THIS year’s TRB Theatre School Summer Company is performing egg staffer Hattie Taylor’s new adaptation of The Tales of 1001 Nights at Bath’s dedicated youth theatre space. With a 29-strong cast on the tiny stage – and a vast number of stories to choose from – it’s as exciting a prospect for the writer as…
WRITER William Boyd came to the theatre late in his illustrious career as a novelist and scriptwriter for the big and small screens, and thank goodness he made the move. His play The Argument, first seen in Hampstead Theatre’s studio in 2016, seems at first to be a mixture of early Ayckbourn and Yasmina Reza…
THERE probably hasn’t been a time when so many people have imagined that there is a better world “somewhere over the rainbow” – so it was a clever touch in this Stage 65 production to have Uncle Henry and Aunt Em’s Kansas farm-hands looking at their mobile phones and an instantly recognisable president’s voice on…
WIMBORNE Rep 2019 reached its dramatic conclusion with performances of Agatha Christie and Frank Vosper’s Love from a Stranger at the Tivoli Theatre. The season began with a comedy (A Bunch of Amateurs), continued with a staging of Rising Damp, and ended with a tense thriller with a real sting in the tail. Vosper was…
RISING Damp, the ITV series broadcast in the mid 1970s, has been judged as one of the greatest television comedies of all time. It started as a play by Eric Chappell, who then adapted it for television, starring Leonard Rossiter, Frances de la Tour, Richard Beckinsale and Don Warrington. Only Beckinsale was not in the…
TEN years ago, Matt Brady put up a marquee in a beautiful walled garden at Hatch House near Tisbury and invited audiences to come and see ballet in the open air. A three-course dinner was served as entr’actes to the main event. It was, by any stretch of the imagination, a brave thing to do….
IF Macbeth is The Scottish Play, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor is THE Scottish Opera. So it was an interesting and logical idea for Christopher Cowell, directing the tragedy for Dorset Opera Festival to nod to the Shakespearean precedent, with three hags and a ghost. Not everyone approved – some critics have been disparaging of the innovation…
ONLY three days are left to see Rupert Everett’s stunning new production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, adapted by David Hare. This second main house play of the summer season started on 18th July but the planned press night had to be postponed when John Light, who plays the doctor Astrov, was injured. Back now on a…
EMMA Rice’s Enid Blyton adaptation has taken over the former Passenger Shed at Temple Meads station for the summer, filling the cavernous space with fun, frolics and friendship. The Malory Towers books, written between 1946 and 1951, interwove with her other favourite series, the Famous Five (1942 to 1963) and the Secret Seven (1949 to…
WIMBORNE Rep got off to a spectacular start with Joshua Ward’s terrific production of A Bunch of Amateurs, on stage at the Tivoli Theatre. Written initially as a screenplay by Ian Hislop and Nick Newman, the film (the Royal Command film for 2008 and much beloved of HMQ) was a box office and critical flop….