JUST very occasionally in a long life of reviewing plays, you find yourself watching something that you know is special. So special that it will stay in your memory forever, but more importantly will make an indelible mark on all who see it. Arthur Miller’s 1955 play A View from the Bridge must have made…

ALTHOUGH Agatha Christie’s 1939 novel was highly successful, with more than 100 million copies sold, she considered the ending to be a little too dark for theatre-goers to accept, and so changed it to the less bleak one most of us know, and was used in Rene Clair’s atmospheric film version in 1945. Director Lucy…

ARE you a devoted Call the Midwife fan? If so, you’ll know all there is to know about bringing babies into the world in the 1960s, and you’ll know how Dr Turner’s wife Shelagh started her life in Poplar as Sister Bernadette, and is now an experienced midwife in the team. So if you were…

I CANNOT think of a more perfect setting to stage a festival dedicated to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and his contemporaries than the City of Bath. Once again, artistic director Amelia Freedman Came up with a splendid variety of five concerts over a three day period, as she does every year with the…

SHERLOCK Holmes was a fictitious creation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Whitechapel Murders were the unsolved murders of 11 women in the three years from 1888, and Jack the Ripper is the name given by the press to the presumed perpetrator. Charles Dickens is the best-known and probably most prolific chronicler of Victorian life….

WRITER and director Ben Crocker has forged a reputation for creating quirky, ultra-local versions of well known pantomimes, so Sturminster Newton Amateur Dramatic Society, aka SNADS, could hardly go wrong with his take on the immortal Aladdin. The story, calling as it does for changes of continent, an instant pop-up palace and of course a…

THERE are all sorts of reasons for becoming obsessed with a person or a subject – Stephen Taylor, traumatised by the death of his parents, painted the same tree over and over again, and Mark Hirsch photographed the same tree every day for a year. Already fascinated by the life and works of Nina Simone,…

SLEUTH is described as “the world’s greatest thriller” – which you might think is hyperbole, unless you recall the almost breathless excitement of the movie with a shocking Laurence Olivier (who had previously dismissed the stage play as “a piece of piss”) and Michael Caine, filmed at Dorset’s historic Athelhampton House. This new touring production,…

WE theatregoers in the west country first came across Emma Rice when she joined Kneehigh, where her productions and adaptations delighted, exasperated, excited, infuriated and inspired for almost 20 years. Then she was appointed director of Shakespeare’s Globe, and after two seasons and lots of controversy, removed herself from the post. She set up Wise…

HOW lucky are those of us who can get to the Ustinov Studio at Bath! Described by What’s On Stage as “the most exciting performance space in the south west, if not the country,” this tiny theatre currently hosts one of the most mesmerising, brilliant and profoundly moving dance performances you are ever likely to…