Bernadette peters

Dawn French showcased her edgy style at a night out at the theatre yesterday, following her decision to ditch her signature black hair for a much shorter, grey hairstyle.

The comedian, 64, was among the guests in attendance at the Sondheim’s Old Friends charity gala last night, which was hosted at the Sondheim Theatre in London’s West End.

The concert was in honour of the late composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim – whose credits include West Side Story, Company and Gypsy – following his death last year.

Dawn looked fabulous at the gala in an all-black ensemble, with her seen wearing a waterfall collar jacket, which she had accompanied with black dress for the special occasion.

The actor – who had appeared in musical revue Side by Side, which features songs by Sondheim, in 1997 – wore a pair of black boots that featured gold detail to the event.

She was photographed at the theatre sporting dark smokey eyeshadow and a pale pink lip, with her further showcasing her natural grey hair at the charity gala last night.

Dawn has embraced such a hairstyle in recent years, with the Vicar of Dibley star having ditched her signature dyed dark hair, as she “couldn’t be bothered” to upkeep it .

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The comedian has spoken about her plan to grow her hair out, telling Good Housekeeping recently that she is “curious” to see what her iconic bob would look like grey.

Her decision to embrace her natural hair has encouraged others to do the same, with some fans having expressed such on Twitter in response to a photo from last night.

One person said that Dawn was a “hairstyle role model” and had been their “inspiration,” having similarly embraced grey hair. Others called her as a “trendsetter” and “gorgeous.”

Old Friends was a concert in aid of the Stephen Sondheim Foundation last night, with performers at the gala having included Michael Ball , 59, and Bernadette Peters, 74.

Other members of the company at the special one-off charity event included Judi Dench , 87, Helena Bonham Carter , 55, Bonnie Langford , 57, and Rob Brydon , 57.

They were joined by Gary Wilmot , 67, Petula Clark , 89, and Imelda Staunton , 66, as well as a host of other theatre performers, with the gala featuring a 26-piece orchestra.

It had been produced by Cameron Mackintosh , 75, whose production credits include several Sondheim shows such as Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

It was in aid of the Stephen Sondheim Foundation, which had been established under his will to receive future income from his copyrights and intellectual property.

The foundation will aim to support playwrights, composers and lyricists in the early stages of their careers to assist in the development and advancement of their work.

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Ground-breaking France-based British theater director Peter Brook , who revolutionized 20th-century theater, has died at the age of 97-years-old in Paris.

The director, who pioneered taking theater outside of traditional theatre houses, mounting productions in unexpected venues such as gymnasiums, abandoned factories and old gas works, was renowned for his experimental and out-of-the box approach to staging classic and new works alike.

He was born in West London to parents of Lithuanian Jewish heritage on March 21, 1925. After attending Westminster School and Oxford, he put on his first production, Dr Faustus at the Torch Theatre in London in 1943.

By his early 20s, he had been appointed director of production at the Royal Opera House, where he distinguished himself with an experimental production of Richard Strauss’s Salome featuring sets by Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dali.

In the 1950s, he started working with the Royal Shakespeare Company, directing Sir Lawrence Olivier in Titus Andronicus at Stratford in 1955.

Brook spent the late 1950s and 1960s, working between London and New York. His most famous productions of this period include his Tony Award-winning production of Marat/Sade by German playwright Peter Weiss, which was seen as daring at the time for its use of nudity and violence.

He moved to France permanently in the early 1970s to set up his International Centre for Theatre Research (ICTR) in the French capital.

In the early days of the ICTR, he famously took its company – which included British actress Helen Mirren and Japanese actor Yoshi Oida – on a tour across the Middle East and Africa to test out his ideas around theater.

On his return, he restored the rundown Bouffe du Nord music hall as a permanent home for the centre. It opened on October 1974 with a production of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, adapted by late French playwright and screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière.

Later landmark ICTR productions included 1985 The Mahabharat, a nine-hour version of the epic Hindu poem, adapted with Carrière, and the 2005 work Tierno Bokar about a Malian Sufi, which became the basis for a wider worldwide discussion on his life and message of religious tolerance.

I will always remember the day they took away the history books. My small boarding school, on a rain-lashed Devon hilltop, had until that day taught us about the glory and grandeur of English history. It was a story of courage, freedom and the defeat of foreign threats.

But these volumes, their pages soft from use, their illustrations in wistful black and white, were no longer acceptable. They were gathered up and carted off. Instead, we were given glossy, brightly-coloured replacements with larger print and supposedly exciting photographs of a brave new world.

Luckily for me, the change came just too late. I had already absorbed all the old stuff and I would never be able to regard the 1945 Labour Government as being as exciting or interesting as the Battle of Trafalgar. I thought then, as I think now, that this country had indeed had a Glorious Revolution in 1688. Significantly, it was about the same time that they began to inflict the ‘New Maths’ on us – but once again I had been lucky enough to learn my times tables by heart long before then.

