ELEVATE Festival, a celebration of new work by local writers, companies and performers, returns to Bath Theatre Royal for a second year, with a two-week programme in September in the Egg theatre. The festival is presented by the theatre’s Engage programme, which is dedicated to creating participatory opportunities across Bath for creatively curious adults and…
A SUMMER repertory season of popular comedies and thrillers used to be a staple of the British seaside summer, but it has largely disappeared in the past few decades, surviving only at Sidmouth, with its three-month summer rep season. Now summer rep comes to the Marine Theatre, a few miles along the coast at Lyme…
Until 1st July, a sound installation created by Orlando Gough and Alastair Goolden continues in the ancient Messums tithe barn at Tisbury. De Nadder / di -næd.ər is “a season of no things”, and the soundscape is inspired both by the flow of the adjacent river Nadder and a play on the word “nada” meaning…
DORSET Opera celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, with performances of one of the world’s best-loved operas and the premiere of an opera adapted from a favourite Thomas Hardy, with its roots firmly in Dorset. There will be seven performances of the two works at Bryanston School’s Coade Hall, Blandford Forum, from 22nd to 27th…
RUTH Eastwood, who steered the run-down Poole Arts Centre to a new life as the nationally renowned Lighthouse, Poole’s centre for the arts, died suddenly after a short and unexpected illness on 31st May. She was 62. Lighthouse staff, led by current chief executive Elspeth McBain, have expressed their shock and sorrow and paid tribute…
ONE of the most popular and critically successful films ever made about the world of high fashion, The Devil Wears Prada has been adapted into a musical, with a score by Sir Elton John. It makes its debut with a six-week, pre-West End season, this summer from 6th July to 17th August, at Plymouth Theatre…
THE distinguished conductor Mark Wigglesworth has been announced as the new chief conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. He will take up the role at the start of the orchestra’s 2024-25 season in September, when Kirill Karabits, the BSO’s inspiring chief conductor for the past 15 years, becomes Conductor Laureate and artistic director of the…
BATH Theatre Royal has announced a season of plays next summer, in which the actor will star in David Hare’s Grace Pervades, and will direct Harriet Walter and Gloria Obianyo in Shakespeare’s As You Like it. Booking opens for both on Wednesday 27th March (if you are an Associate member) or, for Friends, it’s Friday…
BRISTOL Hippodrome is one of four regional theatres chosen to host a tour of Player Kings, director Robert Icke’s adaptation of King Henry IV parts 1 and 2, starring Sir Ian McKellen as Falstaff. The nearly four-hour reworking of the two plays will be at Bristol from 3rd to 6th July, following the end of…
A MUSIC organisation which has been bringing rising stars of the chamber and baroque music scene to Dorset, Somerset and Devon for 18 years, makes its debut at Shaftesbury this year, with two concerts organised in conjunction with Shaftesbury Arts Centre. The first Concerts in the West event in north Dorset will be on Sunday…