LET me begin by saying that I believe John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera to be a masterpiece of music theatre, and I am no fan of Benjamin Britten’s tinkering with familiar tunes. Myra McDadd’s big idea for her production of the Britten adaptation, on stage at Shaftesbury Arts Centre until Saturday 15th October, was to…
I ENJOY the occasional chance to review plays after my national and regional colleagues, but I don’t read their thoughts before seeing the play. So, after a wonderful night at Bath Theatre Royal with Simon Reade’s adaptation of EM Forster’s A Room With a View, directed by Adrian Noble and designed by Paul Willis, I was…
THE 2016/17 season at Bath Theatre Royal’s Ustinov Theatre starts with another triumphant production, Half Life, a play by Canadian academic and scientist John Mighton, directed by Nancy Meckler. The play, set in 1999 (the Year of Older Persons), discusses how we ignore our professional standpoints in our personal interactions, how our expectations are dictated…
A NEW short play by Sturminster Newton based writer Craig White had its first performance for the home audience at the Exchange, after a successful debut at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. Single Varietal is a thought-provoking and topical play about cider and families, provenance and tradition and the insidious encroachment of big corporations into the…
IT is a long way from the blood-stained villages of Bosnia to the peaceful chalk downlands of Salisbury Plain … or is it? Former soldier Zac finds unexpected and uncomfortable memories in Boiling Kettle Theatre Company’s Defender of the Dead, which began an autumn tour at South Petherton’s David Hall. Zac seems to be your…
THE interior of Southampton’s Nuffield Theatre has been redesigned to accommodate the stunning production of Nick Dear’s new play Dedication, an exploration into the relationship between Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton. Reams of paper have been used in discussions of the relationship between the writer and actor from Stratford and the pretty lordling whose…
REVIEWING The Shakespeare Revue sounds a bit tautologous – but that’s a pompous word and pricking pomposity is just one of the witty aims of this sparkling show, at Bath Theatre Royal until Saturday 24th September. The Bard is over-intellectualised, subjected to merciless egotistical exercises in angst and paranoia by pretentious directors, mangled by amateurs, pickled…
WE live in difficult times, when it often seems as though common sense and human decency are concepts of the past. Dawn King’s award winning play Foxfinder, set in a not-too-distant future, is a frightening glimpse at where we might be headed in this time of faux-scientific governmental advice and “reality” star world leaders. In…
SHERIDAN’S immortal comedy The Rivals, set “down the road” in Bath in the 1770s, is the perfect play for Bristol’s Old Vic, which opened just a few years before the play’s premiere. Chosen as part of the Bristol theatre’s 250th anniversary season, it has been revived in a co-production with the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow…
PHILIPPA Davis has recently returned from her first visit to the Mediterranean island of Sardinia … Sardinia meant a new destination and new client for me so it was very exciting. The initial introductions were done over the phone and it all seemed that it would work out very nicely until … “Oh yes, we…