Reviews

The actress of the title is Lydia Martin, who has decided that she is calling time on her career. The play follows her last performance and the interaction she has with a dysfunctional family, an ex-husband and an eager-to-please dresser and theatrical agent. While the audience seemed to appreciate the production, I came away feeling unimpressed and frustrated for the group. I wanted Christine Hughes as Lydia to be stronger and more in charge of the stage, to command our attention, to be the bitter and sharp-of-tongue old actress who makes us feel upset for her at the end, but

When BMT told me almost a year ago that they were planning to perform this show, my heart sank as it has been done locally so many times and just did not seem exciting enough for this innovative, first-rate company. I could not have been more wrong, and it could not have been better. If you analyse what makes a particular production great, it is not just the performances, wonderful though they may be, but everything else too – set, lighting, sound, costumes, make-up, musicians and a million other things that come together to make the whole. By and large,

As a young man, I worked in the book department at Harrods, and an abiding memory is of how the novels by ‘Miss Read’ about English village life flew off the shelves. I assumed that they were rather obvious and unsubtle evocations of the sort of roses-round-the-door existence that might appeal in theory (they would have hated it in real life) to the matrons of Knightsbridge and Kensington. Only later did I discover that the books are much more than that: they have their share of stereotypical rustic characters and events, certainly, but they are also full of humour and,

Abstract artist Virgie invites her daughter, sister and closest friends to her 84th birthday celebrations at her beach-house home – then proceeds to shock them all by confessing to being ‘an octogenarian intent on suicide’: she is determined to take a one-way walk into the sea in order to avoid her body and mind degenerating as she gets older. However, she underestimates their determination to thwart her plans…. Playwright April de Angelis is quoted as saying that she wanted to create ‘a powerful older woman who wants to take control over her life’, while the programme describes Virgie as ‘an

We all know The Darling Buds of May via the ITV David Jason television version, but I was unaware that it had previously been successful as both a novel and a subsequent stage play adaption. The title itself is from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’): ‘Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May and summer’s lease hath all too short a date’. It is testimony to the affection inspired by the character created by David Jason that the utterance of the very first ‘perfick’ should bring such a warm response from the large and loyal Bishopstoke audience. Director

‘Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd’ – so starts Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 musical thriller. The tale of the famous Fleet Street barber dates back to 1846, when he appeared as the fictitious villain in the Victorian penny dreadful, ‘The String of Pearls’. As a composer, Sondheim has written some fairly complex musicals, and any amateur company choosing to take on Sweeney Todd needs to rise to the challenge or risk making a complete hash of it. Thankfully, Winchester Musical and Opera Society do rise to the challenge admirably. David Tatnall’s direction sees the audience submerged into a vaudeville experience, bringing