THE Ladykillers was one of the biggest hits of the Ealing film studios – a classic heist-goes-wrong comedy thriller about a gang of thieves and thugs with a fool-proof plan that has a little old lady-sized hole in the middle. The 1955 film was successfully adapted for the stage in 2011 by Graham Linehan, and…
BASED on David Croft and Jimmy Perry’s successful TV series which won a BAFTA Award for best comedy series in 1984, this stage version has all the much loved regular workers who inhabited Maplins Holiday Camp at the end of the 1950s when this play is set. Because of repeats, which can still be seen…
THE new company formed by actor Tom Burke and director Gadi Roll chose Friedrich Schiller’s monumental drama Don Carlos for its opening production, and a stark and uncompromising setting in which to frame the complex story. Loosely based on history, it focuses on the dysfunctional ruling family of Spain in a time of political and…
WITH Ade Edmondson and Nigel Planer at the helm and on the stage,what could POSSIBLY go wrong? Vulcan 7, their latest joint venture, finds them as two RADA alumni 40 years after their student days, discovering themselves reluctantly sharing a trailer on the set of episode 7 of a monster superhero movie on the slopes…
I have just returned from the Artsreach performance of Sarajevo Big Bang in Shillingstone. Here are three reviews of the show: THREE brilliant satirists are testing out the traditional politeness of a British audience with the strangely titled Sarajevo Big Bang, on a tour of village halls around the UK. The conceit is that they…
TERENCE Rattigan’s late play In Praise of Love is the story of a marriage, and like so many of the writer’s other plays, focusses on what is NOT said rather than the words in the script. Revived by Jonathan Church at the Ustinov in Bath until 3rd November, you have to ask why this magnificent…
SWEENEY Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, is a metaphor for all that is dark and lurks behind closed doors, in streets barely lit with guttering gaslights, for a time when the rich and powerful had almost infinite power over the poor and powerless, when there was no safety net … Yeovil Amateur Operatic…
HAVING spent most of the noughties in the Far East, I missed much of the razzamatazz that surrounded the original Madagascar – Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath’s computer animated film which featured the familiar voices of Ben Stiller and Sacha Baron Cohen among others. With its host of well-known musical numbers such as Stayin’ Alive,…
TWENTY years after the Oscar-winning film (it won seven, including best screenplay) and just four years after the stage adaptation ran for almost a year in London, Shakespeare in Love has been revived and is on tour around the country, starting in Bath, and co-produced by Bath Theatre Royal. Tom Stoppard’s film script, already a…
IT is only ten years since Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s play Her Naked Skin arrived on the National Theatre stage, the first play by a woman to be performed at the Olivier in its first 30 years. At the time, critics commented on how far “we” had progressed since the suffragette days, then 90 years previously. In…