BEHIND every great story, there are the facilitators whose work is both indispensible and invisible. That’s the idea behind Isobel McArthur’s brilliant reworking of Jane Austen’s classic. If you have ever gathered a group of friends, layed out all your clothes and performed a play, swapping characters as the script demands, you’ll get the picture….
TONY and Gill Horitz’s trilogy of plays about the effects of World War I on Wimborne came to an end with Aftermath, performed in the Dining Room of the Hanham ancestral home, Dean’s Court. Following Tommy’s Sisters and The Gathering, this was a play set in the days and weeks immediately after the cease-fire was…
FIFTY-two years on, and Alan Ayckbourn’s comedy of miscommunication is still as sublimely funny as it ever was, as the packed audience at Salisbury Playhouse will vouch. It’s a four-hander about infidelity, acutely observed by the then 28-year-old writer. If the setting in Jo Newman’s brilliant production in Salisbury is extravagantly 60s, even down to…
IN the week when the beloved Harold Peto Cloister at Iford Manor was dismantled to make way for builders to reinforce the failing foundations, Iford Arts opened the flaps on its geodesic dome in the magnificent gardens of Belcombe Court at Bradford on Avon and welcomed audiences to Donizetti’s L’Elisir D’Amore. After 25 years, it was…
AFTER writing more than 60 plays for stage, television and radio, many of them with strong political themes befitting someone who was at the heart of student politics when he chaired the Socialist Society at Manchester University at the end of the 1960s, David Edgar breaks cover and appears on stage in this virtual one…
WE went up to Edinburgh for a concert at the festival (John Eliot Gardiner conducting West Side Story, if you are interested, and it was brilliant) and stayed somewhere new to us – Portobello. On the Forth coast, between Leith and Musselburgh, Portobello is a slightly faded 19th century seaside resort that has not been…
THIS autumn, a National Trust team at Lacock Abbey will be working on the cleaning and conservation of more than 1,000 tiles, dating back to the Middle Ages.. Lacock’s collection of tiles contains medieval tiles, dating from the 1200s to the 1400s, and Tudor tiles, dating from the 1500s. The medieval tiles would have decorated…
AS I drove back from the Quicksilver Mail on Wednesday, pondering the meaning of the Swan Theatre production of Ashes to Ashes, Professor Laurie Taylor was on the radio, in a programme called Ghosts in the Machine, exploring the world of auditory illusion. It seemed weirdly appropriate. Harold Pinter’s plays are notoriously elusive, sometimes menacing,…
THE majority of the audience at Bath Theatre Royal on Tuesday couldn’t get enough of Miles Jupp (as David Tomlinson) talking about his time as Mr Banks. His role in the 1964 film Mary Poppins is how the actor, born in 1917, is best remembered. Now James Kettle has written a solo show, specifically for…
LE Navet Bete Theatre Company (which if we are to believe a group of people who take very little in life seriously or with much reverence, translates as The Daft Turnip) have one great aim in life – to make people laugh. In an era when many seriously-minded theatre groups appear to consider that entertainment…