THERE is a new look to The Tickled Pig in Wimborne. After three years establishing the Michelin-recommended restaurant in East Street as a destination for outstanding locally-sourced and seasonal cuisine, The Tickled Pig has been reinvented as a new breed of delicatessen-come-café and kitchen, selling and serving its own home-grown and home-reared produce. In its…
TRAVELLING chef Philippa Davis has been off to Scotland again, this time to the Highlands to cook for a salmon fishing week on the River Findhorn – lots of big breakfasts, afternoon teas, help yourself suppers and best of all barbecues by the river … “OH, it’s easy to find, you can’t miss it !”…
William Congreve wrote only five plays, the best known of which was the last, The Way of the World. Love for Love, written in 1695 and famous for the line “O fie, miss, you must not kiss and tell”, is a complicated story of sexual encounters and true love which students from Bristol Old Vic…
OSCAR Wilde’s classic The Importance of Being Earnest has been described as the “perfect comedy” and is certainly one of the most enduringing popular shows on the English-speaking stage. Edith Evans is thought to have nailed Lady Bracknell for all time with her iconic interrogation “a handbag?” and directors and actors have sought in vain…
EVEN on a sunny June evening, the waves crash against Portland Bill, the wind whistles along Chesil Beach and the white horses dance and race in the blue-green sea. The seas on the night that the Earl of Abergavenny, an East Indiaman out of Portsmouth, foundered and sank off Portland in 1805 were huge and…
IT’S a rare treat to see a “new” play on an amateur tour, and althought Joao Bethencourt surreal comedy is 30 years old, it is new to audiences in the south west. As it says in the title, it’s about the kidnapping of the Holy Father – on this occasion by an eccentric Brooklyn taxi…
JAMIE Montgomery is a big wheel in the artisan cheese world. His Montgomery Cheddar, made on the farm in North Cadbury, just to the north of Yeovil, is the byword for unpasteurised traditional West Country Cheddar, and now the “go to” variety for French epicures who are latterly discovering that the rosbifs can and do…
WHEN the National Theatre of Brent’s Patrick Barlow got his hands on John Buchan’s The 39 Steps (as reimagined by North Country Theatre for performance by four actors) the result was an instant, and worldwide, success. And now Lesley Bates and Studio Theatre have brought it to the stage in Salisbury, with even more nods…
THE 2015 Iford Festival has opened in glorious style with a production of Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera, The Masked Ball. Timothy Nelson’s production, brilliantly choreographed by Jo Meredith, brings the dichotomy of this story to the fore. Updated to 1920s England, complete with Union flags and the Charleston, King Riccardo is surrounded by the…
THE Maltings carpark in Salisbury is not a thing of beauty. It’s a two-storey brick edifice, with heavy columns, dingy corners and low ceilings, dark and unwelcoming. What better location for a murder? So what more imaginative setting for a reinterpretation of the life and music of Carlo Gesualdo, one of the most remarkable composers…