THIS is the year when the word on the Edinburgh Festival was that unless your show featured at least one transitioning character and was gender neutral, you didn’t stand a chance. So when actor and renowned director Seb Harcombe was asked to direct for the final year of the AUB three year acting course, what…
RICHARD Harris’s 1979 Outside Edge was the play chosen by MADS to mark their 70th anniversary. The popular and much-performed cricketing comedy is the story of a cricket club whose members are trying to win a match at the same time as sorting out their marital machinations. It’s played in real time with a scorer…
SCOTTISH band Skerryvore is fast building an international reputation for the energy and power of its music. From its beginnings 12 years ago on Tiree as a ceilidh band, this year’s eight-man version includes a second piper, and the result is electrifying – as a lamentably small but noisily participatory Octagon audience would confirm. From…
SATURDAY night live? This week you could choose between Strictly Come Dancing, The X Factor and I’m A Celebrity: Get Me Out Of Here … or you could go for the real thing – that’s real life not “reality” television – and have a thundering good night out at Frome’s Merlin Theatre. Frome Drama Club,…
RUTH Rendell’s murder mystery A Judgement in Stone was published 40 years ago and the Classic Thriller Theatre Company’s anniversary stage adaptation is at Bath Theatre Royal until 25th November and then in Brighton, ending a lengthy tour. The story of the awkward Eunice Parchman became one of the great crime writer’s most popular works….
SOMERSET free range egg producer and supplier, The Traditional Free Range Egg Company, has teamed up with The Devilled Egg, a new online cookery school, to create 10 elegant and easy-to-follow canapé recipes using its Great Taste Award-winning Foraging Free quail eggs. Designed to make the most of the delicate and dainty quail eggs, which…
WAKING with the insistent thump of It’s Raining Men and Pop Music in my “brain” and confronted with the news that the population of Australia had voted overwhelmingly to approve same-sex marriage, memories of BLOG’s splendiferous Priscilla seemed perfect. Vicki Klein’s debut as director and choreographer with the company was a resounding success, and Matthew…
TOM Stoppard’s play Arcadia is rightly regarded as one of the great theatrical works of the late 20th century, a play packed with invention, ideas, wit and learning. It is very funny, but the audience needs a certain degree of erudition to get the jokes. Set in two distinct periods in the same room of…
BRUCE Norris’s sharply funny play Clybourne Park had its local premiere with two casts of students from AUB, director Sean Aita drawing performances from the young actors that it’s hard to imagine being bettered by the starriest of casts. The play is a spin-off from Raisin in the Sun, highlighting the inherent racism of communities,…
THROUGHOUT the autumn, National Trust gardeners are restoring the parterre, a significant and integral part of the formal garden at Kingston Lacy near Wimborne. Kingston Lacy was home to the Bankes family for more than 300 years. The parterre sits to the east of the property and was first laid out by Walter Ralph Bankes…