IT is a long way from the blood-stained villages of Bosnia to the peaceful chalk downlands of Salisbury Plain … or is it? Former soldier Zac finds unexpected and uncomfortable memories in Boiling Kettle Theatre Company’s Defender of the Dead, which began an autumn tour at South Petherton’s David Hall. Zac seems to be your…
THE interior of Southampton’s Nuffield Theatre has been redesigned to accommodate the stunning production of Nick Dear’s new play Dedication, an exploration into the relationship between Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton. Reams of paper have been used in discussions of the relationship between the writer and actor from Stratford and the pretty lordling whose…
REVIEWING The Shakespeare Revue sounds a bit tautologous – but that’s a pompous word and pricking pomposity is just one of the witty aims of this sparkling show, at Bath Theatre Royal until Saturday 24th September. The Bard is over-intellectualised, subjected to merciless egotistical exercises in angst and paranoia by pretentious directors, mangled by amateurs, pickled…
WE live in difficult times, when it often seems as though common sense and human decency are concepts of the past. Dawn King’s award winning play Foxfinder, set in a not-too-distant future, is a frightening glimpse at where we might be headed in this time of faux-scientific governmental advice and “reality” star world leaders. In…
SHERIDAN’S immortal comedy The Rivals, set “down the road” in Bath in the 1770s, is the perfect play for Bristol’s Old Vic, which opened just a few years before the play’s premiere. Chosen as part of the Bristol theatre’s 250th anniversary season, it has been revived in a co-production with the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow…
WHAT better way to spend a late summer Sunday afternoon than trundling round the Somerset lanes on a horse-drawn charabanc, singing The Seeds of Love – the very song that inspired Cecil Sharp to begin his famous collection of English folk song. It was the last of four site-specific performances by the enterprising Wassail Theatre,…
NIGHT Must Fall, by Emlyn Williams, is one of the classic British thrillers, a real chiller that builds and builds until the tension is almost palpable. It is the story of an unpleasant old woman, Mrs Bramson, who lives at Forest Corner, a house in the woods, with her frustrated and poor niece Olivia as…
STEPHEN Jeffreys’ play The Libertine, the scurrilous story of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, has its first major revival in a production by Terry Johnson, now on stage in Bath before a season at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket from 22nd September to 3rd December. Set in the court of Charles II, it’s the story of…
IT wasn’t the hills that were alive in Bristol last night as much as the Hippodrome, as song after song in The Sound of Music had people making almost as much noise off stage as on. In most musicals there are a few hits, a few standards that have made their way into the Great…
IBSEN’S epic play Peer Gynt, based on a Norwegian folk tale, has been described as “the story of a life based on procrastination and avoidance” and certainly introduces its audience to an anti-hero. At Salisbury, the Youth Theatre director Dave Orme saw it as a chance to create a modern play for a large cast…