BILLY Howle, in John Haidar’s production at Bristol, may well be one of the greatest Hamlets of our times. The Bristol Old Vic Theatre School graduate comes to the role without all the expectations piled on David Tennant, Benedict Cumberbatch, Kenneth Branagh, Andrew Scott, Maxine Peake, Cush Jumbo et al. Instead he brings an electrifying…
THE green willow of longevity encircles Maddy Prior and her latest band, more than 50 years after the founding of Steeleye Span and now touring the UK in celebration. More or less every British folk performer has done time with the band over the years. Three years from the start, Dorset-born Rick Kemp from Little Hanford,…
WHEN you set out to present the musical Mack and Mabel, you take your theatrical life in your hands. When it was first produced on Broadway it received eight Tony award nominations, but won none of them and only ran for only eight weeks. When it arrived in England it was only the persistence of…
SHAKESPEARE’S ninth play, The Comedy of Errors, is a gift for a director keen to play with perception, time and identity. Set in Ephesus, it starts in a flashback as Egeon, imprisoned and under sentence of death for breaking the immigration laws, tells of his earlier life. He was happily married when his wife Emilia…
DURING the many years that my father trained greyhounds, he had quite a few of them taken from his charge because he gave their owners a too honest opinion of their abilities, and prospects of winning a race. “It takes” he said, “just as much time and effort from me and financial support from you,…
THE first big song in Legally Blonde – The Musical, is Omigod, and it’s reprised repeatedly throughout the show. I found myself wondering how America, with its massive Bible Belt, had reacted. A quick read of Wikipedia showed that the musical version of the book-turned-smash-hit-film had been less than successful on the other side of…
TOLLARD Talks return to the village on Cranborne Chase on Friday 14th October with an unusual and exciting event, Chinese Boxing, a performance by Mark Kitto, an expert on the vast but mysterious country. The play is also being performed at Martock’s beautiful parish church on Thursday 13th October, at 7.30pm. The event is organised…
THE Walt Disney Company maybe one of the biggest and most powerful names in mass media entertainment, with theme parks, travel companys and television studios among its interests, but at heart it is still the film company that introduced Micky Mouse, Donald Duck, Pluto, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio to the world….
THE momentum of Conor McPherson and Bob Dylan’s moving play with music, Girl from the North Country, was cut short by the pandemic. Those who managed to see the show at the Old Vic in 2017 have been waiting for a revival ever since. Now the 24-venue tour comes to Bath, and once again stuns…
TS ELIOT’s verse play Murder in the Cathedral looks at the arguments, political and spiritual, that surrounded the murder of Thomas Becket on the alter steps of Canterbury Cathedral in 1170. First performed in 1935, its Greek chorus of women was a popular format for many years, but more recently it has fallen out of…