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…
MOZART’s comic opera, Cosi Fan Tutte, has some of the most glorious music he ever wrote. So many wonderful arias, so much fun – with four of the silliest protagonists you can imagine! Its basic premise that “all women are the same” – that is, incapable of fidelity – jars with a 21st century (female)…
THERE are some roles in opera, drama and on film, which so dominate that you feel sorry for those who have the other leading parts in the story. One such is that of the courtesan Violetta Valery in Alexander Dumas fils’ novel La Dame aux Camelias. Almost every great actress and singer of their generation…
JUST what is actor-writer Oliver Cotton’s new play The Score about? At its centre is Johann Sebastian Bach, mesmerisingly played by big and small screen actor Brian Cox (Logan Roy in Succession), whose presence is packing Bath Theatre Royal until 28th October. Cox has not been seen on stage for 17 years, and The Score…