SHAKESPEARE’s The Winter’s Tale was presented by students following the International Acting Course at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. It was directed by Kim Durham, the course head. Often described as one of Shakespeare’s problem plays, the production itself was not without its problems, not all of which were solved in a totally satisfactory…
BRISTOL Old Vic Theatre School’s production of London Road is quite extraordinary. The story, both shocking and true, deals with the murder of five prostitutes in Ipswich in 2006, or, to be more precise, the effect these murders had on the residents of the street where they took place; it focuses very much on the…
IFORD Opera’s production of Puccini’s La Rondine marked my first ever visit to Iford. I hope I can be forgiven for thinking I had arrived in paradise; a picnic, a perfect English summer’s evening and the exquisite gardens of Iford Manor. All this and Puccini too – absolute bliss! La Rondine is one of Puccini’s…
NATIONAL Theatre Production: three words which for me ensure quality, high production values, top-class casting, attention to detail at every level, and a great programme, with plenty of quality background material. One Man, Two Guvnors lived up to these standards in every way possible. Most of what I had heard about the play was James…
THEY’RE back, they’re performing very nearby, and they’re just as good as they were last time, possibly even better! Living Spit theatre company have been given a tiny budget by Theatre Orchard and Artsreach to take free live theatre to villages in Somerset and Dorset, and following their hugely successful Six Wives of Henry VIII…
THE new album by American folk singer and songwriter Mary Gauthier, Trouble and Love, is released on 9th June, ahead of her two UK visits this year. Mary’s own back story – from abandoned child in New Orleans through teenage runaway years, university drop out, petty crime, successful cook and restaurant owner through sleuth to…
JOHN Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, written in the 1620s and set in Italy, has incest as its central theme, and has been one of the most controversial plays ever performed. Not seen in England until 1923, the tragedy surrounds the bookish young Giovanni, returning from university and realising that he is in love…
SORTING through family homes after bereavement has been a rich mine for dramatists over the years, and the award-winning play by American writer Lynn Nottage at Bath’s Ustinov Studio is a powerful addition to the list. From her grandmother’s Brooklyn Brownstone, she recovered a shoebox of unidentified photographs, from which she wove this imagined story of her…
BARB Jungr has a new album of songs by Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen…. A NEW album from Barb Jungr is always a thrill. You anticipate interpretations that will delight, inspire, perhaps puzzle, but are guaranteed to stay with you., When you have listened to a new collection of Barb’s songs, you know you…
PLAYS have been notoriously “going wrong” since they began, probably long before Shakespeare included the Mechanicals as Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and through the later part of the 20th century we have been treated to Michael Green’s various Coarse Acting versions of plays, the Farndale Avenue Housing Estate Townswomen’s Guild’s badly produced…