ANTON Chekhov always described his play The Cherry Orchard as a comedy. I have seen many productions over the years, and always thought it would take a miracle to make it substantially funny. Sadly, it was a sleight of hand beyond the powers of the Cornish-based Miracle Theatre, currently performing Bill Scott’s adaptation of the…
WHEN you think of Twelfth Night as a comedy, you probably picture the impish Maria making a fool of the self-serving Puritan steward Malvolio, of cowardly Sir Andrew trying (not) to fight a duel with Cesario/Viola. Olivia is the black figure of mourning in the back of the action – the wealthy young woman, still…
FOR their 250 production, Bristol-based Kelvin Players, who have been entertaining local audiences since 1929, decide to leave the security of their own well-equipped studio theatre in Gloucester Road and take over the Tobacco Factory Theatre for the week. Already used to presenting plays “in the round” at their home base, the company had no…
JERRY Herman’s 1974 musical Mack and Mabel is the story of Mack Sennett, creator of the slapstick Keystone Cops, who kept international audiences entertained in the fading days of the silent screen, and of his lasting love for his star, Mabel Normand. Since its opening on Broadway the show has had a checquered career, finding…
YASMINA Reza has an almost uncanny ability to slice through the veneer of liberal, intellectual charm of the middle classes, and reveal the primitive barbarian beneath. It makes some people uncomfortable. It makes others laugh – it’s a slightly edgy sort of laughter, because we know we are laughing at ourselves, and we don’t much…
IN this year when the centenary of the end of the Great War is marked all over Europe and beyond, Frome Drama Club entered the list of concerts, art installations, talks, films, plays and more to mourn the lives of the millions who died and to celebrate their sacrifice with Stephen MacDonald’s 1982 Edinburgh Fringe…
A COUPLE of “interfering missionaries,” one armed with an “incorruptible Kodak,” revealed one of the worst stories of colonial barbarity – the slavery, torture, massacres and shocking corruption of the Belgian rule over the Congo. Alice Seeley Harris, the “meddlesome missionary” whose shocking photographs revealed the extent of the cruelty and horrors of the Belgian occupation,…
BETHANY Heath is now a veteran of the Frome Festival, after a Peter Shaffer for Frome Drama and a stint as a wife of Henry VIII last year. For the 2018 event she took the brave step of an (almost) solo show, performed at in the intimate Three Swans, packed to the gunwales on a…
SOME ballets send you out of the theatre almost breathless and tingling with excitement, the combination of music and dancing making you want to join in and share the stage with those involved with the production. That however was never the intention of Frederick Ashton when he, against some opposition, decided to choreograph an entirely…
AN opera evening at Herrison Hall, Charlton Down, put on by the Artsreach rural arts touring charity, went with a pop and a fizz as the audience enjoyed a double bill of Mozart one-act operas and a chance to taste Dorset’s newest sparkling wine. This was the second venture into opera for Artsreach, following the…