AFTER my mother died, I inherited a little oil painting of a sailing vessel. I knew it from my parents’ house but had never looked on the back of it (why would I?) When I did, I found a typed note with the story of the boat and of my great-great grandfather, who had sailed…
BEN Weatherill’s new play Frank and Percy, a two-hander for Sir Ian McKellen and Roger Allam, is at Bath until 5th August, and there’s hardly a seat to be had. Perhaps the bright “young” London critics who slated the play at its Windsor opening will attribute that to an older, more staid audience in the…
THEY say it is hard to keep a secret, but it can’t be that difficult because well over 10 MILLION people over a 70 year period have managed to keep the identity of the murderer to themselves after seeing a production of The Mousetrap. That is the audience numbers recorded firstly in London’s Ambassadors Theatre,…
SOMETIMES, the weather gods just get their own way, and all the determination of summer touring actors and the stoicism of their audiences goes for naught. Such was the case when Slapstick Picnic planned to return to the wild, wide open spaces of Dorchester’s Maumbury Rings and the wind howled and the rain poured. And…
IT’S a rare occasion when any entertainment involving pop music asks the audience to resist the temptation to sing along with every song they recognise – but that was the request to the excited audience who gathered in the Bristol Hippodrome to watch The Bodyguard. The reason was that, left to their own devices, this…
AND the show went on … “The show must go on” is one of the best known theatrical sayings, and it was never truer than at Bath Theatre Royal on the opening night of London Classic Theatre’s three day run of Abigail’s Party. Ten minutes into the show, Rebecca Birch, who was playing the leading…
HUMAN beings have been ringing bells for around five millennia – and this ancient art is still alive and thriving today, from the ringtones on your mobile phone to the great bongs of Big Ben, preceding BBC Radio 4 news. If you are lucky enough to live near a church with a set of bells…
JUST as the world’s press is full of news of striking movie actors, fighting for their place against the invisible but encroaching forces of Artificial Intelligence, up comes Bath Opera with a production of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro played out on a film set, where the casting couch is king and #MeToo is finding…
WHEREVER you go these days – doctors surgeries, pharmacies, schools, shops, banks … – there are signs saying that zero-tolerance policies exist and that customers mustn’t be rude and abusive to staff. And you can’t even blame Boris for that one, or Brexit. Most of us agree that manners have been diluted and rudeness is…
FIRST of all, congratulations to every one of the huge cast involved in Wincanton Primary School’s end of term Year 6 and Year 5 show, Peter Pan. It was directed by the teachers of the two classes, who chose Mark, Helen and Naomi Johnson’s version of the familiar story with its script by Sue Langwade….