WEDDINGS, like all the “big events” of human life, provide a fertile source of material for comedies, dramas and television series. Now West Dorset resident Chris Chibnall, best known recently for writing Broadchurch (and now its sequel), has turned his attention to the family trials and tribulations of organising such an event, specially for Salisbury…
NINE members of the youth theatre group at the Swan Theatre in Yeovil last week tackled a play written by one of the country’s brightest young stars, Anya Reiss, for the National Theatre’s annual Connections festival in 2013. The playwright was 22 when she turned in this real-time tour de force, so it is (almost)…
SICILY, eh? One minute it can make you smile, the next it makes you want to weep. It all depends on which of Sicily’s faces you’re seeing. Five minutes spent in its crazy capital Palermo and you’re mourning the neglect of its glorious palazzi and the poverty that confronts you on all sides. Escape the…
AS the concert audience left the abbey, a woman’s voice was heard saying to a group of friends: “Come on back and have some scrambled eggs in the kitchen with Anthony and me.” And the Lord-Lieutenant of Dorset and her husband Anthony Pitt-Rivers got into their car and drove off towards their home at Hinton…
ALTHOUGH Tunworth looks just like a Camembert, it’s so much more. This bloomy white rinded cheese has earned the ultimate accolade of Supreme Champion at the British Cheese Awards on two occasions, in 2006 and again last year, 2013. Made by Stacey Hedges and Julie Cheyney at the family farm in Herriard, Hampshire, this artisan…
PROKOFIEV: Symphony No 2 KORNGOLD: Violin Concerto TCHAIKOVSKY: Fantasy Overture: Romeo and Juliet AT first glance, the programme for this concert looked as if it would attract only die-hard regulars: the least-played and least-popular symphony of Prokofiev, a concerto by a marginal and obscure twentieth-century composer and a possibly rather hackneyed and overplayed piece by…
THE latest show from Dorset-based Dramatic Productions is a new version of the Scottish play by John Foster. He has set the murder drama in 2070, when Earth is a distant memory and those who escaped the conflagration have decamped to Mars and taken over, ousting the native Chuckleheads (?). The story opens as Captain…
SATIRIST, musician and performer Frank Wedekind offended his audience with his first play, the semi-autobiographical Spring Awakening, written in 1891 and not staged for 15 years – and that was just how he wanted it to be. Written partly as a response to the oppressive German education system of the time, which resulted not only…
MARC Camoletti’s farce, written in French in 1960, translated into English the following year, and revived to great acclaim in 2007, is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the most performed French play in the world. For two nights in Yeovil this week, audiences were transported back to the early 1960s in…
DEATH and the Ploughman was written in 1401 in Bohemia by Johannes von Saaz, who penned the text, so the story goes, the day after his wife died in childbirth. Refusing simply to accept this turn of fate, von Saaz (as the Ploughman) and Death lock horns in an epic journey. Saturday’s performance was given…