DIRECTOR and adaptor Sean Foley describes Thomnas Middleton’s raunchy Jacobean comedy A Mad World My Masters as “beyond doubt, the filthiest play I’ve ever read.” He’s not joking – it is truly, amazingly and hilariously filthy. Perhaps almost too filthy for the first-night audience of the Royal Shakespeare Company/English Touring Theatre production at Bath Theatre…
PLAYWRIGHT Reginald Rose drew the inspiration for his famous film-script from his own experience as a juror in a manslaughter case in Manhattan. “We got into this terrific, furious, eight-hour argument in the jury room,” he recalled many years later. At the time he was a script-writer on a television drama series and he realised…
RELIGION is a real problem in the United Kingdom of the 21st Century and for those who, brought up as strict believers, have found their faith lapsing, it raises even more difficulties. Addressing the issue was something that writer and performer Amy Mason, a native of Poole in Dorset, was forced into by an accident…
84 Charing Cross Road must be the unlikeliest best-seller and the unlikeliest stage hit ever (a less unlikely film hit as it starred Anthony Hopkins). Twenty-odd years’ worth of letters between an American bibliophile and a London bookseller, with no action, no changes of location, minimal plot development and no love interest, replete with references…
TALES of Wild Western women have fascinated writers, film-makers and composers over the years, and while many have heard of Annie Oakley, most of us are more familiar with the escapades of Calamity Jane. That could all change with the new show Little Sure Shot, created for West Yorkshire Playhouse, Bath egg, MAC Belfast and…
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra Kirill Karabits: Conductor Sally Matthews: Soprano BEETHOVEN: Coriolan Overture R STRAUSS: Four Last Songs SCHUBERT: Symphony No. 9 in C Major “Great” THE hard-working musicians of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra will have richly deserved their Easter break. Schubert’s “Great” C major Symphony is notorious for the demands it makes on the players,…
DENNIS Potter’s 1979 work Blue Remembered Hills is well known as one of the most innovative and powerful pieces on his impressive CV. The device of having adult actors play children, using all their skills and expertise to convey the viciousness, mob mentality and vulnerability of childhood, is brilliantly conceived and realised. The play is…
THE 2014/15 season at Market House Music in Castle Cary came to a standing-room-only finale with a visit by Misbehavin’ in the intimate atmosphere of The Shambles. It’s less than two years since the building was converted to provide a performance and exhibition space, and already it has established its place on the local scene,…
THE forces that drive an ordinary soldier and his socially ambitious wife into a downward spiral through assassination and murder to brutal tyranny and suicide are given not one but two new twists in Graham Thomas production of the Scottish play at the Athenaeum, as part of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Open Stages project. ALP…
THE rock musical Godspell, first seen in New York in 1971 as a student project, is based mainly on the parables of the Gospels of St Matthew and St Luke, and was created for a theatre setting. Performing it in a church, as Motcombe Community Players are doing this week, inevitably gives the show a…