THE conspiracy and cock-up theories of history collide in the story of Anne Frank and her family and her diary. The grotesque “final solution” of the Holocaust, the industrialised slaughter of European Jewry by the Nazis, was carefully planned. But it was a succession of unplanned events and accidents – the gift of a diary to…
“WHEN I moved here 20 years ago, Lucca didn’t have tourists. Look at it now – foreign voices on every street!” my friend Fabrizio says with a mix of pride and surprise. It’s not hard to see why this exquisite little city of northern Tuscany has so captured the hearts of visitors from around the…
PETER Whelan’s 1982 play The Accrington Pals is a perfect choice for this year, the anniversary of the start of World War One, and I doubt that you’ll see a better production than that at Wells Little Theatre until 27th September. It’s the third time in a decade that the play has been performed by…
TWO enchanted hours flew by as Oddity Theatre’s cast of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe took to the stage in Warminster’s Athenaeum Centre. The confidence and enthusiasm showed by the children in particular were a huge credit to the direction of Luke Willmore, who brought CS Lewis’ famous story to life with a…
THE Bunbury Company of Players, typical of so many amateur companies the length and breadth of England, has been performing Anthony Scottney’s production of Oscar Wilde’s “perfect comedy”, The Importance of Being Earnest, for decades. Save for one newly deceased member of their number, the cast has remained the same throughout the years, and has…
HINDSIGHT is a wonderful thing – we wouldn’t have done that or said that or thought that, would we? But for the young women who went out to nurse in the First World War, the reality and horror that they encountered was so different from the glorious battle that their mothers and sisters were promoting…
THERE’s a Bronte Season going on, organised by south west based Butterfly Psyche and Livewire theatre and directed by Shane Morgan and Jazz Hazelwood. It involves Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, all newly and inventively adapted (by Dougie Blaxland and Alison Farina) and performed by one or…
LIVING in South Somerset, we always have to leave ourselves with plenty of time to get to Bristol, if we are reviewing productions at the Old Vic, the Hippodrome, the Redgrave (up in Clifton) or the Tobacco Factory in Bedminster. Sometimes we eat first, sometimes we take sandwiches, sometimes we stop at a favourite fish…
PERIPLUM brought the madness, chaos and terror of war to Blandford Marketplace in The Bell, a spectacular open-air show which is part of this year’s biennial Inside Out Dorset festival. Thousands of people crowded into the town centre for the free show, which depicted unnamed tribes at war, killing and being killed, and the challenge…
IN the middle of September we were at the 15th annual Sturminster Newton Cheese Festival, and as we sat on straw bales in the warm Indian summer sun, drinking perry, our shopping clustered round our feet, I realised how much things had changed since I first started writing about regional foods. It was a long…