Please join me in the bar of the Fisher Theatre for a FREE pre-performance talk before the live cinema screening of Puccini’s Tosca from the Royal Opera House. I’ll be explaining a bit more about Puccini as a man who loved the best he could get – from fast cars to large cigars – and…
The Fisher Theatre has developed an enviable reputation over the last few years for putting on an excellent pantomime at Christmas, and I’ve seen tired London theatregoers light up when describing brilliance found in Bungay, but until now all that has been the work of visiting professional theatre companies. This year, building on the strength…
Tennessee Williams’ view of humanity, in terms of dead-eyed, disillusioned despair, can give even Ibsen and Thomas Hardy (neither famed for their rosy-tinted outlook) a serious run for their money. Suddenly Last Summer is a horrible story, told by terrible people, about other, even more disgusting people and the revolting things they do to others…
Bungay boasts several natural blessings when it comes to the arts. The town itself is of storybook prettiness; its Georgian theatre, sensitively restored in recent years, still has some original features excitingly intact from 1828: and Bungay’s ruined castle, meanwhile, dates back to 1173. Once the stronghold of Hugh Bigod, that rebellious Earl eventually had…
The Suffolk coast, though dotted with pastel-painted beach huts and gracious Edwardian esplanades, can also be unnervingly bleak – and eerie. So many East Anglian villages have slipped under the waves of the ever-encroaching North Sea, and many tell tales of ghostly church bells which toll beneath the tide, or once-proud manor houses now buried…
The last time I saw a one-man show which an actor had personally researched about the life, times and trials of his lifelong hero, it was Simon Callow’s brilliantly vivid journey Inside Wagner’s Head. Callow made a powerful, emotive case for Wagner’s flawed genius, and the evening was packed with fascinating information: in fact, so…
Stuff of Dreams Theatre Company first performed Anglian Mist in a site-specific, immersive performance on Orford Ness itself in June. Written by Tim Lane and Cordelia Spence, who also directs, the play’s theme is the mysterious military intelligence operations which took place on the Ness in the 1970s, although the plot’s key premise (a Death…