WHEN Stephen Moffatt’s play The Unfriend opened at Chichester’s Minerva Studio in 2019, Joe Biden was the US President and Trump was a ghastly memory, subject of conversations on cruise liners between Peter and Debbie, British parents of teenage children, and Elsa, a charismatic Coloradan with a rather peculiar past. Mark Gatiss made his stage…
THE indisputable star of MPO Musical Theatre’s production of Betty Blue Eyes at Milborne Port village hall is Betty herself – and that’s just as it should be. There is a great song entitled Steal the Pig in Stiles and Drewe’s musical version of Alan Bennett’s 1984 film A Private Function, and the endlessly inventive…
LIKE Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, who explained her origins as “I’spect I grow’d’, so Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s show has also grown. Written as a 15-minute pop cantata for Colet Court School in London, it developed into a full scale musical that has endeared itself to the public for more than 50…
CHRISTY Lefteri’s bestselling book The Beekeeper of Aleppo is a story of our times – a chronicle of the lives of a handful of Syrian and other refugees seeking asylum in the famously civilised and welcoming United Kingdom. Now adapted for the stage by Nesrin Alrefaai and Matthew Spangler, it is in Bath until Easter…
FOR many years, until 1989, an aunt and uncle of mine were the licensees of a pub in a small North Somerset village. Their regular customers were a microcosm of the local community – several farmers, the grave-digger, a farm labourer who was the local table skittles champion, the doctor and two hospital specialists, a…
WATCHING Richard Harris’s cricketing farce Outside Edge 47 years after its premiere, and holding a programme that contains the message “Please be aware that Outside Edge is a classic late 20th-century comedy which reflects the language and attitudes of its time. Some audience members may find this content offensive,” I found myself asking exactly what…
THIS is the third review on the Fine Times Recorder for Simon Stephens’ stage adaptation of Mark Haddon’s best-selling book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. The first two productions were at Bath in 2015 and 2017, both on professional tours of the UK after sell-out seasons in London. This review is of…
IN the years since I last saw Fiddler on the Roof – which was the memorable Chichester Festival production with Omid Djalili as Tevya and Tracy-Ann Oberman as Golde – the world has been turned upside down. That poignant but funny show, with its barn-storming central performance, seemed to end on a note of hope,…
WE Brits talk about the weather all the time. Will it be sunny for the weekend, the wedding, the village fete, the cricket …? Will there be enough rain for the crops? You name it, whatever we are planning to do, we want to know what the weather will be. The Met Office is pretty…
TORBEN Betts’ latest comedy thriller, Murder at Midnight, is a clever, often hilarious, conflation of Jacobean revenge tragedies with all their gory relish and 21st century attitudes. It all starts as the familiarly-suited SOCOs and an insensitive Met cop chat over the blood-bath left in an Kent super-home when the bodies have been removed. It’s…