FOR those of us of a certain age, it seems incredible that the television series Fawlty Towers had only 12 half-hour episodes when it was first shown in 1975 … more than 50 years ago. Its set-piece scenes and catch phrases – and of course Sybil’s laugh – fast entered the Comedy Hall of Fame,…
POLLY Lamb’s latest play, Your Move, was sold out before it opened at the Town Hall, playing for the first three days of Frome Festival 2026. Once again, town councillor and fair housing advocate Lamb has created a play that taps into the concerns of the 2020s, focussing on the “new” ways we live and the…
NOEL Coward’s dazzling wit and uncompromising insights into human behaviour rightly won him the title of “The Master”, and his legacy is a collection of brilliant plays set in a time before political correctness and the “classless” society we now claim. That means they need a very careful and specific style to ring true and…
IN 2005, Maureen Lipman starred, to great acclaim, in Peter Quilter’s play Glorious, the story of the world’s worst soprano, Florence Foster Jenkins. Now she returns to another Quilter play about a woman who (in her own mind) sings to make the world happy. Allegra, older sister to Ronen, lives alone with her empty fridge in…
THERE is nothing light and humorous about Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello, and its overt racism poses a problem for some theatre companies. So it might not be seen as the ideal choice for an open air play, where the audience wants action, fun and laughter to go with their picnics and (in this heatwave) increasing consumption…
YOU probably don’t think much about oranges – juicy, full of vitamin C, useful in salads or with roast duck … But in a time before instant gratification and international food miles, oranges were a treat, an exotic delight to titillate the fancy and palate of the great, the (possibly) good and the wealthy. And…
WHEN I was about to be married, my future Father-in-Law, with great wisdom, steered me towards buying a house about to be built as part of a 40-unit development. This was around the same time that Mike Leigh wrote this play, and being the first to take up residence I watched newcomers arrive. Thinking back,…
WHAT is it that every woman wants? That’s the central question posed by the Wife of Bath in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. It’s something that less-enlightened men think they instinctively know. It is also the framework for the Rude Mechanicals’ 2026 summer tour, The Wife. Writer Pete Talbot, an MBE recipient in the King’s Birthday Honours for…
SOME of the reviewers of this sparklingly sexy and imaginative production have compared it to David McVicar’s famous Giulio Cesare at Glyndebourne – and found David Alden’s production lacking in subtlety. Having seen both, (which I’m guessing the other critics have too), I think this Egyptian-themed production, with its fabulous singing, inventive sets and convincing…
THE Marquise is a very unusual Noel Coward play, written in 1927 as a star vehicle for his friend, the singer and actress Marie Tempest, but set in 1735. Bookended by his smash hits Hay Fever and Private Lives, it is rarely performed, perhaps because it lacks the welter of wit and bon mots of…