CINDERELLA is the most popular of pantomimes, but this season the only professional production in the south west is at Exeter’s Northcott Theatre, where Le Navet Bete (that’s Daft Turnip in translation) has taken the story and shaken it up a bit, to the delight of children, parents, grandparents and other panto lovers. The three…
LEWIS Carroll’s story of Alice in Wonderland is intended to subvert your expectations, but when our heroine stumbles into Blunderland instead, there are even more twists and turns on the way down the rabbit hole. A packed audience at Mere had a second chance to enjoy Eric Kincaid and Chris Wood’s version of the famous…
THE big Christmas 2024 puzzler in the Cotswolds is whether 3 is less than 6, just like 6, or greater than 6? And if you have already been to Cirencester’s Barn Theatre this festive season, you may well have the answer. If not, I strongly suggest you get your tickets for The Three Musketeers –…
WHEN the First World War ended, it was sometimes called the Great War but, in the aftermath of carnage that looked senseless even at the time to many participants, there was a hope that it would be the War To End All Wars. That worked well, didn’t it? As we hover on the precipice of…
BRISTOL has always been a special place for Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson’s ever-popular tale of piracy and treasure maps … it’s even said the Scottish writer worked on the story at the city’s Llandoger Trow inn, which might have been the model for the Admiral Benbow. This year, Bristol Old Vic Theatre School has…
PLAYWRIGHT Stephen Lowe adapted Robert Tressell’s partly-autobiographical novel The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists in 1978 for Joint Stock, and the members of Frome Drama chose it for their autumn show, hot on the heels of a general election that has brought the Labour movement to power after years of Tory rule. Tressell was a painter and decorator,…
TRICK photography has been used in-film making almost from the time of the first moving pictures – Georges Méliès’s Trip to the Moon featured a rocket landing in the Man in the Moon’s eye way back in 1902. It had become much more sophisticated by 1937, when Cary Grant and Constance Bennett caused comic havoc…
SOME years ago we visited a remote castle in Scotland, as a possible choice for a big family holiday. Within minutes of entering the ancient stone tower we were chilled and alarmed, wrapped in a an insidious sense of misery that only grew worse as we went through more rooms. Later, we learned that for…
PLAYWRIGHT Tabitha Hayward, who is about to start a new job at London’s famous Royal Court, was surprised when she left her Dorset home for Oxford University and the working world to find that the hill forts she regarded as ordinary landscape features were not widespread across the country. Now she has returned “home” to…
FIONA Ross’s production of Romeo and Juliet for the students at Arts University Bournemouth in their Palace Court Theatre pares the action and the story back to its bones, convincingly underlining the timelessness of Shakespeare’s greatest love story. With daily news full of knife fights and teenage deaths, this is another story of gangs and…