IN the days before genetic modification and new methods of long-term storage robbed us of the pleasure of enjoying fruit and vegetables at a specific time of year, as they came into season, you looked forward with eager anticipation to the arrival of the first English tomatoes, fresh peas, kidney and broads beans. Fortunately those…
MINIMA – Mick Frangou, Greg Hall, Alex Hogg and Andy Taylor – made their Take Art debut providing original live music for a screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 silent film The Lodger – A Story of the London Fog at Caryford Hall. The Bristol-based quartet plays instruments including cello, double bass, regular and baritone guitars,…
EMILE Zola’s 1868 novel Therese Raquin scandalised readers at the time, with its depiction of adultery and murder. Now Fiona Ross has adapted the story, and directs her own version with performing arts students from AUB, setting the action in immediately post-war Paris, and in the land of the wicked dead. Played without an interval,…
ANCIENT Scandinavian forests are mysterious places full of voices and sounds from the past – the folklore of these vast dark woods provides the atmospheric background for Mara, a storytelling tour-de-force by Dominic Kelly, who comes to Dorset with Artreach, at Milborne St Andrew on Saturday 25th November and Sandford Orcas on Sunday 26th, both…
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…