THE forces that drive an ordinary soldier and his socially ambitious wife into a downward spiral through assassination and murder to brutal tyranny and suicide are given not one but two new twists in Graham Thomas production of the Scottish play at the Athenaeum, as part of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Open Stages project. ALP…
THE rock musical Godspell, first seen in New York in 1971 as a student project, is based mainly on the parables of the Gospels of St Matthew and St Luke, and was created for a theatre setting. Performing it in a church, as Motcombe Community Players are doing this week, inevitably gives the show a…
FRANK Wedekind’s startling, stark look at teenage angst, Spring Awakening, has been shocking audiences ever since it was first produced in 1906, and judging by the reaction to the first night of Ian White’s production at Yeovil Swan, it has lost none of its power to disquiet. The Swan Youth Theatre company decided against performing…
WELLS is always a joy to visit and to shop in, with its wide selection of independent shops and popular high street names. But shoppers got more entertainment than they bargained for last Saturday, when Bristol-based Show of Strength theatre company brought Trading Local to the city. The concept of Trading Local is simple but…
RAILWAYS evoke memories – memories of journeys, arrivals and departures, meetings and partings, new adventures and old routines. Leaves On A Line, the new touring show from Forest Forge, draws on all these strands and motifs in a multi-layered play with music. It is touching, funny, exciting and thoughtful. There are fragments of traditional fairy…
IMPACT’S spring tour 2015, of Amanda Whittington’s play about Ruth Ellis, The Thrill of Love, opened at The Hub in Verwood on Saturday. Whittington is the most frequently performed female playwright in the country, but her works don’t make national headlines. Based in Nottingham, where she trained as a journalist, her plays are full of…
THE short absurdist comedy The Harvest, by Belorussian playwright Pavel Pryazhko, is set on a stage covered with grass and full of apples hanging enticingly ready to be picked, in the UK premiere production directed by Michael Boyd at Bath’s Ustinov Studio until Saturday 11th April. Four young people, two boys and two girls, are…
IT is 64 years ago that Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical version of Anna and the King of Siam, The King and I, opened on Broadway – but this touching show, based on the real story of English widow Anna Leonowens and her engagement by the King of Siam to teach his children and his wives…
NASHVILLE based and New York born singer-songwriter Gretchen Peters has a special affection for her British fans, and with her latest album Blackbirds, they have taken her to their hearts as never before. The CD, whose song subjects range from a Southern murder and incest ballad through a heartfelt story of death on a cancer…
LOSING someone you love is always painful. Losing the love of your life, your soulmate, is immeasurably, infinitely painful – the subject of paintings, poetry, novels and plays over the centuries. But cinema generally struggles with the bleakness – not because the medium cannot convey loss, but because it is a hard sell. The perception for…