FULL marks to Sherborne School Swing Band, whose dazzling performance on the opening day of the fifteenth Sherborne Abbey Festival was given before an enthusiastic and rather more than capacity audience. Despite extra chairs being magicked out from behind the woodwork by beaming, blazered boys, there was standing room only in the Tindall Recital Hall…
EIGHT actors are currently touring the country in a new play by Stella Feehily, urging their audiences not to sit and watch but to get up and fight. The fight is for the existence of the National Health Service and the play, This May Hurt a Bit, is a brilliantly conceived work of agit-prop that…
THERE was a time when most visitors to London wanted to see a “show” and that meant a musical and those musicals ran for years and years and years. And it was that pattern that Cameron Mackintosh expected to follow with his 2011 show Betty Blue Eyes, based on the beloved film A Private Function,…
EVEN now, centuries after the word “Bedlam” struck fear into people’s hearts as the madhouse, a terrifying place of violence, cruelty, chains and ignorance, the word still has connotations of chaos. But the play Bedlam, written by Nell Leyshon for Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre at Southwark, finds not only some meaning in the chaos but also…
HOME in the West Country, from her busy life as a travelling chef, Shaftesbury-born Philippa Davis is enjoying the explosion of blossoms and green life around her in Wiltshire … Happy as a pig in a bun…. BLOSSOM is exploding all over Wiltshire at the moment with magnolia flowers and cherry blossoms bursting out…
IF you really can’t stomach even the thought of goat’s cheeses, then please look away now. If you are tentative or just curious about them, then this Dorset made goat’s cheese, Nanette, is more than worthy of your consideration. If you actively like them, then this is a must for you to sample, as it…
TASTE of the West judges who visited the Riverside Restaurant at West Bay sent a rave review, awarded the restaurant a gold star and concluded “this place should have a Michelin star.” Arthur Watson, who this year celebrates 50 years of running the Riverside with his wife Jan, was understandably thrilled: “It is a wonderful…
IT’S often said that there is a good reason for “rarities” from established playwrights and composers, and that is because the works are inferior. So it is with Gilbert and Sullivan’s penultimate collaboration, Utopia Ltd, which preceded the final opera, The Grand Duke, itself an immediate failure. But for Milborne Port Opera, celebrating its 24th…
RAIN opens and closes this intense two-hander, played with honesty and truth in the intimate Ustinov Studio at the Theatre Royal, Bath, and the steady rain of the title pervades the narrative, only ending once the angst and tragedy of the play has been resolved. A Steady Rain broke weekly box-office records for a non-musical…
THE great excitement about the current production of Alan Ayckbourn’s Things We Do for Love at Bath is the stage debut of Australian singer and actress Natalia Imbruglia. This 1997 play is perfunctorily dismissed on Wikipedia as the story of a woman who begins an affair with her best friend’s fiance, only for it to…