CHARLES Dickens was only 24 years old when he started writing the first instalment of what is now known as The Pickwick Papers. Samuel Pickwick and his friends, failed lover Tracy Tupman, would-be sporting gent Nathaniel Winkle and nervy poet Augustus Snodgrass, set forth from London to discover life around England (Manchester was not mentioned)….
YEARS ago, when the Bible, including the often gruesome Old Testament stories, were part of the curriculum, most of us knew a bit about the more colourful characters – Abraham, King David, Daniel (with all his torments), Judith (murdering the enemy general Holofernes), Jonah (in the whale), Noah (and all those pairs of creatures) ……
DONIZETTI’S comic opera L’Elisir d’Amore is usually set in the heat of an Italian summer … but why not in the heat of a Dorset one, thought director Andy Martin, back to the county of his birth from Australia to direct for the company where he had made his first foray into the world of…
ON the evening of 16th December 1912, Bristol Hippodrome opened its doors for the first time with the spectacular production of The Sands O’ Dee, featuring a 100,000 gallon water tank, diving horses and a variety bill headed by Eugene Stratton singing his signature song, Lily of Laguna. The costs of mounting a modern production…
AS I write this, I have no idea whether the planned production of Claire Dowie’s late 1990s double bill of All Over Lovely and Easy Access (for the boys) will be going ahead at The Exchange at Sturminster Newton tonight and tomorrow. If it does, the audience is in for a brilliantly performed and deeply uncomfortable…
YOU know what they say – if you remember the 60s, you weren’t really there. It is probably also true that if you remember the 50s, you wouldn’t want to go back there. But romantic Judy and her husband Johnny love the 50s. They love the music, the clothes, the home decor … Johnny obviously…
THE north east of England has for many years (centuries, if you include the Border Ballads) been a hotbed of folk music – home to the Waterson-Carthy dynasty, Fay Hield, Kathryn Tickell, The Unthanks, Lindisfarne … The list also includes Rachael McShane, an original member of folk big band Bellowhead, who travelled from Newcastle on…
SHAKESPEARE in the open air is a summer tradition, and this year the memory of sitting in the rain and cold seems like a thing of the past. It was a welcome relief as the cooling breeze wafted across the front of Muchelney’s ancient abbey, following the adventures of storm-separated identical twins Viola and Sebastian….
THE multi-talented actor, artist, playwright and adaptor Clive Francis has turned his pen to Graham Green’s comic novel Our Man in Havana to create a fast and furious visit to the Caribbean where the world’s most unlikely spy is recruited to help the British intelligence service in the time following the second world war and…
THERE is nothing funny about Peter Shaffer’s play Equus, the one about a boy who blinds horses, but there was a joke going around when it first opened on Broadway – that the British audiences thought it was a play about cruelty to horses, while the American audiences thought it was about cruelty to psychiatrists….