IF you want the perfect alternative Christmas show, look no further than Bristol’s Tobacco Factory, where a wonderful new version of Snow White is on stage until 19th January. Adapted by Mike Tweddle and the company, and directed by Alex Byrne, it manages that gargantuan challenge of being woke, politically aware, plant-based and very, very…
THE 21st of the 80-plus plays written by Alan Ayckbourn Ten Times Table comes from the 1970s, one of the most prolific and successful periods in his writing career. No fewer than 17 of his plays were successfully professionally produced at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough and London’s West End during this decade. This…
AFTER five years of turn-of-the-year touring, Bumblefly Theatre has built up a tradition of opening on a Saturday afternoon at Greyfriars in Ringwood, and this year is no exception. The 2019/20 show is David Haworth’s new version of Little Red Riding Hood, peppered with the company’s usual selection of fairy stories and folk tales from…
AFTER the triumph of last year’s award-winning Christmas show, David Walliams’ Billionaire Boy, the city centre Nuffield Theatre had a hard act to follow, and has sensibly taken a very different approach for the 2019/20 production. This is the world’s favourite pantomime story, Cinderella, but not as you know it. In Michael Fentiman’s adaptation, which…
ACTOR and playwright Stewart Permutt’s play One Last Card Trick is a delightfully humorous, poignant and beautifully-observed study of a failing community. Chosen by KCA Players for their final production of 2019, and sensitively directed by Steve Watton, it is the story of three elderly Jewish women whose weekly tradition is to meet at their…
WHY do we love Blackadder? He is really an awful person, ridicules his devoted friend Lord Percy, treats his (admittedly squalid) servant Baldrick like something he might kick into the gutter, and generally would have been at home lording it over the Bullingdon Club in any century. There is something refreshing about his arrogance, his…
SOUTH-Korean playwright Hansol Jung’s Wild Goose Dreams has its UK premiere at the Ustinov Studio in Bath until 21st December. It’s a modern version of a legend, a love story and a look at how the internet and social media connect the world and divide the individual. Michael Boyd’s production for the Ustinov is a…
SIMON Williams is best known for his many television roles and in The Archers, but he is also a novelist and playwright, and one of his four plays, the 2001 Laying the Ghost, was chosen by Yeovil based Civic Players for their late autumn production at the Swan Theatre. Set in a retirement home for…
Eberl Symphony No.3 Beethoven Violin Romance No 2 Beethoven Violin Concerto in C (fragment) Beethoven Symphony No 2 Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, leader Amyn Merchant Conductor Reinhard Goebel Tobias Feldmann, violin THE big names in the music scene in Vienna around 1800: Haydn, Beethoven and Eberl, right? If you’re anything like me, you’ll have been asking…
THE great Dolly Parton famously said: “You’d be surprised how much it costs to look this cheap!” Similarly, it takes incredible skill (and courage) to look as utterly incompetent as the Cornley Polytechnic dramatic society in their various productions.. So it’s hardly surprising that Peter Pan goes wrong when the amateur actors and their long-suffering…