IT’S often said that there is a good reason for “rarities” from established playwrights and composers, and that is because the works are inferior. So it is with Gilbert and Sullivan’s penultimate collaboration, Utopia Ltd, which preceded the final opera, The Grand Duke, itself an immediate failure. But for Milborne Port Opera, celebrating its 24th…
RAIN opens and closes this intense two-hander, played with honesty and truth in the intimate Ustinov Studio at the Theatre Royal, Bath, and the steady rain of the title pervades the narrative, only ending once the angst and tragedy of the play has been resolved. A Steady Rain broke weekly box-office records for a non-musical…
THE great excitement about the current production of Alan Ayckbourn’s Things We Do for Love at Bath is the stage debut of Australian singer and actress Natalia Imbruglia. This 1997 play is perfunctorily dismissed on Wikipedia as the story of a woman who begins an affair with her best friend’s fiance, only for it to…
OLIVER Goldsmith’s hilarious comedy of ill manners She Stoops to Conquer is the latest production by Devon-based Creative Cow, and starts its tour at the Cygnet Theatre in Exeter. Directed with a keen eye for detail, witty designs for costume and set, and a fluent choreographic style by Amanda Knott, this is the story of…
“TELL me it’s not true”, the five words most associated with Blood Brothers, rang around the auditorium time and time again this evening, ironically, as it is all too true that Mrs Johnstone’s twin sons have also died on the same day, causing shock, upset, and a full-house standing ovation at the Hippodrome, with almost…
AMATEUR Players of Sherborne is one of 86 companies, from almost 200 applicants, to have been chosen to take part in the 2014 Royal Shakespeare Company Open Stages project – a special year also celebrating the 450th anniversary of the birth of the Bard. With professional mentors and input from young actors from local schools,…
ON the way home from Bath tonight I have been singing songs from great musicals; South Pacific, Guys and Dolls, CATS, and others, all of which were musical memories stirred by songs in The Witches of Eastwick, yet curiously none of the actual songs from tonight’s show was original or memorable enough to remain in…
JOE Orton’s play Entertaining Mr Sloane caused a sensation when it first appeared, incredibly, 50 years ago. Now the black comedy seems almost gentle, a period piece set firmly in the days of Steptoe and the Kray Brothers, and that’s just how the current London Classic Theatre touring production plays it under the director of…
ALAN Bennett’s wonderfully witty and thought-provoking double bill throwing contrasting lights on two of the ‘Cambridge Spies’, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, finds a perfectly satisfactory production with The Halse Players. In the seven years of their existence this compact group have already formed a reputation for setting themselves high standards and for being prepared…
JOHN Mortimer, drawing from his own experience, wrote his first play The Dock Brief in 1958. It’s a gentle comedy that satirises the precarious existence of those called to the Bar. Wilfred Morgenhall studied late into the night, devouring legal precedent and Latin terminology until he passed his finals and was called. But that was…