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…
THERE is something deeply satisfying about Andrew Carpenter’s production of The Producers at Frome’s Merlin Theatre. It works triumphantly against all the odds that are stacked against it. The show is the story of a wily Broadway producer, Max Bialystock, and a nervous accountant, Leo Bloom, who plot to put on a stinker of a…
IN August 2014 Her Majesty the Queen officially pardoned code breaker Alan Turing, wiping out his conviction for gross indecency. But of course it was 60 years too late. The brilliant cryptographer and founder of computer science, an old boy of Sherborne School and decoder of the German Enigma code, died in 1954 at the…
MISBEHAVIN’, the North Dorset-based jazz quartet, have released their second CD, launched at a gig at the Grosvenor Hotel in Shaftesbury to an enthusiastic audience in the Assembly Room. It is seven years since the first album – Some Other Time (you might conclude that these musicians have time on their minds!) and the new…
THOMAS Aikenhead was the last person in Britain sentenced to death for blasphemy, and the Edinburgh student went to his death in 1697 with the words: “It is a principle innate and co-natural to every man to have an insatiable inclination to the truth, and to seek for it as for hid treasure.” These chilling facts…
JOIN the supper club at La Fosse, the restaurant with rooms in the centre of Cranborne, for a taste of Ireland on Thursday 17th March. You might be lucky enough to get one of the two remaining tables for the Irish Supper Club, where chef-proprietor Mark Hartstone will be serving traditional dishes including lamb, boxty,…
Mozart: Exultate Jubilate K165 Brahms: Ein Deutsches Requiem op. 45 Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, leader Amin Merchant Bournemouth Symphony Chorus Simon Halsey conductor Sarah Tynan soprano David Soar baritone AS a choir trainer, Simon Halsey has in recent years carried all before him. Principal Conductor of Berlin Radio Choir from 2001 to 2015, he now leads…