IMAGINE yourself to be a famous playwright who, in later life, realises that a character from a play and another written three years later were actually the soul-mates each yearned for. In Afterplay, Brian Friel, sometimes called “the Irish Chekhov”, takes the work of the Russian writer and introduces Andrey from Three Sisters to Sonia…
THE Good Life, which started in 1975 and ran for three years and four series, has become one of the best loved television sitcoms of all time. John Esmonde and Bob Larby created four characters who were indelibly personified by Felicity Kendall, Richard Briers, Penelope Keith and Paul Eddington. Each of the 30 episodes lasted…
TWO powerful women with iron wills and a shrewd sense of business are behind the successes of both 9 to 5 , the film, and 9 to 5 the musical. It was the politically active dual Academy Award winning actress Jane Fonda who in 1980 had the idea of highlighting sexual harassment in the workplace…
WASHINGTON Irving’s famous Gothic tale about the dark goings-on at Sleepy Hollow, a Dutch settlement north of Tarrytown (later New York), has provided rich inspiration for theatre and film makers over the years since 1820 when it was written, in Birmingham. Now Tilted Wig has take up the artistic baton, commissioning an inventive new adaptation…
A PREMIERE, particularly a world premiere, is an exciting event, specially for a regional theatre, so there was a predictable buzz around Poole’s Lighthouse centre for the arts as the audience and guests arrived for the world’s first veiw of the new film, Lawrence: After Arabia. Filmed in Dorset, with many familiar views and locations…
THERE will always be discussion about which of Hardy’s Wessex novels is the greatest. Many would say Tess of the d’Urbevilles, which is unquestionably the best known, or Far From The Madding Crowd, the one that offers a happy future for the two central characters, or The Return of the Native, with its powerful evocation…
IT’s easy to see why young performers love Bugsy Malone, the Prohibition era musical first seen as a 1976 movie by Alan Parker, with an all-child cast including Jodie Foster as the singer Tallulah. It’s got catchy songs, great dance rhythms, an exciting story with speakeasies, warring bar-owners, gangsters armed with cream-shooting splurge guns and…
Bizet L’Arlesienne Suite Ravel Piano Concerto in G Prokofiev Autumnal Sketch Mussorgsky (arr. Ravel) Pictures at an Exhibition Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, leader Amyn Merchant Kirill Karabits: Conductor Louis Schwizgebel: Piano It’s great to be back! My last BSO review was posted in January 2020, so last night’s concert was an…
SAY Brooklyn to most people and they picture the dramatic bridge and a New York borough that has gone through several iterations of poverty and crime to its current uber-trendiness. What you probably don’t think about is gentility. But that is precisely what we see in the Brooklyn of Joseph Kesselring’s Arsenic and Old Lace,…
THERE are urban dwellers (and maybe country folk) who are really scared of woods. A legendary aunt sat locked in a car in a state of high terror when the rest of the family went for a walk in the New Forest. We have laughed about it many times. But, having just seen Craig White’s…