WHAT a difference a year makes, as regular Covent Garden Dance Company audiences at Hatch House discovered with a vengeance on Friday. The 2012 event was notable not only for spectacular dancing but for torrential rains that cascaded off the stretch marquees and flooded the parking areas. This year’s performances co-incided with some of the…

Floods in the Tithe Barn THE beautiful Wiltshire town of Bradford on Avon knows all about floods – most recently last year. The river has been at the heart of the town’s long history, made it an important centre of agriculture, wool and transport, powered its mills and provided the water for its industrial canals….

KNEEHIGH, the Cornish-based theatre company, has experienced mixed fortunes in recent years, but the revival of its 2003 production of Tristan and Yseult again confirms its status as one of the country’s most inventive. One of the world’s greatest love stories has been reimagined by Carl Grose and Anna Maria Murphy and is told by…

THE theatrical highlight of this year’s Frome Festival was played in the breath-defying heat of the upstairs room of the Cornerhouse last week, as Ben Tinniswood gave his hour long solo show about a misfit and a loner who police presumed was the most likely perpetrator of a murder. When they could find no evidence…

La Vie Parisienne Iford Festival CUTTING edge or what? Jeff Clarke opens his exuberant new production of La Vie Parisienne with a triumphantly steam punk parade, as a four-person train with REAL steam puffs into the cloister station to disgorge the characters for the evening’s entertainment. Wow! And the fun doesn’t let up until the…

Hors Piste Poole Lighthouse SAY “circus” to most people these days and they are more likely to picture Cirque du Soleil than the conventional big top, with top hatted ringmaster, performing animals and tattooed trapeze artists. The Canadian company has revolutionised the way we view circus – but there is a new generation of circus-influenced…

PLAYING Tom Riddle (aka the fledgling he -who-must-not-be-named) in the Harry Potter Films must be a big thrill for a young actor, but it doesn’t make him a suitable candidate to play an Earl’s son in a Shavian comedy set firmly in the London of 1894. Frank Dillane plays poet Eugene Marchbanks in Simon Godwin’s…

Blackadder Motcombe Village Hall IT’S quite an undertaking for a brand new theatre group to perform two of the best known episodes in a cult hit television comedy for their first outing, but Pieshop Productions was set up to do just that. The performers, mostly from north Dorset and south Somerset, were thrilled at the chance to perform…

La Boheme Dutch National Touring Opera PUCCINI’S La Boheme, certainly the most accessible of all grand operas, has been brought up to date and shortened to barely 75 minutes for a production by young singers from the Dutch National Opera, currently touring our region under the auspices of Dorset Opera Festival. The UK premiere of…

Wessex Actors Company on tour OSCAR Wilde’s “trivial comedy for serious people,” The Importance of Being Earnest, is a perennial on the open air touring circuit, but you won’t see a more sparkling or convincing production than Linsey O’Neill’s for the east Dorset based Wessex Actors Company. Ingeniously devised for a circular performance area that…