THE hard life of the North Sea herring fishermen was memorably captured in a 1929 documentary film which has been reissued with a new live score by the sound artist, nature beatboxer and composer Jason Singh. The film, Drifters, with Singh’s soundtrack and a new film is being shown at two Dorset venues on 15th…
WE are lucky in this area that from Cheltenham down to Plymouth and points East, there are local musical societies who, without the cushion of public funding, take on the challenge of presenting full-scale musicals in large professional theatres. Many of these productions are a match for, and sometimes superior to, the touring professional productions…
JUST very occasionally in a long life of reviewing plays, you find yourself watching something that you know is special. So special that it will stay in your memory forever, but more importantly will make an indelible mark on all who see it. Arthur Miller’s 1955 play A View from the Bridge must have made…
THE Mowlem Theatre at Swanage, close to some of Purbeck’s ancient quarries, was the setting for a film and recording of a new song, Drop The Hammer, described as a “captivating ode to quarrying in Dorset,” written and performed by the West Country folk and shanty band, The Longest Johns. The song was commissioned by…
SALISURY Cathedral’s skilled team of glaziers and glass conservators have removed a 145-year-old Pre-Raphaelite stained glass window by Sir Edward Burne-Jones and designer and craftsman William Morris for a restoration programme expected to take about two years. The window features two huge figurative designs – Angeli Ministrantes (Angels Ministering) and Angeli Laudantes (Angels Praising) by…
ALTHOUGH Agatha Christie’s 1939 novel was highly successful, with more than 100 million copies sold, she considered the ending to be a little too dark for theatre-goers to accept, and so changed it to the less bleak one most of us know, and was used in Rene Clair’s atmospheric film version in 1945. Director Lucy…
ARE you a devoted Call the Midwife fan? If so, you’ll know all there is to know about bringing babies into the world in the 1960s, and you’ll know how Dr Turner’s wife Shelagh started her life in Poplar as Sister Bernadette, and is now an experienced midwife in the team. So if you were…
I CANNOT think of a more perfect setting to stage a festival dedicated to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and his contemporaries than the City of Bath. Once again, artistic director Amelia Freedman Came up with a splendid variety of five concerts over a three day period, as she does every year with the…
SHERLOCK Holmes was a fictitious creation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Whitechapel Murders were the unsolved murders of 11 women in the three years from 1888, and Jack the Ripper is the name given by the press to the presumed perpetrator. Charles Dickens is the best-known and probably most prolific chronicler of Victorian life….
WRITER and director Ben Crocker has forged a reputation for creating quirky, ultra-local versions of well known pantomimes, so Sturminster Newton Amateur Dramatic Society, aka SNADS, could hardly go wrong with his take on the immortal Aladdin. The story, calling as it does for changes of continent, an instant pop-up palace and of course a…