SWISS playwright Friedrich Durrenmatt studied philosophy and went to Berlin for postgraduate studies into Kierkegaard. There, he quickly formed a very different view of his native country and its famed neutrality, instead seeing a state polluted by greed and hypocrisy where neutrality was a euphemism for complicity. The fledgling philosopher turned his attention to playwriting…
THERE’S something about trees and since the publication of Merlin Sheldrake’s fascinating book Entangled Life, we know that there are forces underground, in constant communication with one another. So, if you have been in a forest and been aware of an invisible presence, it’s not really surprising … and humans have had that feeling for…
CONNOR McPherson’s 1997 play The Weir, written when he was in his mid-20s, is set in a dilapidated pub in County Leitrim on a windy night. At first sight it’s a ghostly story, and that is how some of the many productions around the world have played it. When Dennis Barwell chose it to direct…
THE multi-talented and super-versatile members of Yeovil Amateur Operatic Society have scored another triumph with their latest show at Westlands. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is Roald Dahl’s enduring, darkly-funny tale of a poor boy who proves his passion for chocolate to the very peculiar owner of the chocolate factory. And the Yeovil group has…
HOW do you react when someone you love has a terminal diagnosis? Shock, grief, anger, silence, sympathy … humour? Myra Bradley (Rachel Butcher) is diagnosed with bone cancer and told she has about six months to live. She wants to make the most of her time; she wants to choose where she will be buried;…
WHEN, in the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Topsy is asked by Miss Ophelia “Do you know who made you”, she replies “Nobody as I knows on. I s’pect I growed”. That quotation would be a good reply to anyone who wondered how a 15-minute “pop cantata” composed for a school and telling the story of…
FOR the majority of people, the years between the two world wars were full of financial depression and mass unemployment, and could hardly be described as times full of glamour and luxury. If you could afford it however, it was a time when sophisticated glamour and luxury travel reached a height never to be surpassed….
WATCHING Galina Ulanova dance the dying swan when in the 1960s the Bolshoi Ballet made a surprise visit to the Bristol Hippodrome and presented a programme of individual party pieces, was one of those magical never-to-be-forgotten theatrical moments. All future ballerinas have had to do battle with that memory when they come to the poignant…
ONE of the less feeble excuses I have made to friends and family who have suggested that I write my reminiscences of a war and post-war childhood, is that to do so I would show the faults of a father who fought hard all his life to take care of my mother and I, and give…
ALFRED Hitchcock’s film version of John Buchan’s 1915 novel is widely regarded as one of the greatest movies of all time, and every subsequent iteration is judged by this 90-year-old behemoth. So perhaps it is no surprise that a member of the audience, leaving Salisbury Playhouse’s terrific new production of the Patrick Barlow four-handed version…