I HAVE said before that I would travel a long way to see anything performed by BODS, having been thrilled by their Rent and Hairspray, and even impressed with The Witches of Eastwick, a somewhat weaker work. So when I heard that they were taking on one of the 20th century’s musical classics, I was…
THE centenary of the First World War has been an opportunity for many untold stories to be told, forgotten heroes to be remembered and the many roles of women to be celebrated. But few stories are more extraordinary and few women more remarkable than Dorothy Lawrence, a young journalist from Salisbury who made her way…
IBSEN’S Hedda Gabler, considered one of the greatest European plays of the 19th century, has had a radical re-working by Irish playwright Brian Friel. First seen in Dublin in 2008, it is at Salisbury Playhouse until 2nd April, only the second English production (the first was at the Old Vic starring Sheridan Smith) Friel has…
THE Street Theatre company celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2016, and the first play of the special year is The Ladykillers. Graham Linehan has adapted the classic 1955 Ealing comedy film for the stage, and the Strode Theatre based company was lucky to have the vast spaces of a Shepton showground to build the complicated…
THE latest tour by Farnham Maltings, following its back-by-popular-demand version of It’s a Wonderful Life, is The Iranian Feast, and it packed Winfrith Newburgh Hall with an audience drawn by the previous show and keen to try some food with their theatre. The touring company has perfected a style that merges documentary with entertainment, exposing…
ARTHUR Miller wrote his powerful drama The Crucible in response to the mass hysteria that accompanied the McCarthy “witch hunts” in the America of the 1950s, when propaganda was used to inflame feeling against so-called Communists running television, radio and Hollywood. Watching the play in March 2016, you have to wonder what the playwright would…
THERE is something deeply satisfying about Andrew Carpenter’s production of The Producers at Frome’s Merlin Theatre. It works triumphantly against all the odds that are stacked against it. The show is the story of a wily Broadway producer, Max Bialystock, and a nervous accountant, Leo Bloom, who plot to put on a stinker of a…
IN August 2014 Her Majesty the Queen officially pardoned code breaker Alan Turing, wiping out his conviction for gross indecency. But of course it was 60 years too late. The brilliant cryptographer and founder of computer science, an old boy of Sherborne School and decoder of the German Enigma code, died in 1954 at the…
MISBEHAVIN’, the North Dorset-based jazz quartet, have released their second CD, launched at a gig at the Grosvenor Hotel in Shaftesbury to an enthusiastic audience in the Assembly Room. It is seven years since the first album – Some Other Time (you might conclude that these musicians have time on their minds!) and the new…
THOMAS Aikenhead was the last person in Britain sentenced to death for blasphemy, and the Edinburgh student went to his death in 1697 with the words: “It is a principle innate and co-natural to every man to have an insatiable inclination to the truth, and to seek for it as for hid treasure.” These chilling facts…