THE current production at the Nuffield Theatre in Southampton is not like anything the venue’s audience has ever seen before – probably not like anything ANY audience has seen before. Everyone is given a number with their tickets, and asked to stay in the bar area until they are called to the auditorium, which has…
SET in the unchanging living room of an old farm on Salisbury Plain, Barney Norris’s first full length play Visitors is a tender, funny, scarily prescient look at the later stages of life. Arthur’s family has lived in the farmhouse for generations, with Edie since she joined him as a young bride from the village….
DIANE Samuels’ play Kindertransport is a fictional account of the life of one Jewish girl sent from her affluent Hamburg home to England, where she was sponsored, and then adopted, by the kindly but ordinary Miller family. Told in a number of flashbacks, it runs from 1939, when Eva was nine years old, to the…
STURMINSTER Newton Amateur Dramatic Society has a new star in its 2014 pantomime – no mean feat in a show that features SNADS’ delicious regular dame, Ian Greig, as Mrs Twinkey the cook, and Giles Henschel channelling his inner villain as a dastardly Captain Hook. Holly Fripp, who plays Wendy in this new version of the…
DAWN King’s new play Ciphers, ending its tour at Salisbury, is an exploration of life in 21st century England, when surveillance and counter-intelligence are underpinned by rapidly developing technologies and espionage takes on a new importance. This production, directed by Blanche McIntyre for Out of Joint, Bush Theatre and Exeter Northcott, is performed on a…
MARY Anning should perhaps join Thomas Hardy as the first names to come to mind when Dorset is mentioned, and although her story has been better known in recent years, her extraordinary achievements are still not really synonymous with the Jurassic Coast, as it is now designated. That situation has been improved by Tracy Chevalier’s…
PATRICK Hamilton, who wrote Gaslight in 1938, went out of theatrical fashion long before his death in 1962. But many regard his works, notably Hanover Square and Rope as well as Gaslight, as superior to many of his more famous contemporaries. The thriller Gaslight, on stage at Salisbury until Saturday 1st March, has been a…
DAMON Runyan’s swirling, sleazy view of Prohibition New York, as encapsulated in his short stories Blood Pressure and The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown, inspired one of the great classics of musical theatre, Guys and Dolls. The Frank Loesser show has continued to excite directors, actors, singers, dancers and audiences since it first appeared in…
IT’S hard to imagine a more timely play than Crysse Morrison’s Fixing It, half of a double bill presented by Stepping Out Theatre at the Alma Tavern in Bristol. This deeply thought-provoking play shines a spotlight on the complex and conflicting thoughts that many “children of the sixties” must be having in the wake of…
IF your first thought on seeing the poster for Inside Llewyn Davis is “Bob Dylan, Freewheelin” then this latest from the Coen brothers is for you. Set in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, on the eve of the folk music explosion that launched the careers of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and many more, it…