THE great war poet Edward Thomas, who died 100 years ago this year, was remembered in The Life and Work of the Poet Edward Thomas, with Matthew Hollis, biographer of the poet, Stephanie Cole and James Laurenson and Martin Bax, at Rook Lane Chapel, Frome, as part of the town’s 2017 festival. In 1913 Edward…
THE Devil, as the Salvation Army founder General William Booth observed, has all the best tunes. In Gounod’s Faust, he certainly does, making the villainous Mephistopheles the undoubted star of the piece, and requiring a larger than life performance from a great singer to carry it off convincingly. Satan-Mephistopheles, summoned to earth by the suicidal…
THE Melbourne Theatre Company stage version of Hitchcock’s classic film North by Northwest, making its UK debut as part of Bath Theatre Royal’s summer season, is eye-popping fun from start to finish. The staging is a sort of combination of the award-winning stagings of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Southampton…
DORSET Opera, which started its life at Sherborne School in 1974, has never performed a Rossini opera until now, in its new home at the Coade Theatre in Bryanston, Blandford. And many will say that the current David Phipps-Davis production has been worth the wait. Le Comte Ory is a totally barmy story that just…
by Simone Sekers ONLY a month ago we were exploring the Salt Coast of Essex, in Maldon. Now I’m exploring Malton, in deepest Yorkshire, if only from the comfort of my own home. Last week we were sent another book by our old friend Peter Brears. For longer than it is tactful to remember we…
IT’S 50 years since the first BOAT production of Shakespeare’s sylvan romance As You Like It, which transforms a cruel court into the Forest of Arden, and dukes to duchesses in this gender-blind version directed by Brian Woolton. The island in Poole Harbour is the perfect setting for the story of love at first sight,…
HANDEL opera is perfect in scale for the intimate confines of the cloister at Iford, surely the most beautiful setting for “country house opera” in the world on a night such as Tuesday 25th July 2017. This year’s festival opera comes to an end with Timothy Nelson’s production of Jephtha, the harrowing story of the…
DORSET is blessed with great food, gorgeous scenery and some wonderful hotels and restaurants where you can enjoy the best of both. There are few that can compare with Summer Lodge at Evershot, an 18th country house which is one of the region’s finest hotels, set in one of the loveliest parts of West Dorset,…
TIMBERLAKE Wertenbaker’s play The Love of the Nightingale is a feminist take on the ancient Greek legend of the rape of Philomela by her sister Procne’s husband Tereus, and, as we all know those Greeks knew everything there is to know about human nature and our relationships with the all-powerful gods we pray in aid…
FOR far too long, driving in France has for me been no more than a direct route to Italy. But if France has been somewhat under-appreciated, my week in Brittany changed all that and reminded me what a beautiful country it is. One of the benefits was that we were able to avoid the hassle…