THE name of the French fin de siecle comic dramatist Georges Feydeau is synonymous with bedroom farce – but, in the age of #MeToo and the constrictions of cancel culture, is there still a place for his fizzy confections of mistaken identities and thwarted illicit pleasures? That may be the inevitable response to a Feydeau…

WHEN Jim Cartwright’s play The Rise and Fall of Little Voice opened 30 years ago, the performances of Alison Steadman and Jane Horrocks took the critical breath away from the London reviewers. Its impact continues, and several revivals have delighted audiences around the country and the world. Now a new production, starring Shobna Gulati as…

1915. A group of wounded soldiers, French and English, arrive at a military field hospital in France. One of them has a copy of Henry V. They decide to pass their time by staging a Shakespearean play. The action moves back 500 years to the fields of France. Antic Disposition specialises in staging plays in…

ANDREW Lloyd Weber, composer of, amongst others, Evita, Phantom of the Opera, Cats and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and Julian Fellowes, author of Downton Abbey and Aristocrats, are hardly the first names that would come to mind if you were looking for a composer and someone to adopt the script of a cult…

TIM Firth’s play Sheila’s Island – a sort of gender-swapped version of his 1992 Neville’s Island – is touring the UK in a production by Joanna Read. When it opened at Bath Theatre Royal on 11th May, one of its four actors, Abigail Thaw, was indisposed, and the remarkable Tracy Collier got the chance to…

THERE are so many things to admire in the Leeds Playhouse’s production of CS Lewis’s classic children’s book, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. Staging, lighting and sound teams combine to make it a visual treat, and the way in which the cast combine their skills as musicians, providing a continual stream of appropriate…

IT was good to see that BODS were not frightened to put their full name, Bath Operatic and Dramatic Society, at the head of the central page of their informative programme for Crazy for You. Some groups nowadays will bend over backwards to try and ensure that the audience does not realise that the production…

LONG before the line ‘No Sir this is the West, when the legend becomes fact print the legend’, was spoken in John Ford’s 1962 western The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance, the Americans had begun the habit of glorifying dubious characters in their past history.  Men like the multi-murderer William H Bonney, alias Billy the…

WHEN Mark Bell took on the challenge of directing The Play that Goes Wrong, he opted for out- and-out farce dominated by mimed comedy, and as was seen last week in Bath in the new reworking of his original production, it is a formula that works a treat. Faced with transferring a 1985 film version…

“SURPRISE, surprise” is the cry that in many a story goes up as our hero opens the door to find a room full of friends waiting to give them a surprise party. So far no one has thrown a surprise party for me, but under director Sean Turner’s clever reworking of Mark Bell’s original, this…