BY the time you get to our age, you are supposed to forget birthdays, but on the other hand, they are a good excuse to go out with friends and have a meal, so we headed off to West Stafford to meet a friend at the pub she had recommended. West Stafford, just a few…
THE autumn season at Bath Theatre Royal’s Ustinov Studio opens with flourish, as Eugene Marin Labiche’s farce Monsieur Popular weaves its deceitful magic on a newly-framed stage until 7th November. The new translation by Jeremy Sams is full of wit and guile as it unfolds the comical story of a “confirmed bachelor” who takes the…
POOR Philippa Davis – one day she’s in Provence being spoiled by the wonderful seasonal produce and the next she’s in the Highlands serving tea by roaring fires. The life of a travelling chef is so hard … Caught between a midge and … WITHIN minutes of arriving at the lodge in…
THE main question on my mind this evening was “why”? Dirty Rotten Scoundrels was a fairly good Steve Martin and Michael Caine 1988 film about a couple of con men trying to outdo each other on the French Riviera, which itself was based on an earlier comedy, Bedtime Story, starring David Niven as the suave…
YEOVIL Amateur Operatic Society was hot off the mark when it first staged Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe in 1903, less than 20 years after the work’s London premiere. The Somerset society was started a year earlier, and its first seven shows were by G and S. This week YAOS’s sixth production of the batty story…
MY week was not as planned. My diary had me in the dramatic depths of wild Scotland cooking for my first grouse shoot of the season, slapping on the mosquito spray and cooking up a variety of game themed feasts. Tweed cap, puffy jacket, gloves and various layers were ready to be packed. With a…
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, leader Amyn Merchant Kirill Karabits: Conductor Lise Lindstrom (soprano) WHAT a way to start another season! At a packed Lighthouse, the BSO gave an intense yet disciplined semi-staged performance of the scandalous and ground-breaking 1905 opera by Richard Strauss, backed by a world-class team of fifteen soloists. The story of Salome, based…
GEORGE Orwell’s terrifying and prophetic dystopian novel 1984, published in 1949, has been adapted and re-imagined by Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan, and it is playing at Bath’s Theatre Royal until 3rd October, before heading to Australia and the USA. The award-winning production, by Headlong, Nottingham Playhouse and the Almeida, opened two years ago. The…
THE first series of Music at St Giles House at Wimborne St Giles comes to a close on Tuesday 29th September with a visit from the Soloists of Prussia Cove. The programme of music, organised in collaboration between Lord Shaftesbury and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, has been a great success, and plans for the 2016…
SUNSET Boulevard, based as it is on the Billy Wilder film of the same name, depends on the casting of a rock solid, completely confident and fully capable singer and actor in the role of Norma Desmond, the aging silent film star who hopes for one final revival, despite the coming of the talkies. Maureen…