THERE was a time when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes was not only the world’s most famous (fictional) consulting detective, but was also taken very seriously. You could call that multi-book-play-film version Sherlock Holmes Mk 1, pre-Moffat and Gatiss – but post-Moffat/Gatiss’s sexy, tousle-headed Sherlock with his swirling overcoat, quickfire dialogue and dazzling digital…
BATH’s Ustinov Theatre, under the artistic direction of Laurence Boswell, has been hailed as the country’s leading studio theatre, and the opening of Samuel D Hunter’s The Whale will undoubtedly underpin that well-deserved reputation. Running two hours without interval, it charts a week in the life of Charlie, a morbidly obese man who lives in…
THE Representation of the People Act which enfranchised British women over the age of 30 and with property rights had been passed in February 1918, but by Christmas 1918, the completed ballot papers for the first general election to include their votes lay uncounted. Progress had been, and many believe continues to be, astonishingly slow….
IN a dilapidated former health service supplies depot behind Pokesdown Station, the BEAF festival 2108 took flight with The Vodka Hunters. The site-specific show – four solo plays directed by playwright and novelist Nell Leyshon and devised by her and the performers – is about parenthood, seen from the eyes of “outsiders”. Boscombe has been…
WITH the imminent recordings on the Signum label of string quartets by Anton Dvořák, the Albion Quartet presented two of these as part of its recent tour organised by Concerts in the West. Schubert’s A minor Quartet, Rosamunde, was the third quartet of Albion’s programme. Dvořák’s F minor (1873) and E major (1876) quartets were…
MISS Shepherd is (possibly) the best-known inadvertent lodger in English literature, thanks to National Treasure playwright and actor Alan Bennett’s story, play and film The Lady in the Van. The then-young star of Beyond the Fringe moved into the then-affordable Camden in the 1970s, and soon afterwards allowed an eccentric woman who lived in a…
THERE could hardly be a more perfect time to stage Arthur Miller’s profoundly moving play A View From the Bridge than in 2018, when our daily attention is focussed on deporting “illegal” immigrants – both from the UK and from Trump’s America. Mike Tweddle, artistic director of Tobacco Factory Theatres in Bedminster, chose the play…
SALISBURY Playhouse’s artistic director Gareth Machin has been working on his adaptation of J Meade Falkner’s Moonfleet for more than three years, making changes even up to the opening night on 19th April. The resulting show, with its music by Russell Hepplewhite, is a triumph. Perhaps it is particularly effective for an audience familiar with…
I HAVE just spent a couple of days with 17 of my school friends, girls/women I have know for upwards of 60 years, all now retired except me. “Why are you still working” they said. “I am passionate about live performances. I love the theatre. I really would miss it, and I keep being asked…
THERE are said to be only seven plots* – but writers, poets, playwrights and novelists have worked an almost limitless number of variations, and few have done it with more energy and saucy humour than the 14th century Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio. The Decameron, a collection of 100 stories, mostly funny and often quite scurrilous,…