IN 1976, Bath and Bristol’s favourite writer, director and pantomime Dame, Chris Harris wrote and played the only role in Kempe’s Jig, a play that followed Shakespeare’s best-known fool as he danced the 125 miles from London to Norwich. A natural clown and tumbler, Chris brought out the physical comedy, dancing and mime talents of…
IMAGINE your delight if, as an enterprising regional production company, you were approached by a venerable writer and offered the “final part” of a much-loved television series as a world premiere. That’s what happened to Cirencester’s Barn Theatre, when Jonathan Lynn, half of the duo that created Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister, suggested staging…
THE climax of a packed and exciting week for dancers in North Dorset came on Sunday night when stars of Kyiv City Ballet and some of the students with whom they had been working joined Palida Choir and young Ukrainian singers and dancers for a programme showcasing the life of a dancer. The visit by…
DAVID Mamet’s Pulitzer-prize winning 1984 play Glengarry Glen Ross is a scarifying expose of the vicious sales-practices of its time, when targets were all and (in this case) real estate agents achieved them by any means or lost their jobs. Perhaps it was a strange play for the first in-house production by Lyme Regis’s famously…
JOHN Mortimer, who would have celebrated his centenary this year, is perhaps best remembered for creating the immortal Rumpole of the Bailey. His largely autobiographical play A Voyage Round My Father first came to public attention 60 years ago, as three short radio plays. Later adapted for film and for television and stage plays, this…
SALISBURY’S multi-award winning Studio Theatre, now based in Ashley Road, has recently celebrated its 70th anniversary, but in all that time and all those plays, it has never produced a work that centres on LGBTQ characters and issues (to be fair, no-one had ever heard of the ever-expanding LGBTQ categorisations for the great majority of…
IF you are old enough to remember a time when many houses did not have indoor toilets and when soft loo roll did not exist (torn up newspaper was often used), you can wryly sympathise at the slightly disgusted puzzlement of the young cast members of Stronghold of Happiness, a play-within-a-play, adapted by Dorset writer…
OVER the years since the 1984 release of the concept album from which this show evolved, it has developed quite a cult following. But it has always had a mixed reception from critics and audiences, here and in other parts of the world. The original production ran for three years in London’s Prince Edward Theatre,…
WHEN you walk on stage and immediately feel that the entire audience is on your side, sympathetic to what you have to offer and on the same comedy wavelength, it must be very tempting to relax, become self-indulgent and not work too hard. That was the sort of reception Matt Tedford received when he set…
VERY often you can get the flavour of a show from the audience. Arriving for a matinee performance of this musical whodunnit from the Olivier Award-winning team responsible for Fleabag and Baby Reindeer, and thinking of the response to their success at the Edinburgh fringe festival, I was surprised that the majority of the audience…