BACK in 2005, students from Bristol Old Vic Theatre School gave the first performance of Adrian Mitchell’s adaptation of CS Lewis’s The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe outside Stratford-upon-Avon, and this Christmas a new bunch of training actors has returned to the children’s story, directed by Jenny Stephens. This sell-out show, at the Redgrave…
IF you are wondering how to occupy small children in the run-up to Christmas, or in the days following the holidays, there probably won’t be a more wondrous experience than Little Bulb Theatre’s Antarctica, on at Bristol Old Vic Studio until 4th January. Specially created for very young audiences and their families, but equally enchanting for…
THE audience at the Spiegeltent, in Bristol for the month up to Christmas, may have been the first to hear the Tiger Lillies’ new commission from Opera North, Lulu – a Murder Ballad, on 1st December. Loosely based on Wedekind’s Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box, it is 20 songs and interludes charting the life and…
FROME-based actor, playwright (and now film director) Pip Utton has an extraordinary knack of inhabiting his characters, so that their familiar tics and expressions become part of his face and body. His solo shows are now the stuff of theatrical legend, after many years packing houses on the Edinburgh Fringe, and touring to venues large…
JAPANESE-born cook Teruko Chagrin, who has lived in North Dorset for many years and used to write a column for the Blackmore Vale Magazine, now teaches Japanese cooking to small groups, and gives classes at Luke Stuart’s White Pepper Cookery School at Lytchett Matravers and for Christine McFadden at Little Bredy. In the first of…
PETER Wintle first saw Peter Shaffer’s play Equus in 1976, three years after I saw the first production at the National Theatre. It has always been one of the most controversial plays among Shaffer’s extraordinarily varied body of work, recently in the public eye again with Daniel (Harry Potter) Radcliffe in the leading role of…
ANYONE who has ever had dealings with amateur musical or dramatic societies will recognise the set-up in Alan Ayckbourn’s brilliant comedy, A Chorus of Disapproval, Frome Drama Club’s autumn production at the Merlin in November 2014. There is the endearing old couple, company stalwarts who are slightly despised by the younger (but not necessarily more…
TRAVELLING chef Philippa Davis can find herself anywhere from Provence to the isle of Skye, from deer-stalking in the Highlands to the watery landscape of Chichester Harbour where she was catering for a shooting party … “There is nothing half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats…….” so Ratty exclaimed to Mole…
A new monthly column by Justin Tunstall of Town Mill Cheesemonger, Lyme Regis BEING a cheese judge brings mixed blessings. While it’s an honour and invariably stimulating to spend a day with one’s fellow judges, discussing the qualities of a selection of cheeses, not all of the cheeses submitted are up to snuff. Sometimes a…
JANET Wood from Mere travelled to Mongolia during the summer to take part in an expedition with Col John Blashford-Snell of the Scientific Exploration Society. In the second extract from her diary, Janet describes the experience of arriving in the capital, Ulan Bator … We arrived at Ulan Bator Airport in the early hours having…