IN this anniversary year of Shakespearean productions, many pushing the boundaries of accepted interpretation, Dave Hollis was determined that Shaftesbury Arts Centre shouldn’t miss out. His production of The Comedy of Errors, on stage in Bell Street until 16th April, sets the early play in a circus ring, beautifully but incongruously opening with a Japanese song…
JOHN Foster’s gripping play Shot at Dawn tells the story of two soldiers from the Dorchester Regiment, one an officer, the other a private, on trial for cowardice during the First World War. Although the characters themselves are the products of the playwright’s imagination, what they had to say was real enough, the actual text,…
WHEN Woody Guthrie wrote what would become one of his best-known songs, “This Land Is Your Land,”, he was protesting against the jingoistic patriotism of the song “God Blessed America” and supporting the rights of ordinary people to have access to the beauties and riches of the country. Sian Owen’s new play literally digs deeper…
A BIG wedding was arranged in Milborne Port this week, with the contractual exchanges performed outside the Guildhall and the reception in the grounds of Ven House. But when the aristocratic guards officer of a groom decided to unleash his socialist ideas of equality on the love lives of the villagers, by means of a…
STEVE Gooch’s play Female Transport had its first performances in 1974, predating Timberlake Wertenbaker’s (far superior and better known) play Our Country’s Good by 14 years. It is the Gooch play that Tim Greathead has chosen for the April production at Studio Theatre’s Ashley Road base. Set on board the former warship HMS Juliana in…
RICHARD Bean’s One Man Two Guvnors, a hilarious musical updating of Goldoni’s farce A Servant to Two Masters, is one of the great comedy hits of the 21st century. And Merriman Productions, the first amateur company to acquire the performance rights in Somerset, are doing it proud at Somervale School in Midsomer Norton. Like all…
Bach: Suite No. 3 in D major Britten: Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings Mozart: Symphony no 39 in E flat Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, leader Amin Merchant Kirill Karabits: Conductor Robert Murray: Tenor Nicholas Fleury: Horn THE players of the BSO certainly deserved a good sit down after this inspiring and energising concert. What had…
GILES Havergal’s brilliant adaptation of Graham Greene’s Travels with my Aunt is once again filling Salisbury Playhouse, this time in a witty and fast-paced new production by Amanda Knott for her Creative Cow company. It was with this show that Rupert Goold burst onto the scene at Salisbury (where he then became associate director with…
THE second play in the 2016 Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory season, at the Bedminster headquarters until 30th April and then touring, is the difficult “comedy” All’s Well that Ends Well. The beautiful, kind and intelligent Helena, foster daughter to the Countess of Rossillion, is in love with her foster brother Bertram, one of the…
ALAN Bennett would have been giggling all the way home from Bath Theatre Royal had he overheard the conversation I did at the end of the performance of A Question of Attribution. The woman behind me declared “I thought the first one [An Englishman Abroad, the first of the Single Spies pairing] – Bennett’s one…