I FREELY admit that I am a great fan of the wonderful BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth as Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy, and the shamefully underrated Benjamin Whitrow’s study of Mr Bennet. So when I first came across this spoof of Jane Austen’s novel, I arrived full…
WE are quite used to opera singers taking a break after singing a strenuous role, but when two leading ladies are announced for a musical, you presume that they will alternate week by week during a year-long tour, which started earlier this month in Sunderland and ends on 4th April 2026 in Leeds. After watching…
PATRICK Hamilton’s Gaslight, first seen in 1938, has a long and powerful legacy, including a new word for the English language and legislation recognising the coercive control that is at the core of the play. Frome Drama has chosen it to launch the 2025 season, and their production at the Merlin is directed by Richard…
WATCHING this show was a little like eating a gourmet burger full of top class ingredients surrounded by a slightly stale, soggy bun. Under the watchful eye of director/choreographer Craig Revel Horwood, this production was slick and smooth-running, with a string of excellent individual performances and a mouthwatering selection of 20 or so expertly staged…
IN the years since Amanda Whittington’s play Be My Baby was first seen in Salisbury in 2004, there has been growing awareness of the misery and trauma caused to mothers and children by the estimated 215,000 “forced adoptions” over 30 years after the Second World War, and the increased popularity of TV shows and DNA…
THIS reworking of the David Bintley choreographed, John Macfarlane designed production of Cinderella, set to Sergei Prokofiev’s wonderfully evocative score, is a delight to both the eye and the ear. Thanks partially to money raised by last years Big Give Christmas Challenge, the sumptuous costumes (including those delightful frog and lizard heads) have been returned…
THERE were 361 half-hour episodes of the American television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents during the decade following 1955, shows that attracted a host of A-list star actors and directors as well as the Essex-born Hitchcock, known as one of the most influential figures in the history of cinema. Some years ago, American composer, lyricist and…
GRAHAM Smith and Robert Brydges decided that it was time for Amateur Players of Sherborne to tackle an Ibsen play, after 91 years without a single work from the great Norwegian playwright. So they set about adapting the much-performed story, focussing on its timeless qualities and modern relevances, and their new version is on stage…
YOU don’t often hear the phrase “protest singer” these days, but the tradition – which stretches back for many years in unions and traditional working communities, and was reinvented by the folk singers of the 1960s – lives on in Reg Meuross, the Crewkerne-based singer-songwriter whose work has always championed the issues of the day,…
SWISS playwright Friedrich Durrenmatt studied philosophy and went to Berlin for postgraduate studies into Kierkegaard. There, he quickly formed a very different view of his native country and its famed neutrality, instead seeing a state polluted by greed and hypocrisy where neutrality was a euphemism for complicity. The fledgling philosopher turned his attention to playwriting…