ALAN Ayckbourn’s twin plays House and Garden are set simultaneously in the sitting room of the house and the lawns of the garden on the day a government advisor is coming to offer a top job and the village fete is scheduled. Like most of the writer’s works, these are stories of ordinary people in…
IT was a scene that you feel Thomas Hardy would richly have enjoyed – as the New Hardy Players’ 10th anniversary production of The Return of the Native reached its stormy climax, the rain, which had been playing with the audience for about half an hour, came down in sheets and the thunder rattled round….
IT’S all too easy for amateur dramatic companies in small communities to get stuck in a rut, endlessly choosing tired old farces or murder mysteries … and that’s just what David Tristram’s play Last Tango in Little Grimley is all about. The AmDramSoc’s chief tradition is to play to seven-eighth empty houses and to loose…
ALAN Ayckbourn’s Norman Conquests have been among his most popular plays since the trilogy was first performed back in 1973 with Tom Courtenay as Norman. I have loved the three plays – Living Together, Table Manners and Round and Round the Garden – ever since I heard that legendary production on the radio. Courtenay, with his…
WHAT an inspiration of Lindsay Posner’s to update Oliver Goldsmith’s 1773 comedy She Stoops to Conquer to the 1920s, and how brilliantly thought-through is the current production, opening the Bath 2015 summer season. Simon Higlett’s marvellously recognisable set brings the Hardcastle family home and the Three Pigeons pub into Coward’s Hay Fever days, with Marlow…
THE Geoffrey Chaucer Canterbury Tales-telling contest is heading for a field or a theatre near you between now and 26th July. It’s a sort of local Britain’s Got Talent, in which the participants work together to produce a version of the medieval stories that’s accessible to modern audiences, and the winner is chosen by the…
THE Greek myth of Orpheus and his trip to the Underworld has never been more fun or more irreverent than in Jeff Clarke’s version for Iford Festival. Regular audience members are accustomed to Opera della Luna’s antics, but there was general agreement on the beautiful middle Saturday that Clarke has excelled himself with this free…
SHAKESPEARE’S Twelfth Night, often seen as the “entry level” play in the canon, has been staged in countless periods, settings and costumes over the years. Now Gillingham School teachers Richie Lunn and Jane McCarthy have chosen the post-punk era, music of the Sex Pistols and the Clash, and an urban wasteland setting for the end…
THE Cheltenham Everyman production of George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession is at Salisbury Playhouse until Saturday 4th July, and is almost sold out. But judging by the opening night audience, several anticipated an evening of period laughs a la Downton Abbey, and that it certainly is not. Written in 1893 but not performed until…
JEAN McConnell’s series of “Deckchairs” playlets, with their small, all-female casts and minimal set, are a godsend for amateur societies. It is, perhaps, a slight surprise to find such safe fare on the menu at Halse, but every society needs a balanced programme and God of Carnage all the time would get a little wearing….