SAY Brooklyn to most people and they picture the dramatic bridge and a New York borough that has gone through several iterations of poverty and crime to its current uber-trendiness. What you probably don’t think about is gentility. But that is precisely what we see in the Brooklyn of Joseph Kesselring’s Arsenic and Old Lace,…
THERE are urban dwellers (and maybe country folk) who are really scared of woods. A legendary aunt sat locked in a car in a state of high terror when the rest of the family went for a walk in the New Forest. We have laughed about it many times. But, having just seen Craig White’s…
IF you told Laura and Danny, the characters in David Eldridge’s play Beginning, about agricultural workers from Yorkshire walking over the Pennines to Lancashire every weekend to court their lasses, it would be like discussing ancient history. But, oddly, their dreams and wishes are the same, maybe proving that the more it changes, the more…
LIKE most people, I first came upon Grease when the now legendary film starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John arrived like a bursting meteor of energy in 1978. Big impression as it made, I never expected to find it gathering big audiences in the theatre, well over half of whom were not even born when…
DIRECTOR Ian White, a life-long lover of the theatre and Shakespeare’s Scottish play in particular, sees the Macbeths as a couple with “a mature and successful marriage” – indeed the only one in the canon. As such, he says, the guilt and the blame for the murderous tyranny that they unleash has to be shared….
WORSHIPPERS at the church of St Mary, on the outskirts of Kilmington just north of Stourhead, walk weekly over the site of a heinous crime committed in Tudor times. Audiences at the three performances of Murder Most Foul have a clearer idea of the story behind the murders of William Hartgill and his son John,…
IT would be hard to imagine a more perfect setting for baroque opera than the Italianate cloister in the beautiful Harold Peto-designed gardens of Iford Manor near Bradford-on-Avon. Over the years, the cloister and the gardens were the setting for operas from every period, jazz, folk and world music, picnic proms and more. It was…
IN the golden era of Hollywood, you could always pick out a production made by one of the five studios – MGM. Warner Brothers, Paramount, Columbia, and RKO – who dominated the industry, because of the visual production quality of their films. No matter how good or bad the film might be they were always visually…
RONALD Harwood’s 1980 play The Dresser is out on tour again in a new production, opening at Bath Theatre Royal and stopping at 12 venues around the UK until February. Set in January 1942 in a provincial theatre, with German bombs falling all around, it’s a period piece harking back to the days of the actor-manager,…
SOMERSET theatre company Wassail launched its new “community” play, Apples and Angels, at the evocative and atmospheric setting of Burrow Hill. It’s headed for a major production in Yeovil in the future. It’s a magical journey through folklore and legend, orchards and expectations, disappointment and regeneration. In some ways it helps to be an old…