FeaturesHot Cross bunny
Chariots of Fire star Ben Cross, now playing the mysterious Rabbit in HBO’s TV series Banshee, talks to Ben Dowell about his habit of playing bad guys and how his work has led to a life outside the UK
Musical theatre training news
Associated Studios A new, full-time (four days a week), one-year diploma course in musical theatre begins at Associated Studios on October 1 this year. Based at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, London, Associated Studios was…
Raw materials for raw talent
Licensing firm R&H serves the educational sector with musical scores and aids for students It’s a very ancient saying/But a true and honest thought/That if you become a teacher/By your pupils you’ll be taught So…
Letters of the week
Arts Council surplus, teaching diction and projection, audience behaviour, memories of Paul Shane and Hilary Labow and poor treatment of Emma Watson and Mary-Jane Burcher
Michael Earl
Appearing in small acting roles with many opera and ballet companies, Michael Earl enjoyed a long career until he was struck down by the MRSA superbug. After National Service, he won a place at RADA…
Douglas Mounce
A former accountant who became one of the country’s leading pantomime dames, Douglas Mounce played 27 seasons throughout his career, which also spanned a quarter-century in local radio, along with theatre and TV work. In…
Radio review: Electric Dreams – The Giorgio Moroder Story; Britain in a Box – Desmond’s; Heresy
If you’re going to produce an extensive, two-part programme about an iconic music producer, you’d be hard pushed to get anyone more qualified than Nile Rodgers to front it. In the first part of BBC…
Emma the enabler
Emma Rice, joint artistic director of Kneehigh talks to Natasha Tripney about her projects for 2013 and how she has managed to bring the Cornish atmosphere to the city
Tara for now
Founded more than 35 years ago, Tara Arts the cross-cultural London venue is now creating a new, enhanced site. Natasha Tripney explores.
Anne Valery
Before making her mark as one of the main writers of Tenko (1981-84), the BBC Television drama that attracted up to 15 million viewers, Anne Valery had enjoyed a successful career as an actress and…
TV review: How to Win Eurovision; The Fall
Woody Allen once famously declared Nazis in shiny boots as being beyond satire. For esteemed comic musician Tom Lehrer, it was the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger. For the rest of…
Letters of the week
Skills gap supply and demand, venues’ overheads, PFA kicks off, European project seeks volunteers, kind words for Mary-Jane Burcher and Marc Sinden’s common sense
Sean Caffrey
Sean Caffrey was part of a generation of actors that came out of Northern Ireland in the 1960s to find prominence on British television. He made his small-screen debut in Boy in the Smoke in…
Edwin Shirley
Edwin Shirley was a larger-than-life character with a love of showbusiness, unbounded enthusiasm for everything he did, and a great generosity of spirit. He was best known for founding the companies Edwin Shirley Trucking and…
Patrick Garland
If anyone working in British theatre over the past half-century could claim to have been a renaissance man, it was surely Patrick Garland, whose multifaceted life included spells as a poet, novelist, editor, actor, television…
Radio review: Tony and Rose; Jungle of Cities; Love, Etc; Dead Man’s Suit
A tender but bruising account of dementia is filtered through an architect’s view of the world in Nicola Baldwin’s Tony and Rose. But all the design mantras in the world can’t help a son faced…
TV review: Murder on the Home Front; Life of Crime
“Those bastards have bombed my crime scene,” exclaims maverick police pathologist Dr Lennox Collins (Patrick Kennedy). The bastards in question being the Luftwaffe, the crime scene being the terraced house where a young woman’s body…
Independent thinking
James Williams talks to Alistair Smith about shaking off the Shaftesbury’s reputation as a graveyard for shows and his plan to make it the theatre of choice for West End musical producers
Roles fit for acting royalty
Katy Stephens talks to Matt Trueman about life in Stratford under the command of new artistic director Gregory Doran and her forthcoming role as Tamora, Queen of the Goths in Titus Andronicus
Tim Hampton
From tea boy to managing director at 20th Century Fox – the stuff of which legends are made, but also the true-life story of the British film producer Tim Hampton. During a cinema career marked…
Paddy not so ha ha ha
Paddy Considine talks about the reprisal of his Mr Whicher role and gives Matthew Hemley an honest account of his television career choices
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