LUCY Kirkwood’s powerful play The Welkin had its premiere at the National Theatre early in 2020, where its intended run was cut short by the first COVID lockdown. Now the students of Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, directed by Emma Callander, have taken on the play and are performing it at the Weston Studio at…

Bath Mozartfest 2024 – take 2 PLAYWRIGHT, composer and actor Noel Coward and American entertainer Danny Kaye come to mind when summarising the 34th Bath Mozart Fest. Coward was a great one for finding the right venue for his plays, sometimes delaying an opening night until the right theatre was available, and festival artistic director…

THE 11th Celebrate Voice festival in Salisbury was another record-breaker, founder and artistic director Lynsey Docherty (covered in a black “flashers” mac) told the packed audience at the final event, the last performance of Donizetti’s The Elixir of Love at the Guildhall. Lynsey (pictured right)  was all ready (under the voluminous raincoat) to go on…

CLOSE your eyes and you are listening to Dolly Parton – every note, every inflection, every accent in both the songs and the dialogue performed by Tricia Paoluccio in Here You Come Again, the show she co-wrote and is now touring the UK until spring 2025. It is a truly remarkable performance. And the story,…

TERENCE Rattigan’s popularity and fame fell victim to the “big new thing” of the mid-50s – the Kitchen Sink Drama that flowed from the Royal Court Theatre in Chelsea. The time from Rattigan as the most highly paid screenwriter in the world to his relegation as “old hat” was brief, and his restoration has been…

BACK in 1996, theatre director and writer Sheldon Epps first had the idea of setting Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in the Swing-era Harlem of the 1940s – and a brilliant idea it was. With a book by Cheryl L West, and entirely using the music of Duke Ellington, the show cleverly tells the original story at…

AN old man with a long straggly beard shuffles over the ancient mosaic floor, wearing an aged dressing gown and a floppy night cap. He sits at his desk and starts to dig into his long memory. He remembers the young boy with the long, thin fingers who was unsuited to the physically demanding farmwork…

OLD theatres exert an extraordinary power over us. Whether it is a restored beauty like the historic theatres at Bath, Bristol, Bury St Edmunds or Richmond North Yorkshire, or the eerily dilapidated old Hippodrome at Great Yarmouth, we are drawn to them. Some – even the most carefully restored – have ghosts, while others are…

SEVERAL people used to tell the late, great Howard Coggins that he was the spitting image of Henry VIII, and some of them phrased it “living spit.” So when, in 2012, he and his longtime friend and fellow actor Stu Mcloughlin cobbled together a script about the much-married king to enter Bristol Old Vic’s Ferment…

“THERE is no such thing as a bad audience, only bad performances” is an opinion that is often expressed, but I tend to dispute the claim, writing as someone who was a cast member of a farce which, after having the audience in fits of laughter night after night, ran up against an audience that…