FORTY years after its premiere in Scarborough, Alan Ayckbourn’s A Chorus of Disapproval, the play set in and around an amateur production of John Gay’s A Beggar’s Opera, returns to Salisbury Playhouse for a four week run. With its cast of 13, it’s a big undertaking and director Gareth Machin is keen to point out…
A COCKTAIL of Thomas Mann’s semi-autographical novella Death in Venice, a Benjamin Britten score composed in the last months of his life, and the tumbling, mime and balancing skills of circus performers looks like a guaranteed mixture for a disastrous opera production. But if you add in the imaginative talents of director Olivia Fuchs, designer…
THE arts are being removed from school curriculums, grants for further studies are being axed, London theatres are constantly criticised for exorbitant ticket prices, pros are being precious over pronouns and diversity box-ticking is rampant. So perhaps it’s no coincidence that the importance of amateur dramatics is ever more current, and that the brilliant Ian…
THERE are so many conspiracy theories about the composition of Cosi fan Tutte that they would make the basis of the plot for an opera in their own right. Was it the Emperor Joseph II, who died shortly after the first performance of the opera in 1790, who suggested the idea to Mozart, or since…
EVEN lifelong opera-lovers can sometimes feel dispirited. Opera survives on the support, generosity and love of a generation born within 20 years of the war – anyone looking around them in the stalls, or the grand tier, or the balcony or, frankly, even the amphitheatre of the Royal Opera House might be forgiven for wondering where…
NOEL Coward’s Still Life, better known as the stiff-lipped weepie Brief Encounter, focuses on genteel star-crossed lovers Alec and Laura, thrown together when she gets a sooty smut caught in her eye on a railway station. In the film, their love is a tragically doomed affair, but in this more nuanced adaptation by Dorchester Drama…
WE Brits really do love our murder mysteries, and now Salisbury’s Studio Theatre has found an ancient Agatha Christie that tells a rather different story, but with all the essential elements thrown in, all ready for a two-week sell-out staging. The provenance of Love from a Stranger is a bit of a mystery in itself,…
IN the mid 1990s, a survey of the most performed plays in the UK named John Godber as the third most popular playwright behind Shakespeare and Alan Ayckbourn. By comparison with the Bard of Avon, who still remains unchallenged at the head of affairs, and Alan Ayckbourn, although not quite as popular as he once…
IF there was such a term as “Grand Ballet”, you could use it to label The Sleeping Beauty. Every thing about it is on a grand scale – Tchaikovsky’s score, the second longest he composed for any genre, Marius Petipa’s original choreography, based in the Brothers Grimm’s interpretation of Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty, even the original…
THE punchline of the old joke about the local yokels’ reply to a passing motorist asking for directions: “I wouldn’t start from here in the first place”, in some ways fits this adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s story. The story takes us back and forth from late 19th century Pennsylvanian coal fields and the battle between…