SHAFTESBURY Arts Centre’s music and drama group wants to whisk you away from a cold and depressing January to the excitement and colour of Neverland, with this year’s winter show, Peter Pan, The Pants, at the theatre in Bell Street from Thursday 25th January to Saturday 3rd February. All the big theatre pantomimes have packed…
AUDIENCES at the Swan Theatre in Yeovil start their 2024 season with the local premiere of Australian Andrew Bovell’s Things I Know to be True, directed by Mark Payne. The touching, funny and bold play, by award-winning screen writer and playwright Bovell, had its British premiere in 2016, at Warwick, Chichester and the Lyric Hammersmith….
THE story of England’s most married monarch exerts an enduring fascination, and one of the newest plays to tackle the tale from the point of view of the six wives is Stephanie Easton’s A Wife for all Reasons. It describes the turmoil at the court of Henry VIII, as seen by each queen – “divorced,…
LYME Regis continues to build on its long-standing heritage of community plays – the town hosted the first ever production of what is now known as a community play, Ann Jellicoe’s The Reckoning, in 1978. In 2024, the theme will be Shakespeare’s much-loved comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream, following the success of a previous Shakespeare-at-Lyme…
TWO local playwrights will have their latest play performed at Dorchester Corn Exchange on Saturday 16th and Sunday 17th December, as part of the Dorchester Arts festive programme. This Christmas, by Vince Jones and James Cuthill, is a heart-warming, feel-good, romantic comedy about love in later life, showcasing both the talents of the writers and…
CIVIC Players return to the Swan Theatre in Yeovil for their traditional pre-Christmas show, this time Ken Ludwig’s A Comedy of Tenors, on until Saturday 2nd December. It is the follow up to the writers popular Lend Me a Tenor, a play performed by Civic members in November 2022. The cast includes Andrew Meadows, Lucy-Ella…
“SHAKESPEARE has left us nothing so joyful and nothing so lovely,” says director John Crabtree of the dark comedy, Twelfth Night, which is being staged by Amateur Players at the Sherborne Studio Theatre from Monday 4th to Saturday 9th December, at 7.30pm with a Saturday matinee at 2.30. But it is a play with dark…
IT’s murder at Shaftesbury in December! From Agatha Christie short plays to a fairy in a microwave and teenagers lost in a magical wood, the arts centre’s talented actors are putting on some surprising festive entertainment. It all starts with Murder in the Studio, from 30th November to 2nd December. This is a collection of…
MADS, aka Mere Amateur Dramatic Society, is returning to one of the most popular productions it has ever staged, Murdered to Death, in tribute to company stalwart Di Potter, who died earlier this year. Di never trod the boards of Mere’s Lecture Hall stage, but she was a skillful member of the backstage crew, a…
ONE of the classic murder mysteries is the choice of Dorchester Drama for the pre-Christmas production at the Corn Exchange, on Friday 24th and Saturday 25th November at 7.30m, with a Saturday matinee at 2.30. Joseph Kesselring’s Arsenic and Old Lace promises the audience a murderously good time in the company of spinster sisters Abby…