IT may be more than 50 years since Athol Fugard wrote his anti-apartheid play Sizwe Banzi is Dead, but as John Pfumojena, director and performer of the new production at MAST Mayflower studios quickly realised, the play has powerful resonances in the 21st century world we live in. White South African Fugard wrote the play with actor…
IN 1976, Bath and Bristol’s favourite writer, director and pantomime Dame, Chris Harris wrote and played the only role in Kempe’s Jig, a play that followed Shakespeare’s best-known fool as he danced the 125 miles from London to Norwich. A natural clown and tumbler, Chris brought out the physical comedy, dancing and mime talents of…
IMAGINE your delight if, as an enterprising regional production company, you were approached by a venerable writer and offered the “final part” of a much-loved television series as a world premiere. That’s what happened to Cirencester’s Barn Theatre, when Jonathan Lynn, half of the duo that created Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister, suggested staging…
THE climax of a packed and exciting week for dancers in North Dorset came on Sunday night when stars of Kyiv City Ballet and some of the students with whom they had been working joined Palida Choir and young Ukrainian singers and dancers for a programme showcasing the life of a dancer. The visit by…
DAVID Mamet’s Pulitzer-prize winning 1984 play Glengarry Glen Ross is a scarifying expose of the vicious sales-practices of its time, when targets were all and (in this case) real estate agents achieved them by any means or lost their jobs. Perhaps it was a strange play for the first in-house production by Lyme Regis’s famously…
JOHN Mortimer, who would have celebrated his centenary this year, is perhaps best remembered for creating the immortal Rumpole of the Bailey. His largely autobiographical play A Voyage Round My Father first came to public attention 60 years ago, as three short radio plays. Later adapted for film and for television and stage plays, this…
SALISBURY’S multi-award winning Studio Theatre, now based in Ashley Road, has recently celebrated its 70th anniversary, but in all that time and all those plays, it has never produced a work that centres on LGBTQ characters and issues (to be fair, no-one had ever heard of the ever-expanding LGBTQ categorisations for the great majority of…
THE pandemic had a massive (and mainly adverse) impact on the hospitality and catering industry, but post-Covid many have predicted a “new dawn for fine dining” and the recent publication of the 31st edition of the Trencherman’s Guide, the South West’s dining guide, proves it, says Michael Caines, who chairs the Trencherman’s committee. “In the…
IF you are old enough to remember a time when many houses did not have indoor toilets and when soft loo roll did not exist (torn up newspaper was often used), you can wryly sympathise at the slightly disgusted puzzlement of the young cast members of Stronghold of Happiness, a play-within-a-play, adapted by Dorset writer…
THE award-winning FOLDE Dorset bookshop and gallery at the top of Gold Hill, Shaftesbury, has an impressive line-up of speakers for the autumn series of talks at the Grosvenor Arms. Next up is Tristan Gooley’s talk on 15th November, about his book How To Read a Tree is sold out, and there is a waiting…