THE first performance of Shaftesbury Arts Centre’s remarkable production of Amanda Whittington’s The Thrill of Love co-incided with the exact moment of the 69th anniversary of Ruth Ellis’s shooting of her abusive lover David Blakely, which famously led to the last execution of a woman in Britain. The forensic play, with its cast of four…
HAROLD Pinter almost single-handedly invented the “theatre of menace”, and his successors took up the idea and ran with it. Watching his early 1960s television play The Lover again, in the brilliant production by Lindsay Posner currently on stage at the intimate Ustinov Studio in Bath, I couldn’t help but feel that he had invented…
BRITISH Museum curator Sophia Adams will give a talk about the important Iron Age and Roman finds from a grave on Cranborne Chase, at the Dorset Museum in Dorchester on Thursday 18th April at 7pm. “Traditions and Transitions: The Story of the Chettle Grave Group” will discuss the 2003 discovery of a locally made bronze…
IT’S 34 years since the fledgling Milborne Port Opera took to the village hall stage to perform Trial by Jury, and since then dozens of singing actors, acting singers and dancers have got together around Easter to put on a show. The company’s reputation has grown, the repertoire become more varied, and, from the original…
AFTER singing Climb Every Mountain at a band call in the Circle Bar of Bristol Hippodrome, a friend of mine fixed a steely eye on the conductor and brass section of the orchestra and said, “Listen gentleman, the audience will have paid their money to hear me sing this number, not hear you play it”….
IN many ways the story of Montague Burton, gentlemen’s outfitters, runs parallel with the rise and fall of the steel industry in the UK. Escaping from Russian pogroms, Lithuanian born Meshe David Osinsky arrived in this country in 1900, aged 15 and unable to speak English. Within a year he was earning a living as…
STORYTELLER Tim Lowe will take his audience back to the 18th century in his performance of An Audience with George Chafin, at Chettle House near Blandford on Saturday 6th April a 2.30pm. Lowe reimagines the life of George Chafin, an MP who was Head Ranger of Cranborne Chase. He talks about his family and local…
TINY Clouds Hill, near Wareham, where TE Lawrence – Lawrence of Arabia – lived in the 1930s, is now open for the 2024 season. A previously undiscovered photograph shows one of the families who previously lived in the remote cottage – and gives an insight into its appearance before Lawrence. One of the National Trust’s…
APRIL marks the 80th anniversary of Exercise Smash at Studland, a dress rehearsal for the D-Day landings, which took place at Studland Bay, and many other points along the south west coast, in 1944. The event will be marked with a series of commemoration events on 3rd, 4th and 5th April, including a display of…
AT 9pm on Wednesday July 20th 2011 BBC three put out a documentary directed and produced by Jenny Popplewell entitled Jamie: Drag Queen at 16, which to put it mildly raised more than a few eyebrows. Narrated by Jill Halfpenny it followed the story of County Durham schoolboy Jamie Campbell, who after coming out as…