Theatre Picks in Bath
Egg Theatre
Sat-Sun 7-8 Feb. The Sleep Show. Saturday: 11.30am & 3pm. Sunday: 11.30am & 3pm. Tickets from: £10 – £12.50. Running Time – 50 minutes (no interval) plus 10 minutes stay and play. There will be a post-show Q&A with The Sleep Charity on Saturday 7 following the 3pm performance. The Sleep Show is a dreamy performance which transforms the mysteries of sleep into a playful adventure. It mixes captivating dance and imaginative storytelling to explore all the funny and frustrating parts of trying to fall asleep, the fidgeting, the big thoughts, and that feeling of not wanting to miss a thing. Instead of making bedtime stressful, the show turns it into something fun, magical, and wonderfully silly at times.
Tue-Wed 10-11 Feb. Shakespeare in a Suitcase – Hamlet. Tuesday: 10am & 1pm. Wednesday: 10am & 1pm. Tickets from: £10 – £12.50. Schools: £8.50 each plus one free teacher per 10 tickets booked (11th ticket free). Running Time: 1 hour (No interval). Award-winning theatre company New International Encounter present the most famous play in the world. A family drama of revenge, justice, and moral dilemmas—reimagined for young audiences. With just two actors, one musician, seven props, and a suitcase, Shakespeare’s most famous play is brought to life in a funny, fast-paced, and accessible way. Combining Shakespearean verse, contemporary language, and inventive staging, this 60-minute bitesize retelling is packed with excitement, humour, and grief in equal measure. An original soundtrack, live music, and sound effects add to the experience, making it perfect for schools and family audiences.
Sat 14-Wed 18 Feb. We’re Going on a Bear Hunt. Saturday: 10am, 12noon & 3pm. Sunday: 10am, 12noon & 3pm. Monday: 10am, 12noon & 3pm. Tuesday: No Performances. Wednesday: 10am, 12noon & 3pm. Tickets from: £10 – £12.50. Running Time: 45 minutes, no interval. Based on the book by Michael Rosen and illustrated by Helen Oxenbury.
Fri 30 Feb. Play Time: The Enchanted Forest. 10am, 11.30am & 1.30pm. All Tickets: £6.50. Play-along theatre adventures for 2-6 year olds and their grownups. Join Ratty and friends for a fun, relaxed participatory theatre session. This weeks adventure is The Enchanted Forest – come along on a magical adventure through the woods… There’ll be silliness, play-acting, games and music in this play-along theatre adventure… Expect to play, move, watch and laugh. Ratty has a lot of ideas but sometimes things don’t go according to plan….can you help her by playing along and working together? A fun and gentle introduction to theatre with play-along storytelling, original music, puppetry, theatre games, movement, and lots of imaginative play. Sessions last 1 hour, and are created for ages 2-6 and their grown-ups. Younger and older siblings welcome! The Last Baguette makes entertaining, accessible and eccentric work for family audiences.
Mission Theatre
Tue 20-Sat 24 Jan. Shakespeare in Love. 7:30pm. Matinee Saturday 2pm. It’s 1593, it’s Elizabethan London and aspiring playwright William Shakespeare has writer’s block. His latest play, Romeo and Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter, does not seem to be going anywhere and contemporary friend and dramatist Kit Marlowe is writing the plays that the audience want to see. Hounded by theatre impresario, Philip Henslowe, who needs a new play to clear his debts, not to mention Queen Elizabeth I who wants a comedy with a dog in it – Will is despairing. Then he meets his muse.
Thu 5-Sat 7 Feb. The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. 7pm. Matinee Sat 7th 2pm. Presented by Wax Wings Theatre Company. Step into a brilliantly reimagined world of Shakespeare’s classic. Set deep in the bowels of the Catholic Church, we find an almighty Caesar preaching to the masses, but his pulpit is unsteady and his fellow church members recoil at his forward-thinking teachings.
Thu 26-Sat 28 Feb. Blue Stockings. 7.30pm. Presented by Bath University Student Theatre. 1896, Girton College, Cambridge; the first college in Britain to admit women. The Girton girls study ferociously and match their male peers grade for grade yet go home empty handed. Tess Moffat and her fellow first years are determined to win the right to graduate. But little do they anticipate the hurdles in their way: the distractions of love, the cruelty of the class divide or the strength of the opposition.
