WHAT do you do if you inherit a traditional shoe factory that is about to be swamped by cheap overseas imports. If your name is Clark, you convert the main factory site into a shopping village and introduce a smaller range of specialist shoes. Kinky Boots, for all its flamboyant story and big scale musical…

HOW do you set about reviewing a play? That’s a question that lots of people ask, and the answer is complicated. For anyone who has been doing it as long as I have, it is a combination of experience, knowledge of the work, previous productions and performances, the effect THIS production has on THIS audience…

LIKE most of Alan Ayckbourn’s 90-plus professionally presented plays, Just Between Ourselves started life at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, before going out on tour, with the author in tow continually tweaking the text, before finding its way onto London’s West End stage. I caught up with Alan Ayckbourn in Bridgwater Arts Centre when, in…

ONE of the few criticisms of the Roald Dahl and Ken Hughes 1968 screenplay of Ian Flemings children’s fantasy Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, with music added by the Sherman brothers, was that it was too long at, 2 hours 25 minutes. This new production, which draws a long tour to a close when, after leaving…

APRIL de Angelis’s play Playhouse Creatures, commissioned by Sphinx Theatre in Leicester in 1993, might have been a historical drama about the life of the famous Mary Betterton, known as the first actress of the English stage – or about Nell Gwynn, the orange seller who enraptured King Charles II. But it is much more…

ALTHOUGH they were written one hundred years apart, in 1772 and 1888 with one throwing the spotlight on French nobility and the other on Swedish society, there are many parallels between Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses and August Strindberg’s Miss Julie. Both feature debauched nobility corrupted by money and the absolute power that…

IT has been 12 years since the musical adaptation of The Witches of Eastwick, a show spawned by the 1987 film that followed hot on the heels of the publication of John Updike’s novel in 1984, was released for amateur performance. Now it arrives on stage in Milborne Port, providing a very different show for…

Tom Stoppard knew all about it when he wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, back in 1966 when he was still in his 20s. This is a play about two of the minor characters in Hamlet. As the murder mystery of Hamlet’s father unfolds around them, Hamlet’s two, interchangeable, childhood friends wait around until someone…

IF you look up “Cruel Intentions” on Wikipedia you have the choice between the film and the “franchise” … and really, that says it all. Pierre Choderlos de Laclos wrote his infamous epistolary novel back in 1782, and many adaptations have followed, on stage, film and television. Perhaps Jordan Ross, Lindsey Rosin and Roger Kumble…

DAN Brown’s 2003 mystery thriller novel The Da Vinci Code is a worldwide best seller – 80 million copies were sold in the first six years – as well as the cause of international controversy, criticised as a historically and scientifically inaccurate attack on the Catholic church. It was filmed in 2006, again delighting audiences…