WHAT kind of world do we live in where making music is an act of defiance? What kind of country is it where it requires huge courage for girls to learn to play instruments? What kind of god asks its adherents to smash exquisite traditional instruments and bans the making of music or even singing…
RONA Munro’s trilogy The James Plays opened in Edinburgh for the 2014 Festival, attracting enthusiastic reviews from both critics and audiences. This year the epic undertaking has been revived, touring Scotland and England before its ten day stint in Toronto. The plays came to the Theatre Royal in Plymouth for the late May Bank Holiday weekend,…
THERE is always something very special about site-specific productions, many of which tend to be promenade performances too. Some of the most remarkable pieces of theatre I have seen have been conceived along these lines. I can still recall an open air performance about Carl Linnaeus, and the thrill of catching a fleeting glimpse of…
PATRICK Marber’s updating of August Strindberg’s Miss Julie sets the action in 1945, on the eve of the Labour election victory. Miss Julie is the daughter of a Labour peer who is in London to celebrate the landslide. At home with the servants, the brittle and fragile girl starts playing a dangerous game. In this…
JB PRIESTLEY’S sharply comic look at the attitudes of the Victorian northern middle classes, When We Are Married, has a marvellous production at Ilminster until Saturday 28th May. Directed, in a fast-for-amateurs six week rehearsal period by Lyn Lockyer, with an eye and an ear for detail, there is not a weak link among the 14-strong…
SALAD Days, by Dorothy Reynolds and Julian Slade, was written for the Bristol Old Vic’s resident company in 1954, later transferring to London and running for what was then a record-breaking 2,283 performances. More than 60 years later its appeal can hardly be said to have diminished. It certainly remains one of my favourite musicals;…
NINETEEN seventy seven, the year of the Silver Jubilee, my first concert (The Jam at the Village Bowl, Bournemouth) and the year a 14-year- old adolescent first encountered Tom Baker’s Dr Who’s assistant Leela, dressed in little more than was necessary, giving reason alone to tune into BBC1 every Saturday evening. Skip forward 39 years…
PYGMALION is probably the most broadly appealing of all GB Shaw’s plays even if, like me, you inadvertently think of it as My Fair Lady without the songs. Indeed, the dialogue in the musical is so similar to the Shaw original that, almost literally, and more than once too, I half expected the band to…
CAMERON Mackintosh’s “austerity musical” Betty Blue Eyes – a stage reworking of the film A Private Function – looked like a sure-fire hit when it opened in London in 2011 to enthusiastic reviews … but it only lasted six months, to the disappointment and puzzlement of many. It was revived for a provincial tour in…
THE idea of a play which happens in various locations around a town or village, or even a city, is one of the oldest theatrical ideas in this country, with roots going back to Miracle and later Mystery Plays, acted out on carts by local guilds, bringing Bible stories to the masses. When community plays…