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…
I ARRIVED at Cirencester’s Barn Theatre in the apparently unique situation of never having watched the TV series (mostly because I am not a fan of one of the leading actors). So, with a not just open but totally uninformed mind, I approached Simon Nye’s stage version, set on the night of the Millennium, shunted…
STEPHEN King’s novella, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, inspired by Tolstoy’s 1872 story God Sees the Truth But Waits, was first published in 1982. Twelve years later the movie The Shawshank Redemption hit the screens, and, after a slow start, is now regarded as one of the greatest films of all time. Now, fans…
WHAT is the first thing you say to a taxi driver when you get in his (it usually is a man) cab? Chances are that it wouldn’t be “Do you believe in God?” So the taxi driver is immediately on the wrong foot. How on earth do you answer that? And where are you supposed…
THE 250th anniversary production of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s immortal comedy The Rivals, sub-titled A Trip to Bath, comes “home” to the Theatre Royal as part of its 2026 tour. The 23-year-old Sheridan was catapulted to success by the play, which held a mirror up to the preposterous antics of his day. So it is no…
LEWIS Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is one of the greatest works of English literature – beautifully, poetically written, full of vivid and unconventional characters, jam-packed with imaginative touches and extraordinary events, somewhere between a rainbow dream and a fever-nightmare, and memorably illustrated, so that we all know what the White Rabbit or the Cheshire Cat…
THERE are dozens of suggestions as to where the saying ‘Once seen never forgotten’ comes from, but which ever one you subscribe to, the truth of the saying throws up a great problem for director Matthew Dunster as he brings Danny Robins’ thriller out on a tour to areas where it has already been seen….