THE members of Salisbury’s Studio Youth Theatre chose Russ Tunney’s highly-praised adaptation of Joan Aiken’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (the first of her long series of Wolves books) for the first show of 2023, on at the theatre in Ashley Road until Saturday 18th February. Set in a time that never was – the…
Akimenko Nocturne Glazunov From the Middle Ages: Prelude Tanayev St John of Damascus Shostakovich Symphony No 4 Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, leader Amyn Merchant Bournemouth Symphony Chorus Kiril Karabits: Conductor LAST month the BSO announced that Kiril Karabits would be ending his tenure as chief conductor in the summer of 2024 after 15 years. Karabits’s…
THE current touring production of Phil Porter’s adaptation of The Lavender Hill Mob started its national progress last October and ends next weekend in Cornwall. Directed by Jeremy Sams, it stars Miles Jupp and Justin Edwards with a further six multi-role-playing actors to bring to life this stage version of the classic 1951 Ealing comedy,…
THE current tour of the Conor McPherson play Girl from the North Country, set in Depression-era Duluth, Minnesota, at the bottom western corner of Lake Superior with songs by the city’s most famous son, Bob Dylan, returns to the south west at Bristol Hippodrome until 4th February. It’s an unforgettable piece of theatre, combining the…
WHEN five cleaning ladies, dressed in late 18th century clothes, but with modern boots instead of delicate slippers on their feet, took over the stage with the house lights still up, and informed the audience that they were going to tell them the tale of Pride and Prejudice from their point of view, you could…
ONE morning in February 1987, very early, we left our hotel in Spindleruv Mlyn by bus, headed for what was marked the “Friendship Path” on the map – the border between what was then Czechoslovakia and Poland, high in the Czech Krkonose mountains. Thick snow was on the ground. We had taken breakfast with a…
IF you had asked me to nominate when Cher first burst on the pop music scene with her 12- years-senior husband Sonny Bono, (played by Lucas Rush), topping the US and UK charts with I Got You Babe, it certainly would have been much later than 1965. At this time, very much under the influence…
EDWARD Albee’s 1962 masterpiece Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, set in the home of college history teacher George and his wife Martha, daughter of the college founder, has lost none of its power in the more than 60 years since it was first staged. It has been filmed (with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in…
GLEE – defined as “great delight, especially from one’s own good fortune or another’s misfortune”. Glee – a popular American television series set in high school, about the rights of passage of teenagers, at whom it is aimed. Glioma – a brain cancer. Stuart Slade wrote Glee and Me in 2019, and its audacious style…
ALAN Ayckbourn’s first hit play, Relatively Speaking, was originally performed in 1965, when life was very, very different. What isn’t different is people, and it is that certainty that makes the UK’s most prolific playwright an enduring legend. This is a play set in the “swinging sixties”, a time when sexual freedom was big news,…