GEORGE Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer was one of the first plays chosen by the newly-formed National Theatre 50 years ago, and clips from it have been popular highlights in the various television programmes about the anniversary, with Maggie Smith as the plucky Sylvia and Laurence Olivier as the braggart coward Brazen. The exposure should be…

TAKE a name like Francois Billetdoux and an image of famous actors Felicity Kendall and Simon Callow embracing, champagne flutes in hand, against a backdrop of Paris under blue skies, with the single word Chin-Chin, and you think you’re in for a frothy farce. There might be a clue to this extraordinary play, which first…

TALES of mythical gods and kings were regular subjects for the early composers, who, rather like journalists, never let the “facts” spoil a good story – though what was fact and what was fiction in the Greek Myths is open to endless academic debate. The excellent English Touring Opera company, this year accompanied by the…

IF Finea (The Lady of Little Sense) was a 20th century child she’d be diagnosed with behavioural issues, prescribed Ritalin and sent to a school for special needs. But, happily for the audience at Bath’s Ustinov Theatre, in Lope de Vega’s play, translated by David Johnston and directed by Laurence Boswell, she is leaping and…

OUR passion for the Tudors continues unabated, with films, television dramas, historical novels – plus stage adaptations of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies for the Royal Shakespeare Company at the end of this year – and now Bournemouth Gilbert and Sullivan Society joins the merry Tudor dance with The Yeomen of the Guard,…

I HAVE seen Dramatic Productions in an enchanting children’s story, a polished and entertaining Ayckbourn, an unforgettable Of Mice and Men and now a new show that I hope to forget as soon as possible. It is Bournemouth University tutor John Foster’s retelling of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, on at Poole Lighthouse…

DIVORCED, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived, is a well known mnemonic to remember the fate of the Six Wives of Henry the Eighth, all brought to life on screen by Keith Michell et al on the BBC in the 1970s, more recently by Jonathan Rhys Meyers and cast in The Tudors , and for those…

MEREDITH Oakes’ intense and poetic translation of Lope de Vega’s El Castigo Sin Venganza takes its place in the trio of plays that makes up the Spanish Golden Age season at Bath’s Ustinov Studio until 21st December, adding the dark shadows to the comedy of Tirso de Molina’s romp. You might guess from the title…

TIRSO de Molina’s hilarious 1615 play Don Gil de las Calzaz Verdes is one of three plays from the Spanish Golden Age on stage in repertory at Bath’s Ustinov Theatre until 21st December. The writer’s real name was Gabriel Tellez, and he was a monk, one of those sent to the New World to Santo…

BETH Stewart’s production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, on stage at Shaftesbury Arts Centre until 19th October, is full of invention and stylish interpretation. From the opening moment, as the returning army strikes a tableau on stage to sing the traditional English song Rose Red, it’s obvious that the setting is the 1940s and…