IMPACT’S spring tour 2015, of Amanda Whittington’s play about Ruth Ellis, The Thrill of Love, opened at The Hub in Verwood on Saturday. Whittington is the most frequently performed female playwright in the country, but her works don’t make national headlines. Based in Nottingham, where she trained as a journalist, her plays are full of…
THE short absurdist comedy The Harvest, by Belorussian playwright Pavel Pryazhko, is set on a stage covered with grass and full of apples hanging enticingly ready to be picked, in the UK premiere production directed by Michael Boyd at Bath’s Ustinov Studio until Saturday 11th April. Four young people, two boys and two girls, are…
IT is 64 years ago that Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical version of Anna and the King of Siam, The King and I, opened on Broadway – but this touching show, based on the real story of English widow Anna Leonowens and her engagement by the King of Siam to teach his children and his wives…
NASHVILLE based and New York born singer-songwriter Gretchen Peters has a special affection for her British fans, and with her latest album Blackbirds, they have taken her to their hearts as never before. The CD, whose song subjects range from a Southern murder and incest ballad through a heartfelt story of death on a cancer…
LOSING someone you love is always painful. Losing the love of your life, your soulmate, is immeasurably, infinitely painful – the subject of paintings, poetry, novels and plays over the centuries. But cinema generally struggles with the bleakness – not because the medium cannot convey loss, but because it is a hard sell. The perception for…
YAZMINA Reza has written seven plays, and I am a huge, huge fan of her third, Art, having seen 20 of the 26 casts when it played to packed houses at Wyndhams and the Whitehall Theatres in London’s West End for the last few years of the 1900s. She has a real talent for documenting…
SHERBORNE Chamber Choir joined forces with the Sherborne Young Singers, the Sherborne Baroque Players and six fine soloists to perform what is undoubtedly one of J.S. Bach’s greatest works, the St. Matthew Passion. First performed in the Thomaskirche in Leipzig almost three hundred years ago, its portrayal of Christ’s betrayal, trial and crucifixion contains some…
OSCAR Wilde’s satire Lady Windermere’s Fan had a sumptuous staging at Strode Theatre in Street, by courtesy of Street Theatre. Set firmly in the Victorian moral climate, the play not only contains some of the most biting of the writer’s bon mots, but underlines the lasting imbalance of the way society views the behaviour of…
IT was a bad week to be a toff in the theatre with Oh What A Lovely War satirising the Col Blimps and high society buffoons at Bath Theatre Royal and Laura Wade’s coruscating black comedy about an exclusive all-male Oxbridge dining club in Posh at Salisbury Playhouse. Of course, both plays draw their characters…
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, leader Amyn Merchant Nicholas McGegan: Conductor Veronika Eberle: Violin Antoine Tamestit: Viola BRAHMS: Liebeslieder Walzer MOZART: Sinfonia Concertante, K364 BEETHOVEN: Symphony No. 7 in A major English-born conductor Nicholas McGegan was awarded an OBE in 2010 for “services to music overseas”, and a glance at his biography shows what a globe-trotting career…