TWO of the UK’s up-and-coming opera stars will give a recital in the elegant setting of Merley House, Wimborne on Sunday 27th September. The two singers, a tenor and a counter-tenor, were selected by the Dorset-based arts charity Hurn Court Opera, from its prestigious 2025 Singer of the Year Competition. The recital follows the success…
THE play of Steel Magnolias starts with gunshots ringing round the auditorium. It’s an American man – father of Shelby the bride – demonstrating his right to bear, and discharge, arms, this time at the birds in the fruit trees and the magnificent old oaks surrounding his Louisiana property, so they don’t mess up the…
IT is hard to believe it is 30 years since the first Purbeck Film Festival, but in those three decades the rural celebration of film has become one of the country’s most interesting and varied events, this year running from 16th October to 1st November, with an astonishing mix of classic, recent and new releases….
WELLS Festival of Literature returns for its 35th year, following last year’s most successful event, with a packed programme of talks and book-related events at Cedars Hall, from Friday 16th October to Saturday 24th October. From popular novelists to leading journalists, including Jonathan Dimbleby, historians, cultural commentators, archaeologists, biographers, activists and campaigners, the 2026 Wells…
RICHARD Thompson was 18 years old when he and Simon Nicol, Ashley Hutchings and Shaun Frater formed Fairport Convention in 1967, “inventing” – as he told the Poole Lighthouse audience – a new musical genre. Now he is 77, and still going very strong, as is the band he left in 1971, with the seminal…
LATE in life, the by then sadly neglected composer and arranger Max Steiner, was asked by an interviewer what he thought of modern film scores. Steiner, arguably the most prolific, most famous and best composer of more than 300 film scores, including Gone with the Wind and King Kong, replied: “I never comment on things…
THE beautiful gardens of Stoberry Park at Wells are a joy in themselves. Their views of Wells Cathedral and across to Glastonbury Tor are inspiring. And an exhibition of work by West Country sculptors brings a magical and exciting extra dimension to this lovely setting. Beyond Horizons: Where Art, Nature and Community Meet – a…
IT is often a bit of a mystery to English audiences holding back the tears from performances of Three Sisters or Uncle Vanya to be told that Chekhov plays were intended as comedies. Even an attempt to perform The Cherry Orchard as broad comedy can come over as uncomfortably clunky. Back in 1973 Neil Simon…
IN 2003, Carl Grose and Anna Maria Murphy set about adapting the Cornish-based Celtic myth Tristan and Yseult and its later manifestations into a play for Kneehigh. Directed by Emma Rice, it was first staged at Restormel Castle, and continued (in the Kneehigh way) to tour in various theatres and outdoor settings until 2017 –…
THE country’s favourite poet, Pam Ayres, comes to Dorchester Arts at the Thomas Hardye School theatre on Sunday 20th September at 5pm, Tiverton Community Arts Theatre at 7.30 on Friday 25th, Taunton Brewhouse on Sunday 27th at 3.30pm, and Weston super Mare Playhouse on Sunday 21st November, with her latest collection, Doggedly Onwards – a…