IT’S a season of celebration from the folks at Salisbury Playhouse this spring and summer.

As The Queen celebrates her Diamond Jubilee, Howard Brenton’s Epsom Downs (May 2 to 26) takes us back to 1977, another year of royal celebration.

This carnival of a play features colourful characters, epic staging and all the suspense, anguish, triumph and tragedy of a great British sporting occasion.

Meanwhile Mad Men meets Frasier in George Axelrod’s The Seven Year Itch (March 15 to April 7).

Made famous by the Marilyn Monroe movie, this play was one of Broadway’s biggest romantic comedy hits.

A sweltering New York summer in 1952, and an unexpected encounter with the young woman staying on the floor above sets publishing executive Richard Sherman on a re-evaluation of married life.

theatre Fest West will bring some of the best theatre companies in the region to Salisbury for a two-week celebration this Easter.

Theatre Alibi lead the festival with their production of Dick King-Smith’s The Crowstarver (April 17 to 21) on the main stage.

Set in the heart of the Wiltshire countryside this heart-warming story features animal puppets and a live score.

The celebration also includes the Playhouse’s associate theatre company Stuff and Nonsense who have been given extra fertiliser to move their production of The Enormous Turnip (April 12 to 14) to the main house.

Sixth Sense Theatre present Slosh, from April 10 to 13, a gentle show for two to five-year-olds with multi-sensory design, music and puppetry.

Pickled Image’s Wolf Tales (April 10) lets the wolf take centre stage in an expose of much loved fairy tales.

Riot (April 11 and 12) is a true story set in a lamp-lit flat-pack universe bursting with violence, chaos and more characters than you can throw a meatball at.

In May Day, May Day (April 13 and 14) Kneehigh regular, Tristan Sturrock tells his haunting story of the Padstow Obby Oss.

For one night only Publick Transport bring Discombobulated (April 18), an utterly bonkers two handed clown show.

Theatre Fest West will also include workshops from Forest Forge, Big State Theatre and a Regional Youth Theatre Festival (April 21).

Also this season, Salisbury Playhouse is co-producing two innovative productions in the Salberg Studio.

Myrtle Theatre’s Up Down Boy (May 15 to 26) by Sue Shield is an honest and uplifting play, inspired by the extraordinary life story of a boy with Down’s syndrome, and his mother’s humorous and idiosyncratic perspective on bringing him up.

Company of Angels is one of the UK’s leading producers of theatre of and about young people, and will transform the Salberg Studio into an aerial playground for the English premiere of new play Anne And Zef (March 26 to April 7).

Based on a fictional meeting between Anne Frank and Zef Bunga, the play shows how two young people play, flirt and attempt to figure out a complex world with only each other as guides.