GRADUATING students from Bristol Old Vic Theatre School have moved into the Tobacco Factory, transforming its open space to provide an authentically intimate look into London theatre in the 1660s, when women were first legally permitted to perform on stage. April de Angelis’ funny, haunting and moving play chronicles the lives of the early “playhouse…
CHIMPANZEES, trees and a flying trapeze are surely three of the silliest, yet best-known rhymes in recent musical theatre. They have even led to an amusing game with one of my friends, as we create new variants, each ending with “Tell me on a Sunday, please”. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Don Black’s one act, one…
IFORD Festival, in the beautiful Harold Peto designed grounds of Iford Manor near Bradford-on-Avon, has been offering picnics to its patrons for several years, and we enjoyed our first at the opening night of Macbeth this year. Ever since I first visited the festival I have been enthusing about its setting and unique atmosphere, and…
IN an effort to scupper the reputation of opera as an elitist artform, recent productions have moved towards The Big Idea, in which directors impose their often peculiar interpretations on classic works. This is supposed to attract new and younger audiences. Here in the south west, audiences are lucky enough to have the most beautiful and…
MOST of us would recognizes a Chagall painting, with its vibrant and unexpected coleurs and its flying people, but the story of the passionate Russian artist is less familiar. The perfect subject for a Kneehigh work, thought Exeter playwright Daniel Jamieson. And so The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk was born, to provide the finale for…
MICHAEL Frayn’s classic fly-on-the-wall farce Noises Off is the story of a third rate theatre company performing a fourth rate farce, Nothing On, on a regional UK tour. For anyone who remembers such tours, the humour is heightened, but this is a play for all audiences, a riot of dumb show and luvviedom, pratfalls and…
PRINCESS Ida was the eighth comic opera of the fourteen that Gilbert and Sullivan wrote together and of which I have seen about half. This was a new one to me, and I was intrigued to hear from an aficionado at Milborne Port Opera that it is written in blank verse, in three acts, about…
THE annual BOVTS tour is always eagerly anticipated, bringing the newest students from the world famous theatre school to their audience in a production designed to be played in a variety of venues around the region. This year’s, of course, has to be Shakespeare, and director Christopher Scott has chosen A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He…
HAVING thoroughly enjoyed Sasha Regan’s all-male version of The Pirates of Penzance last year, I was pretty certain that her treatment of HMS Pinafore was going to be just as much fun. How right I was; with MD Richard Bates’ sparkling piano playing and some astonishing and athletic choreography from Lizzi Gee, this high energy…
TWO drag queens and a transsexual travel across the desert to perform their unique style of cabaret. That seems such a mundane description of the 1994 film this show was based on, but that’s all you get on iMDB or on-screen television listings, not even a mention of the fact that the desert is in…