STEPHEN King’s 1982 novella Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption has made an interesting journey from its origins among the other short stories in Different Seasons via a cult movie to the stage. Like so many other dramas it is set in a prison, this one “the Shank” in Maine, where lifers expected to be…
LOSS and death hang over Philip Goulding’s play – Margaret Harvey lost her trawlerman husband about 30 years ago and has ever hardly left their run-down fishing community. Now her feisty social worker daughter, Rebecca, is about to move out to live with her poet boyfriend, Pete. It is just one more loss in a one-dimensional…
THOSE who love to place people in little boxes and categorise them would have difficulty in pinning a label on Dave Gorman. For two stints of 75 minuets, either side of a short interval, he kept a capacity audience informed and entertained. It would be inaccurate to describe him as a stand-up comic, and although…
THE way in which the interwoven stories of a World War II romance and marriage, through a next generation firmly embedded in the mystique of that period and on to the present day, and a granddaughter struggling to break away from the stiflingly-traditional life imposed by her father, is reminiscent of William Burroughs’ style in…
ORIGINALLY written as a sharp contrast to the sugar-sweet optimistic teenage comedies of the 1980s, this cynical black comedy that looks at the dark side of American college life, bullying, teenage suicide, sexual assault and school violence, has gathered momentum and a cult following as it has progressed from the written page to film and…
THE Extraordinary Bodies production of Hattie Naylor and Jamie Beddard’s new musical circus play Waldo’s Circus of Magic & Terror has opened in Bristol, presenting its shocked, moved and wildly enthusiastic audience with a sensational and memorable spectacle – and enough food for thought for the rest of 2023. The title might have hints of…
IF is show had been a race horse competing at Cheltenham’s National Hunt Festival last week, a form book might well has described it as being a relentless galloper. From flag fall to a rousing set of encores, Roddy Doyle’s stage version of his 1987 novel and 1991 film The Commitments, is relentless as it…
IAN Hislop and Nick Newman describe their play A Bunch of Amateurs as a celebration of the Am Dram genre and all who take part in it, and nowhere is this better illustrated than in Sheila Martin’s production for Street Theatre, on stage in Street until 18th March. The story (of a threatened Suffolk company…
WHEN it comes to whodunnits, Agatha Christie’s The Hollow is a real classic, an old warhorse of a play with an archetypal country weekend party setting, aristocratic family with poor relations, faithful old retainers and chippy young staff and a victim who pretty much gets what’s coming to … It is quite dated, rather sexist,…
A DAMP Sunday afternoon in Weston-Super-Mare is hardly the ideal time and place to whip up an audience reaction to an entertainment that stems from that most iconic of passionate dances, The Tango. That was the daunting task facing Strictly Come Dancing regular of seven series Vincent Simone and his company of dancers, plus one…