WATCHING Shakespeare’s great tragedy King Lear in the aftermath of the referendum and Jeremy Corbyn’s confidence vote was an extraordinary experience. When the Fool’s prophecy reached the line: … Then shall the realm of Albion Come to great confusion there were gasps in the audience, many of whom were fighting back tears. Not the reaction…
ALAN Bennett’s brilliantly constructed Talking Heads started with A Woman of No Importance, written for the BBC in 1982 for performance by Patricia Routledge. Its success with audiences led to the commissioning of two series of Talking Heads, now recognised as masterpieces of the monologue form. The Dorset-based ImpAct Theatre has a happy relationship with…
IT may be hard to think of a man who died more than 320 years ago as “one of the most forward-thinking English composers” – but Henry Purcell (1659-1695) was a daring innovator and the man who introduced Italian-style opera to Restoration England. Conductor David Gibson delighted the audience at the biennial Winchfield Festival’s opera…
FOR the past six years, Jo Puttick’s Wessex Actors Company has been entertaining increasingly large audiences across Dorset and beyond every summer, in all weathers, in the open air and occasionally indoors. This year’s offering is the company’s second Coward, Hay Fever, that farcical comedy of manners set in the country home of the highly…
HOT on the heels of the announcement of worldwide audience pressure and clever cast negotiations securing a fifth series of Nashville after the bean-counters had tried to pull the plug, four of its stars are on a worldwide tour, with UK dates including a Bristol stop. This was nearest to home for Sam Palladio, who…
MOST of us are familiar with the idea that some of our best-loved “natural” landscapes are man-made – and many know the name of the man who changed the face of England, but we know little about him. Lancelot “Capability” Brown was responsible for a revolution in garden and park design which is still admired…
THE stage is set with piles of books, on the floor and suspended from the “ceiling” and they are the only props in this inventive telling of Trollope’s novel Lady Anna and how it came to be written on board the SS Great Britain en route from Liverpool to Australia. Anthony Trollope’s anniversary in 2015…
SOMETHING Underground Theatre Company was founded by writer/director Jonathan Brown in 2006. The company’s work tends to be visceral and uncompromising, and this, Brown’s latest play, is no exception. A Good Jew was never going to be an easy evening’s entertainment, but little did we know just how riveting and disturbing a piece of theatre…
GRADUATING students from Bristol Old Vic Theatre School have moved into the Tobacco Factory, transforming its open space to provide an authentically intimate look into London theatre in the 1660s, when women were first legally permitted to perform on stage. April de Angelis’ funny, haunting and moving play chronicles the lives of the early “playhouse…
CHIMPANZEES, trees and a flying trapeze are surely three of the silliest, yet best-known rhymes in recent musical theatre. They have even led to an amusing game with one of my friends, as we create new variants, each ending with “Tell me on a Sunday, please”. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Don Black’s one act, one…