THERE was a huge stir, followed by many awards, when Matthew Lopez’s play The Inheritance opened at The Young Vic in 2018, where its sell-out run led to a fast West End transfer. So perhaps it’s surprising that the American writer’s earlier works didn’t make it across the Atlantic, although his first play, The Whipping…

EMLYN Williams wrote his play Night Must Fall in 1935, long before the majority of the population felt themselves equipped to diagnose narcissism and most of the burgeoning number of psychiatric and psychological dis-eases of their fellow humans. But early audiences had absolutely no doubt that there was something very rum about Dan, the chipper…

EIGHT members of Sturminster Newton Amateur Dramatic Society (SNADS) have been working together for weeks to bring Craig White’s three Open University graduate plays to life on the stage of The Exchange – and the production was a thought-provoking delight for both audience and participants. The three short plays, Barney, Double-Glazed and Blood Sport, were…

THE Surrey-based Blackeyed Theatre celebrates its 20th anniversary with a new adaptation of Bram Stoker’s iconic epistolary novel Dracula, 100 years after it was first brought to the stage. The production, adapted and directed by Nick Lane, is on a UK tour until May next year, so if you miss it at Bath Theatre Royal, where…

IN the last line of the lyric of the title song of this show are the words that sum up this whole production … “and we’ll have love, laughter, be happy ever after”. From the moment the curtain rises to the wholehearted finale, BLOC, the only local company to present shows at this 1,904 seater…

WALKING past the stage door after the show, I was overtaken by a petite young lady desperately attempting to explain to her very large companion (he could have been cast as an arch tough guy in Peaky Blinders) that what they had been watching was not a narrative tale, but one full of serial symbolism….

FOR many in the varied press night audience at Bath Theatre Royal, Big Brother would have been a TV show they had seen since childhood, and Room 101 a favourite radio, and later television comedy show. Perhaps that’s why it was necessary for the Lindsay Posner production of Ryan Craig’s adaptation of the iconic 1949…

WITH echoes of the tragic illness and death from multiple sclerosis of the great cellist Jacqueline du Pre hovering like a ghostly spectre in the background, this highly emotionally charged two-hander explores the relationship between a 42-year-old internationally renowned violinist Stephanie Abrahams, newly diagnosed with MS, and her psychiatrist Dr Feldmann. For two and a…

IT would seem that Colin Ingram, the producer of the current tour of Grease, has the same philosophy when it comes to selling something to the public as Tesco founder Sir Jack Cohen, who is credited with saying ‘pile it high and sell it cheap’. From the start, this production leaves nothing hidden, putting everything out…

IT was a courageous act by BLOG when they choose My Fair Lady for their 2024 production at Bath’s Theatre Royal. I can almost here the cries of “How can you say that, My Fair Lady is one of the all time great musicals, so why did it take courage to choose it ?” The…