SHAKESPEARE’S late play The Winter’s Tale is one of his least known, and calls for major suspension of disbelief in this magic-realist plot that combines the conventions of Renaissance and Classical cultures in almost equal measure. There are two royal courts, a rural idyll, barren seashores and even a bear. And there’s an argument that…
WASHINGTON Irving’s classic ghost story, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, is a perfect vehicle for a youth theatre project, and so Miriam Battye’s new adaptation, celebrating 30 years of Bath youth drama, was an appetising prospect. Directed by John East, for the second year in the intimate confines of the egg (the youth theatre space…
LES Miserables is truly a phenomenon – no other musical has run for as long in London, since 1985, or been revived so soon (twice) on Broadway, and with a school edition available since 2001 and the film version hitting screens a few years ago even more people have seen this show. This week it…
THERE is more to Alan Bennett’s Miss Shepherd than the Dowager Countess of Grantham losing her money and her marbles, and marvellously funny though Maggie Smith’s film performance was, the enduring appeal of The Lady in the Van depends on a multi-faceted understanding of the Lady and her reluctant host, the playwright himself. Bennett’s 1999…
GARETH Armstrong’s Fondly Remembered premiered just two years ago in London and only became available for amateur performance a few months ago, so Halse have been (not uncharacteristically) quick off the mark in obtaining the rights. Four former colleagues, all theatricals (extremely so in some cases) meet to arrange the memorial service of a recently deceased,…
THERE have been a few compilation shows featuring the music of Stephen Sondheim over the years, including Putting It Together, featuring Carol Burnett, and Sondheim at the Sheraton, at Edinburgh in 1995, but the most famous of these shows is surely Side by Side by Sondheim, originally conceived as a fund-raiser for Cleo Laine and…
RELATIVELY Speaking is the seventh play that Alan Ayckbourn wrote, some 52 years ago, and although it was his second West End transfer, this was the one that made him an overnight success as soon as the reviews were published. The play is very cleverly constructed, with economy of language to help introduce confusion, but it has a simple structure,…
ALAN Franks’s viscerally intimate Looking at Lucian, in which the small auditorium at Bath Theatre Royal is transformed into the Kensington studio of portrait painter Lucian Freud, could be described as fly-on-the-wall. But as the painter and his unidentified sitter work together over ten months, each moment of Freud’s reminiscenatory conversation is as precise as…
FOLLOWING the huge success of the 1992 film and the 1993 sequel, Sister Act was prime material to be adapted for the stage, with the Motown classics of the film replaced with new songs by Glenn Slater and Alan Menken, a book by Cheers writers Cheri and Bill Steinkellner, and with the plot ensuring that the action…
FLANN O’Brien’s posthumously published novel The Third Policeman takes its readers into a parallel universe of non-sequiturs, obsession and very peculiar people (reminiscent of the current encumbrance of the White House.) It’s a story that might seem impossible to adapt for the stage, but that’s without the skills of Miracle Theatre’s Bill Scott and his…