A SUNNY week in North Wales, staying on the seafront at Llandudno. Doesn’t sound much like hard work, does it? But when the Guild of Fine Food went to North Wales for three days of Great Taste judging it was a serious business for 20 food writers, chefs and food producers.. The Guild of Fine…
ITALIANS love to pin nicknames on their favourite cities like Rome, Venice and Naples – so it says much about Bologna, the pride of northern Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region, that it can boast at least three. There’s ‘La Dotta’, the learned one, a reference to its great university, founded in 1088, the oldest in the world,…
ALASDAIR Beatson has been a regular performer since soon after the start of the Concerts in the West series in 2006 and indeed a patron of Concerts in the West for a number of years. His programming for the series in June was ingenious and infused with good humour. It was unusual but rewarding to…
DAVID Tristram’s hilarious murder mystery spoofs have provided rich materiel for the Street Theatre summer tours, and this year’s third offering, all about a Black Widow Spider and an unlikely murder investigated in flashback, is out on tour. It opened to a select audience at the Edgar Hall in Somerton, and continues until its “home…
THE annual Bristol Old Vic Theatre School summer tour is always eagerly awaited, both by the second year students (for whom this is the first public production) and by audiences across the south and west. Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood is a staple for the students, the many characters providing opportunities to explore and demonstrate…
LAST night’s performance of Written on Water was the third premiere I have attended of works by Jools Scott (music) and Sue Curtis (words). The Cool Web, their deeply moving tribute to the soldiers who died in the First World War, was premiered in the Abbey in November 2014, while And There Was Light received…
AS we near the bicentenary of Jane Austen’s death, various celebrations of her life and work are being held around the country, and one of her greatest stage adaptors, Tim Luscombe, has turned his attention to the novel Emma, with its heroine whom Austen described as “someone who no-one other than myself will much like.”…
OTHELLO, Shakespeare’s tragedy of obsessive love and jealousy, is a story for all time and has been successfully updated and relocated in many landmark productions. Dorset-based professional theatre company SISATA has taken a radical change of direction, moving the central character out of a military setting into the world of contemporary art. How you feel…
THE music of Mozart, the grounds of the Wormsley Estate and a faithful re-creation of John Cox’s famous Garsington Figaro – what more could you ask for? This is the sixth Figaro in Garsington’s 29 years, the production first seen in 2005 and reprised for the final season at the original venue in 2010. Expectations…
IFORD Festival opera comes of age this year with Christopher Cowell’s production of the Puccini tearjerker La Boheme, performed as always in the viscerally intimate Harold Peto cloister. The first of three operas in this year’s 21st opera season, this masterful reading of the familiar story of seamstress Mimi, the coquettish Musetta and the young…