DENNIS Potter’s Blue Remembered Hills, first seen in 1979 as a BBC Play for Today, and his Brimstone and Treacle, written three years earlier but withdrawn from the small screen as it was considered too shocking, are still controversial today. The writer was a Labour candidate in the 1964 election, and watching the antics of…
CLAUDIO Tolcachir started work on his play The Omission of the Family Coleman when his native Argentina was struggling out of austerity and political chaos, and now the play gets its UK premiere as we are much in the same boat – though poverty in early 21st century Argentina is a very different animal from…
IN these days, when there are debates about the wisdom of sex education in schools for children under the age of ten, to make a highly charged drama out of the reason why a 17-year-old boy unable to cope with his first sexual experience is driven to blind six horses he loves, may seem to…
A NEW production of Peter Shaffer’s psychological thriller Equus comes to Bath Theatre Royal from Tuesday 2nd to Saturday 6th April, after its opening to rave reviews in London Director Ned Bennett’s startling staging of this thought-provoking modern classic is presented by English Touring Theatre and Theatre Royal Stratford East. When teenager Alan Strang’s pathological fascination…
THREE (or was it four?) bodies have been found at Short Mere House, and it’s certain that not all their deaths were due to natural causes. The question is, (or rather “the questions are”) who dunnit, whydidtheydoit and withwhatdidtheydoit? And the answers at this Mere Amateur Dramatic Society murder mystery supper must come from the…
FROM the sudden blackout and gun shot which starts the show, and startles the audience, to the built in encore when the entire company reappear demanding that the audience rise to their feet and join them in I Wanna Dance With Somebody this show delivers to what has now become a cult following audience everything…
TORBEN Betts is the man who became director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough when Alan Ayckbourn handed over the reins, so it’s no surprise that his play Caroline’s Kitchen (originally titled Monogamy) has indelible touches of the UK’s most prolific playwright. Set in the real life North London kitchen of television cook Caroline…
DANGEROUS Corner was JB Priestley’s first play, and the precursor to his other “time” plays. Set in 1932, it is the story of an evening in the home of publisher Robert and Freda Caplan, where they are entertaining Robert’s co-director Gordon Whitehouse and his young wife Betty, staff member Olwen and the novelist Miss Mockridge. It…
Vaughan Williams – Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis Tippett – A Child of Our Time BSO, leader David Juritz Bournemouth Symphony Chorus, director Gavin Carr David Hill: Conductor Lauren Fagan: Soprano Christine Rice: Mezzo-Soprano Samuel Sakker: Tenor Simon Shibambu: Bass THIS concert started with a wonderful surprise: we settled in…
THE long-running comic strip Little Orphan Annie, 1922/2010, particularly the first 63 years when it was drawn by its originator Harald Gray, was full of often controversial political and social comment. By the time it reached Broadway and London’s West End in the late 1970s it had become a much softer sentimental tale which audiences…