THE cast at Studio Theatre in Salisbury waited for two years to put on their production of Amanda Whittington’s 2013 Ruth Ellis play, The Thrill of Love – and the result proves that it was well worth the wait. The facts that led up to the 1955 murder, which resulted in the last woman in…

TO say that this show only scratches the surface of the life and work of composer/singer Carole King would be putting it mildly. With more than 100 pop songs that found their way into the charts and 25 solo albums, many written for some of the top musical artists to emerge in the later part…

EDUCATING Rita burst on to the national consciousness nearly 40 years ago in a film which made a star of Julie Walters – but Willy Russell’s play was first staged three years previously, and it is as a play that it really works its magic, as it does once again in this production by Sherborne’s…

THERE are so many good causes associated with the writing, production and presentation of this play that a desire to support them can take over your emotions. leaving you almost incapable of looking at the production as a piece of theatre. As someone who at a young age spent hours rolling my Rs in order…

DIRECTOR Rachel Butcher brings a cinematic vibe to her production of Agatha Christie’s Go Back for Murder, on at the Swan Theatre in Yeovil until 19th March. This is the one where Christie began with Poirot in the novel version, but changed him to young solicitor Justin Fogg for the stage, and the Swan was…

KINKY Boots, the film, came out in 2005, and was followed by Cyndi Lauper’s multi-award winning musical of the same name in 2012. It has arrived at Yeovil’s Octagon Theatre, performed by the versatile, plucky and very talented Yeovil Amateur Operatic Society – now known more modernly as YAOS Productions – and it’s on until…

AFTER Everton’s crushing 5-0 defeat by Tottenham Hotspurs in their last Premier League game, oh how Bill Kenwright must be wishing and hoping that his beloved football club, of which he is a lifelong fan and previous Chairman, will follow in the footsteps of this production and burst into life, performing at the top of…

Dove        Sunshine Mozart    Piano Concerto No. 22 Schubert    Symphony No. 9 ‘The Great’ Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, leader Amyn Merchant Mark Wigglesworth, conductor, Imogen Cooper, piano CURRENT tragic events in Ukraine are impossible to ignore, especially for an orchestra whose chief conductor for the last 13 years is the Ukrainian Kirill Karabits. Kirill was not…

WHEN you have a stage full of brilliantly created life-sized puppets, expertly manoeuvred and voiced, the storyline within the play being presented can undermined, at times almost forgotten. In the case of Robert Icke’s intense adaptation of George Orwell’s 1945 novella there was never a chance that the story would slip into the background. Brutally…

GERALD Sibleyras’s play An Hour-and-a-Half Late  is recognisably French, a sort of Yasmina Reza-lite, following a pattern set by both she and Florian Zeller  of small-cast, intense, domestic stories of family function and dysfunction. But the new play, adapted and directed by Belinda Lang and starting its six-venue UK tour at Bath, is also very…