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‘The Silence of Snow’ was the latest instalment in BLT’s Sunday Night offerings. If you are not familiar with them, do take note of them as they provided a rich and diverse range of entertainment. This was an accomplished piece of dramatized story telling.  At times, a ‘regular’ play yet, with frequent breaches of the fourth wall, the audience were drawn into the story telling. The play starts with a bone-chilling uncertainty – mist hangs, literally, in the auditorium (the […]

The theatre-goer off to see Pygmalion when it was first performed in London would probably have been surprised. Until George Bernard Shaw’s play, what an educated person would have known about Pygmalion, if they knew anything at all, was that it was the name of a Greek sculptor-king who fell in love with his statue when it came to life. It was a classical story then best known from translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and from the poetry of William Morris […]

By Peter Yolland Richard Everett’s bitter-sweet comedy set in a quintessentially English vicarage garden opened in 2006 to sell-out shows at the Chichester Festival. It follows Grace, a recently widowed vicar’s wife coming to terms with his passing, the loss of her family home to the potential new incumbent, the return of her missionary sister and a daughter with her own issues. It thus provides lots of scope for long hidden secrets to be unearthed and relationships examined. The play […]

By Patrick Neylan You’ve got to admire Alan Ayckbourn, even if you belong to the significant cadre of theatregoers who regard his work as hackneyed village-hall fodder. Back in 1979, Peter Hall described him as “one of the most talented … richest dramatists in the world”, but even then his plays were starting to be seen as too comfortable, complacent and predictable and much of his 80s work has dated badly. Yet 2001 saw a move away from the trivial […]