ON the 24th of September 1930 London’s glitterati gathered for the opening of a new Theatre, the Phoenix. It was a night when champagne corks popped and everything sparkled, including the first production Noel Coward’s Private Lives. Despite critic Ivor Brown writing ‘ Within a few years, the student of drama will be sitting in…
WHEN the curtain rose showing a white gauze curtain which in turn rose to reveal a completely bare white set dominated by a two-storey, futuristic house mounted on a revolve, my companion – and many others in the audience – exclaimed “Wow!” When the chorus entered, again clad in white, in contrast to the two…
THERE’S nothing predictable about Emma Rice’s productions other than their unpredictability, but for those of us in the South West who saw her development first hand with Kneehigh, before she went national and divided audiences and administrators at Shakespeare’s Globe, her take on Wuthering Heights was bound to be an exciting prospect. The co-production between…
THE Classic Thrills Company tour of The Cat and the Canary is a large scale production, filling the stage with big furniture and sets – a taste of things to come at Yeovil Octagon, which closes next year for a major refurbishment. John Willard’s original, which has spawned numerous film and theatre adaptation, gets a…
WHEN a documentary entitled Drag Queen at 16 was shown on BBC Three as part of their season about young people with amazing stories to tell, few thought that a 16-year-old who wanted to attend his school Prom dressed in drag, would provide the seeds for a successful stage musical and film. That is not…
AGAINST a background of doom and gloom, it’s hardly surprising that theatregoers are champing at the bit for a chance to return to venues as audiences watching their favourites, friends and families on stage again. It would be difficult to imagine a more perfect play than Philp Goulding’s version of the famous film The Titfield…
IN the classic David Lean film adaptations of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist and Great Expectations, several storylines, important in the books, have virtually been edited out in order to make the narrative flow more smoothly and quickly. Watching this, Shaun McKenna’s fifth stage adaptation of a Peter James novel, that there were just too many…
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…