JOHN Godber’s 1977 play Bouncers was once voted the nation’s most popular play, and has been performed at the National Theatre, toured the world and been staged by countless amateur companies in its almost 50-year long life. The current production at Sherborne’s Studio Theatre, directed by Sarah Webster, is my first encounter with this story…

WE live in a time of advertising slogans and clichés, like “bucket list” and “best self” and “soundtrack of our lives”, and it can be infuriating. But the last of those really can’t be better applied than the opening bars of Henry Wood’s Barwick Green – more familiarly known as The Archers theme. It is…

THE attention of new generations of music lovers has been drawn to Woody Guthrie with the success of the Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, and it is fortuitous timing for Somerset-based singer and songwriter Reg Meuross, whose brilliant new song cycle, Fire and Dust, was ready at much the same time. The release of the…

MANY intellectuals pick over and dissect JM Barrie’s fantasy fable Peter Pan, just as they continue to do with Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland – and find dark hidden meanings within the text. The American writer, composer and lyricist Jim Steinman, sometimes described as the Wagner of rock music, certainly found some very dark, violent…

THERE was a world premiere at Strode Theatre in Street on Saturday, but one that arrived without fanfare and played out to a sadly small, but wildly enthusiastic audience. Baroque opera lends itself to fun interpretation, and for 40 years, ever since Nick Hytner’s indelible Xerxes at ENO, directors have included quirky elements to inventive…

  BLACK Hound Productions was formed in 2016 at Frome, by a group of young friends who had met in various productions at the Merlin Theatre. Now the company comes back to its home theatre with three performances of at the Edge, a new play co-written by BHP artistic director Patrick Withey and writer Melissa…

“A FIDDLER on the roof, sounds crazy no?” are the opening words of Joseph Stein’s adaptation of three stories from Tevye and his daughters, short stories set at the turn of 20th century Tsarist Ukraine by the Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem. The story, that follows the life of poor milkman Tevye (Matthew Woodyatt) as he…

SHAKESPEARE’S blueprint doom-scroller, a character who has won the name of “melancholy” Jacques over the centuries, is getting a new look and a blindingly incisive interpretation at Bath Theatre Royal this summer. Harriet Walter, no stranger to gender-blind casting, proves again how potent it can be with her interpretation of the Seven Ages of Man…

HAVING made her West End debut playing Jenny in this play, Lily Allen, at present drawing capacity houses to Bath’s Ustinov Studio playing the neurotic, emotionally strangled Hedda in a reworking of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, must be tempted to slip across to the Bristol Hippodrome to see Stacey Dooley, who also made her West End…

THERE is something special about the sound of a period musical ensemble in an old church – the voices and the instruments seem to take on a special feel, and even if the acoustic is not perfect, the effect is always emotional and compelling. And so it was at the beautiful little St Mary’s Church…