ALAN Bennett’s wonderfully witty and thought-provoking double bill throwing contrasting lights on two of the ‘Cambridge Spies’, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, finds a perfectly satisfactory production with The Halse Players. In the seven years of their existence this compact group have already formed a reputation for setting themselves high standards and for being prepared…
JOHN Mortimer, drawing from his own experience, wrote his first play The Dock Brief in 1958. It’s a gentle comedy that satirises the precarious existence of those called to the Bar. Wilfred Morgenhall studied late into the night, devouring legal precedent and Latin terminology until he passed his finals and was called. But that was…
EVELYN Glennie, the world-famous percussionist, chose the cellist Jacqueline du Pre, for her interview on BBC Radio 4’s Great Lives series last week. It was a fortuitous choice for those of us who were due to see Duet For One at the Warehouse Theatre this week. The programme looked at du Pre both as one…
ERROL John’s groundbreaking 1958 play Moon on a Rainbow Shawl was written when he was 34 years old, an immigrant from Port of Spain (where the play is set). It tells of the struggle of a young man to leave the ties of his Trinidad home and make the break for a new life in…
MOZART: Piano Concerto No. 27 in B flat major BRUCKNER: Symphony No. 9 MOZART’s cycle of piano concertos sees the composer exploring a very wide variety of moods. His final concerto, No. 27, is Mozart at his most intimate, delicate and wistful. Orchestrated without timpani, trumpets or clarinets, the wind section consists of a flute…
WHEN you have a global reputation for music like Glastonbury has, a world-renowned shoe manufacturers like Street, and your long-established joint musical comedy society boasts an internationally in demand award-winning choreographer among its alumni, perhaps it’s no surprise that the current show at Strode Theatre in Street is a spectacular, triumphant hit. The G&SMCS is…
TOM Stoppard’s 1993 play Arcadia is a constant delight and revelation, no matter how many times you see it. It’s probably the playwright’s cleverest play, set at Sidley Park, home of the Coverlys, in 1809 and the present day, and interweaving not just characters over two centuries but brilliantly constructed ideas and explanations from a…
DORCHESTER’s sixth community play, Drummer Hodge, is a triumph! Moving, dramatic, funny, full of rousing music and great performances, it will make you laugh and cry. Dorchester at the end of the 19th century. The world is changing, there is war on the horizon in distant South Africa and the pace of life in Dorset…
WEDDINGS, like all the “big events” of human life, provide a fertile source of material for comedies, dramas and television series. Now West Dorset resident Chris Chibnall, best known recently for writing Broadchurch (and now its sequel), has turned his attention to the family trials and tribulations of organising such an event, specially for Salisbury…
NINE members of the youth theatre group at the Swan Theatre in Yeovil last week tackled a play written by one of the country’s brightest young stars, Anya Reiss, for the National Theatre’s annual Connections festival in 2013. The playwright was 22 when she turned in this real-time tour de force, so it is (almost)…