SALISBURY’S renowned Studio Theatre decided to celebrate the Queen’s platinum jubilee with an Elizabethan masque in the style of the Tudor monarch’s day, gathering together well known speeches, scenes and sonnets from Shakespeare, interspersed with music of the period. Merely Players, on at the Ashley Road theatre from 22nd to 24th June, has a 12-strong…

AS soon as the title of his musical is mentioned thoughts immediately turn to the music of ABBA, and with 22 Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus numbers (a couple with the help of Stig Anderson) included in the show, that is a reasonable route to go down. The fact that this show is NOT just…

THE south coastal area of Dorset has something of a reputation for community plays, and it all started with Anne Jellicoe’s The Reckoning, back in 1978. Since then both Lyme Regis and Dorchester have staged memorable plays about incidents in the history of their settlements, and this week the latest, Lyme and the Sea, opened…

THOSE of us who remember Jonathan Church’s tenure as artistic director at Salisbury Playhouse from 1996 to 1999, full of invention, excitement and visual splendour, look back on those as the glory days of the venue and the precursor to Helen Marriage’s time as director of the city’s annual arts festival. Since then Church has…

THERE have been many stories, often taken from life, showing how great wealth, suddenly acquired, corrupts those in receipt of such a windfall.  One perfect example is Spend, Spend, Spend, the musical based on the rags-to-riches-to-rags story of Yorkshire housewife Vivian Nicholson who in 1961 won £152,319 on the football pools, and five husbands later…

FIGS in Wigs, the quintet of women who describe themselves as “dancing beings”, end their spring tour of Little Wimmin at Bristol. There are a few constants about the company – Alice Roots, Sarah Moore, Suzanna Hurst, Rachel Gammon and Rachel Porter. They dress identically, they wear wigs, they don’t take themselves (or much else)…

SINCE London Classic Theatre launched its touring company in 2000, it has taken on a very wide variety of plays ranging from classic Coward and Wilde comedies to Pinter, Joe Orton and Beckett. Tackling a 60-year-old full blown farce, albeit one that ran for seven years when first presented in London’s West End, means venturing…

AUGUST Strindberg’s 1900 play The Dance of Death sowed the seeds for a number of important 20th century works, notably Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. It was brought to public notice in the UK by Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre production at the Old Vic in the late 1960s. Now a new version, adapted…