THERE really WAS a storm on the lawn for the final production at Prior Park after 18 seasons – the opening night was rained off! But the 36 young performers were ready to challenge the weather gods on Thursday, giving a powerful performance of Mark Powell and Ben Occhipinti’s new musical, The Teacup Poisoner. Based…
CARYL Churchill is surely one of this country’s leading playwrights, her best known plays probably being Top Girls, about the rise of women to the top of business and politics, written during the Thatcher era, and Serious Money, about stock market traders in the same Thatcher era or monetarism, and premiered in 1987, the year…
SOME of the finest food and drink producers from Dorset and Somerset were at the 2015 Gillingham and Shaftesbury Show, offering sparkling flavours and warm feelings despite the wretched weather. For the first time, this year saw a Dorset Farmers Market marquee with several of the best-known market members selling their wares to crowds who…
A STARTLING modern-dress and high-tech version of Macbeth played to 450 people in late summer sunshine in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s open air venue, The Dell. The two performances by Warminster’s Athenaeum Limelight Players was part of the RSC’s 2015 Open Stages programme and ALP chairman Adela Forestier-Walker said it had been a great challenge…
IF the spirit of Noel Coward hovers around any theatre where his plays are being staged, it must have been very blithe last week, when Dramatic Productions staged his delightful satire on the vogue for seances and spiritualism in the appropriately Art Deco setting of Wimborne’s Tivoli Theatre. Blithe Spirit is usually seen primarily as…
THE New England seaboard is famed for its lobster, so Philippa Davis thought she should learn a little more about this delicious crustacean as well as cooking and eating lobster after lobster for her Boston clients. Theoretically, a lobster can live forever. They have an enzyme called telomerase, which prevents the DNA from becoming damaged…
DURING her working visit to Boston, North Dorset-born chef Philippa Davis cooked as lot of lobster. She also learned to cook the classic brioche for the US East Coast traditional sensation, lobster sandwich. She says it is definitely not one of her quicker recipes but she has become obsessed with making it now that she…
WAY back in 1964, as part of the international Shakespeare Quatercentenary celebrations, Joyce Caton and her merry band of actors from Bournemouth and Poole took the first audience to Brownsea, ferried over by a fleet of little boats from Sandbanks to the island in Poole Harbour – and the first words they heard on the…
AVENUE Q broke many barriers when it first appeared on stage in the early years of this century. What had started with the simple idea of taking popular puppets into “crossover” roles, specifically to cast Kermit the frog in the title role of a production of Hamlet, soon developed into a grown up musical with…
THE lactose and gluten intolerant Nashville-based country singer songwriter Gretchen Peters couldn’t help commenting on the name of the venue her agent had chosen for her Cambridge Folk Festival warm up – Frome’s Cheese and Grain – but the room’s history did nothing to prevent her and her excellent band performing a sensational set to…