THE audience at the latest Arts University Bournemouth production had a Brechtian experience at the reconformed Pavilion Dance, but the question has to be whether David O’Shea’s interpretation was more style than substance. There should be nothing comfortable about the German playwright’s works, which are specifically aimed at suppressing emotional involvement to give the audience…
PRINCIPAL boys are becoming an endangered species in professional pantomime – apparently young audiences brought up on boy bands and “reality” television shows find it hard to accept the idea of a girl dressed as a boy. But the tradition lives on in amateur panto, and at Shaftesbury this year, director Rosie King has not one…
Don’t just see it – be it! So read the G&S4U publicity for Saturday’s HMS Pinafore at Salisbury Playhouse. Under the energetic direction of Ian McMillan, we, as members of the audience, were being invited to become a vast chorus of sailors, sisters, cousins and aunts and, clutching union jacks, to set sail on the…
THE Sally Cookson directed, company-devised adaptation of Jane Eyre, first seen at Bristol two years ago in its two-part, four-and-a-half-hour version, has been abridged to three hours plus, and has been enthralling audiences at the National Theatre in recent months. Now it is back in Bristol until 6th February, and those with good memories and…
Dutilleux: Tout un monde lontain Tchaikovsky: Manfred Symphony Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, leader Amyn Merchant Kirill Karabits: Conductor Jean-Guihen Queyras: Cello THIS year the centenary of the French composer Henri Dutilleux is being commemorated in a series of events on Radio 3, and this concert was the BSO’s contribution. Dutilleux died three years ago at a…
JACQUELINE Wilson’s story Hetty Feather, originally published in 2009, has been a hit with young readers ever since, spawning several sequels one of which is about to be published. The Bath born writer was delighted when producer Mark Bentley suggested bring Hetty to the stage, and from its earliest outings at The Rose in Kingston,…
JUST less than a year ago, Amy Kemp (pictured right) was playing the lead in a youth theatre production of Spring Awakening at the Swan Theatre. Now she’s back as director of David Auburn’s play Proof, and kicking the Swan into a new era of experimental production. It is an astonishing achievement, visually and intellectually….
THE Schmoozenbergs are a Bristol based group of musicians with a lively passion for gypsy swing and jazz. Back for a second season with Take Art, Somerset’s enterprising arts charity, this quartet of supremely talented young men promised to recreate the swinging sounds of Paris in the 30s and 40s, bringing us irresistible rhythms and…
A PACKED Colston Hall enjoyed an insider’s look at Mozart’s three last symphonies before John Eliot Gardiner’s English Baroque Soloists played them “in earnest.” The atmosphere of a “classical” concert has undergone a sea change in recent years. While the rigorous conductor, who is also an organic farmer in Dorset, wouldn’t dream of some of the…
Liadov: Kikimora Shostakovich: Violin Concerto No. 1 Beethoven: Symphony No. 5 Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, leader Amyn Merchant Kees Bakels: Conductor Valeriy Sokolov: Violin HAVING glutted on Strauss waltzes over the New Year, this concert saw the BSO returning to their usual business of providing reliably polished and stimulating performances of the classical repertoire. It was…