FORMER university lecturer Kate Rawles comes to Sladers Yard at West Bay on Thursday 23rd November, as part of the Help Our Planet (HOP) series. Her talk, Adventure in the Andes: The Life Cycle biodiversity bike ride, is the story of her extraordinary journey the length of South America on a bamboo bike she built…
IBSEN’S play A Doll’s House, first performed in 1879, has been translated, adapted and produced ever since, providing theatre with one of the great female roles in Nora Helmer. Two recent English language versions have come from Bryony Lavery and from Frank McGuiness. It is the latter that catapulted the glitteringly charismatic Janet McTeer to international…
IT is rather interesting to see a new play twice within a few weeks – the first time as a brand new, hot off the press production, and the second out on tour. I’m Sorry Prime Minister, I Can’t Quite Remember opened at the Barn Theatre, Cirencester, in mid-September and went on tour (to Bath…
SINCE 1956, when local musical society BLOC took the mad gamble to take their production of The Gypsy Baron into the 2,000 seater Bristol Hippodrome, they have seen many changes both in the ownership of that flagship theatre and in theatrical musical tastes. Those days, when the management was keen to create and preserve a…
THE hilariously funny, cuddly, wry and inspired Howard Coggins, best known in the south west as co-founder of Living Spit and nationally for his Lottery adverts, has died at the age of 52. He was diagnosed with cancer late in 2022. Frustrated with playing bit parts in other people’s shows, Howard and Stu McLoughlin started…
PETER Shaffer’s 1979 play Amadeus opens in Vienna 200 years ago, as court composer Antonio Salieri is committed to an asylum, where his ravings about his murder of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, decades earlier, are overheard by his incredulous attendants. It continues in flashback to episodes in the period from 1781 to 1791. It has been…
I FIRST saw The Mousetrap during its 15th year in London’s West End, having come to what seemed a logical conclusion that this simple little Whodunit could not possible last much longer in the capital. Looking around a near-capacity house on the play’s opening night at Weston-super-Mare’s Playhouse Theatre, and observing the wide age range…
THE job of following on from a very successful person or event in entertainment or sport is often a poisoned chalice. Sequels can be and often are a great let-down. Philip King and Falkland L Carey’s Watch It Sailor, which followed their runaway success with Sailor Beware, was decidedly disappointing. Films and TV are littered…
WHEN artist Alexander Hollweg and his family moved from London to Exmoor 40 years ago, he said they “sold a house and bought a way of life”. A new exhibition at the Museum of Somerset in Taunton celebrates his Journey in Art, with paintings and sculptures from throughout the six decades of his career. The…
THE November event in the Guardians of Martock Church programme is a talk rather than a concert, looking at life on the Channel Island of Jersey during the Nazi occupation in the Second World War. The talk is at the Martock Fellowship Hall on Thursday 16th November at 2pm. The Nazi occupation of the Channel…