WASSAIL, known as Somerset’s resident theatre company, is back with a bang (or at least a strawberry pavlova) in a new show called Birthday Day, currently touring until the beginning of September. Based on a short story by company founder Nick White, it does what Wassail does best – get into the heart of the…

ITALIAN playwright Carlo Goldoni is best known now for his The Servant of Two Masters, written in 1745 and adapted for a 21st century audience as One Man, Two Guvnors by Richard Bean in 2011 and catapulting James Corden into international success. The Venetian lawyer was a prolific writer, and in 1761 he wrote what…

TERENCE Rattigan was the star playwright of the 40s and 50s, until the new wave kitchen sink writers shot him from the firmament, after which he was considered dated, mannered, posh and irrelevant. Recently, a few directors have rediscovered his works and revelatory productions have been mounted. Lindsay Posner’s current production at Bath’s Ustinov Studio,…

CHARLOTTE Jones’s astonishing first play Airswimming was inspired by a newspaper cutting announcing the “release” of perfectly sane women from decades of incarceration in hospitals for the mentally ill, better known at the time as lunatic asylums. The 1913 Mental Deficiency Act enabled angry, disappointed and embarrassed families to categorise their errant daughters as “moral…

TENNESSEE Williams’ semi-autobiographical play The Glass Menagerie was first performed in 1944, a year after his beloved sister Rose was subjected to a frontal lobotomy in an attempt to cure her schizophrenia. In the play, adapted from a short story, writer Tom Wingfield is trying to get away from the claustrophobic home he shares with…

AUDIENCES at Salisbury’s Studio Theatre in Ashley Road had a triple treat this May, when three of the company’s short plays were performed together. The show started with a return of the 2023 production of John Finnemore’s English for Pony Lovers, which was pipped to the post at the Western Area final of the All…

THERE’S no Business like Show Business … so goes the lyric of Irving Berlin’s song from Annie Get Your Gun, and there is nothing better than good comic business to lift even a modestly written farcical comedy into an evening of riotous fun. Although this play may be described as a spoof of a murder…

IF you describe opera as being a story set to music which has virtually no spoken word, then this rap-style, sung through musical is an opera. Such a description would not be welcomed with open arms by the producers, because, whereas modern and classical ballet have, to the benefit of each, embraced each other, classical…