THE BOVTS production of David Edgar’s monumental adaptation of Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby is a triumph. Graduating students from the prestigious Bristol Old Vic Theatre School have traditionally been split, performing two, contrasting, plays in the summer, but this year’s show gives all 26 of the acting students equal opportunities in Geoffrey Brumlik and Jenny Stevens’…
RICHARD Eyre got lots of stick from fans of The Master when his long and triumphant tenure at the National Theatre did not include one Coward work. Now he’s making up for lost time in Bath, with a terrific production of the 1941 Blithe Spirit, that satire on the then-current fad for spiritualism and the…
WHEN the Puritans lost power and the Restoration was in full swing, there was an almost audible sigh of relief, and the arty types took every advantage of the chance to explore the limits of the new permissiveness. Among them was the multi-talented John Vanbrugh, who wrote two original plays (one to save the struggling…
IF you thought Sardinia was just about sun, sea and sand, think again. It’s got all those glorious holiday basics, of course, but this Mediterranean island has plenty more to boot. It’s part of Italy, after all, so it was certain to have layers of history beneath its shiny surface, but it can also boast…
THE Ustinov Studio has another triumph on its hands with the UK premiere of Christopher Durang’s award-winning comedy, which has Chekhov’s plays at its core. Best known for his absurdist plays, Durang brilliantly weaves academic theatrical parents, Chekhovian motifs and the fears and certainties of getting old into the lives of three siblings, Sonia the…
TWO images will remain in my mind from this year’s Salisbury International Arts Festival, and particularly from the middle weekend Festival of Ideas, which had the theme Our Fragile World. The images are of Gaia, Luke Jerram’s seven metre diameter globe based on NASA images of the planet from the Apollo space mission, and of…
DRIVING home from Salisbury on Saturday night we were thrilled to see a substantial flock of colourfully striped tigers on a field by Charnage Hill – that’s the power of art! Lesley Bates’ production of John Finnemore’s A Flock of Tigers has already won Salisbury Studio Theatre awards for top play at both Totton and…
JOHN Hartoch’s adaptation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, for the 2019 Bristol Old Vic Theatre School summer tour, also draws its inspiration from the style of Kneehigh and some recent pick-and-mix productions. The student company has taken 11 of the 24 original stories, and every night eight of them will be performed, at the…
ALTHOUGH opera purists and some serious musicians dismiss La Boheme as a lightweight work with only limited merit, [composer Benjamin Britten disliked it intensely], audiences in general have taken the opposite view for more than a century and a quarter, making it one of the most popular and often presented of operas. When Opera Up…
TO quote David Pugh and Dafydd Rogers the producers of this play: “This is the best British comedy ever written”. I think there are several other plays that would be legitimate challengers for that accolade, but there is no doubting that Willy Russell’s story of Rita, a 26-year- old ill-educated Liverpudlian hairdresser seeking to expand…