WHEN Private Tommo Peaceful asks where is the young woman he has been visiting on leave from the trenches, the reply is: “In the cemetery. Damn the Germans, damn the French and damn you for fighting your war over my land!” The exchange comes part way through the play, almost as an aside. Those words…
IN the early 1970s as I was leaving the Bristol Hippodrome after watching a third-rate production of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes, redeemed only by the performance of Marion Montgomery in the role of Reno Sweeney, I thought what a pity that such a fine show should receive such a poor presentation. Since that date there…
THE enlightened populace of the 21st century can hardly get its head around the idea that, not too long ago, our ancestors regarded human beings as property to be insured, and compensated for, just as any other commodity. If we look not too deeply into it, there are STILL some landed gentry living off the…
THE song lyric ‘Never, never trust a woman, You’ll be sorry if you do, For man was made out of a monkey, And a Dame will make a monkey out of you’, came to mind as this play closed with Max, Keith Allen’s bullying patriarch, suddenly realising that it was his apparently credulous daughter-in law-Ruth,…
WHILE Janacek’s Jenufa and Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, the companions to Mozart’s Don Giovanni on the Welsh National Opera’s spring tour, leave the impression that they are yet to reach their full potential, the blend of singers, musicians, and designers in Mozart’s magnificent opera seem as well blended as cordon bleu omelette. Baritone Aaron O’Hare, suave…
THE versatile and talented Frome Drama company has chosen Christopher Hampton’s 1985 play Les Liaisons Dangereuses for its first show of 2022 at the Merlin. Loosely translated from the epistolary novel by Choderlos de Laclos in 1982, it is a story of love, sex, revenge, jealousy and sophisticatedly complex plotting. It requires enormous skill both…
THIS Katie Mitchell production dates back nearly a quarter of a century, first seen in the pre-Millennium Centre days when the New Theatre Cardiff was WNO’s home base. Now re-imagined by co-director Eloise Lally and staff director Sarah Crisp, it has lost none of its power to capture the hearts of an audience as the…
THE cast at Studio Theatre in Salisbury waited for two years to put on their production of Amanda Whittington’s 2013 Ruth Ellis play, The Thrill of Love – and the result proves that it was well worth the wait. The facts that led up to the 1955 murder, which resulted in the last woman in…
TO say that this show only scratches the surface of the life and work of composer/singer Carole King would be putting it mildly. With more than 100 pop songs that found their way into the charts and 25 solo albums, many written for some of the top musical artists to emerge in the later part…
EDUCATING Rita burst on to the national consciousness nearly 40 years ago in a film which made a star of Julie Walters – but Willy Russell’s play was first staged three years previously, and it is as a play that it really works its magic, as it does once again in this production by Sherborne’s…