The President's Husband's Drama Reviews

There is something dystopian about the racket of a tube’s approach. The gust of stale air which presages the beastly roar of its arrival, and then the descending scale of its slowing to a stop. Angel , a piece of new writing by Susie Weidmann and Jacob Potter, takes the Underground as the setting for its own modern dystopia. A thirty-odd woman, Sara, takes a seat on the tube to make a ten minute journey down the Northern line to Angel, where she has a doctor’s appointment to attend. Sara (Susie Weidmann) tells us that she’s going to find out whether the lump in her breast is cancer or not, before directing the stranger sitting next to her to feel it for himself. Angel plays out as a concatenation of laughably awkward moments like this one. Weidmann’s Sara monologues at the audience in real-time, like a subterranean Fleabag , while her journey is interspersed with flashbacks from key moments in her life, all of which also took place on trains. In each of these flashbacks, Sara is play...

The last time I saw Romeo and Juliet in Oxford, I was in it: 1984, at the Catholic Chaplaincy on St Aldates. Unlike Peter Sutton's beautifully restrained interpretation for the Jesus College Shakespeare Project, ours was wild and violent - basically a series of rolling street fights between rival mobs of troublesome Italian ultras. During the dress rehearsal I was actually knocked unconscious by a scrawny second-year mathematician who is now the Oxford Professor for the Public Understanding of Science. I woke up in the Radcliffe Infirmary with a doctor tickling the soles of my feet and saying, 'Can you feel this?' All of which goes to show that directorial caprice can be a dangerous thing. For this production, the latest in Jesus College's thirteen-year quest to perform all Shakespeare's plays in order of composition, Sutton has taken the remarkable, almost unprecedented, step of avoiding any sort of 'angle' on the play at all. It's not set in a sink ho...

In a sentence, Up Styx Creek is an elongated, Aristophanes-themed Horrible Histories episode. Importing the sketch-cum-variety show formula wholesale, the play strings together musical numbers and skits summarising all of Aristophanes’ surviving comedies and, rather neatly, conveying them in modern-ish terms. At the centre of any good variety show is an emcee who exudes charm and comedy in equal measures, whose overarching monologue weaves together the seemingly random array of content (think Rattus Rattus). For Up Styx Creek , Aristophanes (Cameron Spruce) himself made a logical choice. In Spruce’s hands, Aristophanes is – oddly – not Greek at all, instead coming across with the aspect of an ex-Footlights comedian doing Live at the Apollo, breezily commanding the stage and berating his critics. As the play begins, our Aristophanes takes his seat in an onstage audience to watch a mindnumbingly boring rendition of The Wasps. Beside him, Classics finalist Sophia (Macey Pattenden) lo...

"Nothing is in greater opposition to life, than art", playwright Sergio Blanco tells us at the climax of his kaleidoscopic piece of multi-self-referential theatre, When You Pass Over My Tomb . And he's right. Art freezes life in portraits, approximates it in dialogue, traduces it in seductive verse. Go and look at the ornate rooms of the Garrick Club in London, and you'll see hundreds of great actors from across the centuries hanging on the walls, captured in moments of high drama by artists, every one of them lacking any spark of the life they so skilfully embodied on the stage. And so this play is a paean to death: its inspiration, its freedom and, daringly, even its sexual allure. Blanco, a French-Uruguyan master of the avant-garde, has created a piece of theatre more dazzlingly complex in its structure than anything I've ever seen before. It doesn't just break the fourth wall. It builds fifth and sixth walls, knocks them down, installs windows in them, and...

Every so often, I find myself watching a newly-written play dramatising Oxford student life. They often express an anxiety about life after graduation, or use getting into Oxford as the apotheosis of characters’ coming-of-ages. The Secret does away with such tropes, mutating the city into a horrifying world of bumbling TV-style detectives, cannibalistic tutors, and a counselling service that aims to depress. The Secret is padded with an armour of well-timed quips about uninterested tutors, unattended laptops in the RadCam, and ineffective welfare initiatives, mostly delivered by Michael Gormley, writer, director, and – in the play’s world – the comically evil head of a student support service that procures students for cannibalistic dons.  The play begins with a student (Cathy Scoon) in tears as she reports her friend missing. “Maybe she’s just gone home,” both a police officer (Ed Dhanowa) and a counsellor (Jem Hunter) suggest to her. The symbolism is clear: as my time of Oxford w...

St John's College only puts on one play a year,* but it's worth waiting for. Their resident undergraduate director Elspeth Rogers has an inspiring philosophy: everyone who auditions will get a part. This is inclusivity in action, and it means people who may never act in another play during their entire university careers will get a chance in the magnificent surroundings of the Garden Quad Theatre. Elspeth, we salute you.  St John's has developed quite a reputation over the last two years for mounting plays about the downfall of powerful but criminal American men. Last year it was Frost/Nixon , and now we've got ENRON , Lucy Prebble's breakthrough play about the demise of the evil energy corporation and its firebrand figurehead Jeffrey Skilling. What next? An adaptation of Netflix's Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich ? Please, no. ENRON is a meticulously researched expose of the false accounting, embezzling and corporate bullying that dragged Enron from being a multi...