EVEN lifelong opera-lovers can sometimes feel dispirited. Opera survives on the support, generosity and love of a generation born within 20 years of the war – anyone looking around them in the stalls, or the grand tier, or the balcony or, frankly, even the amphitheatre of the Royal Opera House might be forgiven for wondering where…

NOEL Coward’s Still Life, better known as the stiff-lipped weepie Brief Encounter, focuses on genteel star-crossed lovers Alec and Laura, thrown together when she gets a sooty smut caught in her eye on a railway station. In the film, their love is a tragically doomed affair, but in this more nuanced adaptation by Dorchester Drama…

WE Brits really do love our murder mysteries, and now Salisbury’s Studio Theatre has found an ancient Agatha Christie that tells a rather different story, but with all the essential elements thrown in, all ready for a two-week sell-out staging. The provenance of Love from a Stranger is a bit of a mystery in itself,…

IN the mid 1990s, a survey of the most performed plays in the UK named John Godber as the third most popular playwright behind Shakespeare and Alan Ayckbourn. By comparison with the Bard of Avon, who still remains unchallenged at the head of affairs, and Alan Ayckbourn, although not quite as popular as he once…

IF there was such a term as “Grand Ballet”, you could use it to label The Sleeping Beauty. Every thing about it is on a grand scale – Tchaikovsky’s score, the second longest he composed for any genre, Marius Petipa’s original choreography, based in the Brothers Grimm’s interpretation of Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty, even the original…

THE punchline of the old joke about the local yokels’ reply to a passing motorist asking for directions: “I wouldn’t start from here in the first place”, in some ways fits this adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s story. The story takes us back and forth from late 19th century Pennsylvanian coal fields and the battle between…

MOST theatre lovers and pantomime fans have heard the name Grimaldi and can possibly conjure up an image of the legendary clown, but know very little about the man or his life. That all changes with Sue Curtis’s new play Slapstick, getting its world premier at this year’s Bath Comedy Festival. The play, written in…

“YESTERDAY upon the stairs I met a man who wasn’t there” – so starts William Hughes Mearns’ poem Antigonish. If you replace “woman” for “man”, you have a description of a very important contributor to this show who sadly from the audience point of view, appears only via video images rather then in person. The…

THE first performance of Shaftesbury Arts Centre’s remarkable production of Amanda Whittington’s The Thrill of Love co-incided with the exact moment of the 69th anniversary of Ruth Ellis’s shooting of her abusive lover David Blakely, which famously led to the last execution of a woman in Britain. The forensic play, with its cast of four…

HAROLD Pinter almost single-handedly invented the “theatre of menace”, and his successors took up the idea and ran with it. Watching his early 1960s television play The Lover again, in the brilliant production by Lindsay Posner currently on stage at the intimate Ustinov Studio in Bath, I couldn’t help but feel that he had invented…