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…
ESTABLISHED in 2006, the Wincanton-based chamber choir Spectra Musica has given many concerts throughout the region, with imaginative programmes ranging from Palestrina to Porter and Bach to Bernstein. The Spring concert, under the masterly control of Musical Director Peter Leech, took place in the glorious surroundings of St. Michael’s Church, North Cadbury, with its brilliantly…
EUGENE O’Neill’s autobiographical Long Day’s Journey into Night is regarded as one of the greatest of all American plays, flaying the fabric of a family in the course of one intense day. Mary Tyrone was once a romantically pious Catholic schoolgirl with dreams of the Sisterhood until she met matinee idol James, an Irish actor…
MICHEL Tremblay’s famous 1971 play A toi, pour toujours, ta Mary-Lou, has been translated and relocated by Michael West for its UK premiere, on at the Ustinov Studio in Bath until Saturday 30th April. Four members of a family talk. Two of them are dead. This is a play deep-rooted in poverty and repressive Catholicism,…
I HAVE said before that I would travel a long way to see anything performed by BODS, having been thrilled by their Rent and Hairspray, and even impressed with The Witches of Eastwick, a somewhat weaker work. So when I heard that they were taking on one of the 20th century’s musical classics, I was…
THE centenary of the First World War has been an opportunity for many untold stories to be told, forgotten heroes to be remembered and the many roles of women to be celebrated. But few stories are more extraordinary and few women more remarkable than Dorothy Lawrence, a young journalist from Salisbury who made her way…
IBSEN’S Hedda Gabler, considered one of the greatest European plays of the 19th century, has had a radical re-working by Irish playwright Brian Friel. First seen in Dublin in 2008, it is at Salisbury Playhouse until 2nd April, only the second English production (the first was at the Old Vic starring Sheridan Smith) Friel has…
THE Street Theatre company celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2016, and the first play of the special year is The Ladykillers. Graham Linehan has adapted the classic 1955 Ealing comedy film for the stage, and the Strode Theatre based company was lucky to have the vast spaces of a Shepton showground to build the complicated…
THE latest tour by Farnham Maltings, following its back-by-popular-demand version of It’s a Wonderful Life, is The Iranian Feast, and it packed Winfrith Newburgh Hall with an audience drawn by the previous show and keen to try some food with their theatre. The touring company has perfected a style that merges documentary with entertainment, exposing…
ARTHUR Miller wrote his powerful drama The Crucible in response to the mass hysteria that accompanied the McCarthy “witch hunts” in the America of the 1950s, when propaganda was used to inflame feeling against so-called Communists running television, radio and Hollywood. Watching the play in March 2016, you have to wonder what the playwright would…