BASED on one of Agatha Christie’s most famous and enduring novels, published in 1939, this play was originally called Ten Little Niggers. By the time novel and play reached America the title had become Ten Little Indians, and at some point even this proved offensive to some, so the title was changed to the last…
ARTHUR Miller’s play The Crucible, written 62 years ago as a response to the anti-Communist McCarthy Witch Hunts, is as relevant and powerful today as it was then. When director Peter Kelly chose it for the Studio Theatre’s April play, and rehearsals began, he saw a news clip of terrorists demanding that hostages recite sacred…
WHAT a wealth of talent there is in Warminster, and how hard they work. It is less than a month since the Athenaeum Limelight Players staged a powerful, contemporary version of Macbeth, and this week that production’s Lady M, Tanya Stockting, is back at the theatre as musical director and pianist for the youth group,…
Celebrating 30 years of a unique ceilidh band TELEVISION brought millions of people to Lark Rise To Candleford, Flora Thompson’s stories of growing up in a remote rural village at the turn of the 19th century. In 1978-9 a previous generation of theatre-goers had enjoyed an inventive adaptation with music at the National Theatre, followed…
THERE can’t be many amateur operatic companies who can call upon one of their number to create new shows when they have exhausted the usual repertoire, but Milborne Port Opera has the ingenious Neil Edwards. This year’s production, Spring Fate, on stage at the village hall until Saturday 11th April, is the third show that…
DIRECTOR and adaptor Sean Foley describes Thomnas Middleton’s raunchy Jacobean comedy A Mad World My Masters as “beyond doubt, the filthiest play I’ve ever read.” He’s not joking – it is truly, amazingly and hilariously filthy. Perhaps almost too filthy for the first-night audience of the Royal Shakespeare Company/English Touring Theatre production at Bath Theatre…
PLAYWRIGHT Reginald Rose drew the inspiration for his famous film-script from his own experience as a juror in a manslaughter case in Manhattan. “We got into this terrific, furious, eight-hour argument in the jury room,” he recalled many years later. At the time he was a script-writer on a television drama series and he realised…
RELIGION is a real problem in the United Kingdom of the 21st Century and for those who, brought up as strict believers, have found their faith lapsing, it raises even more difficulties. Addressing the issue was something that writer and performer Amy Mason, a native of Poole in Dorset, was forced into by an accident…
84 Charing Cross Road must be the unlikeliest best-seller and the unlikeliest stage hit ever (a less unlikely film hit as it starred Anthony Hopkins). Twenty-odd years’ worth of letters between an American bibliophile and a London bookseller, with no action, no changes of location, minimal plot development and no love interest, replete with references…
TALES of Wild Western women have fascinated writers, film-makers and composers over the years, and while many have heard of Annie Oakley, most of us are more familiar with the escapades of Calamity Jane. That could all change with the new show Little Sure Shot, created for West Yorkshire Playhouse, Bath egg, MAC Belfast and…