gigs are part of Birth of the Cool, a month-long festival of jazz,…