Tag Archives: The Theatre Royal

Win Guide to March

Lainston House
Lainston House

Ladies and gentlemen of Winchester, spring has nearly sprung! And it’s about time too.  According to the astronomical definition, the first official day of Spring in 2015 is on March 20th.  Some of you will be celebrating this momentous burst of growth and sunshine with the Winchester duathlon on Sunday March 22nd which this year is being held at Lainston House.  It’s a 2.5km run, a 7.5km bike race and a further 2.5km run, followed by a private bbq.  Billy the falconer will be on hand with his birds of prey to keep the children (and adults) entertained.

Others might prefer to celebrate with the  CAMRA Winchester Real Ale and Cider Festival, which is being held at the Winchester Guildhall on Friday 20th & Saturday 21st March.  Tickets are running low so do book in advance to avoid disappointment.  There will be tutored beer-tasting sessions available introduced by writer and beer expert Adrian Tierney-Jones and over a hundred different real ales, ciders, perries and foreign bottled beers to behold.

Cream teas on the Watercress Line
Cream teas on the Watercress Line

Mum’s the word on Sunday 15th March, and the Watercress line is offering a traditional afternoon cream tea onboard a steam train. Don’t forget to order some spring flowers from the divinely named Mills in Bloom Florists & Vintage Interiors, where Mother’s Day local deliveries are available all day on Saturday 14th March.  Other gifts on offer include vintage items, pictures, glassware & china. The aforementioned Lainston House will be offering a homely 17th century barn or 3AA Rosette awarded restaurant lunch, and a champagne tea. All guests attending the three-course Sunday lunch will also be treated to a free falconry display. The Winchester Hotel and Spa are also planning lunch or afternoon tea treats, with a prize draw to win a luxury spa day for two. The whole party will receive a free glass of fizz – or non-alcoholic fizz for the kids and non-drinkers. And the day can be rounded off with a few giggles at the Theatre Royal Winchester which will be presenting Richard Herring and his take on death, love, religion and spam javelins at 8pm.

The Cathedral’s newly refurbished and relaunched Refectory will be hosting a special evening on the 13th March at 7pm to mark the 200th anniversary of the publication of Jane Austen’s fourth novel, Emma. Tickets are £40 and include a glass of sparkling wine on arrival, a three-course meal and tea or coffee. After dinner, Dr Nigel Paterson will give an illustrated talk about Austen and what we know about her from circa 1815. Some ideas will also be given about following in Jane’s footsteps around places she would have known 200 years ago. Dr Nigel Paterson regularly gives after-dinner talks about Jane Austen and other topics of cultural interest. Educated at Winchester College and then Jesus College, Cambridge, he was later a Senior Lecturer in English for the University of Winchester.

Captain Finn and the Pirate Dinosaurs
Captain Finn and the Pirate Dinosaurs

Les Petits Theatre’s Captain Flinn and the Pirate Dinosaurs will be on offer for young theatre fans at the Theatre Royal between Wed 25th – Thurs 26th March (Wed 4pm & Thurs 1.30pm, 4pm).  And if you’re keen to ‘cultivate’ your kid, don’t forget to call into the City Museum, which has plenty available for children such as sorting artefacts like an archaeologist, brass rubbing, Anglo-Saxon pot design, quizzes and the opportunity to try on all sorts of period costumes and see what you’d look like as a Roman, a Saxon, a Victorian gent or an Edwardian lady. Adults welcome too! The museum has just acquired a large collection of locally collected archaeological items, due to go on display in Autumn 2015.

FIGURE GROUND - Yorke Dance Project
FIGURE GROUND – Yorke Dance Project

Finally, our editor recommends the Yorke Dance Project ‘Figure Ground 2015’ at the Theatre Royal on 24th March. Founded by dancer-turned-choreographer Yolande Yorke-Edgell, the company’s lush and lively mixed bill features the quartet Lingua Franca, the first new work in a decade by the American-born UK modern dance giant Robert Cohan OBE. No spring chicken but still a sharp-witted creative, Cohan turns 90 on March 27th. The programme also includes Yorke-Edgell herself in the revival of a Cohan solo dating from 1978, a sextet by the promising (and, at 17, certifiably young) Charlotte Edmonds and a septet by Yorke-Edgell set against a computer-animation backdrop. You can read more on the company and its work later this month on this website, but for now we can all start to kick up our heels in anticipation of the impending season.

