FOR my ninth birthday, my godfather sent me a book and a letter saying “my goodness, it will be double figures next time!” (silly the things you remember). The book was Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome. From the first sight of that distinctive cover with its pen and ink drawings and maps, I was…
MARKING its new collaboration with the Royal and Derngate Theatre in Nottingham, the Nuffield on the Southampton University campus commissioned award-winning television comedy scriptwriter Georgia Pritchett to adapt Hans Christian Andersen’s famous story The Snow Queen as a Christmas show with a different slant. And that she has done. The multi-talented eight-strong cast take the…
ONE day, more than ten years ago in Bristol, fledgling musician, singer and DJ Ed Patrick crawled into the Google underlay, found an anagram site, pressed a button … and out came Kid Carpet. Kid has been delighting children and their parents ever since, and his latest show, The Magic Elves, is playing at Bristol…
THE students at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School are ending the year with a colourful flourish at the Redgrave Theatre, with a new adaptation of the books of Lewis Carroll by Philip Monks. It all starts with a sepia image of Carroll (aka the Rev Charles Dodgson) and a group of friends posed in a…
MY first awareness of Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, better known, in the same way as other early 20th Century writers HG, AA and TS, by his initials, PG, was through a strangely funny programme on BBC1 in the early 1970s called Wodehouse Playhouse, which I was encouraged to watch because it starred two people from…
WHEN the Hammond brothers, Henry and Robert, set off on their bikes around the lanes of West Dorset in 1905 to 1907, gathering traditional songs and carols from people who were already old, they captured many of the tunes and words that Thomas Hardy knew as a boy. They had long been overtaken by the…
BUFFALO Gals founder and fiddler extraordinaire Kate Lissauer has recently discovered the silent films of Frank Borzage, made almost a century ago. She, with John Whelan and Jason Titley, have worked on three of the earliest short silents by the man who directed 100 films and won two Oscars, composing new music and authentic songs…
Orchestral players take centre stage at The Lighthouse Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra Kirill Karabits: Conductor Sunwook Kim: Piano Amyn Merchant: Violin Jesper Svedberg: Cello MAHLER: Blumine BEETHOVEN: Triple Concerto SHOSTAKOVICH: Symphony No. 5 WITH no virtuoso solo concerto in the programme, the focus in this packed Lighthouse concert was on the orchestra, with several principals…
ONLY connect, said E M Forster, quoted by Frank in Willy Russell’s Educating Rita: only connect, the motto written on Forster’s monument in Stevenage, and the two words which sum up not only much of Forster’s output, and Rita’s attempt at education, but also every tiny piece of the magical, mystical, deep, yet seemingly simple,…
ONCE we have been born, the one certainty remaining in this confused and confusing world is that we will die. We can no longer depend on real estate maintaining its value, jobs for life for lawyers, bankers and doctors or the sunshine in summer, but we ARE going to die. Not many of us wait…