Rondo Theatre
Sat 14 Feb. Quentin Crisp: Naked Hope. 8pm. £16/£12 • Professional Theatre. Written and performed by Mark Farrelly. Directed by Linda Marlowe. From a conventional upbringing to global notoriety via The Naked Civil Servant, Quentin Crisp was one of the most memorable figures of the twentieth century. Openly gay as early as the 1930s, Quentin spent decades being beaten up on London’s streets for refusing to be anything less than himself. Naked Hope depicts Quentin at two phases of his extraordinary life: alone in his Chelsea flat in the 1960s, certain that life has passed him by, and thirty years later, performing An Evening with Quentin Crisp in New York.
Fri 27 Feb. Francis Dunnery: England’s Tales Of The Council House Kid. 7.30pm. Admission £30. Professional Theatre. A new theatre show from Francis Dunnery. Get ready for a powerful and nostalgic journey back to the heart of working-class Britain in the 1960s and 70s. This isn’t just a performance, it’s a living memoir, celebrating the humour and resilience forged in the shadow of Britain’s small towns, cities, tower blocks and council estates. The performance features some of my old songs that soundtracked those formative years, along with a few brand new tunes that bring the past right into the present.
Theatre Royal Bath Main House
Tue 27-Sat 31 Jan. The Rivals. Evenings 7.30pm. Matinees Weds, Thurs & Sat 2.30pm. The most famous play set in Bath celebrates its 250th anniversary in a sparkling revival set in the Roaring Twenties: risqué revelry, romance, and rivalry in the Assembly Rooms – a town torn between tradition and the new age.
Mon 2 – Sat 7 Feb. The Shawshank Redemption. The acclaimed stage adaptation of the hit movie returns with Joe McFadden, Bill Ward, Ben Onwukwe. Evenings 7.30pm. Matinees Weds & Sat 2.30pm. Despite protests of his innocence, Andy Dufresne is handed a double life sentence for the brutal murders of his wife and her lover. Incarcerated in the notorious Shawshank facility, he quickly learns that no one can survive alone. Andy strikes up an unlikely friendship with the prison fixer Red, and things start to take a slight turn for the better. However, when Warden Stammas decides to bully Andy into subservience and exploit his talents for accountancy, a desperate plan is quietly hatched.
Tue 10 – Sat 14 Feb. Indian Ink by Tom Stoppard. Felicity Kendal in the first major revival for thirty years of one of Tom Stoppard’s most nostalgic plays. Evenings 7.30pm. Matinees Thurs & Sat 2.30pm. 1930, India. Flora Crewe, a noted Bloomsbury Group poet, undertakes a journey through India for her health. Free-spirited, she unsettles most people she meets, but secretly captivates Nirad Das, a handsome Indian painter. 1980s England. Flora’s sister, Mrs Swan, is visited by an American biographer trying to uncover exactly what took place on the trip – and then Das’ son appears in her garden with a painting of Flora by his father – a nude… Satirising the self-importance of both academia and the ruling class, Tom Stoppard’s Indian Ink is an evocative meditation on art and love, exploring how creativity can bridge even the most profound cultural barriers.
Fri 20 – Sun 22 Feb. David Copperfield: A Life. Friday 7pm. Saturday 2pm. Sunday 2pm & 7pm. What happens when 100 people from the region who have never met come together to tell the story of David Copperfield? What does this story mean to us today? How can we make it our own? And how do we build a community through the act of making theatre? Following the story of David Copperfield from infancy to adulthood as he strives to find love and connection in a world that feels at times impossibly lonely and cruel, this epic tale is packed with some of Dickens’s most vivid characters including Peggotty, Betsey Trotwood, Steerforth, and Uriah Heap. Working with acclaimed writing and directing team Sally Cookson and Mike Akers, whose productions of Jane Eyre and Peter Pan transferred from Bristol Old Vic to the National Theatre, this ambitious community production promises a thrilling adventure with visually stunning story telling including creative BSL Integration and live music.
