ALAN Bennett, JM Barrie and Lesley Bates share a birthday – 9th May – and now they are also linked in the production of two one-act plays entered by Salisbury Studio Theatre in the Totton and Woolstore Theatre festivals. The plays, Barrie’s rarely performed The Old Lady Shows her Medals, and Bennett’s An Englishman Abroad,…
THE Bristol-based Publick Transport theatre company has jumped on the Bronte bandwagon, extracted the essence of the books the family wrote and their own life stories, distilled and sorted them and created that show that’s part lunacy and part brilliance. Isolation on the windswept Northern moors might not sound like a barrel of laughs, but…
POP-Up Opera made its Shaftesbury debut at Port Regis with the current touring production of Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi. Librettist Felice Romani used the same source as Shakespeare for his work, but for the Pop-Up version Harry Percival (philosopher, economist, computer scientist and stand up comedian) has provided a modern interpretation in surtitles,…
JUKEBOX musicals tend to either use the songs of one artist or writer to tell a brand new story, as happens in Mamma Mia or Singing in the Rain, or to tell the story of the artist themselves, as with Twentieth Century Boy and Sunny Afternoon, which started a national tour as soon as its…
THE first stage adaptation of The Verdict, best known as a 1982 Sidney Lumet film, stops at Salisbury Playhouse until 11th March, the sixth venue of a 12-stop UK Middle Ground Theatre tour. This Margaret Mary Hobbs adaption of Barry Reed’s novel, directed by Michael Lunney, keeps the audience holding its breath. It’s a story…
HOW would it be, 40 years on? I was frankly curious to see if this play, that seemed so effortlessly to have skewered the social pretensions and fragile egos of the far from swinging 70s, had lasted the course? I wondered if it would seem dated, a period piece with pineapple and cheese on sticks,…
AFTER my glowing review of their their production of Princess Ida last Summer, Bath Gilbert and Sullivan Society invited me to their Old Time Music Hall. I drove to the Mission Theatre this afternoon amidst the traffic chaos caused by a home rugby fixture exacerbated by roadworks and an accident, arriving just in time, and…
FORGET Burns Night – we’ve got Barnes Night, and if the inaugural Supper Celebration of William Barnes, The Dorset Poet, was anything to go by it should become as popular a date in the calendar for Dorset folk as Burns is for everyone who loves Scotland, poetry and a good time! The traditions of Burns…
MERE Amateur Dramatic Society’s pantomime is usually the last in the season, and this year they gave their devoted audience the favourite story of them all, Cinderella. Taken from an original script by Pip Brown, Allan Glide and Chris Wood, this was Merely the story of Cinders, packed full of local references, awful jokes and…
Junkyard, Bristol Old Vic and touring IN 1979, some years before the coining of the term “sink estate”, the community of Lockleaze in north eastern Bristol was still reeling from the adjoining M32 opened four years earlier, and petty crime, unemployment and despondency were rife. It was then that the Baroness Allen of Hurtwood’s…