YEOVIL’S intimate Swan Theatre, whose stage is home to some of the region’s finest non professional theatrical productions, is celebrating 50 years of live drama with a January festival, and it starts by allowing a multi award winning actor to realise a long held dream.

Patrick Knox will takes the title role in Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, on stage from 13th to 15th January. In a part created by Peter O’Toole, based on the life of the Spectator’s “Low Life” columnist, Patrick will be joined by four other noted Swan actors, Sarah Ambrose, Robert Graydon, Sarah Nias and Mark Payne on a journey into the famous Soho pub The Coach and Horses, and into the writer’s rich and racy memories of a life as a modern-day Pepys in a London that has all but disappeared.

Expect to meet Dylan Thomas, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, John Minton and Frank Norman in this extraordinary play, which is directed by Robert Graydon.

The Swan Festival 50 continues on Friday 16th and Saturday 17th with SwanSong, a murder mystery evening in which an am dram group, The Cygnets, are staging a play called Lady Agatha’s Dilemma, in which the culprit has replaced blanks in a stage gun with real bullets (with a nod to Alec Baldwin in the New Mexican desert).

The audience must determine who might have had the motive and the opportunity. Was it Millicent Crabbe, the shy prompt? Or Flora Hartburn, the Cygnet’s beloved diva? Or maybe Vincent, the adjudicator from the Somerset Amateur Dramatic Society?

On Wednesday 21st January, Yeovil’s most flamboyant and glittering royalty will be on stage for Feathers and Footlights, a drag night to put South Somerset on the sequin and peruke map.
Look out for Sasha Silk, Shorti, Rayven and Sterling Sylvia. This is adult entertainment for over 18s only.

Then comes the premiere of a film called Midnight Radio on 22nd January. The film is directed by University of Sussex final year film student Sebastian Boudin, who, as Sebastian Thrower, made such an impression in Mark Payne’s November 2019 production of Regeneration. Sebastian says: “‘In a desolate, dreamscape town over the course of a night out of time, the fraught circumstances and loosening minds of two women begin to spiral together as their respective pasts close in on them, under the influence of a strange and unreal narcotic …”

The next offering is an evening of classical music from the Kilma Trio, featuring the Swan’s musical maestro Mike Stanley. On Friday 23rd January they will perform Dvorak’s Dumky trio Op. 90 and Rachmaninov’s Elegiac trio No. 1 G minor, followed by Shostakovich’s piano trio no.1 in C minor and Turina’s 2nd piano trio in B minor.

The anniversary festival comes to an end on Saturday 24th January, when the Swan will be transformed into a pub for a traditional pub quiz. Teams of four are invited to compete in an evening with quizmaster Joe Wainwright.

For more details of all these varied and exciting events, visit the Swan website.