MORE than 40 worthy residents of Lyme Regis, and scores more volunteers making sets, props and costumes, and moving them and the audiences around the Marine Theatre – that’s what it takes to mount a community play, and this group is now very good at it. Locally-born writer Andy Rattenbury, on this fifth community play…
WHEN Laurence Boswell decided to move on after seven-plus highly successful years as artistic director of Bath’s Ustinov Studio, it was a little like Manchester United searching for a replacement for their legendary manager Sir Alex Ferguson. Unlike United, who have had seven new leaders in the nine years since Sir Alex retired, the Ustinov…
FROM Shakespeare’s As You Like It to Mark Twain, who believed you could not have too much good whisky, there have been variants of the saying ‘You can’t have too much of a good thing’. In the world of entertainment, there are all too many examples when this saying doesn’t hold water. Most notorious is…
GARETH Farr’s new play, A Child of Science, is clearly a heartfelt project for the writer and director – and by the end it has hauled on the heartstrings of everyone in the audience. It’s the true story of the development of In Vitro Fertilisation and the years of obstacles that the three pioneers, Patrick…
JUST a short time before the powerful Bridgerton family burst into the London society, 30 miles away in Tunbridge Wells the social scene was already abuzz, and “fashion”, in all its many meanings, was the beating heart of life. There, coal merchant and magistrate Sir George Erstwhile daily reminded his decorative wife that she was…
WE started 2024 with the screening of Mr Bates vs The Post Office, and over four nights more than ten million television viewers were caught up in the story of Horizon, Paula Vennells and the hundreds of postmistresses and postmasters whose lives they ruined. It really was a historic piece of television, and one that…
UNLIKE many famous drawing-room socialists of the 1930s and 40s who, even after visiting Russia, turned a blind eye to Joseph Stalin’s excesses and brutality, quite happy to sacrifice the lives of millions of his fellow countrymen in order to maintain his position of absolute power, George Orwell was quite willing to point an accusing…
THE magical parallel universe created by Shakespeare for his ever-popular A Midsummer Night’s Dream gives the play a timeless quality, and a chance for directors, designers and actors to explore their imaginations. The Arts University Bournemouth team, under the leadership of visiting director Aileen Gonsalves, certainly did that, and the result is a marvellously playful,…
THERE are quite a few similarities between Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw and Alan Bennett’s Habeas Corpus, as there are about the background of the two authors, born within a year of one another. Both plays contain farcical elements using comedy to expose what the authors see as hypocrisy among the medical profession that…
GENERALLY, when you go to the theatre, you expect (hope) to like or at least empathise with some or all of the characters – but not with Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit. All the characters – apart from the bumbling maid Edith – are more or less unpleasant. And Yeovil’s Civic Players production has absolutely nailed…