CENTRE Stage, which was known for the first 20 years of its existence as the 14-20 Music and Drama Society, now happily welcomes younger members into its ranks. Two of them, 11 year olds George Killoran and Jack Gittoes-Davies, shared the exacting title role in Lionel Bart’s wonderfully tuneful adaptation of Charles Dickens’ far darker…
SHAFTESBURY Arts Centre drama group is cris-crossing the fourth wall with this spring double bill of Michael Frayn’s Audience and Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound, on at the Bell Street theatre until Saturday 13th April. Crossing the fourth wall is an enticing project for a playwright, and Frayn adds to the fun of his…
MOIRA Buffini’s 2013 play Handbagged is an imagined look at the private conversations between the monarch and her Prime Minister – in this case Elizabeth II and Margaret Hilda Thatcher. It could hardly be a more apposite time for a new production, as many will be wondering if the weekly meeting with Her Majesty is…
PAULA Hawkins’ 2015 novel The Girl on the Train is not only a publishing phenomenon, selling more than 1,500,000 copies in weeks, but it marked the move of the traditional British Murder Mystery into the 21st century. This is a story of urban loneliness, where one’s whole identity is tied up in “social” media jargon,…
THREE people on a rickety boat are ship-wrecked on a desert island, with just three packing cases to provide shelter. And so the three performers of Spanish circus and physical theatre company D’Click Circo begin their adventure, Isla. A sold-out audience at Blandford’s Corn Exchange enjoyed an hour of charming, hilarious, surprising and brilliant clowning…
THE devil, so the old adage goes, has all the best tunes – and they don’t come much better than Don Giovanni’s wickedly, deliciously seductive La Ci Darem la Mano duet with Zerlina. It was the perfect opening for an evening of quite heavenly music in a heavenly setting. The ancient Wimborne Minster hosted a…
DENNIS Potter’s Blue Remembered Hills, first seen in 1979 as a BBC Play for Today, and his Brimstone and Treacle, written three years earlier but withdrawn from the small screen as it was considered too shocking, are still controversial today. The writer was a Labour candidate in the 1964 election, and watching the antics of…
CLAUDIO Tolcachir started work on his play The Omission of the Family Coleman when his native Argentina was struggling out of austerity and political chaos, and now the play gets its UK premiere as we are much in the same boat – though poverty in early 21st century Argentina is a very different animal from…
IN these days, when there are debates about the wisdom of sex education in schools for children under the age of ten, to make a highly charged drama out of the reason why a 17-year-old boy unable to cope with his first sexual experience is driven to blind six horses he loves, may seem to…
A NEW production of Peter Shaffer’s psychological thriller Equus comes to Bath Theatre Royal from Tuesday 2nd to Saturday 6th April, after its opening to rave reviews in London Director Ned Bennett’s startling staging of this thought-provoking modern classic is presented by English Touring Theatre and Theatre Royal Stratford East. When teenager Alan Strang’s pathological fascination…