CHRIS Bush’s new gender-swapping take on Marlowe’s Faustus, on at Bristol Old Vic until 21st March, is a play for anyone who has inexplicably real, vivid and terrifying dreams, is worried about a global pandemic or has seen their computer freeze, and in its icy state eat up all their work and throw it who…
PINK is the colour that dominates this show, and “In the Pink” are the words that describe Steve Blackmore’s silky smooth production for Bath Operatic and Dramatic Society. Not only do costume coordinators John Cousins and Anna Fraenkel pick up the colour in the costumes, the sets and accessories on view are equally colour coordinated…
MANY words of praise – fantastic, great and legendary amongst them – have become devalued because they are now too often applied to people and events that do not deserve such a description. It was only after much thought that I decided to declare that director/choreographer Matthew Bourne’s production of The Red Shoes left me…
ONCE upon a time (in 2007, actually) there was a low budget Irish film that charted the unusual relationship of two musicians, one Irish and one Czech. It became an international hit, with its charm, its music mixing Irish standards, new songs and Eastern European Klezmer and its unpredictable story line. Four years later it…
EDWARD Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf crashed onto the theatre scene almost 60 years ago, dividing critics and audiences. Since then it has become a classic of American theatre, perhaps best known as the five-Oscar 1966 film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, as well as a regular academic text. It is set in…
WILLY Russell’s 1986 play Shirley Valentine, written as a solo performance for one remarkable actress, was fleshed out when it was filmed with Pauline Collins, Tom Conti and Alison Steadman, and it’s the cinema version that is best known. Now, in a new production by Ian Talbot of Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre fame, is…
Montero: A Piece for Ruth Rachmaninov: Piano Sonata No.2 Op. 36 Shostakovich: Piano Quintet in G minor, Op. 57 Montero: Improvisations Gabriela Montero, piano with Mark Derudder and Carol Paige, violins, Tom Beer, viola and Jesper Svedberg cello “THERE are not many artists about whom it can be said that their talent borders on…
ONE of the most frequent criticisms levelled at musical biographies in the golden years of Hollywood was that the scripts rarely did anything more than scraped the surface of the true story of those whose lives were being depicted, and this show reminds me of one of those glossy presentations. Like those films, it does…
IF you look down a list of plays written in the 1920s, you will find quite a few successfully produced which border on the style of Grand Guignol, melodrama and horror. Most of them – with titles like The Monster, A Man with Red Hair and the Edgar Wallace pair The Flying Squad and The…
WHY do women fall for Norman? In the original stage and television productions, Alan Ayckbourn’s bumbling Casanova was played, first, by Tom Courtenay, and on screen by Tom Conti, two actors possessed of such charisma that we would probably go weak at the knees if they read a paint chart aloud. There is a huge…