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…
PHILIPPA Davis, the travelling chef from Shaftesbury, has been swamped with plums on her recent engagement in the south of France where she faced an almost impossible task of making use of all the plums growing in the garden. For her latest trip she was in Stirlingshire in Scotland where she found a freezer full…
JONATHAN Larson’s rock opera (not musical; quite apart from its source in Puccini, the whole structure of the piece is distinctly operatic with its almost total lack of spoken dialogue and 19th-century-style recitatives) is probably the most successful and influential work of its kind of the last fifty years; it’s been described as speaking to,…
THE Ustinov Studio’s exciting autumn season opens with the UK premiere of Play Strindberg, Alistair Beaton’s new translation of Friedrich Durrenmatt’s satirical take on Dance of Death. The programme starts with an imagined conversation between the Swiss dramatist and his translator, justifying the slight changes but emphasising that this is very much a translation and…
STOURHEAD’s annual Festival of the Voice owes its origins to the Confluence Project, almost 15 years ago now, when two musicians, Helen Porter and Karen Wimhurst, came together to travel the course of the River Stour from its source to the sea, exploring the importance of water in our lives and creating music en route….
YASMINA Reza wrote one of my favourite plays, “Art”, and after its huge success in London’s West End and on Broadway, three other plays by Reza have been translated from the original French by the same British playwright, Christopher Hampton. One of these, Life x 3, is gracing the stage of the Swan Theatre in…