Ustinov Studio
Mon 2 – Tue 3 Feb. Rank. A taxi driver’s life is turned upside down by an epic encounter with a young woman and her two small children who use his services to travel cross-country to buy a horse. Based on a true story by Frome-based writer and actor, Dan Gaisford, with award-winning film director Archie Rowell making his theatre directing debut, RANK explores working class men, what we do when everything starts to go wrong and if we can truly trust the people around us.
Wed 4-6 Fri Feb. Team Viking. The remarkable, hilarious and heart-lifting story of how writer and performer and Ustinov favourite James Rowland actually managed to give his best mate the send-off he wanted. Blending storytelling, music, comedy and even a genuine Viking helmet, it’s a comic ode to death, friendship and the beautiful absurdity of life. 7.30pm
Sat 7 Feb. Please Do Not Touch. Mason is an activist who explores historic houses on TikTok to uncover the true stories behind the objects that lie within. After an incident with a Somali Afro comb, he is wrongly imprisoned in a Young Offender Institution. Can he find a way to survive this ordeal and navigate how to keep speaking up when everything is designed to silence him? 7.30pm
Mon 9-Tue 10 Feb. Too Small To Tell. In the nineties, Lisa Rose worked as an assistant for Harvey Weinstein. She delivered scripts, made coffee, scheduled appointments, and, like so many other women, had to navigate a dangerous professional environment filled with toxic, gendered power roles. Nearly thirty years later, in the wake of recent stories about Mohamed al Fayed, Sean Combs, Neil Gaiman, Justin Baldoni, Lisa reflects on her time at Miramax and asks: Why does this keep happening? What prevents women from coming forward? And when is a story too small to tell?
Thu 12-Sat 14 Feb. Life Before You. Life Before You, a fierce and unflinching new play by Eva Hudson, lays bare the fault lines between mothers and daughters. Addressing women’s healthcare, class, survival, and the erasure of aging women, it asks: what do we pass on, and how do we escape the lives written for us?
Fri 27-Sat 28 Feb. 1984. A new adaptation of Orwell’s dystopian classic. Known for their ingenious sets and slick storytelling, Box Tale Soup’s unique puppetry becomes a striking metaphor for Orwell’s chilling vision of power and control.
Theatre Picks outside Bath
Tobacco Factory, Bristol. Sun 8- Tue 10 Feb. Nine Sixteenths. In 2004, in the SuperBowl halftime show finale, 23 year old Justin Timberlake ripped off 37 year old Janet Jackson’s top. Her breast was exposed on screen for nine sixteenths of a second. A pop icon and role model for many black women, and an outspoken ally for the LGBTQ community, the moment derailed Jackson’s career for many years, while Timberlake’s thrived. But who was invested in the backlash? What does all this have to say about the demographics of who controls the media, and the ways in which black women are scrutinised in the public eye?
Axbridge. Sun 8 Feb. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde. Axe Vale Arts, West Street, Axbridge. 7.30pm. An experiment to separate virtue from wickedness in his own nature results in the respectable Dr Jekyll releasing the demon within: a malevolent force which will eventually possess him body and soul. The story of Dr Jekyll and the terrifying Mr Hyde has fascinated the world for more than a hundred years, since its original publication in 1886. This fascination arises, perhaps, because a Mr Hyde lurks deep within us all, watching and waiting. Axe Vale Arts are delighted to present Isosceles Theatre with this retelling of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novel, which has been playing to rapt audiences throughout the UK.
Alma Tavern and Theatre, Bristol. Tue 10-Wed 11 Feb. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. 8pm. Rarely staged – this is a chance to see some of Shakespeare’s Sonnets performed by Kenneth Bell. Exploring themes of love and life with philosophical depth and wit, Shakespeare’s Sonnets were first published in 1609 and have been delighting readers around the world for over 400 years. Including some of his most famous and enduring lines, the works have inspired countless other poets and artists since publication. Now, at the Alma, just before Valentine’s Day there’s a rare chance to catch these beautiful and timeless pieces performed by Kenneth Bell, an actor with decades of experience performing Shakespeare.
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