ACTOR Anton Lesser could hardly have been a more appropriate choice to read the words of Thomas Hardy, a man with whom he shares qualifications as an architect, and a subsequent and far more successful and famous career. And on an unforecastly beautiful evening, just west of the world famous Stonehenge, Mr Lesser joined actress…
ALFRED Hitchcock’s 1959 film North by Northwest, the story of mistaken identity in the frozen depths of the cold war, is widely considered to be one of the greatest films of all times. But it WAS 66 years ago, and many of today’s audiences will be entirely unfamiliar with the plot or its background. So…
BATH’S annual music festival, still struggling to retain its former glories, ended the 2025 event at the beautiful St Swithin’s Church on Sunday afternoon with a concert by Ensemble Moliere, celebrating the life and work of the remarkable dancer Marie Salle. Born to fairground tumblers in 1707, Marie transformed the then rigidly formal world of…
THE celebrations held to mark the anniversary of VE day must not only have stirred memories for those now comparatively few people who remember the occasion, but intrigued those who are too young to know about the lives and times of their parents and grandparents. If you, like me, were born after the war, but…
FLORA Wilson Brown’s play The Beautiful Future is Coming was first seen at the Jermyn Street Theatre in 2024, and now comes to Bristol Old Vic in a new production by Nancy Medina, the theatre’s artistic director. In the programme Nancy says “ We’re thrilled to share this beautiful human story in our city, which…
IT keeps raining, the fields are under water, the country has a policy of forced quotas for farmers, townsfolk are rationed to one egg a week, any misdemeanour or farm failure means removal from your farm to work in factories where life expectancy is a maximum of three years … and brutally trained young men…
IN a recent discussion with a group of young people about the merits of the lyrics in modern pop music compared to those in the 20th century, those of the 1930s were dismissed as having no merit, just cheap romantic nonsense, full of ‘moon and June’ rhymes. A visit to this production where Matthew Bourne…
I MUST confess that having seen mort than a dozen productions of John Kander and Fred Ebb’s musical version of Maurine Watkins 1926 play since it first hit the stage in 1975, I came to this new production with a rather jaded palate. However, it took only a few minuets, and Djalenga Scott’s Velma Kelly…
WHAT is it about the story of Dracula that continues to grip us? Whether it is the 1897 original Bram Stoker novel, the high camp of Hammer horror movies, the dark charisma of the Mark Bruce Dance Company version or any of the stage adaptations, this gothic tale exerts a peculiar fascination. One answer, suggested…
ANTHONY Shaffer’s thriller Sleuth is one of those extraordinary plays whose complexities are such that you forget the outcome, no matter how many times you see it – and that’s even WITH two famous film versions, one made in Dorset’s own Athelhampton House back in 1972 and starring Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine. Set firmly…