I should stress that this was a private school mainly attended by the sons of naval officers and prosperous farmers. I’d guess it was round about 1963. Yet even we, in that lost era, could not escape the rising flood of indoctrination which has been washing over British education ever since.

How deep and nasty that flood is we may never know. Its victims, the school pupils don’t know that they are the victims of propaganda, since they have no way of telling when they are being brainwashed. Parents only discover by accident what their children are being taught, then are refused permission to see what is going on. For, as we have learned in recent weeks, the level and nature of propaganda in schools is an official secret, as closely-guarded as our nuclear launch codes.

A parent at Haberdashers’ Hatcham College, an ‘academy’ in South-East London, was concerned about what her teenage daughter was being taught. She found she had been exposed to all kinds of violent and dubious material, including politicised rap music. An assembly was held to discuss ‘white privilege’, in which pupils were told that people perpetuated their privilege just by being white.

And of course (as usual) there was sex education which was more about spreading liberal immorality than anything else. The only unusual thing about this is the determination of the parents involved to find out the facts, and good luck to them.

Most parents have neither the time nor the energy to take this up, and many will reasonably worry that, if they make a fuss, their child will suffer in some way. Are they wrong to fear this?

From my correspondence over the years, I am pretty sure modern education, state and private alike, is filled with radical, politically correct propaganda. This includes the curriculum. And the effective nationalisation of all state schools by the ‘academy’ programme has if anything made them even more secretive than when they used to be run by local government.

This indoctrination works. If you go on social media and engage in debate on some subjects, especially illegal drugs or the sexual revolution, it is amazing how uniform and instant the response is to any conservative or Christian argument.

Someone has taught them to say these things. This conformism is combined with almost total ignorance of history, English literature or anything else worth knowing. The great thinker, academic and author CS Lewis used to ask ‘What do they teach them at these schools?’ I think we now have a pretty good idea, precisely because they won’t tell us.

Still blind to killers’ drug abuse

As we recently saw in Texas, most Americans miss the point about rampage killings. They are so anxious to blame gun laws, exclusively, that they actually suppress evidence that the killers are crazed by drug abuse, as the New York Times did over the Uvalde killer. They shockingly deleted accurate information that he was a marijuana user.

In Europe we have a similar problem, as governments and media are determined to blame Islamist terror, exclusively, for all such events.

So you probably won’t know that the alleged Oslo murderer, who is accused of killing two and wounding 21 others in the Norwegian capital, is on record as having mental problems (common in marijuana users) and has also been convicted for drug possession. As usual with such people it is very hard to see how his crime could possibly have helped any cause.

Yet the Oslo Police have said they consider the attack as ‘an act of extreme Islamist terrorism’.

When the authorities are in the grip of this sort of crazy misunderstanding, there is little hope that anything will be learned from such episodes. So they will keep happening.

Gosh, it’s long but Elvis film has a message

The new film about Elvis Presley lasted so many hours that my beard was visibly longer and bushier at the end of it than it had been at the beginning. Other members of the audience were actually brought meals on trays by cinema staff, to sustain them during the screening. I wouldn’t have been surprised if stretcher-bearers had been called before the end, to carry away the stunned and the exhausted.

Which is a pity, because we need to know about Elvis. Like the Beatles, he was as important as Lenin and Mao in overthrowing the existing order. Human behaviour, especially in Western countries, changed totally, especially in its attitudes towards sex and marriage, thanks to such people.

The world after Elvis was utterly different from the world before him. The crabby old Southern politicians and police chiefs who tried and failed to stop him or to control his concerts were pretty unlovely, but they instantly understood that this was a revolution.

But it wasn’t conscious on Elvis’s part. I don’t think he had much in the way of politics and as far as I know, he wasn’t exactly liberal in his views. I don’t think the Beatles or the Rolling Stones started out with any opinions, either, though they certainly developed them later. What was it that made girls scream and grab at Elvis’s pink suits? I’m not sure, though Frank Sinatra had the same effect on an earlier generation, and he was never accused of doing wild things with his hips, as far as I know. So did the Beatles, and they also are not famous for wiggling their pelvises. Yet the screaming and loss of control at their early concerts was so wild that nobody could hear what they were singing. My suspicion is that centuries of Christianity had more or less buried fierce passions that were well-known to the ancient Greeks and Romans.

And that somehow, maybe just in the curl of a lip or a surly scowl, or in some rediscovered combination of sounds, Sinatra, Presley and the others unlocked those passions again, so accidentally transforming the world. We will find out in time if our ancestors had good reasons for trying to keep such things under control, for the post-Elvis age has really only just begun.

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Peter Andre has reposted a video that his daughter Princess had posted on Instagram about her 15th birthday.

Peter, 49, shares Princess and her brother Junior 17, with his ex-wife Katie Price, 44.

Princess turned 15 on Wednesday (29th June), and proud dad Peter sang her praises to his 1.8 million Instagram followers.

