THE Commandery Players are returning to their summer retreat at Ansty, near Tisbury, to perform Shakespeare’s The Tempest, from 4th to 8th August nightly at 7.30pm. The company is an offshoot of Tisbury Arts Group, and has been staging plays at the beautiful Elizabethan banqueting hall since 2016. This year they have chosen the play…
THE Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen is not generally considered a barrel of laughs – “grim up north” would be the usual opinion, but when Cornwall’s inventive Miracle Theatre gets hold of a classic there is usually a comic twist or two, as Artsreach audiences will find when A Comedy of Terrors comes to Ibberton village…
AS Lord Mountararat informs us in Iolanthe: “When Wellington thrashed Napoleon Bonaparte, As every child can tell, The House of Peers throughout the war, Did nothing in particular, And did it very well.” Those last two lines could well be applied to the sterling work done in this play by three actors, Jo Patmore, Sophie…
THE psychological thriller The Late Edwina Black was first performed 77 years ago, a drawing-room play that followed the then-current fashion for isolated houses, moody weather and unexplained deaths, set in 1895 long before the days of DNA but as policing was already becoming increasingly scientific. Of course it is “old fashioned”, but the trick…
IF Matt Brady drank a bottle of good champagne and danced until dawn on the third and final night of this year’s Ballet Under the Stars, the celebrations were totally justified. The last night of the last year of Covent Garden Dance Co’s summer residency in the 17th century walled garden at Hatch House was…
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 at Sixpenny Handley village hall, from 7th to 9th August at Dartmoor Folk Festival, Friday 25th September…
WAITRESS – the musical comes back to Bristol Hippodrome on 4th August as part of its tenth anniversary tour. Dorset residents were the first in the country to see the 2007 film on which it is based, written by Adrienne Shelly and previewed at the late lamented Screen Bites food film festival. Shelly, who also…
CHARLES Dickens was only 24 years old when he started writing the first instalment of what is now known as The Pickwick Papers. Samuel Pickwick and his friends, failed lover Tracy Tupman, would-be sporting gent Nathaniel Winkle and nervy poet Augustus Snodgrass, set forth from London to discover life around England (Manchester was not mentioned)….
YEARS ago, when the Bible, including the often gruesome Old Testament stories, were part of the curriculum, most of us knew a bit about the more colourful characters – Abraham, King David, Daniel (with all his torments), Judith (murdering the enemy general Holofernes), Jonah (in the whale), Noah (and all those pairs of creatures) ……
DONIZETTI’S comic opera L’Elisir d’Amore is usually set in the heat of an Italian summer … but why not in the heat of a Dorset one, thought director Andy Martin, back to the county of his birth from Australia to direct for the company where he had made his first foray into the world of…