PANTOMIME is all about familiarity – familiar stories, familiar routines, familiar songs, familiar faces … and Bath Theatre Royal has it in spades, plus the most beautiful theatre in the country. For many years, the theatre had one of panto’s great double acts – the much-missed Dame and writer, Chris Harris and his knockabout sidekick,…
THE story of Robin Hood, outlawed in Sherwood Forest and famous for robbing the rich to give to the poor, is the most obvious of all the traditional stories to politicise – it’s all there in the massive body of stories that first emerged in the poem Piers Plowman, written in around 1370. You might…
WHEN you’ve got a perfect cast performing a highly-acclaimed version of a couple of episodes of a favourite TV comedy, why not reprise the experience for some other episodes of the show. That was the welcome thinking behind Paul Townsend’s Christmas production at Strode Theatre in Street, getting the faithful audience into the festive spirit…
WHY is it that fairy tales are always described as timeless? It is just because they are just as relevant to every new generation of children, as Chippenham-born writer and actor Florence Espeut-Nickless discovered when she was preparing the Bristol Old Vic Weston Studio Christmas show, Little Red and Other Winter Tales. Florence, the “writer…
BRISTOL Old Vic’s 2024-25 Christmas show takes this famous story, gives it a contemporary environmental twist and creates something more beautiful, more powerful, more moving and more thoughtful than the original. It will also probably be the most inspiring Christmas show of the year – with a message that sings and swims throughout from the…
EDITH Evans, that grand theatrical dame who took over-acting to a fine art, once became so exasperated with a ‘method’ actor, who in rehearsal was moving and doing things continually during a scene, that she exploded – and, fixing the young man with a beady eye, announced in stertorous tones to one and all: “Young…
LOUISA May Alcott’s claim to a December slot on the theatrical calendar rests with the titular March girls’ yearnings for fine dresses and Christmas presents instead of the lives they are living in 1860s Massachusetts, while their newly-penurious father is off fighting in the four-year American Civil War. It was the perfect choice for Salisbury’s…
CHRISTMAS isn’t a time when we want to think about politics and pinched purses, but if you live in the Yeovil catchment and one of your favourite festive treats has been a visit to the Octagon pantomime (moved last year to Westlands), you won’t have missed the fact that the Arts Council part funded plans…
THE prolific American writer Jack Sharkey first published The Murder Room in 1977, and now, almost 40 years on, Yeovil’s Civic Players have brought it to their avid audience. It should have happened back in 2020, but the pandemic got in the way, just weeks before the opening night. Thankfully, director Andrew Meadows and his…
BACK in 2018, Salisbury Playhouse came up with a national award-winning version of Beauty and the Beast, which remains in my memory as the finest new pantomime version of a favourite story ever – and I really have been to a few hundred pantos in my time – oh yes I have! Now, after all…