WHAT a treat for folk fans in the south west when Fay Hield and her Hurricane Party band blew into the Wiltshire Music Centre at Bradford-on-Avon on the night after the launch of their new album, Old Adam. Still elated by the excitement of the launch party, the band was in high spirits for a…
WHEN Strode Theatre director Liz Leyshon’s mother watched By Our Selves her reaction was a baffled “It’s bonkers.” In many ways, she was right. It is a puzzling, strange and sometimes almost incomprehensible film. But it is also beautiful and moving and somehow gets to the heart of John Clare’s remarkable poetry and of the…
MOST amateur theatrical companies put on an annual pantomime … it’s what we do in England and it is usually a sure-fire banker, attracting all ages and often entire families along for the fun. But everything is getting more and more expensive these days. Hiring halls, renting scripts, costumes, sets … the list goes on. …
IF there’s one thing we like to while away the long winter nights, it’s a good murder. And since we are engaged with the subject at one remove – on the television screen or across the footlights – we are quite happy to have a laugh as well. So Ira Levin’s comedy thriller Deathtrap hits the…
DAVID Mynne is a master at his craft, and his craft is acting. That craft includes all aspects of acting, including verse-speaking, singing, whistling, mime, oral sound effects, character playing, accents, physical representation, dramatic interpretation and countless other skills, all brought together to tell a tale familiar to most of the audience, in a style…
YESTERDAY afternoon’s recital by Gemma Rosefield and Tim Horton was the third in the current Shaftesbury Chamber Music series. The series always promises music of the very highest calibre and artistic director Ruth Rogers is to be congratulated once more in her choice of artists. Cellist Gemma Rosefield, justifiably described by the Evening Standard as…
THERE was great excitement in the dance world when Mark Bruce launched his latest production at Frome’s Merlin Theatre. After taking critics and audiences by storm with his Dracula in 2013, expectations were high for his version of The Odyssey, and they were not disappointed. This first tour opened in Bruce’s now home town and…
WILLIAM Golding was a teacher at Bishop Wordsworth’s school in Salisbury when he wrote his most famous novel, the dystopian and enduringly terrifying Lord of the Flies. The world is at war and a plane carrying schoolchildren to a place of safety away from the conflict crashes on a remote tropical island. It’s the sort…
THE last time The Beatles appeared in concert, apart from their well-publicised show on top of the Apple building a year before they finally split up, was at Wembley in May 1966, before many of their most famous songs had been written or recorded, let alone performed live. The beauty of a show such as…
AS a student scientist in the 1970s, Malcolm Green and a fellow undergraduate spent three months on a tiny uninhabited island in the Vestmann archipelago off the western coast of Iceland. They were there to study and record the breeding lives of the seabirds and particularly of the shearwater, tiny elegant birds, which migrate from…