EUGENE O’Neill’s autobiographical Long Day’s Journey into Night is regarded as one of the greatest of all American plays, flaying the fabric of a family in the course of one intense day. Mary Tyrone was once a romantically pious Catholic schoolgirl with dreams of the Sisterhood until she met matinee idol James, an Irish actor…
MICHEL Tremblay’s famous 1971 play A toi, pour toujours, ta Mary-Lou, has been translated and relocated by Michael West for its UK premiere, on at the Ustinov Studio in Bath until Saturday 30th April. Four members of a family talk. Two of them are dead. This is a play deep-rooted in poverty and repressive Catholicism,…
MACCLESFIELD in Cheshire holds its Treacle Market on the last Saturday of every month; it’s a relatively new invention, aimed at bringing back life to one of the most attractive small towns that orbit Manchester. It reminded me of our own Frome Independent, the market stalls trickling down the hills and congregating wherever there’s a…
I HAVE said before that I would travel a long way to see anything performed by BODS, having been thrilled by their Rent and Hairspray, and even impressed with The Witches of Eastwick, a somewhat weaker work. So when I heard that they were taking on one of the 20th century’s musical classics, I was…
THE centenary of the First World War has been an opportunity for many untold stories to be told, forgotten heroes to be remembered and the many roles of women to be celebrated. But few stories are more extraordinary and few women more remarkable than Dorothy Lawrence, a young journalist from Salisbury who made her way…
IBSEN’S Hedda Gabler, considered one of the greatest European plays of the 19th century, has had a radical re-working by Irish playwright Brian Friel. First seen in Dublin in 2008, it is at Salisbury Playhouse until 2nd April, only the second English production (the first was at the Old Vic starring Sheridan Smith) Friel has…
THE Street Theatre company celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2016, and the first play of the special year is The Ladykillers. Graham Linehan has adapted the classic 1955 Ealing comedy film for the stage, and the Strode Theatre based company was lucky to have the vast spaces of a Shepton showground to build the complicated…
PHILIPPA Davis had an exhausting few days recently, including cooking for a Shabbat in West London, a whisky tasting lunch and photographic exhibition in a Soho car park, a wine tasting at the fabulous Whirly Wines down in Tooting Bec, working on a brilliant Dorset book project* and a trip to Nice and Monaco. I…
THE latest tour by Farnham Maltings, following its back-by-popular-demand version of It’s a Wonderful Life, is The Iranian Feast, and it packed Winfrith Newburgh Hall with an audience drawn by the previous show and keen to try some food with their theatre. The touring company has perfected a style that merges documentary with entertainment, exposing…
ARTHUR Miller wrote his powerful drama The Crucible in response to the mass hysteria that accompanied the McCarthy “witch hunts” in the America of the 1950s, when propaganda was used to inflame feeling against so-called Communists running television, radio and Hollywood. Watching the play in March 2016, you have to wonder what the playwright would…