Author: Graham Wyles

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF FANNY HILL at Bristol Old Vic

“The book is one of those more sniggered about than read. Not so much a manual of sex as the 70’s bearded recipe book, The Joy of Sex, but the reminiscences, laid out in letter form, of a young, parentless country girl who finds herself in sin city. Frances Hill (Fanny) is a girl who falls in love with sex as she falls in love for the first and only time. It is the story of a girl seduced by pleasure as much as by men . . . All in all this is a self-consciously bawdy romp performed by a top class cast in the perfect setting of the Bristol Old Vic.”

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Tom Stoppard’s ARCADIA on tour

“. . . The customary Stoppardian leaps of imagination are transmuted here into leaps between epochs and the play’s USP is the way it skips nimbly between the early nineteenth and latter twentieth centuries, drawing our attention, by way of a number of devices including speculations about rice pudding and jam, to the uni-direction of time or ‘entropy’. . . This stylish English Touring Theatre production offers everything a Stoppard fan might look for, fizzing as it does with intellectual challenge and might even gain a few converts along the way.”

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CLOSER EACH DAY at the Wardrobe, Bristol

” . . . Bristol is rapidly becoming something of a centre for improvised theatre and getting an early warm-up for the forthcoming Bristol Improv. Theatre Festival (BITFest) Closer Each Day last night gave the latest instalment of their improvised soap opera . . . Standup is now firmly established as a sub-genre and for one reason or another, perhaps its open-endedness and informality included, has become very popular. With a pint from downstairs to keep you going you might very well get hooked and find yourself going back to see how the unpredictable plots develop.

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Alan Ayckbourn’s ROUNDELAY at Bath Theatre Royal

” . . . For me the four plays didn’t hang together and were only saved from complete collapse by some good acting. E.M.Forster gives a useful distinction of the difference between a random sequence and a plot; whereas, ‘The king died then the queen died’, is a story, ‘The king died then the queen died of grief’, is a plot in virtue of the fact that the latter contains the element of causality. In Roundelay Mr. Ayckbourn has lost the plot in that sense, but hasn’t quite given us a satisfying replacement . . . ”

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GROUNDED at the Arnolfini, Bristol

“. . This performance by Lucy Ellison is as intense and concentrated a piece of acting as you are likely to find anywhere on the contemporary stage . . . The direction by Christopher Haydon gets the most from the scenario, leading his actress in such a way as to maintain interest with great economy of stagecraft . . . George Brant does not offer any alternative point of view or any answers, but he does raise some fundamental, important and urgent questions about the way we go about killing one another. This is theatre at its most vital, brilliantly acted.”

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