CHARLOTTE Jones’s astonishing first play Airswimming was inspired by a newspaper cutting announcing the “release” of perfectly sane women from decades of incarceration in hospitals for the mentally ill, better known at the time as lunatic asylums. The 1913 Mental Deficiency Act enabled angry, disappointed and embarrassed families to categorise their errant daughters as “moral…

TENNESSEE Williams’ semi-autobiographical play The Glass Menagerie was first performed in 1944, a year after his beloved sister Rose was subjected to a frontal lobotomy in an attempt to cure her schizophrenia. In the play, adapted from a short story, writer Tom Wingfield is trying to get away from the claustrophobic home he shares with…

AUDIENCES at Salisbury’s Studio Theatre in Ashley Road had a triple treat this May, when three of the company’s short plays were performed together. The show started with a return of the 2023 production of John Finnemore’s English for Pony Lovers, which was pipped to the post at the Western Area final of the All…

THERE’S no Business like Show Business … so goes the lyric of Irving Berlin’s song from Annie Get Your Gun, and there is nothing better than good comic business to lift even a modestly written farcical comedy into an evening of riotous fun. Although this play may be described as a spoof of a murder…

IF you describe opera as being a story set to music which has virtually no spoken word, then this rap-style, sung through musical is an opera. Such a description would not be welcomed with open arms by the producers, because, whereas modern and classical ballet have, to the benefit of each, embraced each other, classical…

On 2oth May the promoters of the national tour of Bonnie and Clyde announced its cancellation with immediate effect, due to poor advance ticket sales.   THE musical version of the story of Bonnie and Clyde, with its Frank Wildhorn music, Don Black lyrics and Ivan Mencell book, started life in San Diego in 2009,…

FORTY years after its premiere in Scarborough, Alan Ayckbourn’s A Chorus of Disapproval, the play set in and around an amateur production of John Gay’s A Beggar’s Opera, returns to Salisbury Playhouse for a four week run. With its cast of 13, it’s a big undertaking and director Gareth Machin is keen to point out…

A COCKTAIL of Thomas Mann’s semi-autographical novella Death in Venice, a Benjamin Britten score composed in the last months of his life, and the tumbling, mime and balancing skills of circus performers looks like a guaranteed mixture for a disastrous opera production. But if you add in the imaginative talents of director Olivia Fuchs, designer…

THE arts are being removed from school curriculums, grants for further studies are being axed, London theatres are constantly criticised for exorbitant ticket prices, pros are being precious over pronouns and diversity box-ticking is rampant. So perhaps it’s no coincidence that the importance of amateur dramatics is ever more current, and that the brilliant Ian…

THERE are so many conspiracy theories about the composition of Cosi fan Tutte that they would make the basis of the plot for an opera in their own right. Was it the Emperor Joseph II, who died shortly after the first performance of the opera in 1790, who suggested the idea to Mozart, or since…