AS UKIP posters appear across the nation, Alan Ayckbourn’s 2011 play Neighbourhood Watch is a timely reminder about what can happen even with the best of intentions. Martin Massie and his older sister Hilda have lived together all their lives, since their mother died giving birth to Martin and their father some years later. They…
“WHERE ignorance is bliss, ‘Tis folly to be wise,” as Thomas Grey elegiacally said. Not the sort of thing The Master opined, but he instead gave us a sort of Bliss that has endured 90 years of performance and still turns up trumps. The Street Theatre production of Noel Coward’s Hay Fever, on stage in…
FRANK Marcus’s 50-year-old play The Killing of Sister George, staged by Taunton Thespians until 15th March, comes from a very different time, but one which includes eerie predictions of life in the 21st century. District nurse Sister George is a favourite character on a BBC radio soap, but the powers that be decide to bump…
YEOVIL might have an exceptionally high concentration of talented music theatre performers, but gospel music and its descendant, soul, is not what the area is known for. So it’s all the more remarkable that the long-established YAOS chose Sister Act for its big show of 2014. The company was delighted to be one of the…
AMERICAN playwright Dan LeFranc drew on his own experiences of life when he created his “48-hour play” The Big Meal, which opens the Ustinov Studio’s three-play American season, on stage until 5th April. The stage of the intimate theatre has been stripped bare, tongue-and-grooved wood to half way up the wall, banquettes round the edges,…
AS he approaches his 75th birthday, Alan Ayckbourn proves with his latest plays that his extraordinary powers of observation are undulled, but perhaps his lengthy period of disliking most of the human race is at an end. His own ensemble from the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough is currently on a UK tour, prior to…
FRENCH playwright Marc Camoletti’s farce Boeing Boeing, first performed 50 years ago, has become a staple of touring and amateur companies across the English, French and German speaking world, and a West End revival a couple of years ago packed them in again. As a professional tour traverses the country, newly fledged company Stab in…
BASH Street Theatre, in Dorset this month on a short Artsreach tour with The Last Illusion, has a great reputation in Cornwall, where the company has been based for 22 years. Inventive and multi-talented, performers Simon Pullum and Jo-Jo Pickering have won street theatre awards and have toured extensively, around the UK, to 18 European…
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, leader Amyn Merchant Bournemouth Symphony Chorus, chorus master Gavin Carr Conductor: David Hill Lisa Milne, Soprano Jennifer Johnston, Mezzo-Soprano MAHLER: Symphony No. 2 in C Minor, “Resurrection” THE word ‘apocalyptic’ was used in the BSO’s publicity for this concert: this sounds like hyperbole, but the word is precise and accurate….
HAPPY is exactly how the audience felt at the end of the first night of this brand new musical in Bristol, based on the television series of the same name and written by its creator Garry Marshall. The title song appears reassuringly early in the show, crops up as part of another song along the…