IF you know anything about the early years of rock’n’roll, the names Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Elvis Presley will be top of anyone’s list of performers. Add in the unmistakeable voice and charisma of Johnny Cash and you have a recipe for … Million Dollar Quartet, returning to Cirencester’s Barn Theatre for a…
ONE of Thomas Hardy’s great Wessex novels, The Return of the Native, is rarely adapted for the stage, unlike Tess of the D’Urbevilles, Far From the Madding Crowd or The Mayor of Casterbridge. But it is one of the most powerful and atmospheric stories. Hotbuckle Theatre is touring a new stage version of the novel,…
THE play that skewers the brittle, materialist, class-conscious spirit of the 1970s, Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party is on a national tour, in a new production starring Tamzin Outhwaite, coming to Bath Theatre Royal from Monday 22nd to Saturday 27th June. A ferocious satire on suburban life, the play is set in the Essex home of…
BEST-selling novelist, playwright and scriptwriter Chris Chibnall is one of the big draws at this year’s 29th Beaminster Festival. One of Dorset’s prettiest towns has an eclectic and stimulating programme, from 27th June to 5th July, including Chris Chibnall, superstar folk duo Kathryn Roberts and Sean Lakeman, actress and singer Lucy Stevens as the great…
THE Emma Rice Company will be coming to Bath Theatre Royal’s Ustinov Studio this Christmas with a delightful staging of Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales. Adapted and directed by Emma Rice, the play was a sell-out at her company’s Frome base last year, and fans will be delighted to get a second chance…
SOME of the reviewers of this sparklingly sexy and imaginative production have compared it to David McVicar’s famous Giulio Cesare at Glyndebourne – and found David Alden’s production lacking in subtlety. Having seen both, (which I’m guessing the other critics have too), I think this Egyptian-themed production, with its fabulous singing, inventive sets and convincing…
THE Marquise is a very unusual Noel Coward play, written in 1927 as a star vehicle for his friend, the singer and actress Marie Tempest, but set in 1735. Bookended by his smash hits Hay Fever and Private Lives, it is rarely performed, perhaps because it lacks the welter of wit and bon mots of…
PETER Talbot, the founder of the brilliant and always original Rude Mechanical Theatre Company, has been awarded an MBE in the King’s Birthday Honours for services to the arts. Pete founded the Rude Mechanical company in 1997 and spent the next 27 years building it into one of the country’s most distinctive touring open air…
IF you are a fan of the popular television series The Detectorists you will know that the curious and occasionally eccentric people who head out into the countryside with their metal detectors sometimes make remarkable discoveries. A Dorset detectorist discovered a beautiful Early Bronze Age mirror and another found an equally rare and exquisite crescent-shaped…
IF you were raised on hymns included in Hymns Ancient and Modern, you now have 847 to choose from in the latest edition – and whatever your choice, you can go and hear it played live on the organ of St Gregory’s Church in Marnhull over the weekend of 19th to 21st June. The Great…