DIRECTOR Paul Clarkson has chosen the inventive and challenging Helen Edmundson version of The Mill on the Floss, made for Shared Experience, for the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School summer tour. As with all Shared Experience productions, the story is told on many levels, transporting the audience into the mind of heroine Maggie Tulliver as…
THE “Summer Show” genre has all but disappeared, but its demise doesn’t stop an audience richly enjoying a feel-good, lightweight summery romp – and that’s just what they get with Love on the Links, a new play adapted from the words of PG Wodehouse, on in Salisbury until 23rd June. After a week of violent…
CHARLES Dickens’ classic tale of hope, disappointment and love, Great Expectations, is a favourite for stage adaptation, and you won’t see a better one than the Malvern Theatre/Tilted Wig current tour. Ken Bentley has worked with Katherine Senior (best known as actress and writer with Creative Cow) on bringing the story of Pip, Estella, Miss…
IT’S an unforgettable moment when a performer comes down from the stage into the audience and sings a song. I saw David Bowie sing Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud from the stalls at Taunton, and now Gretchen Peters sing Love That Makes a Cup of Tea from the front row of St George’s in Bristol,…
DONNIE and Zak are sister and brother. Zak is older and yearns to be a musician, but he knows that Donnie has more talent. She has “the voice.” Even with their old “salvaged” piano, with its critically missing middle B, you know that Donnie can sing. It’s almost as if she was born to it…
BATH Komedia was packed for the festival concert by Kathryn Tickell and her new band, The Darkening. It was only the third performance from the new lineup, and the leader was suffering from the after effects of a throat infection, so she sang less than usual. Thankfully it did not inhibit her signature anecdotes. Her…
IF anything good could be said about Bristol Colston Hall’s connection to slavery (it is named after wealthy slave trader Edward Colston) it was that the audience at Joan Baez’s Fare Thee Well concert in the city was treated to one of her rare performances of No More Auction Block/O Freedom – to exorcise the…
FELIX Humble, a theoretical astrophysicist, could blame his inability to connect to the real world on a total lack of copy from his parents. Charlotte Jones’s extraordinary play Humble Boy starts on the day Felix comes home to the funeral of his father. Loosely based on Hamlet, the play has Stoppardian and Ayckbournian moments, but…
CHARLOTTE Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre is accurately described as iconic, providing indelible set-piece scenes as it unfolds its story of an unloved orphaned girl and her quest to find love and acceptance. When Polly Teale adapted the book for the Shared Experience theatre company in 1997, she took a fresh approach, looking at the repressed…
SUPERSTITION, religious fervour, jealousy, domination and unrequited love are at the centre of Fermented Honey, a piece devised by graduating actors on the performing arts courses at Arts University Bournemouth based on the writings of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Pablo Neruda. The setting is the Santa Clara asylum for female lunatics. The stage of Pavilion…