STEEL Magnolias, Robert Harling’s powerful ode to female friendship, was inspired by his own upbringing rural Louisiana. The award-winning film starring Sally Field and Julia Roberts was based on Harling’s play, written as a tribute to his diabetic sister. In the hands of director Adela Forestier-Walker and the versatile Athenaeum Limelight Players, this funny, poignant…
THERE are plenty of people who will tell you that Thomas Hardy’s novels are depressing, but chances are they haven’t actually read them. Howard Payton knows the novels inside out, particularly Far From The Madding Crowd, which he first read about 50 years ago. “I was hooked, not only by the description of Gabriel Oak…
WHEN I left the Old Vic after watching this show for two-and-a-half hours, I was not quite sure if my feelings were those of elation and excitement or darn right depression. One thing is certain, Carl Grose’s re-working of John Gay’s Beggars Opera and Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera with a vibrant addition of music by…
THIS production was a fine example of the reply, in a caption of a Victorian cartoon, of a very nervous Curate to the Bishop who has invited him to breakfast, to the remark “I’m afraid you’ve got a bad egg Mr Jones.” “Oh no, My Lord, I assure you – parts of it are excellent’….
AS I drove over to Sturminster Newton on Saturday afternoon to see Taboo Theatre’s new site-specific play, The Miller’s Daughter, a caller on Any Answers was responding to President Putin’s derogatory comments about liberalism. The caller claimed that he didn’t know anybody who didn’t agree that liberalism was obsolete, that immigration and gay marriage were…
FACTION, that mixture of fact and fiction so beloved by TV and film-makers, is the style of writing Kemp Powers chose for his debut play A Night in Miami. The factual side is that, after he had provided one of the biggest upsets in sporting history by defeating Sonny Liston in February 1964 to become…
MARTIN Jacques (that’s not as in Hattie Jakes or As You Like It Jay-quez but Jax) and his merrie band took Taunton by peculiar storm on Saturday 22nd June, when the new Tiger Lillies album, The Devil’s Fairground, was performed in its entirety. The trio (now with one replaced member) used to be regulars on…
WE have to thank two queens for The Mousetrap, the worlds longest initial running play. Opening in the Ambassadors Theatre on 6th October 1952 and moving to the St Martin’s Theatre in 1974, where it continues to run successfully today, the play has its roots in an enquiry by the BBC in 1947 to the…
THE annual summer Street Theatre tour has been an eagerly-awaited treat for many years now, and the 2019 offering, with a sparse three performances, is a collection of monologues and a one acter by the brilliant David Tristram. Directed for the first time by Matthew Maisey, it started with Rowan Atkinsons pair of monologues, Heaven…
THE BOVTS production of David Edgar’s monumental adaptation of Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby is a triumph. Graduating students from the prestigious Bristol Old Vic Theatre School have traditionally been split, performing two, contrasting, plays in the summer, but this year’s show gives all 26 of the acting students equal opportunities in Geoffrey Brumlik and Jenny Stevens’…