BEAMINSTER-based chamber choir Parnham Voices will perform a programme of love songs drawn from four centuries for its autumn concert at All Saints Church, Wyke Regis, on Saturday 14th November at 7pm. The Course of True Love, conducted by Mark Burstow, who became the choir’s director earlier this year, runs from Elizabethan madrigals by Morley,…
TS Eliot’s 1937 verse play Murder in the Cathedral was created as a site-specific event, performed where the action is set, in Canterbury Cathedral. When Tom Littler, director of the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, decided on a 2026 production, he moved the setting across the road into the church of St John the Divine,…
THE life of a remarkable West Country woman, whose story deserves to be better known, will be revealed in a talk with music at Ilminster Arts Centre, on Friday 27th November. Wadham is a familiar name in education circles, locally with Wadham School at Crewkerne, and nationally with Wadham College, Oxford, the first college at…
WE are accustomed to murder mysteries where all the characters have motives for murder, but Rick Abbot’s play But Why Bump Off Barnaby?, chosen by Mere Amateur Drama Society for the next production, comes at the dastardly deed from a different angle. When Barnaby Folcey is murdered at the Marlgate Manor family gathering, it really is…
DORCHESTER Drama tackles one of the masterpieces of the great Norwegian dramatist, Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People, updated and reimagined from 1882 to 2009. The group’s autumn production is at the Corn Exchange on Friday 20th and Saturday 21st November at 2.30pm and 7.30pm. The performers are having fun with the generally serious…
HERE are 36 productions featuring 24 traditional pantomimes and Christmas stories on offer in the south and west region this year, and the first one, Arthur, starts at Bath’s Egg on 19th November and runs to 3rd January. Again the line-up is a mixture of the familiar and the new, with several book and film…
THE country’s favourite poet, Pam Ayres, comes to Weston super Mare Playhouse on Sunday 21st November, with her latest collection, Doggedly Onwards – a Life in Poems. From an appearance on the television talent show Opportunity Knocks in 1975 to performing before the late Queen Elizabeth II, Pam Ayres has become a genuine national treasure,…
A REVIVAL of TS Eliot’s theatrical masterpiece, Murder in the Cathedral, has attracted rave reviews – the Evening Standard described the production as magnificent and star Sir David Suchet’s performance as “spell-binding”, and the Daily Mail called it “hugely impressive”. The Orange Tree Theatre production at St John the Divine Church in Richmond is coming…
STU McLoughlin wasn’t the one who was the Living Spit of Henry VIII – that was his co-founder the late Howard Coggins. And Stu isn’t the average idea of Shakespearean hero Hamlet either, though an average is difficult to envision. But nothing ventured, he thought, and finding an obscure reference to an eggshell in Act 4…
IT could be the slogan of any local newspaper or website, but “Every story matters” is also part of the subtitle of a Dorset-set novel by the journalist Margery Hookings – Plashy Fen: In a Place This Small, Every Story Matters. Set in a fictional coastal West Dorset village, this is an affectionate and beautifully…