MERE Amateur Dramatic Society’s pantomime is usually the last in the season, and this year they gave their devoted audience the favourite story of them all, Cinderella. Taken from an original script by Pip Brown, Allan Glide and Chris Wood, this was Merely the story of Cinders, packed full of local references, awful jokes and…
Junkyard, Bristol Old Vic and touring IN 1979, some years before the coining of the term “sink estate”, the community of Lockleaze in north eastern Bristol was still reeling from the adjoining M32 opened four years earlier, and petty crime, unemployment and despondency were rife. It was then that the Baroness Allen of Hurtwood’s…
GERMAN playwright Marius von Mayenburg is one of the most prolific of his generation, and his 2015 play Stuck Plastik makes its UK debut at Bath’s Ustinov Studio, opening the Spring German season and on stage until 25th March. In its brilliant Maja Zade translation, and now called simply Plastic, it is a scintillating, hilarious…
DIRECTOR Richard Twyman, only the third “guest” in the company’s 19 year history, has joined Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory for the 2017 season opener, Othello, in its second production on the former cigar packing floor of the converted Wills building in Bedminster. The young director, who has recently taken over the reins at English…
Wagner: Lohengrin: Prelude to Act I Schumann: Cello Concerto Wagner: Lohengrin: Prelude to Act III Schumann: Symphony No. 3 ‘Rhenish’ Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, leader Amyn Merchant Kirill Karabits conductor Steven Isserlis cello NO love was lost between Wagner and Schumann, who both found themselves in Dresden in 1849. Broadly, Wagner was the revolutionary…
TAKE a closed, out-of-season hotel, a classic horror story, one of the world’s most exciting directors and a group of adventurous and multi-talented students and you are guaranteed an immersive theatre experience. Yes, immersive experiences are a bit of cliche in contemporary theatre but this was the real deal. We were swept into the increasingly…
THE internationally acclaimed Tallis scholars under their director Peter Phillips were on top form last night when they performed to a capacity audience at the Assembly Rooms as part of this year’s Bath Bachfest. In an interesting and well-balanced programme of mostly relatively short pieces, they traced and celebrated the development of German church music,…
IT would be hard to imagine a more atmospheric setting than the new village hall at Kimmeridge for the first night of Dave Mynne’s Artrsreach tour of The Odyssey. The waves of the ancient past wash over you in this beautiful new building, almost within the sound of the sea, and built with a substantial…
LOVE is at the heart the musical version of The Addams Family, and if the famously gruesome family has a message it is a sentimental song of family values and romance. It’s also a hilarious romp peopled by the undead forebears of the legendary Gomez and Morticia, set in their creepy mansion in central park…
Bartók: Dance Suite, Barber: Violin Concerto, Lutosławski: Concerto for Orchestra Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, leader Amyn Merchant Kirill Karabits: Conductor Nemanja Radulović: Violin THIS concert of 20th-century music saw a deepening of the love affair between the Lighthouse audience and the BSO’s charismatic artist in residence, Serbian violin virtuoso Nemanja Radulović. With his huge barely-controlled afro,…