IBSEN’s A Doll’s House is a powerful drama about a woman with an adoring but controlling husband –and a big secret which will change her life in ways that none of the characters can imagine. Deeply shocking in its day, it is sometimes described as a proto-feminist play – with its famous finale of Nora…
STEPHEN Daldry’s multi-award winning 1992 production of An Inspector Calls is not only the National Theatre’s most successful show ever, and the world’s longest running revival, but is credited with reclaiming playwright JB Priestley from the back shelves of dated drama. Anyone who has seen the production – and that’s now millions around the world…
THE programme may advertise An Evening with Anton Du Beke, but you get a great deal more than an evening just in the company of the multi-talented Mr Du Beke. Joining the man we most associate as dancer then judge with the long-running TV show Strictly Come Dancing, are four top-of-the-range, beautifully costumed dancers, piano…
IN 2019, Before Covid, singer and songwriter Steve Knightley got together with historian Michael Wood to explore the stories of English songs about the working people, and a prototype show was performed All sorts of plans were made to create a show and tour it, but the pandemic stepped in. Now, thankfully, the idea has…
FRANK Loesser’s Guys and Dolls is not only his masterpiece, in a career that was full of clever and witty work, it is also one of the greatest musicals ever. It is entirely of its time – thanks to the brilliance of Damon Runyon’s tales of New York in the 1920s and 30s – yet…
GEOFFREY Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, written between 1387 and 1400 and detailing stories of pilgrims on the road from London to Canterbury, have spawned probably hundreds of other stories and plays, but none more heartfelt and natural than Adrian Harding’s Stepping on my Shadow, which has its premiere in Yeovil this week. Adrian has been acting,…
WHEN asked about the show Fisherman’s Friends – the Musical, a member of the actual group Fisherman’s Friends said: “Well, not only did they make a film, which we are not in, now there’s a musical which we are not in as they din’t think we were handsome enough to play ourselves”. Whatever the reason…
JOHN Steinbeck’s 1937 novella Of Mice and Men was drawn from the writer’s own experiences in California in the Great Depression, and paved the way for what is considered his masterpiece, the Nobel prize winning The Grapes of Wrath. The period has been a fertile ground for literature, drama and music, and, until recently, we…
IT is said that King Henry I died from eating a surfeit of lampreys, and while this new and flamboyant Daisy Evans production was never in danger of dying a theatrical death, it did came close to overwhelming Mozart’s wonderful opera, The Magic Flute. Individually there is little to criticise in Loren Elstein and Jake…
THE world of PG Wodehouse extends its delights from generation to generation, but most fans of Jeeves, Bertie Wooster, Blandings Castle, Gussie Fink-Nottle et al don’t know much about the man who created them. Playwright William Humble set about to correct that with his solo show, Wodehouse in Wonderland, performed by Robert Daws and playing…