IF you think of Clarks of Street, the first thing that comes to mind will be shoes – but there is so much more to the story of this family and the Somerset village where they have lived and worked for centuries. From prehistory to contemporary art, the Shoemakers Museum tells the story of a…
IF you travel by train in an urban area you can see into people’s back gardens, terraces, even kitchens, get a fleeting glimpse of their lives and perhaps occasionally imagine something about them. Rachel travels by the same train into London every day for work; while the train is running at a slower speed she…
SHIRLEY Jackson’s book The Haunting of Hill House, published in 1959, has been described as the greatest horror story ever, so it’s no surprise it has seen several stage and two screen adaptations. Now the book has been adapted by Stef Smith, for a new theatrical version, designed by Ti Green and directed by Martin…
It’s nearly 400 miles (as the crow flies) from Marlborough in Wiltshire to Pitlochry in Scotland, so perhaps a surprise to find actor Sir Simon Russell Beale and director Ben Occhipinti, both with strong links to Salisbury and resident in Wiltshire, brought together in the Perthshire highlands in the service of Liberace, 20th century superstar…
THE professional commercial theatres in Bristol (the Hippodrome, Weston-super-Mare (the Playhouse) and Bath Theatre Royal all open their doors to productions by local amateur companies. Weston Operatic Society, founded in 1908 and the oldest of the local clubs, had to wait until a change of management in 2008 before they could establish themselves as regular…
A much-respected local music critic, with a deep knowledge of opera and classical music, had one great blind spot – he hated Mozart’s music, one his operas, Don Giovanni in particular. Despite the fact that ever since its first, rapturously received 1787 production in Prague, it has been constantly named as one of the worlds…
AMONGST my most treasured long-playing records is a box containing two LPs of the January 1954 BBC Third Programme broadcast of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood originally described as a play for voices. Some 30 actors, led by Richard Burton and Richard Bebb as the narrators, combined to bring the 60+ named characters who inhabited…
DIRECTOR Robert Wiene’s 1920 horror film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari is considered to be the masterpiece of German expressionist filmmaking. With sharp angles, crooked windows, twisted streets with leaning buildings, its unique visual pictures present the story from angles that are anything but the expected manner of the usual film and theatrical presentation of…
THE play of Steel Magnolias starts with gunshots ringing round the auditorium. It’s an American man – father of Shelby the bride – demonstrating his right to bear, and discharge, arms, this time at the birds in the fruit trees and the magnificent old oaks surrounding his Louisiana property, so they don’t mess up the…
RICHARD Thompson was 18 years old when he and Simon Nicol, Ashley Hutchings and Shaun Frater formed Fairport Convention in 1967, “inventing” – as he told the Poole Lighthouse audience – a new musical genre. Now he is 77, and still going very strong, as is the band he left in 1971, with the seminal…