Talking Murder with Lucy Worsley

Lucy Worsley
Lucy Worsley

Touring her current talk on murder, Lucy Worsley – author, TV presenter and Chief Curator of Historic Royal Palaces – visits the Theatre Royal, Winchester with a grizzly package of scintillating information that helps transport startling notions from the past into our own time.  Asked how she feels about such macabre subject matter, and what we might learn from it, Lucy explains that the 19th century saw a distinct rise in the fear of murder.

People began to get obsessed with the idea that they might be murdered, and you see that in Victorian art, fiction and theatre.  It’s a luxury, really, to be so free from care that you can afford to worry about something as inherently unlikely as being murdered.  It goes along with neurosis, paranoia and anxiety and all the other things we ‘enjoy’ about life in the modern city!”

Lucy Worsley has become a bit of a household name to students studying at The University of Winchester. Breaking a series of boundaries as a female historian and presenter, she has brought certain aspects of social history (such as wardrobe and dance) to the forefront, legitimising her choice of topics in academic circles.

Lucy stresses that Historic Royal Palaces is a charity.  Every penny that visitors spend on their admission ticket goes towards our conservation and education work; we don’t get any money from the government or the Royal Family.  So we have to make sure that the type of history we research will appeal to kids, families, tourists – a really wide range of people.  I like the challenge of using things people can really relate to – like lovely dresses – to open up the whole history of society.”

I ask Lucy how she feels about the rise in social history and how it will affect her work and the focus of her research.

“Because I work for Historic Royal Palaces people think I might only be interested in kings and queens, but I’ve always been drawn to people who are a bit marginal to the main story: the servants, the mistresses, the bit-part players.  What particularly interests me about kings and queens is the way that they tend to be the best-documented people of their day, and that you can really get under their skin as representative of Tudor, or Stuart, or Georgian people at large as well as heads of state.”

Accessibility is one of the core objective for Lucy’s unique choice of subject matter – from blogging about the cod-piece to presenting on the Royal Wardrobe. The diversity of media at her disposal, plus the balance between academic research and commercial output, is what makes her career unusual and inspiring to young historians, particularly as the rise in gender studies, social history, and accessibility are currently hotly debated. But for Lucy the emphasis has always been on curating:

Lucy Worsley
Lucy Worsley

I knew from the age of 18 that I wanted to work in the field of historic buildings as a curator, and I dedicated myself to achieving that like an Exocet missile.  The route I took was to work my way up through jobs as assistant curator and then as curator at English Heritage and Glasgow Museums, before joining Historic Royal Palaces ten years ago as Chief Curator.”

This grounding in academic research feeds both historic exhibitions and commercial projects. As she says, “Any exhibition, book or show arises out of research – the bread-and-butter day-to-day work of being a historian. By that I mean research into historic artefacts, research into an archive of documents or perhaps more active research like carrying out a re-creation or an investigation of a particular event or process.  So whether commercial or academic it comes from the same place.  For academic historians, it’s important that they publish their research in a peer-reviewed journal so that the world’s experts in that field can read it.  For a public historian, like me, the aim is more to intrigue a larger number of people to go on to learn more.”

As a fellow historian it’s comforting to hear that the processes applied both commercially and academically are similar. Perhaps Lucy Worsley is paving a path for the rest of us to strive for such varied careers. Tonight, aptly enough on Friday the 13th of February, you can catch her at the Theatre Royal , Winchester where she’ll demonstrate that murder – or the idea of it – has formed trends throughout history. The evening [editor’s note: which is, not surprisingly, now sold out] exemplifies the juicy material that can inspire historians and general audiences alike.

by Rebecca JS Nice

Visit www.lucyworsley.com for more information.

Win Guide to January

It’s official. Christmas is over, New Year’s Eve passed in a blur of bubbles and bongs and a grey, dreary January has nudged its way in to break up the revelry.

Parkrun
Parkrun

So how to combat the winter blues? Well, to work off some of the festive indulgence and get involved in some outdoor fitness, why not join in with Parkrun every Saturday at 9am in the North Walls Recreation Ground? It’s open to all runners, from nervous beginners to spandex-clad pros, and it is an entirely free community endeavour to get people outdoors for a 5k run against the clock. All you have to do is register (once only is all that’s necessary) and bring along your printed bar code so you can get your time. It’s about fun rather than pressure, so not a bad way to get fit without the commitment of a gym membership if that isn’t your thing.

