UNTIL a few hours ago, I would have failed miserably if asked who wrote the Beatles song Till There Was You: I would have said Lennon and McCartney before hearing it sung beautifully by Sarah Linehan and Luke Whitchurch in CATS production of The Music Man, but I now know it is written, as is the…
SHAKESPEARE at the Tobacco Factory, the company set up by Andrew Hilton 15 years ago on the cigar packing floor of the former Wills factory in Bedminster, Bristol, celebrates its anniversary with the pairing of Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Bristol-trained playwright Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. The first, which is running until 2nd May at…
NOEL Coward’s hilarious play Fallen Angels, on an eight-venue UK tour, has an extended run at Bath Theatre Royal until 1st March, and is the perfect antidote to the doom and gloom of persistent rain and wind. Written in a time of creative ferment, while The Master was performing in the West End AND writing…
THE current production at the Nuffield Theatre in Southampton is not like anything the venue’s audience has ever seen before – probably not like anything ANY audience has seen before. Everyone is given a number with their tickets, and asked to stay in the bar area until they are called to the auditorium, which has…
SET in the unchanging living room of an old farm on Salisbury Plain, Barney Norris’s first full length play Visitors is a tender, funny, scarily prescient look at the later stages of life. Arthur’s family has lived in the farmhouse for generations, with Edie since she joined him as a young bride from the village….
THE award-winning Eastbury Hotel in Sherborne has a new head chef, Matt Street, who has been working at the hotel for six years and aims to continue its tradition of serving outstanding, locally sourced food in the beautiful conservatory restaurant. Matt, who is 29, reached the knock-out stages of MasterChef The Professionals in the quarter…
DIANE Samuels’ play Kindertransport is a fictional account of the life of one Jewish girl sent from her affluent Hamburg home to England, where she was sponsored, and then adopted, by the kindly but ordinary Miller family. Told in a number of flashbacks, it runs from 1939, when Eva was nine years old, to the…
STURMINSTER Newton Amateur Dramatic Society has a new star in its 2014 pantomime – no mean feat in a show that features SNADS’ delicious regular dame, Ian Greig, as Mrs Twinkey the cook, and Giles Henschel channelling his inner villain as a dastardly Captain Hook. Holly Fripp, who plays Wendy in this new version of the…
DAWN King’s new play Ciphers, ending its tour at Salisbury, is an exploration of life in 21st century England, when surveillance and counter-intelligence are underpinned by rapidly developing technologies and espionage takes on a new importance. This production, directed by Blanche McIntyre for Out of Joint, Bush Theatre and Exeter Northcott, is performed on a…
MARY Anning should perhaps join Thomas Hardy as the first names to come to mind when Dorset is mentioned, and although her story has been better known in recent years, her extraordinary achievements are still not really synonymous with the Jurassic Coast, as it is now designated. That situation has been improved by Tracy Chevalier’s…