"No Peace on St Jude". Burton Taylor Studio
On the third consecutive day of record May temperatures, the Burton Taylor Studio is probably the best place in Oxford to spend the evening. This tiny performance space is blessed with a ginormous air-conditioning machine, and the kindly front-of-house manager Rob has decreed that it will stay on throughout the show. Your sweat cools, your mind clears, and by the end of Gabriel Meadowcroft's new play, you're freezing. Bliss. The cold in the room is matched by the weather on the tiny, fictional island of St Jude, where the play is set. It's a windswept, rocky outpost, peopled entirely by misfits who have come here to get away from their secret pasts. There's newcomer George, a doctor who clearly did something so dreadful that he's come all the way from the United States, and never wants to return. (We're not told what terrible thing George did - or if we are I must have missed it - but it can't have been that bad, because his business partner Paul turns up on...