READ MORE: Love Island 2022 stars’ famous connections – Jack Grealish, Patsy Palmer and A-list exes ]

Peter wrote: “Happy 15th birthday to my kind, loving, moody and caring daughter. You bring so much life to our home. We all love you so much.

“You are beautiful inside and out just the way you are and never forget that. Happy birthday and NO, you can’t go on Love Island . Love dad.”

Peter, who is now married to Emily Andre, 32, with whom he shares two children, Amelia and Theo, was soon receiving feedback from his celeb pals.

Football legend John Terry wrote: “Happy Birthday Princess”.

Fred Sirieix, the charming host on Channel 4’s First Dates, posted a number of laughing emojis and writing: “The Love Island bit!”

Ex-Apprentice star Luisa Zissman wrote: “Ahh happy birthday P, Defo no love island”.

Princess responded to her dad’s post, writing: “Love you” with a red heart emoji.

Princess has previously expressed her wish to go on the hit ITV2 dating show, as Peter revealed in his column for new! Magazine: “Princess has said she wants to do it [Love Island] but I still haven’t changed my mind about that.”

He continued: “Presenting it? Yes. A contestant? Not so sure!

“She said to me, ‘Would you ever let me go on Love Island?'”

“I said to her, ‘When they start doing Love Island based on priests and nuns and they’re having their sermons on Sundays you can go on Love Island but until then no chance’.”

Peter’s reality show ruling comes after he also ruled out getting another dog for Princess.

The teenager has previously received pets as presents before, mum Katie giving her French bulldog Rolo on her 13th birthday, but sadly he died instantly after getting caught in the mechanism of an armchair a few weeks after joining the family in 2020.

Writing in his weekly column for new! magazine, Peter explained how “like every year” Princess is desperate for a dog, but he has had to explain to her again how it is “not just a six-month commitment”.

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“Nobody could accuse Peter Brook of simplicity,” wrote Kenneth Tynan in 1953. “He cooks with cream, blood and spices.” The description now seems bizarre, but in 1955, when the man the Evening Standard called “a plumping ex-prodigy in a powder-blue suit, with electric blue eyes, beetle brows and an enthusiastic titter” announced that he was to direct Shakespeare’s bloodiest play, many anticipated a “horror comic”, as Philip Hope-Wallace described it in the Manchester Guardian. Brook surprised him, coaxing “dazzling simplicity out of a terrifying tawny darkness”.

“Titus Andronicus,” wrote the Evening Standard’s Milton Shulman, “has only been given two major productions in 100 years. The squeamish may well wonder why there have been so many.” But Brook – whose first stab at Shakespeare had been a four-hour, one-man Hamlet, staged for an intimate audience (his parents) when he was seven – was determined to rehabilitate the play. First he took his red pencil to the text, removing infamous phrases such as “baked in that pie”. Next, according to the Evening Standard, he “clashed experimentally with pots and warming pans, played with pencils on Venetian glass phials, turned wire baskets into harps”, and even resorted to a plastic trumpet to compose a suitable score. When it came to the play’s murders, mutilations and cannibalism, he maximised the drama and minimised the gore. “Lavinia loses her hands, tongue and virtue off stage and her ‘stumps’ … are unbloody, and muslin-bound … The heads of Chiron and Demetrius … are decently draped in baskets,” wrote Punch’s critic.

The casting, the critics agreed, was superlative. Laurence Olivier, playing Titus, stimulated Tynan into a fit of bad puns, concluding that: “Olivier’s Titus, even with one hand gone, is a five-finger exercise transformed into an unforgettable concerto of grief.” The Sunday Times’s Harold Hobson also praised Olivier, but felt “the ladies [came] less well off”. Tynan agreed, noting that “[Vivien] Leigh receives the news that she is about to be ravished on her husband’s corpse with little more than the mild annoyance of one who would have preferred foam rubber”.

Despite the lack of gore, Punch’s critic observed that, on opening night, “half the audience expected to laugh, the other half to swoon”. These fears were not entirely groundless. During the run, the Express reported: “Extra St John Ambulance volunteers have been called in. At least three people pass out nightly. Twenty fainted at one performance.” A spokesman for the theatre pinpointed the “nice scrunch of bone off-stage when Titus cuts off his hand” as the crucial moment.

The Times’s critic said Brook had “created an atmosphere in which the horrors can take hold of us”. Hobson went further: “There is absolutely nothing in the bleeding barbarity of Titus Andronicus which would have astonished anyone at Buchenwald.”

However, the Daily Mail’s Cecil Wilson pointed out that the first-night party (attended by Noel Coward “wearing tropical evening dress”) was not without its moments of irony. “A group of pretty girls sat on velvet and gilt armchairs under a placard which read: ‘Welcome to Rape Wood’.” But he hailed Brook for having made Titus “at once full-blooded and bloodless … What a gory gala night Mr Brook could have made of it! And how triumphantly he has resisted the temptation!”