Reviews

Dorian Gray is alive! Make no mistake. Not looking too shabby for someone over 150 years old. He’s a photographer now. It’s much easier to capture a soul in a click rather than a brush stroke. The way to immortality fast-tracked from paint to lens. It must be very reassuring for hell that souls are so snappily taken. But he died, didn’t he? Slashed his own painting in the attic, found as a desiccated corpse. I did wonder whether ‘Dorian Gray’ would be a metaphor for all those men who play fast and loose with aestheticism—‘life for life itself’—driving a

Dial M for Murder – written by Frederick Knott, directed by Val Smith It is always a pleasure to go to the Memorial Hall in Broadstone. It was doubly so to see Am Dram alive and well with a packed audience for this fabulous play. But before I get into that I have to say what a wonderful set these guys had built. The Memorial Hall is only little, and the stage is quite tiny so what Peter Watson and Estelle Hughes managed to do with it is nothing short of miraculous. Costumes were also top notch. I’m no expert

My show this evening was part of NST City’s Make It SO festival. I was sat in the studio theatre on this occasion and, having not been up here before, I remarked on what a good space it is to discover little gems of theatre. Rachel O’Neill’s The Fasting Girl was one such gem, glittering with a fresh and new perspective on the theme of protests and hunger strikes. It told the tale of Eva, a young activist refusing to eat and only talking in ‘fairy’ tales. As Eva’s mother understandably panics and despairs for her daughter’s health, she is

At under 40 minutes in length, this script-in-hand play for voices could be described as informative rather than entertaining, dealing as it does with the plight of ‘fallen women’ in Hyde, Winchester, but its content, highlighting the plight of many unfortunate women who were sentenced to 12 months hard labour at the County Bridewell for having illegitimate babies, was extremely interesting. Led by local landowner and magistrate Sir Robert Allan (Kate McCarthy Price) and the Rev John Wellwood (Ros Liddiard), the arguments flowed back and forth between these two traditionalists and reformer Elizabeth Howard (Katherine Hodgkinson), the latter arguing that

NST City prides itself on its support of local artists at various stages of their careers, be they professional or amateur, and this February is excited to be holding the 2020 Make It SO festival that showcases their skills and talents. 19 shows from 18 companies over a three week period is no mean feat to attain! Mudlark Theatre is one of those companies, a new local group who describe themselves as “a collection of excitable people from Hampshire who love working together and love making theatre. […] We like making people laugh, we like making people think, we like

James And The Giant Peach and The Witches If I had a passion as a child, besides musicals, it was reading. I would spend hours escaping to the fantasy worlds created by Beatrix Potter, Enid Blyton, Lewis Carroll – and, of course, Roald Dahl. I therefore jumped at the opportunity to see Chesil Youth Theatre performers bring their adaptations of two classic Dahl stories to life. Greeted by an open black stage, simply adorned by an array of chairs (all different to each other), I knew our imaginations would be needed to immerse us in the wonderful world of James