BATH audiences were delighted last night to have had the opportunity of seeing father and son James and Jack Fox in a brand new stage adaptation of Dear Lupin. The book on which it is based, Dear Lupin: Letters to a Wayward Son, was written by father and son Roger and Charlie Mortimer in 2012…

THE second offering in this year’s Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory season is Sheridan’s classic comedy The School for Scandal. Dominic Power has not only adapted the text but added a prologue and epilogue that underline the play’s contemporary relevance. It opens in a salon of gossip, so how much more appropriate could it be…

ARTHUR Miller’s play Death of a Salesman is regarded by many as the finest American play of the 20th century, and its central character  Willy Loman as the greatest character in American theatre. Gregory Doran’s new production, on the main stage at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon (and transferring to the West End), underlines…

BASED on one of Agatha Christie’s most famous and enduring novels, published in 1939, this play was originally called Ten Little Niggers. By the time novel and play reached America the title had become Ten Little Indians, and at some point even this proved offensive to some, so the title was changed to the last…

ARTHUR Miller’s play The Crucible, written 62 years ago as a response to the  anti-Communist McCarthy Witch Hunts, is as relevant and powerful today as it was then. When director Peter Kelly chose it for the Studio Theatre’s April play, and rehearsals began, he saw a news clip of terrorists demanding that hostages recite sacred…

WHAT a wealth of talent there is in Warminster, and how hard they work. It is less than a month since the Athenaeum Limelight Players staged a powerful, contemporary version of Macbeth, and this week that production’s Lady M, Tanya Stockting, is back at the theatre as musical director and pianist for the youth group,…

THERE can’t be many amateur operatic companies who can call upon one of their number to create new shows when they have exhausted the usual repertoire, but Milborne Port Opera has the ingenious Neil Edwards. This year’s production, Spring Fate,  on stage at the village hall until Saturday 11th April, is the third show that…

DIRECTOR and adaptor Sean Foley describes Thomnas Middleton’s raunchy Jacobean comedy A Mad World My Masters as “beyond doubt, the filthiest play I’ve ever read.” He’s not joking – it is truly, amazingly and hilariously filthy. Perhaps almost too filthy for the first-night audience of the Royal Shakespeare Company/English Touring Theatre production at Bath Theatre…

PLAYWRIGHT Reginald Rose drew the inspiration for his famous film-script from his own experience as a juror in a manslaughter case in Manhattan. “We got into this terrific, furious, eight-hour argument in the jury room,” he recalled many years later. At the time he was a script-writer on a television drama series and he realised…

RELIGION is a real problem in the United Kingdom of the 21st Century  and for those who, brought up as strict believers, have found their faith lapsing, it raises even more difficulties. Addressing the issue was something that writer and performer Amy Mason, a native of Poole in Dorset,  was forced into by an accident…