HENRY V – Marquis of Anglesea rather than he of “once more into the breach” – is the extraordinary subject of Seiriol Davies’s show How to Win Against History, which has its first fully-staged production at Bristol’s beautiful Old Vic Theatre … made even more exotically, fantastically beautiful in Hayley Grindle’s Cabinet of Curiosities set….

THRILLER writer Peter James is keen to point out that his creation Roy Grace is HMQ Camilla’s favourite detective, and it is he who leads the investigation in Picture You Dead, the seventh and latest James novel to be dramatised for the theatre, touring the UK until the end of July. Mr James, whose Brighton-based…

THE Rude Mechanicals, that endlessly inventive commedia dell’arte touring company, first performed Pete Talbot’s play Gentle Harry’s Farm in 2011, and now the story of a green and pleasant England in the 1950s is on the road again. Performing in the open air is always a gamble, and one that didn’t quite pay off at…

THE New Hardy Players, who were founded to mark the 100th birthday of Norrie Woodall*, the last surviving member of the original Hardy Players, this year celebrate their own big birthday – their 20th anniversary. They marked it with a return to touring their summer production for the first time since the pandemic, with a…

SINCE its formation in 2012, the Taunton based @2KTheatre has made extensive tours of Somerset, taking comedy and drama to many small venues where there no longer is a local non-professional company. Picking up several awards en route, they have presented classic comedies – Noel Coward’s Private Lives, Alan Bennet’s Habeus Corpus and The Lady…

BACK in the dark ages in Bournemouth, and every time a more sordid story emerged from the courts, my first editor used to delight us trainees with the mischievous quip “How unlike the home life of our own dear queen.” This extraordinary woman was so much a part of all our lives for so long…

THE attention of new generations of music lovers has been drawn to Woody Guthrie with the success of the Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, and it is fortuitous timing for Somerset-based singer and songwriter Reg Meuross, whose brilliant new song cycle, Fire and Dust, was ready at much the same time. The release of the…

PETE Machale, who graduated from the Arts University Bournemouth’s acting course in 2017 with a memorable performance as the White Rabbit in Alice, is back, but now as a playwright commissioned to create a new play based (loosely) on a bit of the history of the Palace Court Theatre, where students on the course now…

MICHAEL Morpurgo was more than a little sceptical when in 2007 the National Theatre decided to produce a stage version of his 1982 anti-war novel War Horse. Not surprisingly in that the story followed the adventures of a thoroughbred horse from foal to becoming one of the 62,000 (out of one million) horses taken over…

THIRTY years ago, two writers, Simon Corbie and Nobby Dimon, adapted John Buchan’s famous story of spies, derring-do and pre-war tension in London and the Highlands, into a play. It had been a successful Alfred Hitchcock film, updated from 1915 to 1935. Ten years later, Patrick Barlow took the play, shook it up and gave…