COUNTRY singers have the traditional reputation of whining out cliched down-home wisdom, very little of which has any relevance to the stiff-upper-lipped Brits. But lordy how things have changed. Not only in our post-Diana society do we vie with family, friends and neighbours to show ever more open and intimate expressions of affection, love and…
THE conspiracy and cock-up theories of history collide in the story of Anne Frank and her family and her diary. The grotesque “final solution” of the Holocaust, the industrialised slaughter of European Jewry by the Nazis, was carefully planned. But it was a succession of unplanned events and accidents – the gift of a diary to…
PETER Whelan’s 1982 play The Accrington Pals is a perfect choice for this year, the anniversary of the start of World War One, and I doubt that you’ll see a better production than that at Wells Little Theatre until 27th September. It’s the third time in a decade that the play has been performed by…
TWO enchanted hours flew by as Oddity Theatre’s cast of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe took to the stage in Warminster’s Athenaeum Centre. The confidence and enthusiasm showed by the children in particular were a huge credit to the direction of Luke Willmore, who brought CS Lewis’ famous story to life with a…
THE Bunbury Company of Players, typical of so many amateur companies the length and breadth of England, has been performing Anthony Scottney’s production of Oscar Wilde’s “perfect comedy”, The Importance of Being Earnest, for decades. Save for one newly deceased member of their number, the cast has remained the same throughout the years, and has…
HINDSIGHT is a wonderful thing – we wouldn’t have done that or said that or thought that, would we? But for the young women who went out to nurse in the First World War, the reality and horror that they encountered was so different from the glorious battle that their mothers and sisters were promoting…
THERE’s a Bronte Season going on, organised by south west based Butterfly Psyche and Livewire theatre and directed by Shane Morgan and Jazz Hazelwood. It involves Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, all newly and inventively adapted (by Dougie Blaxland and Alison Farina) and performed by one or…
PERIPLUM brought the madness, chaos and terror of war to Blandford Marketplace in The Bell, a spectacular open-air show which is part of this year’s biennial Inside Out Dorset festival. Thousands of people crowded into the town centre for the free show, which depicted unnamed tribes at war, killing and being killed, and the challenge…
JONATHAN Larson’s rock opera (not musical; quite apart from its source in Puccini, the whole structure of the piece is distinctly operatic with its almost total lack of spoken dialogue and 19th-century-style recitatives) is probably the most successful and influential work of its kind of the last fifty years; it’s been described as speaking to,…
THE Ustinov Studio’s exciting autumn season opens with the UK premiere of Play Strindberg, Alistair Beaton’s new translation of Friedrich Durrenmatt’s satirical take on Dance of Death. The programme starts with an imagined conversation between the Swiss dramatist and his translator, justifying the slight changes but emphasising that this is very much a translation and…