THE Royal Shakespeare Company’s welcome return tour to Plymouth brought three current productions – Measure for Measure, As You Like It and the gender-swapped The Taming of the Shrew – back to the south west. The Justin Audibert production of The Shrew confounds expectations, set in a matriarchal Padua where Katherine and Bianco are the…
WHEN I mentioned the Bach Fest to a friend, to whom the music which fills the programme did not appeal, they immediately hid behind that old excuse, “well of course such an event is very elitist”. To which I replied “there must be an great number of elitist music fans in the Bath area, because…
IMAGINE a world where corrupt and fearful politicians forced a unifying greyness on the entire population – a state where everyone wore the same, talked the same, looked the same and lived in fear of breaking the rules. That’s what’s happened in Greytopia, where her Greynesty has collected all the colour and joy and locked…
SIX is a phenomenon. It started life as a student show, and now it’s packing theatres round the globe. It brings new audiences in. It’s super clever. It’s full of unrelenting energy, colour, music and light. It takes a new look at the familiar story of the six wives of Henry VIII and it has…
IT takes talent and chutzpah to mount a production of My Fair Lady, and the young members of Salisbury’s Studio Youth Theatre have both in spades. Lerner and Loewe’s musical version of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, famously filmed with designs by Cecil Beaton, really leaves no scope for faltering. The cast are either what is…
STURMINSTER Newton Amateur Dramatic Society is 90 years old this year – a remarkable age by any standards. So it’s great to be able to report that the group is looking good for its years – and for the future, with lots of new young talent on stage for this year’s pantomime. As Snow White…
THE highly-polished sophistication that can be seen on every inch of film in Alfred Hitchcock’s screen version of Frederick Knott’s expertly contrived thriller may not be fully replicated in this production, but under tight direction from Anthony Banks there is still plenty of tension and thrills on view for the audience to enjoy. For those…
ANYONE who has met a 30-something American clean- freak, displaying all the gesticulating neuroses that come with the territory, will immediately recognize Pony Jones, one of four extraordinary characters in Will Eno’s award-winning play The Realistic Joneses, which is making its UK premiere on Bath Ustinov Studio’s stage. Set in two neighboring houses, both surrounded…
IMAGINE the torrid, passionate and intense traditions of rural Spain in the 1930s transported to Salisbury Plain. That’s what Barney Norris has done to Lorca’s play Blood Wedding. The original has a cast of 12 and embodies death as a character. The Wiltshire playwright has cleverly pruned the company to six, cutting out the feuds…
THE gleeful excitement of Jennifer Saunders playing Madame Arcati is a sight to behold and Bath audiences have a second chance to experience it before Coward’s Blithe Spirit moves into London. The Richard Eyre production opened in Bath last June, and returns until Saturday 8th February, and overall it’s a delight. A few changes have…