CHEF and food journalist Nigel Slater’s memoir, Toast, was a best-seller among his many fans and the film of the book, starring Freddie Highmore and Helena Bonham Carter, has become a classic. Now the story of how the nine-year-old Nigel learned to love cooking has been adapted for the stage by the Lowry Theatre, and…
ONE of the greatest plays of the 20th century, Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, is a brave and triumphant choice for the Churchill company in Wimborne. The Tivoli’s is an audience not accustomed to big, serious drama, unless it’s in the form of a movie. But the many who all but filled the stalls on…
WILLIAM J Locke’s short story Ladies in Lavender is best known in Charles Dance’s film starring dames Judi Dench and Maggie Smith, but as so often happens with cinema adaptations, the stage play is a much subtler dramatic form. So it is with Shaun McKenna’s version, chosen by director Patricia Richardson for ImpAct’s autumn tour…
WHEN the 19-year-old Shelagh Delaney burst onto the theatre scene with her first play, A Taste of Honey, its gritty script and unrelenting subject matter kicked audiences and London-centric critics into the reality of existence in the north. Sixty years on it still has the power to shock, as it vividly shows the growing seeds…
THERE’S something strange and mysterious about Bulbarrow in Dorset, and it inspired writer Natasha Solomons in several of her successful novels, the first of which was Mr Rosenblum’s List. One of its characters, Curtis Butterworth, particularly endeared himself to her, so his own history became the subject for a short story, which has now been…
THE 2019 Celebrate Voice festival is in full swing in the pop-up Wilson’s Piccolo Theatre in Salisbury’s Guildhall Square, and after two days of jazz, cabaret and song, Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro took to the stage on Sunday afternoon. In the six years since Lynsey Docherty created the festival, it established itself as one…
A NEW scheme by the National Trust aims to return rivers to their natural path to reduce the impact of climate change, flood risk and to make space for nature, including the endangered water vole. Allowing rivers to meander like ‘the branches of a tree’ rather than along a single channel will slow river flow,…
IT’S 20 years since Andrew Hilton took the ambitious and risky step of establishing a theatre company to perform Shakespeare – for five years – in the former Imperial Tobacco factory in Bristol’s Southville. In the intervening years the area has seen a resurgence of popularity, and the company, now known as stf, is a…
A MALE koala has been flown from Osaka in Japan to join Longleat’s koala programme. The 12-year-old marsupial was flown from Osaka Tennoji Zoo and accompanied on the flight by his Japanese keepers and vet who are helping him settle in to his new home. His arrival means Longleat now has what is believed to…
EDMOND Rostand’s 1897 verse play Cyrano de Bergerac draws its inspiration from the true story of a Gascon hero and poet, and its swashbuckling romance continues to excite and delight audiences in theatres and cinemas across the world. It is currently one of the flavours of the year, with new several new stage productions and…