WHEN you have a global reputation for music like Glastonbury has, a world-renowned shoe manufacturers like Street, and your long-established joint musical comedy society boasts an internationally in demand award-winning choreographer among its alumni, perhaps it’s no surprise that the current show at Strode Theatre in Street is a spectacular, triumphant hit. The G&SMCS is…
TOM Stoppard’s 1993 play Arcadia is a constant delight and revelation, no matter how many times you see it. It’s probably the playwright’s cleverest play, set at Sidley Park, home of the Coverlys, in 1809 and the present day, and interweaving not just characters over two centuries but brilliantly constructed ideas and explanations from a…
DORCHESTER’s sixth community play, Drummer Hodge, is a triumph! Moving, dramatic, funny, full of rousing music and great performances, it will make you laugh and cry. Dorchester at the end of the 19th century. The world is changing, there is war on the horizon in distant South Africa and the pace of life in Dorset…
WEDDINGS, like all the “big events” of human life, provide a fertile source of material for comedies, dramas and television series. Now West Dorset resident Chris Chibnall, best known recently for writing Broadchurch (and now its sequel), has turned his attention to the family trials and tribulations of organising such an event, specially for Salisbury…
NINE members of the youth theatre group at the Swan Theatre in Yeovil last week tackled a play written by one of the country’s brightest young stars, Anya Reiss, for the National Theatre’s annual Connections festival in 2013. The playwright was 22 when she turned in this real-time tour de force, so it is (almost)…
PROKOFIEV: Symphony No 2 KORNGOLD: Violin Concerto TCHAIKOVSKY: Fantasy Overture: Romeo and Juliet AT first glance, the programme for this concert looked as if it would attract only die-hard regulars: the least-played and least-popular symphony of Prokofiev, a concerto by a marginal and obscure twentieth-century composer and a possibly rather hackneyed and overplayed piece by…
THE latest show from Dorset-based Dramatic Productions is a new version of the Scottish play by John Foster. He has set the murder drama in 2070, when Earth is a distant memory and those who escaped the conflagration have decamped to Mars and taken over, ousting the native Chuckleheads (?). The story opens as Captain…
SATIRIST, musician and performer Frank Wedekind offended his audience with his first play, the semi-autobiographical Spring Awakening, written in 1891 and not staged for 15 years – and that was just how he wanted it to be. Written partly as a response to the oppressive German education system of the time, which resulted not only…
MARC Camoletti’s farce, written in French in 1960, translated into English the following year, and revived to great acclaim in 2007, is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the most performed French play in the world. For two nights in Yeovil this week, audiences were transported back to the early 1960s in…
DEATH and the Ploughman was written in 1401 in Bohemia by Johannes von Saaz, who penned the text, so the story goes, the day after his wife died in childbirth. Refusing simply to accept this turn of fate, von Saaz (as the Ploughman) and Death lock horns in an epic journey. Saturday’s performance was given…