RUSSIA’s national poet, the creator of one of the world’s most famous and tragic love stories, Aleksandr Pushkin, is the subject of the latest talk by Graham Fawcett at Sladers Yard arts centre, West Bay, on Thursday 9th February at 7.30pm. Pushkin is revered in the West via the Russian composer Tchaikovsky as the creator…
THE current tour of the Conor McPherson play Girl from the North Country, set in Depression-era Duluth, Minnesota, at the bottom western corner of Lake Superior with songs by the city’s most famous son, Bob Dylan, returns to the south west at Bristol Hippodrome until 4th February. It’s an unforgettable piece of theatre, combining the…
WHEN five cleaning ladies, dressed in late 18th century clothes, but with modern boots instead of delicate slippers on their feet, took over the stage with the house lights still up, and informed the audience that they were going to tell them the tale of Pride and Prejudice from their point of view, you could…
ONE morning in February 1987, very early, we left our hotel in Spindleruv Mlyn by bus, headed for what was marked the “Friendship Path” on the map – the border between what was then Czechoslovakia and Poland, high in the Czech Krkonose mountains. Thick snow was on the ground. We had taken breakfast with a…
IF you had asked me to nominate when Cher first burst on the pop music scene with her 12- years-senior husband Sonny Bono, (played by Lucas Rush), topping the US and UK charts with I Got You Babe, it certainly would have been much later than 1965. At this time, very much under the influence…
THE national conservation charity, the Countryside Regeneration Trust (CRT), is planting fast-growing willows (osiers) on Bere Marsh Farm near Shillingstone in Dorset and is appealing for public donations to help protect the young trees. Deer cause catastrophic damage to trees by stripping the shoots, foliage and flowering buds. The fence will protect the recently planted willow…
EDWARD Albee’s 1962 masterpiece Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, set in the home of college history teacher George and his wife Martha, daughter of the college founder, has lost none of its power in the more than 60 years since it was first staged. It has been filmed (with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in…
GLEE – defined as “great delight, especially from one’s own good fortune or another’s misfortune”. Glee – a popular American television series set in high school, about the rights of passage of teenagers, at whom it is aimed. Glioma – a brain cancer. Stuart Slade wrote Glee and Me in 2019, and its audacious style…
ALAN Ayckbourn’s first hit play, Relatively Speaking, was originally performed in 1965, when life was very, very different. What isn’t different is people, and it is that certainty that makes the UK’s most prolific playwright an enduring legend. This is a play set in the “swinging sixties”, a time when sexual freedom was big news,…
The Story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons DURING the 1940s, the big Hollywood studios were notorious for airbrushing out all the unpleasant aspects of the lives of famous musicians. MGM’S Till the Clouds Roll By (1945) and Words and Music (1948) and Warner Brothers’ Rhapsody in Blue (1945) and Night and Day (1946)…