JAMES May, the television presenter who owns the Royal Oak pub in Swallowcliffe between Shaftesbury and Salisbury, will be taking audiences through time and across thousands of miles in his new stage show, coming to Southampton Guildhall on 23rd October. The Top Gear and Grand Tour star is presenting a very different – and generally…
FOR many years, one of the great teats a group of us enjoyed was to go on Shrove Tuesday to a friend’s house to enjoy home-made pancakes. Good cook as she was, we were never offered the first pancake made, because she said it was never up to the standard of those that followed. Anyone…
WITH a few brush strokes in his paintings The Finish and The Greyhound, artist John Skeaping created all the power, grace and beauty of two horses fighting out the finish of a race, and a greyhound’s elegance of movement. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first and best known of his seven…
BOURNEMOUTH Symphony Orchestra’s chief conductor Mark Wigglesworth will be conducting 22 performances across the new 2025-26 season, which takes the region’s major orchestra to venues in major towns and smaller centres including Bristol, Exeter, Sherborne and Taunton, as well as its home at Poole’s Lighthouse arts centre, where the season opens on Wednesday 1st October….
THE Mitsu Trio come to Dorset and Somerset on Friday 26th and Saturday 27th September for the first dates in the autumn season of Concerts in the West. The series, as always, begins at Bridport Arts Centre, with a coffee-time concert, at 11.30am, followed by Ilminster Arts Centre that evening and The Dance House at…
ILLUSTRATOR Gabrielle Parker’s delightful, surreal and whimsical creations will be celebrated at this year’s Arts by the Sea, the South West’s biggest free celebration of art, culture, people and place, returning to Bournemouth from Friday 26th to Sunday 28th September. Gabrielle Parker, the 2025 Artist in Residence, is an Arts University Bournemouth graduate, who creates…
JANE Austen’s millions of fans tend to have their favourites among her heroines – for many it will be Elizabeth Bennett, for some it will be Anne Elliot, but for a lot of us it is the high-spirited but often wrong-headed Emma Woodhouse. Bath Theatre Royal celebrates the Jane Austen 250th anniversary with a new…
SINCE its first performances in 1957, in French and later in English, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame has been subjected to endless debate, interpretation and controversy, by academics, students, theatre-goers and critics. Regarded by many as the greatest work by the Irish Nobel literature laureate, the play was written while the writer lived in France, where the…
LOVERS of early and baroque music are in for an absolute treat with the first Salisbury Musick early music festival, from 3rd to 5th October, at some beautiful and unusual venues, ranging from Fovant Chapel to Salisbury’s magnificent St Thomas’s Church. The new festival, which brings together many talented local musicians and some visiting professionals,…
WELSH storyteller Shon-Dale Jones is back on tour with a new show, Stories From An Invisible Town, with final dates in the area at Bath Theatre Royal’s Ustinov Studio on 17th and 18th November. Shôn is first and foremost a storyteller. He’s honest, inventive, and deeply human … curious, restless, wide-eyed, offbeat and resonant. His…