CHARLOTTE Keatley’s play My Mother Said I Never Should is on stage at Yeovil’s Swan Theatre until Saturday 21st September, directed by Ian White. It’s an oddly unbalanced piece, with moments of poignant lyrical writing interspersed with clunky efforts at progressing the story. It starts with four young girls playing on a waste ground, discussing…

KANDER and Ebb’s musical version of Cabaret opened on Broadway in 1966, was made into an eight Oscar-winning film, and has been produced on stages around the world ever since. You won’t see a better production than the current tour, directed by Rufus Norris, starring Will Young and at Bristol Hippodrome until Saturday 21st September….

THAT most varied of playwrights Peter Shaffer wrote the double bill The Private Ear and The Public Eye back in 1962, the fledgling days of the Swinging Sixties, and it provided a vehicle for the actress who was to become the Dowager Countess of Grantham to exhibit her comic versatility. Now on its first major…

HAVING  already taken us back to the reality of the seventies in Apollo 13 and Frost/Nixon, director Ron Howard returns to the decade again to bring us the “true story” of the feud between Formula One drivers James Hunt and Niki Lauda. Formula One fans will remember the 1976 season, covered by the BBC in short highlights programmes, usually…

ERNEST Thompson’s play On Golden Pond is best known this side of the Atlantic as an award-winning film that starred father and daughter Henry and Jane Fonda, and provided a catalyst for their exploration of their own difficult relationship. Now the original play opens Salisbury Playhouse’s autumn season, played on an atmospheric set designed by…

JULIAN Mitchell’s play Another Country, on at Bath Theatre Royal this week in an atmospheric production directed by Jeremy Herrin, is set in an English public school in the 1930s. This was a time when inter-pupil fiddling was commonplace and accepted as a rite of the normal passage towards heterosexuality. But if the love that…

THOMAS Hardy’s story The Woodlanders is a classic of doomed and unrequited love, social climbing and sacrifice. The New Hardy Players, based on the group with which the writer himself was associated, chose the Emily Fearn adaptation of the story for the 2013 production, and, sadly for them, chose the late rather than hot and…

BLINDLY following my satnav along the windy B-road from Corfe Castle to Langton Matravers, I foolishly thought I’d easily spot a festival in the open countryside … I didn’t. Purbeck Folk Festival has a unique setting in the valley of the National Trust’s Wilkswood Farm, where barns and outhouses are transformed into five stages –…

FOR a generation raised on Twilight and Buffy, the idea of the eternal undead is no surprise, but Bram Stoker’s Dracula continues to weave its fascination. This week a group of 59 young performers aged between 12 and 19 are performing a new adaptation of the story by Oliver Birch as the 2013 Storm on…

THE 2013 summer season at Bath Theatre Royal ends with a hilarious bang in Lindsay Posner’s production of the farce A Little Hotel on the Side by Feydeau and Desvallieres, in a timeless adaptation by John Mortimer. Performed on Michael Taylor’s inventive set, which makes full use of the theatre’s revolve, this is the classic…