OVER recent years, my dad and I have slowly developed an appreciation for each other’s musical tastes and, while some of the CDs lurking amongst his collection are, in my eyes, slightly dubious, I was really pleased that for the first time last Friday night, we set off to a gig together. The audience that…
AT the end of a powerful performance of his book Private Peaceful at the Octagon in Yeovil on Saturday, Michael Morpurgo congratulated the organisers of the town’s first ever Literary Festival – and the packed house proved the success of the venture. The Devon-based writer and former children’s laureate was joined on stage by acapella…
THE New Forest is an ancient and mysterious place, full of legends, memories and voices. It is a special place and it is different. As the novelist LP Hartley famously wrote at the beginning of The Go-Between, “The past is another country – they do things differently there.” Karen (Melody Brown) has fled the stresses…
THE Dorset-based State of Play company describes its work as “creative journeys through drama and the arts” and its modus operandi is to settle on a theme, research it and create a production through workshops and improvisation. It is a tried and tested method which can and has produced powerful drama and compelling storytelling, and…
CHARLOTTE Keatley’s play My Mother Said I Never Should is on stage at Yeovil’s Swan Theatre until Saturday 21st September, directed by Ian White. It’s an oddly unbalanced piece, with moments of poignant lyrical writing interspersed with clunky efforts at progressing the story. It starts with four young girls playing on a waste ground, discussing…
KANDER and Ebb’s musical version of Cabaret opened on Broadway in 1966, was made into an eight Oscar-winning film, and has been produced on stages around the world ever since. You won’t see a better production than the current tour, directed by Rufus Norris, starring Will Young and at Bristol Hippodrome until Saturday 21st September….
THAT most varied of playwrights Peter Shaffer wrote the double bill The Private Ear and The Public Eye back in 1962, the fledgling days of the Swinging Sixties, and it provided a vehicle for the actress who was to become the Dowager Countess of Grantham to exhibit her comic versatility. Now on its first major…
HAVING already taken us back to the reality of the seventies in Apollo 13 and Frost/Nixon, director Ron Howard returns to the decade again to bring us the “true story” of the feud between Formula One drivers James Hunt and Niki Lauda. Formula One fans will remember the 1976 season, covered by the BBC in short highlights programmes, usually…
ERNEST Thompson’s play On Golden Pond is best known this side of the Atlantic as an award-winning film that starred father and daughter Henry and Jane Fonda, and provided a catalyst for their exploration of their own difficult relationship. Now the original play opens Salisbury Playhouse’s autumn season, played on an atmospheric set designed by…
JULIAN Mitchell’s play Another Country, on at Bath Theatre Royal this week in an atmospheric production directed by Jeremy Herrin, is set in an English public school in the 1930s. This was a time when inter-pupil fiddling was commonplace and accepted as a rite of the normal passage towards heterosexuality. But if the love that…