PETER Shaffer’s 1979 play Amadeus opens in Vienna 200 years ago, as court composer Antonio Salieri is committed to an asylum, where his ravings about his murder of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, decades earlier, are overheard by his incredulous attendants. It continues in flashback to episodes in the period from 1781 to 1791. It has been…
I FIRST saw The Mousetrap during its 15th year in London’s West End, having come to what seemed a logical conclusion that this simple little Whodunit could not possible last much longer in the capital. Looking around a near-capacity house on the play’s opening night at Weston-super-Mare’s Playhouse Theatre, and observing the wide age range…
THE job of following on from a very successful person or event in entertainment or sport is often a poisoned chalice. Sequels can be and often are a great let-down. Philip King and Falkland L Carey’s Watch It Sailor, which followed their runaway success with Sailor Beware, was decidedly disappointing. Films and TV are littered…
FRANK Wedekind’s semi-autobiographical play Spring Awakenings, written when he was in his mid-20s, has become a popular performance piece for drama students and young actors in recent years, underlining the message that whoever you love or however you love is acceptable. The play, which has been censored and suppressed in many societies, is a satirical…
IN the days before Strictly Come Dancing when the Frank and Peggy Spencer Formation Team from Penge were top dogs in the even-longer-running Come Dancing on television and Victor Silvester was teaching people to dance on radio to his strict tempo Ballroom Orchestra, you never heard the spoken word or a singer intrude on the…
IT was once said about builders that all they have to do was see was a patch of green grass and they would immediately want to put a house on it. The same sort of thing can be said about modern theatre impresarios – one viewing of a successful film, romance, drama or comedy, and…
SOPHIE Treadwell is an unusual animal among American playwrights – a feminist Expressionist who is best known for her play Machinal, which is not some French word as you and I might have thought, but a reference to the machines that control our lives. The play is one of her prolific output of novels and…
SEVEN years ago, when this production last visited Bristol, I went in the company of two traditional ballet lovers, who were genuinely shocked by what they saw on stage. Had they not been such polite guests I am sure, like quite a number of other members of the audience, they would have left at the…
THE Girl on the Train was one of the best-selling novels of all time, topping the fiction lists in both the UK and the US for months. Paula Hawkins’ thriller was successfully adapted into a hugely successful film, starring Emily Blunt, and now comes to Salisbury Playhouse in a brilliantly visualised, minimalist staging that brings…
ONE-MAN shows can take many forms and cover the widest of subjects. When the audience gathered for storyteller, poet and musician Phil Okwedy’s solo show they were greeted by an easel with a large photograph of his mother and father, and of his beloved Aunty Barbara and himself as a schoolboy in front of an…