ROCK of Ages has acquired a lighter look since it last came to this part of the world with quite a few of the characters happily sending up themselves and the part of the story about a Nazi-style business man’s attempt to buy up The Strip, close the clubs and turn it into a commercial…
THE children’s writer Michael Morpurgo, author of Private Peaceful and Warhorse, said: “When children are very young, you read them books that are positive to help them go to sleep. But there comes a moment when they begin to understand the difficulties of the world. They know there are problems and the books they read…
TAMARA von Werthern’s inventive and rivetting play The White Bike was created in London and was site-specific for that audience. When ImpAct Theatre’s director Patricia Richardson acquired permission to stage the first amateur production in Dorset, she worked closely with the writer, and relocated the action to the Boscombe, Bournemouth, and Branksome area, familiar to…
LAURA Wade’s latest award-winning play Home, I’m Darling, more than lives up to all the rapturous national reviews. The extraordinarily varied writer has created a seemingly artificial world which is the only reality that central character Judy knows. Brought up in a 60s commune, she has swallowed hook, line and sinker the advertising promises of…
FROME’S Tri.Art Theatre School and Dance Academy is on a roll. The 2018 summer school production In the Heights was chosen as best youth theatre in Somerset for the year, and now the dance section has staged, almost incredibly in one week, a sensational production of Peter Pan at the Merlin Theatre. What links them…
AN important Iron Age hillfort and other archaeological remains, covering 73 acres at Ham Hill Country Park has been purchased with £235,000 from the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF), funding from the Friends of Ham Hill and a capital grant from South Somerset District Council. The area that has been saved for the nation makes…
CENTRE Stage, which was known for the first 20 years of its existence as the 14-20 Music and Drama Society, now happily welcomes younger members into its ranks. Two of them, 11 year olds George Killoran and Jack Gittoes-Davies, shared the exacting title role in Lionel Bart’s wonderfully tuneful adaptation of Charles Dickens’ far darker…
SHAFTESBURY Arts Centre drama group is cris-crossing the fourth wall with this spring double bill of Michael Frayn’s Audience and Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound, on at the Bell Street theatre until Saturday 13th April. Crossing the fourth wall is an enticing project for a playwright, and Frayn adds to the fun of his…
MOIRA Buffini’s 2013 play Handbagged is an imagined look at the private conversations between the monarch and her Prime Minister – in this case Elizabeth II and Margaret Hilda Thatcher. It could hardly be a more apposite time for a new production, as many will be wondering if the weekly meeting with Her Majesty is…
PAULA Hawkins’ 2015 novel The Girl on the Train is not only a publishing phenomenon, selling more than 1,500,000 copies in weeks, but it marked the move of the traditional British Murder Mystery into the 21st century. This is a story of urban loneliness, where one’s whole identity is tied up in “social” media jargon,…