THE Freight and Salvage in the centre of the university town of Berkeley in California is described as a coffee house, but its fame is for much more than serving a latte or a frapaccino. This community run venue not only offers weekly classes in banjo, fiddle and guitar but attracts some of the world’s…
CARYL Churchill’s 1987 play Serious Money was a smash hit when it opened at the Royal Court, and now, quarter of a century later, it is just as powerful now when audiences can see how weirdly prophetic it was. Set in the time when the London money markets exploded in coke and insomnia fuelled mania,…
IN these days when, in spite of rapidly increasing air fares, many of us are lucky enough to travel to distant continents more than once in our lives, the concept of the “trip of a lifetime” is more an advertising cliché than a reality. But there are some plans that are so difficult to bring…
TRAVELLING chef Philippa Davis spent Hallowe’en in Scotland where she swopped the spooky delights of pumpkin pie for the deeper and more complex seasonal flavours of a traditional breakfast. Guests on shooting parties in the Highlands usually expect a cooked breakfast, often a comprehensive menu including scrambled garden eggs, streaky bacon and avocado or black…
IF your dog has the misfortune to be allergic to fleas, it is hard to have any interest in the little beasts. But no-one could fail to be seduced by the charms of Karen Wimhurst’s musical flea and Frances Lynch’s interpretation of the scientist and entomologist Miriam Rothschild, who made a special study of the…
525,600 minutes, as a song from Rent points out, is a year, spent in the life of a New York community “celebrating life and facing death and AIDS at the turn of the century” to quote its writer Jonathan Larson. The show is a rock version of Puccini’s La Boheme, with most of the characters…
GEORGE Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer was one of the first plays chosen by the newly-formed National Theatre 50 years ago, and clips from it have been popular highlights in the various television programmes about the anniversary, with Maggie Smith as the plucky Sylvia and Laurence Olivier as the braggart coward Brazen. The exposure should be…
TAKE a name like Francois Billetdoux and an image of famous actors Felicity Kendall and Simon Callow embracing, champagne flutes in hand, against a backdrop of Paris under blue skies, with the single word Chin-Chin, and you think you’re in for a frothy farce. There might be a clue to this extraordinary play, which first…
TALES of mythical gods and kings were regular subjects for the early composers, who, rather like journalists, never let the “facts” spoil a good story – though what was fact and what was fiction in the Greek Myths is open to endless academic debate. The excellent English Touring Opera company, this year accompanied by the…
IF Finea (The Lady of Little Sense) was a 20th century child she’d be diagnosed with behavioural issues, prescribed Ritalin and sent to a school for special needs. But, happily for the audience at Bath’s Ustinov Theatre, in Lope de Vega’s play, translated by David Johnston and directed by Laurence Boswell, she is leaping and…