Before concentrating on The Light in the Piazza, which runs at the Royal Festival Hall (until 5 July 2019), I want to give a big shout out to the whole of London's South Bank London. Whenever I have cause to visit, which is not nearly enough, I look to have the time to take in whatever is happening here. This cultural hub across the Thames from the...

Sagittarius edged from her mooring in the middle of Eyemouth Harbour. The time was 6.58am and the rain hammered down. Anglers on board the 15-capacity catamaran chatted about the prospects of catching while skipper Ronnie Marshall edged the vessel into the tideway. The swell was OK and the wind moderate but oh that rain. We were drenched as we tack...

Hansel and Gretel is the second English National Opera production to be locked into the Open Air's theatre season at Regent's Park. Following the acclaimed operatic production of Henry James's horror novella The Turn of the Screw in 2018, this is Engelbert Humperdinck's 19th century operatic reworking of the Grimmm Brothers' fairytale. As someone n...

The Cotswolds covers an almost 800 square miles that takes in the five English counties of Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Warwickshire, Wiltshire and Worcestershire. A designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, it offers quintessential English country towns and villages of honey-coloured Cotswold stone The Cotswolds also has more than 3,000 mile...

9/11, two numbers that conjure huge emotional resonance. The al-Qaeda terrorist attacks of Tuesday September 11 2001 - on the World Trade Centre in New York and Pentagon in Virginia - was witnessed by many, many millions who were glued to TVs around the globe. The overwhelming, barbaric, futility of 9/11 tends to be the abiding memory for those who...

The Open Air Theatre Regents Park stages an annual season of four major productions and one of these usually arrives from 'left field'. It is a work that carries a risk of not quite resonating with the wide demographic range of regular theatregoers to the theatre. Our Town, which opens the 2019 season at the Open Air Theatre, is just such a product...