I HAVE seen Dramatic Productions in an enchanting children’s story, a polished and entertaining Ayckbourn, an unforgettable Of Mice and Men and now a new show that I hope to forget as soon as possible. It is Bournemouth University tutor John Foster’s retelling of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, on at Poole Lighthouse…
DIVORCED, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived, is a well known mnemonic to remember the fate of the Six Wives of Henry the Eighth, all brought to life on screen by Keith Michell et al on the BBC in the 1970s, more recently by Jonathan Rhys Meyers and cast in The Tudors , and for those…
MEREDITH Oakes’ intense and poetic translation of Lope de Vega’s El Castigo Sin Venganza takes its place in the trio of plays that makes up the Spanish Golden Age season at Bath’s Ustinov Studio until 21st December, adding the dark shadows to the comedy of Tirso de Molina’s romp. You might guess from the title…
TIRSO de Molina’s hilarious 1615 play Don Gil de las Calzaz Verdes is one of three plays from the Spanish Golden Age on stage in repertory at Bath’s Ustinov Theatre until 21st December. The writer’s real name was Gabriel Tellez, and he was a monk, one of those sent to the New World to Santo…
BETH Stewart’s production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, on stage at Shaftesbury Arts Centre until 19th October, is full of invention and stylish interpretation. From the opening moment, as the returning army strikes a tableau on stage to sing the traditional English song Rose Red, it’s obvious that the setting is the 1940s and…
IT is hard to believe it is over 30 years since I first saw Cats in 1982 in its New London Theatre home, where War Horse now resides, and today it was time to see just how this piece of theatre history is standing up to the test of time. The last London cast I saw, in 2000, was…
HENRIK Ibsen’s play Ghosts was greeted with fury and disgust when it was first published in 1881, and it was many years before it found favour with the theatre-going public, although it is now regarded as a classic of European theatre. In this new translation by Steven Unwin, who also directs the English Touring Theatre…
WITH a sunny, watery poster recalling David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash and a cast including Maureen Lipman, audiences at Bath this week could be forgiven for thinking they had booked for a comedy set in Florida. But by the time Oliver Cotton’s remarkable and thought-provoking play Daytona reached its enigmatic conclusion, they realised there were…
Conductor Kirill Karabits, Olga Myktenko (soprano), Alexander Vassilev (bass) Mozart: Serenade No. 10 for 13 Winds, K.361; Shostakovich: Symphony No. 14 THE BSO’s second Lighthouse concert of the season, subtitled Beauty and Death, saw the eagerly-anticipated return of Kirill Karabits to the podium in a programme of striking contrasts. The 36-year-old Ukrainian is now in…
IN Act 5 Scene V of the Scottish Play, a cry is heard and Seyton tells Macbeth “The Queen, my lord, is dead” … but her suicide is offstage. What if this had been false information and the queen had lived on after the death of her husband? It’s this question that David Greig explores…