BLACKMAIL is often touted as the first British “talkie”, as Director Alfred Hitchcock got permission during filming to make parts of it with sound, and ended up recording sound for most of the film. It was actually the third or fourth film released with sound; two versions came out in June 1929, to allow for…

AS part of this year’s Arts by the Sea Festival, Fuel Theatre Company have blacked out a large room in the Pavilion Dance complex and invite the audience to sit in complete darkness for an hour, wearing wireless headphones, and be transported to another “very similar” room. Director David Rosenberg, a doctor and qualified anaesthetist,…

CHARLES Dickens’ famously tense and spooky novel Great Expectations has been revised by Neil Bartlett for his new production at Bristol Old Vic, performed by nine actors on a sparsely furnished stage in which the soundscape is as important as the props might usually be. It’s a bold reading of the famous story, rich in…

THE beautiful barns of Ashley Wood Farm near Tisbury were a home-from- home for the Creative Cow company, whose rehearsals are held in a Devon agricultural building with perplexed cows looking on. On 29th September the new production of Shakespeare’s farcical comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor was performed at the “new” Tisbury venue after…

YOU don’t expect to go to the nightclub/ disco/farmer’s market venue in Wincanton on a Sunday afternoon to see an Edinburgh Fringe style – and standard – show, but that’s what happened on 29th September, when Fringe Files put on their inventive play UnderLINE. The matinee started with Stuart Lyddon’s solo piece Sorry, the unfolding…

WHEN I heard, at the end of last year, that Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones were going to be directed by Mark Rylance in a new production of Much Ado About Nothing at the Old Vic on London’s South Bank in September 2013, I booked my seats immediately. So, with expensive tickets waiting to…

THE Wars of the Roses surge across the stage in the Shakespeare’s Globe on Tour’s tumultuous Henry VI plays, at Bath Theatre Royal until Saturday 28th October – the final night of a tour that started in June. On the last day, all three plays – Harry the Sixth, The Houses of York and Lancaster…

SHAKESPEARE’S Globe on Tour has had a busy summer, performing the three parts of Henry VI in some evocative places, including the battlefields of Towton, Tewkesbury, St Albans and Barnet. Until Saturday 28th September, the company is in the more conventional surroundings of Bath’s Theatre Royal, where the Bard’s rarely-performed trilogy is on stage, nightly…

Pencoweth is a heart-warming tale of 1850s Cornish life, full of original music and ballads and set in the harbour of a Cornish fishing village. Two young fishermen set out to test their respective fiancees prior to the impending weddings. But their disguises and deceptions have a devastating impact on the community  and they are…

NOT Just for Sundays is a music theatre piece by Dorset born composer Graham Stansfield.  Inspired by Sir Roy Strong’s book on the history and current state of our churches, the piece was given, I believe, only its second performance in Broadstone last Saturday. The performance had already begun as we entered.  The young lady…