PATRICIA Highsmith, the American writer who died in Switzerland in 1995, is best known for her Ripliad, five books in which the central character is the amoral and conscienceless Tom Ripley. A hiatus in her writing following the fourth book in 1980 predictably caused some consternation at her New York publishing house. From there, Australian…

DRAMATIC Productions are back at the Tivoli this Summer, with two plays, the Mike Leigh classic Abigail’s Party, and another play by the ever-prolific Alan Ayckbourn. Things We Do For Love is described by director Tracy Murray  as “not done very often as the set is very complicated”, and when I looked it up online…

IT’S a confusing time to be a girl today. We are celebrating 100 years since the first women in the UK could vote, but our strong and powerful role models seem to be behaving in less than strong and powerful ways. We are taught we can do anything, dress how we like, but then we are…

FOUR recitals and a masterclass in a short three-day period with travel to disparate venues is a challenging schedule for any soloist. To focus and maintain an audience’s interest in Schubert’s 40-minute and largely introspective G major piano sonata D.894 (Fantasie) requires a performer with special attributes. Together with Schumann’s Arabeske in C major and…

THE 1982 film ‘An Officer and a Gentleman’ showed a handsome profit for its producers, costing a mere six million dollars to make and taking $130 million at the box office. Those who mounted this revised musical version of the story earlier this year at the Curve Theatre Leicester,  in a different format it previously…

THOSE of us of a certain age will picture Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren when we hear of El Cid, but Massenet’s opera, given its UK stage premiere at Dorset Opera, is a very different story. This one is based on the five act Corneille play first seen in 1636, used as the basis for…

AMERICAN imperialism and child sex trafficking are never out of the news these days, but when Giacomo Puccini composed Madame Butterfly the adverse audience reaction was to the music rather than the subject matter. For the final opera of the 2018 Iford Festival, director Bruno Ravella has tried to merge both the political reality of…

IF there is a more perfect setting than the 17th century Dutch walled garden of Hatch House near Tisbury, for an evening of spectacular classical and contemporary dance and delicious food, it is difficult to imagine. Each year, Matt Brady’s Covent Garden Dance Company seems to bring more exciting dancers, each year the commissions, from…

VERONICA Stewart was a force to be reckoned with in the arts community in and around Salisbury, passionately interested in music, sculpture, theatre, literature and painting. So it is fitting that her early death in 2011 should have inspired her family and friends to celebrate her life by creating a short term trust to support…

“A LITTLE of both, guv’ner, a little of both,” was Alfred P Doolittle’s reply in Pygmalion when asked if he was an honest man or a rogue. Take that idea on a little and the reply to what this play is trying to illustrate would give you not two but several answers.  Tenuously they are…