Reviews

Cats at Bristol Hippodrome

IT is hard to believe it is over 30 years since I first saw Cats in 1982 in its New London Theatre home, where War Horse now resides, and today it was time to see just how this piece of theatre history is standing up to the test of time. The last London cast I saw, in 2000, was…

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Ibsen’s Ghosts at Salisbury Playhouse

HENRIK Ibsen’s play Ghosts was greeted with fury and disgust when it was first published in 1881, and it was many years before it found favour with the theatre-going public, although it is now regarded as a classic of European theatre. In this new translation by Steven Unwin, who also directs the English Touring Theatre…

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Daytona, Bath Theatre Royal to Saturday 19 October

WITH a sunny, watery poster recalling David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash and a cast including Maureen Lipman, audiences at Bath this week could be forgiven for thinking they had booked for a comedy set in Florida. But by the time Oliver Cotton’s remarkable and thought-provoking play Daytona reached its enigmatic conclusion, they realised there were…

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Beauty and Death with the BSO

Conductor Kirill Karabits, Olga Myktenko (soprano), Alexander Vassilev (bass) Mozart: Serenade No. 10 for 13 Winds, K.361; Shostakovich: Symphony No. 14 THE BSO’s second Lighthouse concert of the season, subtitled Beauty and Death, saw the eagerly-anticipated return of Kirill Karabits to the podium in a programme of striking contrasts. The 36-year-old Ukrainian is now in…

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Dunsinane at the Theatre Royal, Bath

IN Act 5 Scene V of the Scottish Play, a cry is heard and Seyton tells Macbeth “The Queen, my lord, is dead” … but her suicide is offstage. What if this had been false information and the queen had lived on after the death of her husband? It’s this question that David Greig explores…

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1984, Salisbury Playhouse

IT’S arguable whether George Orwell’s most revered book can really work on the stage, but there’s no doubt this adaptation at Salisbury Playhouse succeeded in capturing much of the raw power of the story. Orwell’s chilling version of a dystopian future was written in 1948 and now projects haunting echoes of Soviet era secret police;…

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Guys and Dolls, Yeovil Amateur Operatic Society, Octagon Theatre

FROM the first moment, as the terrific band strikes up Frank Loesser’s overture and the curtains open to a stunning tableau, the scene is set for an evening of stylish delight at the Octagon in Yeovil as YAOS embarks on only its second Guys and Dolls. Directed and choreographed by Alan Spencer with Matthew Holmes…

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Wagner and Lisitsa launch BSO season

Wagner: Die Meistersinger Overture Wagner: Das Rheingold: Entrance of the Gods into Valhalla Wagner: Tannhäuser: Grand March Wagner: Tristan and Isolde: Liebestod Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto No 3 in D minor   THE Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra’s 2013/14 season at Poole Lighthouse got under way in a thrilling concert featuring Valentina Lisitsa, the Ukraine-born pianist often described…

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Evita, Bristol Hippodrome

AS someone who still owns the original, white-sleeved, album, starring Julie Covington as Eva and a young Colm Wilkinson as Che; who remembers David Essex and Elaine Paige being cast in the stage show reach newspaper front pages in the 1970s; and who loved the chain of pop videos that was Alan Parker’s film of…

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Jamaica Inn Studio Theatre, Ashley Road, Salisbury

DAPHNE Du Maurier’s chilling mystery Jamaica Inn was famously adapted for the stage by David Horlock in 1990, the artistic director of Salisbury Playhouse who was killed in a traffic accident only days after the play had opened. Now the version has been revived by the Studio Theatre in Ashley Road, the amateur company of…

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