ONE hundred years on from the Great War, the echoes of military conflict resound across Salisbury Plain, where the Army still holds around half of the 300 square miles as training grounds. The prolific and prodigiously talented Barney Norris, a Salisbury boy who writes plays and novels, teaches and co-runs a theatre company, has turned…
ABI Morgan’s play Lovesong, given its Dorset premiere by APS at Sherborne, is a poignant and clever example of why she is one of the most in-demand writers of the 21st century. She wrote Lovesong at the same time her television series The Hour was on screen, and just before scripting The Iron Lady for…
‘I TALK to the birds,” sings the eccentric Dr Doolittle – and in truth, many of us do. We talk to the cheeky robin who sits on the wall as we dig the vegetable patch and the blackbird who watches for the worms. But Beth really talks to the bird who comes to live in…
IT is 47 years since Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice created the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, setting the story of the Passion to the sounds that were all the rage in the early 1970s. And mostly it has stood the test of time, the powerful and memorable tunes leading the way to stadium…
RUFUS Hound has no reason to try and impress anyone with his acting, having been one of those who followed in James Corden’s footsteps taking One Man, Two Guvnors on into its West End transfer and on tour around the country, proving, with sold-out shows, that the play was still great without the big name,…
ALAN Bennett’s satirical play People opened at the National Theatre in 2012 and made a short UK tour the following year, to great critical and audience acclaim. It has not been seen since. Winston Leese, founder producer of the Dorset-based Churchill Productions, tried in vain to get performing rights and undaunted, found a way to contact…
BRIAN Friel’s semi-autobiographical play Dancing at Lughnasa and first performed in 1990, is set in County Donegal in 1936 seen from a child’s eyes and from the perspective of that child, grown up, many years later. Writer Michael Evans revisits the harvest festival of Lughnasa when he was a six- year-old boy living with his…
PLAYWRIGHT Caryl Churchill is, according to Wikipedia, “known for dramatising the abuses of power, for her use of non-naturalistic techniques, and for her exploration of sexual politics and feminist themes.” She is also 78 years old. The only stage direction she gives for her latest work, Escaped Alone, is that the four women who make…
ALMOST 20 years ago, in a hot Edinburgh Assembly Rooms with no air conditioning, a very talented member of the National Youth Music Theatre impressed a small group of us as Mrs Hardcastle, in The Kissing Dance, a musical version of She Stoops to Conquer. A year later, when the same company brought Into The…
MATTHEW Bourne’s newest creation, a dance adaptation of the Powell and Pressburger film The Red Shoes, itself inspired by Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tale of the same name, is a triumph. The message of the story is that Art is the greatest force, more important than love and human relationships and, literally, to die for….