YOU wouldn’t call Agatha Christie an obvious feminist, but in Witness for the Prosecution, which she considered her best play, she does a great job puncturing the pompous superiority of her principal male characters. It’s classic Christie – more twists and turns than an Alpine mountain pass. It’s not so much red herrings as unpredictable…
A FULL-fledged pantomime is back on stage at the Octagon in Yeovil this season, once again starring those local favourites Gordon Cooper, Jack Glanville and Lizzie Frances, and giving the audience a chance to join in – even behind the advisory masks. It’s Paul Hendy’s new version of Mother Goose, the timeliest of pantomime stories…
MIKE Kenny’s adaptation of E Nesbit’s classic story The Railway Children has been packing audiences in to railway stations, first at York and then at Waterloo and King’s Cross, since 2007 – and now it’s come to Salisbury’s intimate Studio Theatre. And it is an absolute delight. It’s a huge risk to take a cherished…
SAMUEL Beckett, Nobel literature laureate and best known as the writer of the iconic Waiting for Godot (among many other plays) is well known for his bleak look at the world and its inhabitants, increasingly minimalised as he grew older. He was born in Ireland and lived most of his life in France, where he…
PENELOPE Christopher, who has directed Athenaeum Limelight Players in their first play since the onset of the pandemic, has been a fan of Jeeves and Wooster for many years, so Perfect Nonsense seemed an ideal choice. The basic requirements – given the constraints of social distancing and the need to give audiences confidence to return…
MATTHEW Bourne’s The Midnight Bell, inspired by the writings of novelist Patrick Hamilton and set in central London in the early 1930s, is a febrile investigation of love and how to find it, as well as a nostalgic plunge into a barely-remembered time. We know, looking at the era from the next century, what was…
ON the face of it, Hairspray is just a lightweight bit of fun – especially a production like this one, that fully captures the feel of the 1960s, with back-combed beehive hair styles and clothes to match. But lurking just below the surface are the prejudices of racism that prevent black dancers even auditioning for…
THE Bath Mozart Fest took us musically through three of the four seasons, Spring, Summer and Autumn, in the course of just 24 hours. Spring came in the form of four members of the BBC New Generation Artists – pianist Elisabeth Brauss, violinist Aleksey Semenenko, violist Elvind Ringstad and cellist Andrei Ionita. In music, as…
IF I was to ask 1,000 people who won the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest, I doubt that more than a handful would come up with the answer – Irish duo Paul Harrington and Charlie McGettigan singing Rock ‘n Roll Kids. If I mentioned the name Michael Flatley, a dancer who led an Irish dance team…
THERE are moments when the magic of theatre is almost tangible, seconds or even minutes when a whole auditorium holds its breath, intense passages when even the stage lighting seems to change subtly and you don’t know whether it’s the lighting engineer’s skill or your brain that is lowering the level. Conor McPherson’s The Weir…