AS we near the bicentenary of Jane Austen’s death, various celebrations of her life and work are being held around the country, and one of her greatest stage adaptors, Tim Luscombe, has turned his attention to the novel Emma, with its heroine whom Austen described as “someone who no-one other than myself will much like.”…
OTHELLO, Shakespeare’s tragedy of obsessive love and jealousy, is a story for all time and has been successfully updated and relocated in many landmark productions. Dorset-based professional theatre company SISATA has taken a radical change of direction, moving the central character out of a military setting into the world of contemporary art. How you feel…
THE music of Mozart, the grounds of the Wormsley Estate and a faithful re-creation of John Cox’s famous Garsington Figaro – what more could you ask for? This is the sixth Figaro in Garsington’s 29 years, the production first seen in 2005 and reprised for the final season at the original venue in 2010. Expectations…
IFORD Festival opera comes of age this year with Christopher Cowell’s production of the Puccini tearjerker La Boheme, performed as always in the viscerally intimate Harold Peto cloister. The first of three operas in this year’s 21st opera season, this masterful reading of the familiar story of seamstress Mimi, the coquettish Musetta and the young…
NEIL Simon’s original play The Odd Couple was first performed to great and lasting acclaim in 1965. Twenty years later he agreed to adapt it for a female cast. It was the second version that Ilminster Entertainments Society chose for the spring production, directed by Lyn Lockyer. The odd couple of the title, personified on…
THE unique atmosphere of Bridport’s Electric Palace was the ideal setting for the circus-themed community theatre “opera” Flea! The auditorium was filled with colourfully costumed acrobats, musicians, singers and brilliantly-lit smoke effects for the show, a complicated tale of Eastern European circus folk and itchiness. Recent Bridport resident and head of the world famous Ukulele…
SHELAGH Stephenson, best known for her radio plays, wrote the semi-autobiographical The Memory of Water for the Hampstead Theatre in 1996, gathering together her own family history and the tried and tested “three sisters” structure. Vi has died and her three daughters have gathered in the crumbling clifftop house where they grew up to sort…
BASED on a competition in Japan this month, the concerts given by the young Maxwell String Quartet were both a challenge and a delight. Ravel’s Quartet of 1903 is a work admired for its lyricism and beauty – it pleased Ravel’s contemporary Debussy, and audiences thereafter. Careful preparation ensured that the gliding phrases and the…
THERE’S nothing new under the sun, as Ecclesiastes would have it. We might think that the cult of celebrity is a modern phenomenon, but of course it’s not. And it’s just as important to be careful what you wish for now as it ever was. If someone suggests you go to the pub to see…
PLAYWRIGHT Alistair Beaton is not a scientist – he makes that very clear right at the start of his programme notes. He’s not a policitian either. But something about the fracking debate caught his attention, and, like the “words man” he is, he set out to research and then to write a play that would…