The President's Husband's Drama Reviews

The chapel of St John's College is a magnificent setting for this most stately of all Shakespeare's regal plays. (Even its battles are far off-stage, happening between rather than during the scenes.) And Tom Allen's production takes full advantage of that ancient splendour, with a version of the play presented in proudly traditional style. Saleem Nassar, up in the St John's organ loft, pipes out steady funeral dirges and musical announcements that seem the perfect embodiment of that ubiquitous renaissance stage direction, "Alarum". If the current Edward the Second  in Stratford-upon-Avon is a royal court full of back-biting, action and unadulterated snogging, this one is closer to a sequence of tableaux, where the focus, to the exclusion of almost everything else, is on verse, verse, verse. The actors' diction is perfect. Trochees and spondees are observed with rigour and respect. The iambic pentameter is king here, not Richard or Bolingbroke. You can almo...

Daniel Raggett’s production in the Swan Theatre is as short, sharp and fiery as a red hot poker up the butt. Raggett has reduced the normal three-hour running time of Christopher Marlowe’s tragedy of a gay king to just over ninety pulsating minutes, and in the process has done the playwright several huge favours. Instead of sprawling with inter-courtier debate, this production feels like a train hurtling to hell. It’s reduced to cause and effect, not exactly Elizabethan Tiktok, but picking up lessons of brevity and allusion from the world of microvideos, and putting them to powerful and effective work. Effective, because Marlowe, left to his own devices, doesn’t do depth all that well. His language occasionally soars skyward with radiant poetry, but his characters stay stuck to the ground. They are who they are. They don’t change or develop, and they don’t peel away psychological layers. They’re like chess pieces: once you know what their abilities are, you know them. His plays are lik...

The last time I saw a production of Hamlet, I spent a long evening at the Almeida Theatre in the presence of Andrew Scott. He had meandered seamlessly between fits of emphatic rage and brazen tears in a spine-tingling, if at points gruelling, four-hour stint. Hamlet is Shakespeare’s longest play; Robert Icke did not let me forget this on that evening in 2017.  Director Seb Carrington’s adaptation, however, does not succumb to this challenge. From the moment I was greeted with the titular character strapped into a chair in the centre of the rather stifling Denis Arnold Hall – decked out in a straitjacket of sorts – right to his grisly end, I was left both relieved and impressed at the tight production. No discrete glances to the time to be had here. On the contrary, the audience feels immersed in a delightfully ambiguous world that feels at once familiar and enigmatic.  Carrington had an ambitious vision for taking on the Everest of Shakespeare’s plays. It was to be a bold, hig...

The Merchant of Venice is the most problematic of all Shakespeare's so-called problem plays, and it's even more of a problem now than when he wrote it. Back in 1596, Jews had been banned from England for over 300 years, and they were the ideal bogeymen: strange, dangerous, exotic and alien. Depicting a Jew on the London stage was not unlike a 16th-century British artist painting a hippopotamus: the final portrait may not have been based in reality, but it was sensational. These days almost every production of The Merchant makes it about antisemitism. The humanity wired into Shylock by Shakespeare unlocks caverns of prejudice in the other characters. And the disproportionate cruelty of his final humiliation is matched only by the naked glee with which the "Christians" mete it out. Now, in a UK society where racist attacks on Jews have tripled in the last 18 months, what does a student production do with this hot, and very unkosher, potato? In the case of director Cic...

 The Gondoliers, St John’s Auditorium Many profess to be lovers of musical theatre, but few love it enough to get to its comic opera roots. Cue Oxford’s Gilbert and Sullivan Society, which has spent most of the last century running through the duo’s repertoire. This term’s production was The Gondoliers, a slightly absurd piece of theatre which follows a pair of singing dancing gondolier brothers who choose their wives while blindfolded, only to be propelled to kingship minutes after their marriage. The rest of the plot is far too complex to pithily summarise. In a sentence, it revolves around many more such instances of paupers becoming princes, princes becoming paupers, and princesses loving paupers. The result is slightly ridiculous, and extremely hilarious.  At times, the predictable constraints of staging what would once have been a piece of mass entertainment as a student company felt evident – for example, in the lack of set design and absence of the twenty-four flower g...

Theatre is filled with examples of the tortured, reclusive, and frankly weird persona of ‘the genius’ – both on and offstage. Good Work begins with one such genius in the form of a character, Felix (Eddie Jones). He sits at a table taking notes from a hefty stack of books, and his scholarly, hunched posture suggests that this is a regular pastime for him. As the play gets going, Felix is joined by his flatmate, Zach (Charlie Lewis). The two are best friends to the point of brotherhood, and together they anxiously anticipate the arrival of Felix’s sister, George (Orla Wyatt), who is visiting from London. George’s entry sparks a sheen of congeniality, which quickly gives way to awkwardness and resentment as George reveals the true purpose of her visit: she comes bearing their father’s will and a mission to make Felix come back home to London. Good Work , though just a three-hander, manages to crowd the small BT stage. The play is populated by three characters whose own confused iden...