AMATEUR Players of Sherborne was the first non-professional company in our region to mount a show following the first lockdown of 2020, and their Waiting for Godot in the Paddock Gardens was such a success that they decided on the same venue for a Shakespearean compilation this year. Dress rehearsing on a beautiful Saturday afternoon,…
ONE of the best-known songs from Handel’s Acis and Galatea could have been the theme for this year’s Dorset Opera Festival. “Happy, happy we!” really summed up the atmosphere in the Coade Hall at Bryanston School. Opera lovers from across Dorset, starved of live performance for so long, turned out to enjoy a very different…
TWO of England’s greatest comics, Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel, born a year apart, boarded the same steamer, the converted cattle ship SS Cairnrona, to make a new life across the pond. Both were part of the travelling vaudeville company, Fred Karno’s Army. Laurel (then known as Stanley Jefferson), was Chaplin’s understudy. Charlie and Stan,…
AT first sight, you might think that Emlyn Williams’ 1935 drama Night Must Fall would be dated. The grumpy old hypochondriac in her wheel-chair, lording it over her staff and her penniless niece-companion, the bumbling Scotland Yard detective, the middle-aged bachelor looking for a wife and the cliche setting of the house in the middle…
ILLYRIA’s Wind in the Willows was one of the highlights of summer 2020, a colourful, funny show that told the beloved story well, and featured a brilliant Mr (Boris Johnson) Toad. We took a friend with two young children for their first ever open-air show and they loved it. This year, we took another friend…
WHAT joy! Live opera, and for the first time in our home town. It’s not that we have been starved of opera these past 18 months. Quite the contrary – we have seen more, with bigger name stars, than ever before, thanks to the wonders of streaming from the New York Met, the Royal Opera and…
THE title of this show reflects the way it was devised by the graduating cohort of Bristol Old Vic Theatre School’s BA in Professional Acting, from three different adaptations by Christopher Hampton, Anya Reiss, and Aaron Posner of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull. Guided by the imaginative hand of director Sally Cookson, they set out to…
THE lives of spies – defected and active – have provided rich pickings for writers and dramatists, with Alan Bennett’s An Englishman Abroad, Peter Moffat’s Cambridge Spies, Graham Greene’s The Third Man and John Le Carre’s tales of George Smiley leading the way for Ben Brown’s new play, A Splinter of Ice. Halfway through its opening…
I FIRST came across “political correctness” when, holding a door open at a department store so that a young women could have free access to the store, I was greeted with: “You wouldn’t have done that if I had been a man.” To say that I was shocked and confused would be putting it mildly…
TEN years after Bec Applebee first performed Oh Mary at Sandford Orcas, she was back again, courtesy of Artsreach, on a beautifully chilly night to rehears the story of her heroine, Mary Bryant. Sentenced to death by hanging for stealing a lace-trimmed bonnet, reprieved as good breeding stock for the new penal colony in Botany…