BACK in the early 1980s, Declan Donnelley wrote a brilliantly updated version of Thackeray’s classic Vanity Fair for his company, Cheek by Jowl. The adaptation has been brought into the new century by Paul Chesterton for the students of Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, on their (shortened) two-part regional tour this year. On Wednesday 6th…
WHEN this new production of the now-veteran farce, which started life in 2013, opened at the Theatre Royal in Bath on the 20th April this year, there was every excuse for the production not to run smoothly. Defying any doubters it came up as fresh as a daisy, running smoothly on all levels, with the…
FED up with hitherto dependable newspapers filled up with celebrity gossip … previously intelligent and sensible friends and colleagues taken in by manifest lies and bullshit? There could hardly have been a better day to watch Gods and Dogs, Pete Talbot’s brilliantly witty new satire for his company the Rude Mechanicals, than on Thursday 23rd…
WE have been using the phrases” the old world” and “the new world” since time immemorial, perhaps indicating that every generation views its successors’ ideas as a foreign country. And we all probably think that THIS time, the changes are more radical and unacceptable than ever before. From that confirmed position, I think it is…
SALISBURY’S renowned Studio Theatre decided to celebrate the Queen’s platinum jubilee with an Elizabethan masque in the style of the Tudor monarch’s day, gathering together well known speeches, scenes and sonnets from Shakespeare, interspersed with music of the period. Merely Players, on at the Ashley Road theatre from 22nd to 24th June, has a 12-strong…
AS soon as the title of his musical is mentioned thoughts immediately turn to the music of ABBA, and with 22 Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus numbers (a couple with the help of Stig Anderson) included in the show, that is a reasonable route to go down. The fact that this show is NOT just…
THE south coastal area of Dorset has something of a reputation for community plays, and it all started with Anne Jellicoe’s The Reckoning, back in 1978. Since then both Lyme Regis and Dorchester have staged memorable plays about incidents in the history of their settlements, and this week the latest, Lyme and the Sea, opened…
THOSE of us who remember Jonathan Church’s tenure as artistic director at Salisbury Playhouse from 1996 to 1999, full of invention, excitement and visual splendour, look back on those as the glory days of the venue and the precursor to Helen Marriage’s time as director of the city’s annual arts festival. Since then Church has…
THERE have been many stories, often taken from life, showing how great wealth, suddenly acquired, corrupts those in receipt of such a windfall. One perfect example is Spend, Spend, Spend, the musical based on the rags-to-riches-to-rags story of Yorkshire housewife Vivian Nicholson who in 1961 won £152,319 on the football pools, and five husbands later…
FIGS in Wigs, the quintet of women who describe themselves as “dancing beings”, end their spring tour of Little Wimmin at Bristol. There are a few constants about the company – Alice Roots, Sarah Moore, Suzanna Hurst, Rachel Gammon and Rachel Porter. They dress identically, they wear wigs, they don’t take themselves (or much else)…