THE First World War changed almost everything for ordinary people across northern Europe and the other countries drawn into the conflict. In Britain, the changes entered every corner of the country, from the tiniest village in south west England to the furthest north of Scotland. Factories were converted from peace-time production to munitions. A generation…
ALAN Bennett’s triumphant adaptation of Kenneth Graham’s classic children’s book The Wind in the Willows provides a perfect platform for actors of all ages to show off their skills – and that’s certainly what they’re doing in Shaftesbury this summer. Barbara Arnold’s cast is full of familiar faces and (mostly) youthful newcomers, all of them…
JOHN Betjeman, who dropped the second “n” at the end of his name to avoid being ridiculed at school as a German, was probably England’s first “national treasure.” His poems, rhyming without triteness, have immortalised railway stations, village names, afternoon tea and of course Miss Joan Hunter Dunn. And, as we learn at Bath this…
THE Regina Monologues, the brilliant short play by Rebecca Russell and Jenny Wafer, was first seen in Edinburgh in 2006, and now fortunate audiences at Frome’s Silk Mill have a chance to discover it. It helps to have a passing acquaintance with the history of Henry VIII and his six wives, whose lives have been…
I HAVE never been to a community play as involving and passionately felt as is Monmouth, The West Country Rebellion, on at Lyme Regis until 16th July. Inspired by the success of 2016’s production of The Tempest of Lyme, Marine Theatre artistic director Clemmie Reynolds and writer Andrew Rattenbury teamed up again to create a play about…
IT’S hard not to be impressed by the sheer chutzpah of deciding you’re going to play Shakespeare’s greatest (and longest) role, forming a theatre company to allow you to do it, losing three stone in weight and learning the 1,422 lines that make up the Bard’s Hamlet. But that’s just what Edgar Phillips has done,…
THERE is a speech at the end of David Hare’s Racing Demon, the opening play of Jonathan Church’s first summer season at Bath’s Theatre Royal, that talks about the eradication of certainties. It was relevant when the play opened in London in 1990, but goodness it is even more relevant now! Racing Demon – named…
ROSSINI’S The Barber of Seville, the “prequel” to The Marriage of Figaro, is widely regarded as the greatest opera buffa of the genre, bringing broad comedy into the operatic repertoire. It lends itself to a variety of settings, and Charles Court Opera’s at the Iford Festival is perhaps the most ingenious to date. Here the…
NEVER before have the eight and ninth words of this particular Shakespeare comedy meant quite so much. As the band in the Elephant Jazz Club prepare us for a night of prohibition-era entertainment, we are not bothered about music being the food of love, we just want the band to “play on”. Two of the…
A SENSE of home and belonging is something we increasingly think about in the light of Brexit, the horrors of Grenfell Tower and the international dismantling of certainties. Barney Norris’s new play While We’re Here, set in present-day Havant, is all about longing for attachment and fearing that its inevitable consequence will be unhappiness. Former…