AUDIENCES at Strode Theatre in Street are accustomed to pantomimes, musicals, comedies and classic dramas, but Mayfly, on stage until Saturday 9th November, is something entirely new. Director Neil Howiantz discovered Joe White’s play, produced only once before in London, and arranged to meet the playwright. A long chat resulted in the Somerset company getting…
IN many ways, the combination of names above the show title, Gary Barlow and Tim Firth’s Calendar Girls-The Musical, tells you all you need to know about this telling of the now well-known story of members of a Yorkshire WI who have raised millions of pounds for cancer charities through posing for a nude calendar….
CHEF and food journalist Nigel Slater’s memoir, Toast, was a best-seller among his many fans and the film of the book, starring Freddie Highmore and Helena Bonham Carter, has become a classic. Now the story of how the nine-year-old Nigel learned to love cooking has been adapted for the stage by the Lowry Theatre, and…
ONE of the greatest plays of the 20th century, Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, is a brave and triumphant choice for the Churchill company in Wimborne. The Tivoli’s is an audience not accustomed to big, serious drama, unless it’s in the form of a movie. But the many who all but filled the stalls on…
WILLIAM J Locke’s short story Ladies in Lavender is best known in Charles Dance’s film starring dames Judi Dench and Maggie Smith, but as so often happens with cinema adaptations, the stage play is a much subtler dramatic form. So it is with Shaun McKenna’s version, chosen by director Patricia Richardson for ImpAct’s autumn tour…
WHEN the 19-year-old Shelagh Delaney burst onto the theatre scene with her first play, A Taste of Honey, its gritty script and unrelenting subject matter kicked audiences and London-centric critics into the reality of existence in the north. Sixty years on it still has the power to shock, as it vividly shows the growing seeds…
THERE’S something strange and mysterious about Bulbarrow in Dorset, and it inspired writer Natasha Solomons in several of her successful novels, the first of which was Mr Rosenblum’s List. One of its characters, Curtis Butterworth, particularly endeared himself to her, so his own history became the subject for a short story, which has now been…
THE 2019 Celebrate Voice festival is in full swing in the pop-up Wilson’s Piccolo Theatre in Salisbury’s Guildhall Square, and after two days of jazz, cabaret and song, Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro took to the stage on Sunday afternoon. In the six years since Lynsey Docherty created the festival, it established itself as one…
IT’S 20 years since Andrew Hilton took the ambitious and risky step of establishing a theatre company to perform Shakespeare – for five years – in the former Imperial Tobacco factory in Bristol’s Southville. In the intervening years the area has seen a resurgence of popularity, and the company, now known as stf, is a…
EDMOND Rostand’s 1897 verse play Cyrano de Bergerac draws its inspiration from the true story of a Gascon hero and poet, and its swashbuckling romance continues to excite and delight audiences in theatres and cinemas across the world. It is currently one of the flavours of the year, with new several new stage productions and…