THE shipping forecast celebrates its centenary this year, and Charlie Connelly, author of the best-selling book, Attention All Shipping: A Journey Round the Shipping Forecast, performs his hilarious and fascinating history of this important maritime service at Bridport Arts Centre on Saturday 22nd June. The shipping forecast started out as (and remains) an essential service…
THE team who brought you The Play That Goes Wrong, and many more, turned their mischievous attention to magic, and the result is Mind Mangler: Member of the Tragic Circle, which comes to Bath Theatre Royal from Tuesday 11th to Sunday 16th June, direct from the West End, with a cast led by Henry Lewis…
TURN the clock in your head back to the time of Jane Austen and imagine you have been invited to a ball at Bath’s most fashionable venue, the Assembly Rooms. Then move forwards in time and here it is – an invitation to a ‘Fancy Ball’ on Saturday 15th June, from 6.30pm, at the elegant…
RUTH Eastwood, who steered the run-down Poole Arts Centre to a new life as the nationally renowned Lighthouse, Poole’s centre for the arts, died suddenly after a short and unexpected illness on 31st May. She was 62. Lighthouse staff, led by current chief executive Elspeth McBain, have expressed their shock and sorrow and paid tribute…
JUST a short time before the powerful Bridgerton family burst into the London society, 30 miles away in Tunbridge Wells the social scene was already abuzz, and “fashion”, in all its many meanings, was the beating heart of life. There, coal merchant and magistrate Sir George Erstwhile daily reminded his decorative wife that she was…
WE started 2024 with the screening of Mr Bates vs The Post Office, and over four nights more than ten million television viewers were caught up in the story of Horizon, Paula Vennells and the hundreds of postmistresses and postmasters whose lives they ruined. It really was a historic piece of television, and one that…
UNLIKE many famous drawing-room socialists of the 1930s and 40s who, even after visiting Russia, turned a blind eye to Joseph Stalin’s excesses and brutality, quite happy to sacrifice the lives of millions of his fellow countrymen in order to maintain his position of absolute power, George Orwell was quite willing to point an accusing…
THE magical parallel universe created by Shakespeare for his ever-popular A Midsummer Night’s Dream gives the play a timeless quality, and a chance for directors, designers and actors to explore their imaginations. The Arts University Bournemouth team, under the leadership of visiting director Aileen Gonsalves, certainly did that, and the result is a marvellously playful,…
THERE are quite a few similarities between Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw and Alan Bennett’s Habeas Corpus, as there are about the background of the two authors, born within a year of one another. Both plays contain farcical elements using comedy to expose what the authors see as hypocrisy among the medical profession that…
GENERALLY, when you go to the theatre, you expect (hope) to like or at least empathise with some or all of the characters – but not with Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit. All the characters – apart from the bumbling maid Edith – are more or less unpleasant. And Yeovil’s Civic Players production has absolutely nailed…