WHEN the tide goes out at Berrow Beach on the North Somerset coast (and remember that the tidal range of the Severn Estuary is the second larges in the world), you can see the timbers of a boat emerging from the sand. She is the SV Nornen, and she went down on 3rd March 1897 in…
ONE of the most famously memorable phrases uttered on the silver screen since in 1927 Al Jolson declared ‘You ain’t heard nothing yet’ in The Jazz Singer, the film which heralded the beginning of the Talkies, came six years later in the film 42nd Street, from which this show is taken. The whole future of…
MASSENET’S exotic and dramatic opera Le Roi de Lahore is rarely performed now, but the huge success of its opening at the Paris Opera in 1877 cemented the composer’s position as one of the most popular in Europe, and the work became a regular feature of operatic seasons. When Rod Kennedy decided to stage it…
AFTER my mother died, I inherited a little oil painting of a sailing vessel. I knew it from my parents’ house but had never looked on the back of it (why would I?) When I did, I found a typed note with the story of the boat and of my great-great grandfather, who had sailed…
BEN Weatherill’s new play Frank and Percy, a two-hander for Sir Ian McKellen and Roger Allam, is at Bath until 5th August, and there’s hardly a seat to be had. Perhaps the bright “young” London critics who slated the play at its Windsor opening will attribute that to an older, more staid audience in the…
THEY say it is hard to keep a secret, but it can’t be that difficult because well over 10 MILLION people over a 70 year period have managed to keep the identity of the murderer to themselves after seeing a production of The Mousetrap. That is the audience numbers recorded firstly in London’s Ambassadors Theatre,…
SOMETIMES, the weather gods just get their own way, and all the determination of summer touring actors and the stoicism of their audiences goes for naught. Such was the case when Slapstick Picnic planned to return to the wild, wide open spaces of Dorchester’s Maumbury Rings and the wind howled and the rain poured. And…
IT’S a rare occasion when any entertainment involving pop music asks the audience to resist the temptation to sing along with every song they recognise – but that was the request to the excited audience who gathered in the Bristol Hippodrome to watch The Bodyguard. The reason was that, left to their own devices, this…
AND the show went on … “The show must go on” is one of the best known theatrical sayings, and it was never truer than at Bath Theatre Royal on the opening night of London Classic Theatre’s three day run of Abigail’s Party. Ten minutes into the show, Rebecca Birch, who was playing the leading…
HUMAN beings have been ringing bells for around five millennia – and this ancient art is still alive and thriving today, from the ringtones on your mobile phone to the great bongs of Big Ben, preceding BBC Radio 4 news. If you are lucky enough to live near a church with a set of bells…