THERE is one essential element for a village pantomime, and that is that everyone – the cast, the crew and the audience – needs to be involved. And it’s impossible to think of a more successful example of the genre than this year’s Cinderella from Buckhorn Amateur Theatrical Society at Buckhorn Weston Village Hall. Alison…
THERE is something of a fashion to adapt vast novels for the stage in two or more parts, most of them involving large casts and vast sets. But the current show at Bristol Old Vic, a new working of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre devised by the cast under the direction of Sally Cookson, is on…
WHEN customers ask for this cheese, they pronounce it one of two ways: “Oh-gleshield” or “Ogg-leshield”. I spoke with Jamie Montgomery, who makes this fine cheese in North Cadbury, Somerset and he says it’s Oh-gleshield. That’s settled, then. Jamie’s celebrated unpasteurised cheddar, Montgomery, uses milk from his Friesian herds, while Ogleshield is made from the…
BADGER Ales, produced by family firm Hall & Woodhouse at the Blandford St Mary brewery, has won a Silver Award in the 2014 Design Effectiveness Awards for its new brand identity created by BrandOpus. The award acknowledges the success of Badger’s rebranding across the nine-bottle range. This new identity has created a strong on-shelf presence,…
WHAT do we need? Sunshine! When do we need it? Now! Most of us would give our eye-teeth for a few weeks of sunshine – frosty would be fine! So who can blame travelling chef Philippa Davis from Shaftesbury if she grabbed with both hands and the first available plane an invitation to go and…
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….