Something for everyone at Arundel Festival

Today (Saturday, August 20) marks the launch of the 34th Arundel Festival, with more than enough music, drama, art and entertainment to satisfy all tastes.

From opera in the Barons’ Hall at Arundel Castle, to the wacky, weird and wonderful street entertainment over both festival weekends, and from the 150 artists and makers featured in the Gallery Trail to the annual marbles championships at the football club, it promises to be a dizzying array of diversity.

Town-based companies Arundel Players and Drip Action are again staging festival productions, respectively The Sleeping Prince, by Terence Rattigan, and Stones in his Pockets, by Marie Jones, while the ever-popular Theatre Trail showcases eight new plays in eight venues over eight days.

And if the cultural vultures will clear the skies for long enough, the newest addition, a balloon festival over the bank holiday weekend offering flights over the town, promises, literally, to be a very special highlight.

Passengers will certainly have a wonderful view of the castle, which again hosts several festival events, beginning with a light classical programme, Music for a Summer Evening, on Monday, featuring soprano Joanne Appleby and tenor Andrew Rees, followed by Donizetti’s opera Don Pasquale, both in the Barons’ Hall, on Tuesday.

The action switches to the castle’s Collector Earl’s Garden for three nights of Shakespeare from Thursday, with a performance of Twelfth Night sandwiched between two evenings of Romeo and Juliet, productions by the GB Theatre Company.

Northbrook College is once more helping to stage the Big Weekends music programme in Jubilee Gardens, where 20 bands are booked to play on the stage over the two weekends.

There will be more music every day in Town Square, part of the rich community programme of the festival which also includes history talks, a treasure hunt, the Arundel 10k run, the Waiters’ Race, the Lions’ Club’s Duck Race and the Rotary Club fair, the latter two both on bank holiday Monday.