A DAMP Sunday afternoon in Weston-Super-Mare is hardly the ideal time and place to whip up an audience reaction to an entertainment that stems from that most iconic of passionate dances, The Tango. That was the daunting task facing Strictly Come Dancing regular of seven series Vincent Simone and his company of dancers, plus one…
IT’S a bit of a drive (65 miles there and back) to Bath, and, facing dire warnings of blizzards and tarmac ice rinks, the lure of the Elevate Festival offerings had to be honed down to one event in the 15 days of pop-up performances. If Frome-based Really Truly Theatre Company’s Lockdown Blues was anything…
THE critic Lionel Hale once described the legendarily risqué comedian Max Miller’s act as being full of ‘honest vulgarity’. It is a phrase that can be used to describe this production which makes no apologies for lurching happily from big, bold, flashy numbers, performed in uninhibited style by soloists and ensemble alike, to gentle oversentimental…
JOEL Horwood’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s short novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane thrilled audiences and critics when it opened at the National Theatre in London just before the pandemic hit, and after a West End transfer is now on a UK tour until early October, returning to the south and west…
THERE is a new literary event in our region, a celebration of fiction, on at the Grosvenor Hotel, Shaftesbury (pictured), until Saturday 25th March. Rosie King and Fran Hill, who write as Rosie Lear and Tiggy Hayes, have organised an interesting and varied programme covering different genres, including historical, crime, contemporary and children’s, and featuring…
YOU Bury Me, recently seen at Bristol Old Vic, was joint winner of the inaugural Women’s Prize for Playwriting in 2020, a prize Tunisian-born novelist and poet Ahlam shared with Amy Trigg. The daughter of a political activist forced into exile from his Algerian home, before returning to hold high office in the newly-formed government,…
TWELFTH Night, a story of love, mistaken identity, revenge, gender swapping and more love, is widely recognised as entry-level Shakespeare. So how do you make it relevant to today’s concerns about equal opportunities, self-selection of pronouns and celebrity culture? At Arts University Bournemouth, guest director Aileen Gonsalves found the perfect solution, a brilliantly-conceived mashup of…
WE think of fashions in clothes or hairstyles changing on a regular basis, but other changes in society slip by us almost unnoticed. At the end of the last century, feminist arguments were almost always presented in such and angry and belligerent way that they were practically guaranteed to offend and upset most of those…
A TRAIL inspired by The Lost Words has opened in Thorncombe Wood, a Local Nature Reserve three miles east of Dorchester, and will be available until April. Thanks to funding from Stepping into Nature community pot, you can pick up a leaflet from the Thorncombe visitor centre and follow the seasonal trail on the theme…
‘WHEN an irresistible force, such as you. Meets an old immovable object like me. You can bet just as sure as you live, Something’s Gotta Give, Something’s Gotta Give’. So go the lyrics of the popular Johnny Mercer song. The problem is that while the words are a romantic bit of fun in the musical…