Swansongs at The Colston Hall, Bristol

Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra Kirill Karabits: Conductor Sally Matthews: Soprano BEETHOVEN:  Coriolan Overture R STRAUSS:  Four Last Songs SCHUBERT:  Symphony No. 9 in C Major “Great” THE hard-working musicians of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra will have richly deserved their Easter break.  Schubert’s “Great” C major Symphony is notorious for the demands it makes on the players,…

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Blue Remembered Hills at Wellington Arts Centre

DENNIS Potter’s 1979 work Blue Remembered Hills is well known as one of the most innovative and powerful pieces on his impressive CV. The device of having adult actors play children, using all their skills and expertise to convey the viciousness, mob mentality and vulnerability of childhood, is brilliantly conceived and realised. The play is…

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Time Piece at Castle Cary and touring

THE 2014/15 season at Market House Music in Castle Cary came to a standing-room-only finale with a visit by Misbehavin’ in the intimate atmosphere of The Shambles. It’s less than two years since the building was converted to provide a performance and exhibition space, and already it has established its place on the local scene,…

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Macbeth, Athenaeum Limelight Players, Warminster

THE forces that drive an ordinary soldier and his socially ambitious wife into a downward spiral through assassination and murder to brutal tyranny and suicide are given not one but two new twists in Graham Thomas production of the Scottish play at the Athenaeum, as part of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Open Stages project. ALP…

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Japanese cooking with Teruko Chagrin

JAPANESE cook and cookery teacher Teruko Chagrin, who lives near Shaftesbury, believes in using the wonderful produce available in Dorset whenever she can for her recipes. For these recipes she is using Arctic Char, which she sources in North Dorset from Houghton Springs Fish Farm, at Winterbourne Houghton. Arctic Char is a special fish and…

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Godspell, Motcombe Community Players at St Mary’s Church

THE rock musical Godspell, first seen in New York in 1971 as a student project, is based mainly on the parables of the Gospels of St Matthew and St Luke, and was created for a theatre setting. Performing it in a church, as Motcombe Community Players are doing this week, inevitably gives the show a…

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Spring Awakening, Swan Youth Theatre, Yeovil

FRANK Wedekind’s startling, stark look at teenage angst, Spring Awakening, has been shocking audiences ever since it was first produced in 1906, and judging by the reaction to the first night of Ian White’s production at Yeovil Swan, it has lost none of its power to disquiet. The Swan Youth Theatre company decided against performing…

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Leaves On A Line, Forest Forge, Artsreach at Sturminster Marshall and touring

RAILWAYS evoke memories – memories of journeys, arrivals and departures, meetings and partings, new adventures and old routines. Leaves On A Line, the new touring show from Forest Forge, draws on all these strands and motifs in a multi-layered play with music. It is touching, funny, exciting and thoughtful. There are fragments of traditional fairy…

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The Thrill of Love, ImpAct on tour

IMPACT’S spring tour 2015, of Amanda Whittington’s play about Ruth Ellis, The Thrill of Love, opened at The Hub in Verwood on Saturday. Whittington is the most frequently performed female playwright in the country, but her works don’t make national headlines. Based in Nottingham, where she trained as a journalist, her plays are full of…

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