THE first production by new Dorset company Close to the Mark burst onto the scene in triumph, delighting the packed Shaftesbury audience. It is perhaps the sixth or seventh time I have seen this Ayck­bourn play, written 18 months after The Norman Conquests and certainly following Norman on his disaster-prone  travels through life, now in…

ON Saturday 16th November a group of people gathered at the Discover Church in Hin­ton Road, Bournemouth, for worship of a different kind. We were celebrating the centenary of the Bourne­mouth Little Theatre Club, in what was its home, the former Palace Court Theatre. Sold in 1970, when the audience had turned to television and…

THE names Leonard Elschen­broich and Alexei Grynyuk hardly trip off the tongue like Morecambe and Wise, but musically they are as well knit a team as the great British comedy duo. Opening with a delightful rendition of Mozart’s Piano Sonata in A major, in which he coaxed and cajoled in turn the piano to pick…

THERE was a time when baseball addicts in the USA were very fond of Double­headers, two games between the same teams played back to back on the same day. It is stretching the imagination  a little to say that audiences were offered a double header with a String Quartet, plus guests, in the Guildhall at…

A PROGRAMME of string quartets composed by a 14 year old Mendelssohn, a 15 year old Schubert, a relatively mature 29 year old Mozart and a rarely heard two-movement example by Luigi Boccherini, a contemporary of Mozart, gave the capacity audience at Crewkerne’s Dance House an insight into the considerable qualities of the Consone Quartet….

SARAH Waters’ story The Night­ Watch, set in London during and immediately after the Second World War, is told in reverse, opening in 1947. There the central character Kay warns of the dangers of living in the past. This literary device for filling in the blank spaces is a challenge for theatrical adapters, but one…

THERE was a distinct cool draught in the Assembly Rooms when Cuarteto Casals arrived onstage to start the concert with Mozart’s String Quartet in B flat major. In between movements, violinist Vera Martinez, wearing a lovely bare-armed dark green full evening dress, certainly not designed for a cold winter’s evening, had to resort to breathing…

PAT Barker’s Regeneration trilogy is one of the great literary achievements of the late 20th century – an evocation both of the sheer horror of the “war to end all wars” and of the different ways in which the soldiers, medics, governing class and military top brass dealt with the experience. The late autumn production…

I FIRST saw the current Classic Thriller Company touring production of The Lady Vanishes in Bath at the end of January, and now it is at Yeovil Octagon with a substantially new cast. Roy Marsden directs this adapation of a Hitchcock film, performed on an impressive and atmospheric set designed by Morgan Large and lit…

WHETHER you subscribe to Charles Spurgeon’s version “Begin as you mean to go on”, or the New Year resolution “Start as you mean to continue”, the idea is the same – that something has been started on a high note. And that certainly can be applied to the opening concert of this the 29th Bath…