THE lives of spies – defected and active – have provided rich pickings for writers and dramatists, with Alan Bennett’s An Englishman Abroad, Peter Moffat’s Cambridge Spies, Graham Greene’s The Third Man and John Le Carre’s tales of George Smiley leading the way for Ben Brown’s new play, A Splinter of Ice. Halfway through its opening…

I FIRST came across “political correctness” when, holding a door open at a department store so that a young women could have free access to the store, I was greeted with: “You wouldn’t have done that if I had been a man.” To say that I was shocked and confused would be putting it mildly…

TEN years after Bec Applebee first performed Oh Mary at Sandford Orcas, she was back again, courtesy of Artsreach, on a beautifully chilly night to rehears the story of her heroine, Mary Bryant. Sentenced to death by hanging for stealing a lace-trimmed bonnet, reprieved as good breeding stock for the new penal colony in Botany…

WHEN a ship docked at Melcombe Regis near Weymouth in 1348, carrying treasures from the Far East, via Europe, it also carried the then usual cargo of fleas. These were no ordinary Siphonaptera, but carriers of the bubonic plague. Its devastating effects, from its Dorset landing all across the land of King Edward III, became…

SOMETIMES things fall into place, are of their time, when you couldn’t know this was going to happen, and the parties involved could not know, so it is a co-incidence whose time has come. Perhaps it is a consequence of the times we live in and the uncertainty that hovers over everything. In the space…

COPENHAGEN, Michael Frayn’s still astonishing 1998 three-hander about physics, philosophy, mathematics, ethics, common sense and human interpretation, is delighting audiences at Bath again, en route to London in these uncertain days for live performance. Danish Niels Bohr, Jewish on his mother’s side, was just 16 years older than his young German student Werner Heisenberg when…

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…