THE majority of the audience at Bath Theatre Royal on Tuesday couldn’t get enough of Miles Jupp (as David Tomlinson) talking about his time as Mr Banks. His role in the 1964 film Mary Poppins is how the actor, born in 1917, is best remembered. Now James Kettle has written a solo show, specifically for…
LE Navet Bete Theatre Company (which if we are to believe a group of people who take very little in life seriously or with much reverence, translates as The Daft Turnip) have one great aim in life – to make people laugh. In an era when many seriously-minded theatre groups appear to consider that entertainment…
AFTER last year’s sensational In the Heights – probably the best youth theatre show I have ever seen – Tri.art had a hard act to follow for the 2019 summer musical. The choice was Footloose, based on the 1984 film. It’s the story of Chicago boy Ren who moves with his abandoned mother to live…
THIS year’s TRB Theatre School Summer Company is performing egg staffer Hattie Taylor’s new adaptation of The Tales of 1001 Nights at Bath’s dedicated youth theatre space. With a 29-strong cast on the tiny stage – and a vast number of stories to choose from – it’s as exciting a prospect for the writer as…
WRITER William Boyd came to the theatre late in his illustrious career as a novelist and scriptwriter for the big and small screens, and thank goodness he made the move. His play The Argument, first seen in Hampstead Theatre’s studio in 2016, seems at first to be a mixture of early Ayckbourn and Yasmina Reza…
THERE probably hasn’t been a time when so many people have imagined that there is a better world “somewhere over the rainbow” – so it was a clever touch in this Stage 65 production to have Uncle Henry and Aunt Em’s Kansas farm-hands looking at their mobile phones and an instantly recognisable president’s voice on…
WIMBORNE Rep 2019 reached its dramatic conclusion with performances of Agatha Christie and Frank Vosper’s Love from a Stranger at the Tivoli Theatre. The season began with a comedy (A Bunch of Amateurs), continued with a staging of Rising Damp, and ended with a tense thriller with a real sting in the tail. Vosper was…
RISING Damp, the ITV series broadcast in the mid 1970s, has been judged as one of the greatest television comedies of all time. It started as a play by Eric Chappell, who then adapted it for television, starring Leonard Rossiter, Frances de la Tour, Richard Beckinsale and Don Warrington. Only Beckinsale was not in the…
TEN years ago, Matt Brady put up a marquee in a beautiful walled garden at Hatch House near Tisbury and invited audiences to come and see ballet in the open air. A three-course dinner was served as entr’actes to the main event. It was, by any stretch of the imagination, a brave thing to do….
IF Macbeth is The Scottish Play, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor is THE Scottish Opera. So it was an interesting and logical idea for Christopher Cowell, directing the tragedy for Dorset Opera Festival to nod to the Shakespearean precedent, with three hags and a ghost. Not everyone approved – some critics have been disparaging of the innovation…