THE EIGHT: REINDEER MONOLOGUES
THE EIGHT: REINDEER MONOLOGUES

If you aren’t quite ready to let the festive theme go, then you could consider Jeff Goode’s ‘The Eight: The Reindeer Monologues’ by local theatre company Gallows Productions on 12th & 13th January at the Theatre Royal. The shows are dark and definitely adult in content so not a family panto affair. Tickets are a fiver or £7 with some mulled wine thrown in for those who aren’t on the wagon for January – or feel like falling off.

The Winchester Chamber Orchestra New Year concert takes place on the 10th January at St Paul’s Church. The programme includes Mozart’s piano concerto, Haydn’s symphony number  103 and Brahm’s St Anthony Variations. Later in the month the Winchester City Festival choir will be performing a concert on 31st January at St Swithun’s School. The programme includes Tsunami Requiem by Chris Williams, a dramatic commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the Asian tsunami.

Cllr Eileen Berry, Mayor of Winchester
Cllr Eileen Berry, Mayor of Winchester

The Office of the Mayor of Winchester is one of the oldest mayoralties in England. The city was first given permission during the reign of Richard the Lionheart to create the role. The current Mayor, Cllr Eileen Berry, is the 815th on the historical roster and she has a busy start to the year. There’s the 6th annual Mayor’s Charities Quiz Night at the Winchester Guildhall on 9th January. Tickets are available from the Tourist Information office. Or, further up the hill, she’ll be opening her Mayors Choice art exhibition at the Discovery Centre featuring important local work from 31st January.

Twin Wild at The Railway
Twin Wild at The Railway

The Railway Inn has a great line-up of live music and comedy for January. Acts include rock quartet Twin Wild on 29th January, described by BBC Radio 1’s Edith Bowman as “The love child of Bastille and Biffy Clyro”. Or why not pop along to Roots and join in with Winchester’s longest running open mic night? Entry is free every Monday at 8.30pm and all levels of artists are welcome, from seasoned pros to first time gig’ers. Alternatively, banish the Sunday blues twice a month with the Late Train open mic comedy night. Again, entry is free with a donation bucket.

Plenty to do on a budget to brighten up a drab, cold January.

October Win Guide

Hampshire Harvest Weekend
Hampshire Harvest Weekend

The tractors are twitching.  The pumpkins are plump.  It’s the Hampshire Harvest weekend (4th & 5th October), and Winchester Cathedral is throwing a free weekend of family-oriented events celebrating the County’s food and farming.  Entry into the Cathedral is free all weekend too. Displays and activities include Kidsroam mobile farm,
 horse and carriage rides,
 vintage farming machinery,
 a static falconry display, the Hampshire & Isle of Wight Air Ambulance Pod,
 poultry displays 
and a vintage fairground organ.   The Harvest event is held in partnership with Hampshire Farmers Market, Sparsholt College, The New Forest Show and Hampshire County Council.

Winchester Comedy Festival
Winchester Comedy Festival

To laugh off some of the root vegetables, The Winchester Comedy Festival is running from 2nd – 5th October at the Discovery Centre, The Theatre Royal and The Railway.  There’s a brochure available here, but some of the headline acts are sold out so make sure you have booked in advance.

Speaking of witty folk, the absolutely fabulous Joanna Lumley will be in conversation with John Miller at Winchester Cathedral on 21st October at 7.30pm, followed by a drinks reception.  Tickets are available to book online at £15 or £10 for Friends of the Cathedral. The evening will raise money to save the medieval stained glass windows in the building.

Trench Coach: From Field to Fashion
Trench Coach: From Field to Fashion

The Minster Gallery will be presenting work from The Society of Women Artists (founded in 1857) from 10th October until 10th November.  Celebrating contemporary female talent in oil painting, water colour, sculpture, printing and ceramics, entry is free and it’s a great excuse to pop down to the Square for a post-exhibition drink at The Old Vine. The Discovery Centre will be opening the exhibition Trench Coat: From Field to Fashion on 4th October, which is running until 21st December.  Introduced by Hilary Alexander OBE, the fascinating theme will explore everything and anything trench coat-related, from the more traditional WW1 calvary garb to such filmic connections as Marlene Dietrich in Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair.

Halloween at Winchester City Mill
Halloween at Winchester City Mill

Later in the month you can get in the mood for Halloween by joining Supernatural Tours on a guided tour of Winchester’s ghostly past, 28th October 7.30pm – 8.30pm, starting at the Royal Oak. Alternatively, if you pop into Winchester City Mill on the 31st October you can bake some Halloween-themed biscuits and treats using their own freshly milled stone-ground flour, combined with other local produce.

Happy harvest one and all.