THE great war poet Edward Thomas, who died 100 years ago this year, was remembered in The Life and Work of the Poet Edward Thomas, with Matthew Hollis, biographer of the poet, Stephanie Cole and James Laurenson and Martin Bax, at Rook Lane Chapel, Frome, as part of the town’s 2017 festival. In 1913 Edward…
THE Devil, as the Salvation Army founder General William Booth observed, has all the best tunes. In Gounod’s Faust, he certainly does, making the villainous Mephistopheles the undoubted star of the piece, and requiring a larger than life performance from a great singer to carry it off convincingly. Satan-Mephistopheles, summoned to earth by the suicidal…
THE Melbourne Theatre Company stage version of Hitchcock’s classic film North by Northwest, making its UK debut as part of Bath Theatre Royal’s summer season, is eye-popping fun from start to finish. The staging is a sort of combination of the award-winning stagings of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Southampton…
DORSET Opera, which started its life at Sherborne School in 1974, has never performed a Rossini opera until now, in its new home at the Coade Theatre in Bryanston, Blandford. And many will say that the current David Phipps-Davis production has been worth the wait. Le Comte Ory is a totally barmy story that just…
IT’S 50 years since the first BOAT production of Shakespeare’s sylvan romance As You Like It, which transforms a cruel court into the Forest of Arden, and dukes to duchesses in this gender-blind version directed by Brian Woolton. The island in Poole Harbour is the perfect setting for the story of love at first sight,…
HANDEL opera is perfect in scale for the intimate confines of the cloister at Iford, surely the most beautiful setting for “country house opera” in the world on a night such as Tuesday 25th July 2017. This year’s festival opera comes to an end with Timothy Nelson’s production of Jephtha, the harrowing story of the…
TIMBERLAKE Wertenbaker’s play The Love of the Nightingale is a feminist take on the ancient Greek legend of the rape of Philomela by her sister Procne’s husband Tereus, and, as we all know those Greeks knew everything there is to know about human nature and our relationships with the all-powerful gods we pray in aid…
THOSE “plays that go wrong” are now big TV as well as stage hits, but David McGillivray and Walter Zerlin Jnr have been doing it for decades with the Farndale series. The current show at the Swan in Yeovil, Murder at Checkmate Manor, is a perfect spoof on the country house murder mystery, and like…
TENNESSEE Williams’ 1947 play A Streetcar Named Desire is set in one of New Orleans’ many run-down housing districts, where Stella DuBois and her husband Stanley Kowalski rent a cramped apartment from its owner, who lives upstairs. The action starts when older sister Blanche turns up in New Orleans, travelling on the streetcar whose destination…
JEREMY Secker’s adaptation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales was written in 1978 for The Hertfordshire Players to perform at The Minack in Cornwall. Now this delightful modern version has been chosen by Taunton Thespians for the 2017 summer tour. Mr Secker’s version, which adheres to the verse format of the original, was created for performance…