TERENCE Rattigan’s popularity and fame fell victim to the “big new thing” of the mid-50s – the Kitchen Sink Drama that flowed from the Royal Court Theatre in Chelsea. The time from Rattigan as the most highly paid screenwriter in the world to his relegation as “old hat” was brief, and his restoration has been…
AN unprecedented hoard of 2,584 silver coins from the time of the Norman Conquest, found by metal detectorists in the Chew Valley, has been saved for the nation, and will have a permanent home in the Museum of Somerset, after being exhibited at the British Museum and in museums across the country. The acquisition of…
BACK in 1996, theatre director and writer Sheldon Epps first had the idea of setting Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in the Swing-era Harlem of the 1940s – and a brilliant idea it was. With a book by Cheryl L West, and entirely using the music of Duke Ellington, the show cleverly tells the original story at…
AN old man with a long straggly beard shuffles over the ancient mosaic floor, wearing an aged dressing gown and a floppy night cap. He sits at his desk and starts to dig into his long memory. He remembers the young boy with the long, thin fingers who was unsuited to the physically demanding farmwork…
OLD theatres exert an extraordinary power over us. Whether it is a restored beauty like the historic theatres at Bath, Bristol, Bury St Edmunds or Richmond North Yorkshire, or the eerily dilapidated old Hippodrome at Great Yarmouth, we are drawn to them. Some – even the most carefully restored – have ghosts, while others are…
SEVERAL people used to tell the late, great Howard Coggins that he was the spitting image of Henry VIII, and some of them phrased it “living spit.” So when, in 2012, he and his longtime friend and fellow actor Stu Mcloughlin cobbled together a script about the much-married king to enter Bristol Old Vic’s Ferment…
“THERE is no such thing as a bad audience, only bad performances” is an opinion that is often expressed, but I tend to dispute the claim, writing as someone who was a cast member of a farce which, after having the audience in fits of laughter night after night, ran up against an audience that…
ONE of Somerset’s finest traditional unpasteurised farmhouse Cheddar makers, Keen’s, based at Moorhayes Farm near Wincanton, has been named as the first People’s Cheese Champion, after three rounds of public voting in a new award organised by campaigning group The Real Cheese Project. Keen’s Extra Mature Cheddar was one of four finalists, voted in the…
A LOT of Hollywood and television stars seem to be drawn to the world of spirits – Ryan Reynolds, Brad Pitt and Emma Watson all have their own gin brands, and Outlander star Sam Heughan has a malt whisky. Now former Top Gear presenter James May has launched his own gin, made in Wiltshire, where…
THERE was a huge stir, followed by many awards, when Matthew Lopez’s play The Inheritance opened at The Young Vic in 2018, where its sell-out run led to a fast West End transfer. So perhaps it’s surprising that the American writer’s earlier works didn’t make it across the Atlantic, although his first play, The Whipping…