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…
IT is not unusual for directors to take liberties with the setting, and costuming, of what is arguably Shakespeare’s most endearing and popular comedy. After nearly three centuries of turning the actors out in traditional Athenian costumes, and placing them in the Forest for most of the production, Harley Granville-Barker swept all that away in…
ONE of the most spectacular, and difficult to stage, moments from Shakespeare’s Macbeth is to bring the forest of Birnam Wood to Dunsinane castle, and you might think it would be too big an ask in the intimate confines of Bedminster’s Tobacco Factory Theatre, with a cast of only ten actors. Think again. By blending…
ONE of the reasons that Adrian Brendel has slipped so seamlessly into the charismatic shoes of the late Amelia Freedman as artistic director of Bath’s Mozart and Bach Fests, is that he, as he pointed out when introducing The Sixteen Choir and Orchestra’s splendid closing concert in the Abbey, he is fully aware what a…
THE south-west of England has a particularly rich heritage of community plays – Dorchester has mounted seven, a record number. Increasingly, large theatres are commissioning plays for a vast cast of performers, usually with a professional production team and an amateur cast keen for the chance to make friends and perform on big stages, with…
SOME music just tugs at your heartstrings, no matter how often you hear it. A couple of bars of Puccini’s La Boheme and I am transported back to my very early childhood … my mother singing, or, a bit later when we had a radiogram, to Renata Tebaldi’s voice recorded at La Scala in 1951….
AN audienceful of avidly excited theatregoers packed into the Towngate Theatre in Poole’s Lighthouse with the full intention of being scared witless by Robin Herford’s production of Stephen Mallatratt’s adaptation of Susan Hill’s novel The Woman In Black. The long running show comes with an enviable pedigree of peril. The 1993 book has sold more…
SCOTTISH playwright David Greig set his 2002 play Outlying Islands on the furthest outlier rock from the Outer Hebrides in 1939, a time when Great Britain was holding its breath for another war and just nine years after 18-year-old Mary Anne MacLeod emigrated from Lewis to America … later to give birth to Donald Trump. That’s…
THE annual SNADS pantomime has always been a big part of the society’s year, the large cast and crew meaning that almost every member is involved in some way to bring the February show to the audience. This year experienced director Craig White joined debut director (and principal boy) Jessica Allen to lead a 34-strong…
TOM Stoppard’s play Indian Ink, first seen in 1995, comes to Bath after a short season at the Hampstead Theatre. Directed with a meticulous and playful eye by Jonathan Kent, it once again stars Felicity Kendal, the actress for whom the central character, avant garde 1920s poet Flora Crewe, was written. Now she plays Flora’s…