THERE couldn’t have been a more evocative and beautiful place to experience Wassail Theatre’s Whispering Willows, than Coates English Willow at Stoke St Gregory, below a hillside woodland overlooking the green, lark-punctuated fields of willow towards the M5 in the distance. The wordless show, devised by the company and directed by Jesse Briton, tells a…
TIME fascinates us. It has fascinated philosophers and scientists, mathematicians, poets and playwrights for centuries. It particularly fascinated the poet and Nobel laureate TS Eliot – and nowhere was that fascination more powerfully expressed than in Four Quartets. Everything about this masterpiece in four movements is preoccupied with time – “Time present and time past…
JACK the Treacle Eater, one of Yeovil’s legendary characters, is famed for running long distances at high speed and fuelling himself with treacle. But in the Yeovil College end of year show for performing arts students, that fuel was friendship. It must have been a horrendous year for students, with classes happening and then not…
GATHERING together in Bath for the annual festival had a uniquely poignant atmosphere, enhanced by the ancient setting of the Roman Baths, when the Gesualdo Six sang a programme of 14 songs with a watery theme last night. After months of lock-downs and cancellations, the joy of live performance was shared equally by the singers…
RAMBERT’S new livestream dance-film Rooms, by Norwegian choreographer and cinematographer Jo Strømgren, has been specially created in and for the isolated days of Coronavirus restriction. See it as a glimpse into windows as you take a bike ride through a city, says the blurb. The 17 dancers perform vignettes of life in a series of…
THE Netflix hit Bridgerton had viewers round the world hooked on the roller-coaster love affair of beautiful Daphne Bridgerton and her dashing Duke. Many of the scenes were filmed in Bath, and this year’s Bath Festivals will include a walking tour of the locations. The Regency romp was a storming success with more than 82…
ACTOR Ronald Pickup, who has died at the age of 80 after a long illness, is now best known for his performances as Norman in The Best Marigold Hotel films and as the Archbishop of Canterbury in The Crown. But for those of us lucky enough to have been around for the early days of…
IF, like us, you love live performance, whether it is theatre or music, you will be desperately missing it, and looking forward to a time when we can once again sit in Bristol Old Vic or Bath Theatre Royal, Poole’s Lighthouse arts centre or Salisbury Playhouse. But while they remain closed in this interminable lockdown,…
I LIKE to think I am pretty good at recycling plastic, avoiding buying things that are packaged or wrapped in plastic and reusing as much as I can. But then I look around the kitchen or even my desk and realise how difficult it is to avoid it. Pens, clip-top boxes, the computer mouse, light…
I WAS driving through nearby villages last week, and miserably missing all those posters advertising Aladdin, Sleeping Beauty, Jack and the Beanstalk, Dick Whittington (and of course Cinderella) that you’d expect to see taped to lamp-posts at this time of year. Covid-19 has scuppered all performances in early 2021, and those pantomimes have been a…