THE world thankfully has many fine string quartets and a vast repertoire to draw on. To raise the profile of a relatively young professional quartet above those of its many excellent rivals, it is important to programme the concert with imagination and care and through the works to show and say something of real value….
TREVOR Nunn’s first production at Bath Theatre Royal’s Ustinov Studio is causing excitement in the theatre world – a world premiere of a play written 118 years ago by one of the greatest writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Harley Granville Barker’s early work, in a draft form, was found at the…
I LAST saw Kneehigh at its tent base The Asylum, in the home county of Cornwall, in Midnight’s Pumpkin, the crazy adaptation of Cinderella, aimed at folk of all ages, and before that my experience had been outdoors in a couple of villages in Dorset, so I knew roughly what to expect, and was intrigued…
OSCAR Wilde’s classic comedy of manners The Importance of Being Earnest must surely be one of the most enduring and best loved plays in the English language. In this stylish production, from the Suffolk based Original Theatre Company, and with some well-known faces in the cast, it is not difficult to see why. Who cares…
HAVING seen Matthew Bourne’s latest ballet, The Red Shoes, last year, and Sleeping Beauty the year before, it was good to see how they compared with one of his older works, Cinderella, relocated by Bourne to the Second World War with Cinderella’s chance meeting not with a Prince but an RAF pilot, Harry, and with…
EDITH, growing increasingly dotty with age, lives alone in a house in the Cornish woods, hoarding her rubbish and brooding. Every three months her no-nonsense middle-aged daughter Viv descends on her from London, briskly taking over, clearing and cleaning, despite her mother’s feeble protests. Outside in the woods lives a nameless runaway teenager, kept going…
TOP Hat started life as one of those classic Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers films in the years leading up to the Second World War, only being adapted for the stage seven or eight years ago. As might be expected, the plot line is pretty thin, but with its host of (mostly) memorable tunes by…
MY main source for knowledge of the life and works of the Bronte sisters is a chart-topping single by Kate Bush, so I was looking forward to learning more about this literary family this evening, in the safe hands of the company at The Swan. I have said before that I would happily watch them…
ARTSREACH, Dorset’s rural arts charity, picked an absolute winner once more with Clown in the Moon, a dramatic portrait of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas’ chaotic, frequently hilarious and all too brief life. Written by Gwynne Edwards, directed by Gareth Armstrong and starring Rhodri Miles as the poet, this one-man show, located, in part, in a…
DIRECTOR Michael Boyd and translater Rory Mullarkey have taken one of the best known and greatest plays in European literature and given it an extraordinary fresh energy and warmth in the new production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, on at Bristol Old Vic until 7th April. They have reconfigured the country’s oldest theatre into an…