CAN it really be 34 years since I saw Felicity Kendal and Roger Rees in this play? My old programme assures me that it was, at the Strand Theatre. I remember there being four characters in it, and it mainly about two couples and their relationships, including some clever trickery with a play within a…
EVERY time I return to this auditorium built into the side of a hill in Yeovil I prepare myself to be disappointed. I have enjoyed every production I have ever seen there, even of plays I do not like, so sensitive and detailed is the work by the actors, directors and crew. I will no…
Ensemble Askew Emily Askew, John Dipper, Jamie Roberts and Simon Whittaker 7-9 September 2017 The latest CD album, Alchemy, from Emily Askew and her band of early music musicians was recently reviewed in The Times as “unpredictable, impassioned and one of the albums of the year so far”. Hearing the CD programme live over their…
ALFRED Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy celebrates its 30th anniversary in 2017, and what better way to mark its timeless relevance than a new production starring one of our greatest actresses, Sian Phillips. This Bath Theatre Royal production starts on the home stage, the first of an eight venue UK tour, teaming the octogenarian Dame with Derek…
THE Autumn season at Salisbury Playhouse starts with Jo Newman’s production of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, which still has the aura of a very modern play although it was first seen in 1978. It has generated acres of words from the (predominantly male) critics and academics, and great public interest when Joan Bakewell, whose affair with…
ONE Carthy is always going to be a delight, an evening of virtuoso musicianship and erudition worn lightly, with a satisfying mix of traditional and new folk music. Two Carthys is double the delight and then some. Martin and Eliza Carthy have been sharing stages across Britain for decades, often with Martin’s wife and Eliza’s…
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…