ANGEL Exit, set up in Dorset by Tamsin Fessey after her graduation from the celebrated French drama school Lecoq, has established itself as an exciting experimental physical theatre company. Perhaps its most experimental work is The Drive, currently on tour and featuring Tamsin and her co-director Lynne Forbes. They not only play the two characters…
FRIEDRICH Schiller’s play Mary Stuart could hardly be more timely than in a mid-Brexit Britain teetering on an uncertain future with the threats of religious fanaticism and mindless violence filling our consciousness. Robert Icke’s stunning production for the Almeida, centering on and amplifying an imagined meeting between English Queen Elizabeth I and her cousin Mary…
OVER the years, whether we have been travelling in Europe, America, the Middle East or Western Australia, we have found that the best advice to find unusual historic buildings, extraordinary landscapes, great places to eat, quirky shops or galleries or other hidden gems, has come from people we have met. We use maps (not GPS)…
TWO of the silliest musical tales ever put on stage get a rousing, vivacious and thoroughly enjoyable performance by Milborne Port Opera in the company’s annual spring show at the village hall. Fresh from their triumph in the 2017 Giant Coarse Acting Festival with a 15-minute masterpiece of country house mayhem, MPO is performing an…
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…