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"To What End". Burton Taylor Studio. Review by Josie Stern

“Look like the innocent flower but be the serpent under’t”. “To What End” , with its many nods to Shakespeare’s tragedy, heeds Lady Macbeth’s caution from the curtain-raiser. As a couple (Georgina Cotes and Luke Carroll) waltzes under a warm glow to the tune of Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again,” all RP accents and poised prose, the audience may very well assume they are immersed in a cushy love story set in the shadow of World War II. They would be mistaken. The illusion swiftly curdles as two directors stride onstage, revealing that we are, in fact, witnessing a play-within-a-play. What follows is a shrewd deconstruction of the very machinery of theatre; its clichés, self-importance and rituals are all delightedly laid to waste, revealing the stark insecurity and self-consciousness that always seems to lurk beneath the act of making art. If you managed to catch my previous review, you will be aware of my newly discovered favourite theatrical genre: the 60-minute, one-act play. That s...
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"To What End". Burton Taylor Studio

Is there anything quite so enjoyable as a bit of meta-theatre? Oxford has been spoilt with it in recent times. When You Pass Over My Tomb used realities within realities to address the fuzzy line separating life from death. Unprofessional demolished the fourth wall in its hilariously tongue-in-cheek critique of personal achievement. And The Writer gave us a central character who tries to make sense of her own life by fictionalising it in her art. Now the writing/directing team of Billy Skiggs and Billy Hearld, collectively known as ‘The Billys’ (and I can’t help thinking that they get a tiny kick out of having a shared name ending in a y that doesn’t change to ie in the plural despite having a consonant before the final letter) have produced a gloriously twisted piece of self-referential entertainment called To What End? Ostensibly the title refers to the fact that the characters in the Billys’ play have lost the final page of their own script, and they literally need to know What...
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"A View From The Bridge". Oxford Playhouse

In her concise, passionate and perceptive programme note, director Rosie Morgan-Males talks about the rhythmic power of Arthur Miller's language, how it manages to deliver unbearable emotion beneath the cadences of everyday speech. She's right. Miller gives poetry to those who cannot express their feelings, and a voice to the inarticulate, without ever departing from the rhythms, words and slang of 1950s Brooklyn harbourmen. A View From The Bridge  started life as a one-act play entirely in verse. Labyrinth's production at the Oxford Playhouse may be the two-act prose version, but the performances, the staging and the music are at times so lyrical that this feels like pure theatrical poetry. It's intense, tragic and deeply unsettling. The story focuses on veteran harbour-worker Eddie Carbone, a man around whom the post-War world is changing fast, and who fears what those changes will bring. His niece Catherine is 17 and ready to fly the nest. The illegal immigrant to wh...
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"The Detention". Pilch

In The Detention five high school students have been given Saturday detention, and none of them knows what for. Their mysterious teacher Mr Fairton informs them that they will stay there until they know why. Over the course of the play each teenager reveals a secret that transforms how their classmates view them. But will it be enough to release them back into the weekend? If the structure of The Detention sounds familiar, then it should. It's based squarely and unashamedly on John Hughes' era-defining school drama The Breakfast Club , with Mr Fairlot adding a soupcon of Inspector Goole from An Inspector Calls . But where The Breakfast Club ultimately rejected the social stereotyping of schoolchildren, The Detention accepts those stereotypes, and uses them to confront a number of issues our youngsters grapple with during their formative years. It's The Breakfast Club if written by Jacqueline Wilson. So our five misfits - a class clown, a nerdy bookworm, a spoilt mean g...
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"Uncle Vanya". Keble O'Reilly

After fifty years of theatregoing, you’d have thought there were few canonical classics I haven’t seen. But some have slipped through the net. And one of these is Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov. I know, it’s inexcusable. But thanks to Fennec Fox’s highly original production at Keble’s O’Reilly Theatre, another one is off the list. And Uncle Vanya is so Chekhov. It’s like a dry run for Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard . All the tropes are there: a once-wealthy Russian family forced to sell off its woodland – check; a group of women desperate (but psychologically unable) to escape the confines of their rural idyll – check; visiting, idealistic men whose ideals will take them nowhere – check; characters obsessed with their own petty problems and unable to sympathise with others – check ov! In fact, if it weren’t actually by Chekhov, Uncle Vanya could almost pass as a parody of the master. It even has a Chekhov’s Gun (of which more later). Joshua Robey’s production is a daring balan...
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"One Battle After Another". Curzon Westgate

Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest cynical broadside on American values is one of his most enjoyable films yet. Masquerading as a high-octane thriller, it delivers a satirical stealth bomb to Trumpian policies, while Leonardo DiCaprio has the time of his life inverting the role of the action hero. In fact, in one of the film’s multiple flashes of self-referential comedy, Benicio del Toro encourages DiCaprio to jump out of the window of a speeding car by imagining himself as Tom Cruise. As well as being a Hollywood in-joke about the self-stunting superstar, it’s also a moment that sums up this whole movie: it knows action. It does action. But it’s smarter than action. Rather than cosily introducing us to the characters and their lives at the start, Anderson throws us into the heat of battle from frame one, leaving us desperately scampering to figure out what the hell is going on, as some sort of revolutionary army led by Teyana Taylor (as the brilliantly-monickered Perfidia Beverly Hills) s...
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"Your Funeral". BT Studio. Review by Josie Stern

 “Your Funeral”. BT Studio Ask me my dramatic genre of choice on the way to a fourth Hamlet viewing of the year, and I’ll tell you honestly: “Ninety minutes, no interval.” For all the allure of playing esteemed theatre critic over a glass of house red in a humming West End bar, if I am sharing the Tube home with clubgoers just starting their nights, I know something’s gone wrong along the way. So, in a world of sprawling five-act-long plays and playwrights who’ve taken Pinter’s pauses to the very extreme, director Nick Samuel offers a welcome respite with his second original play.  Your Funeral is a 60-minute, one-act play inspired by Neutral Milk Hotel’s cult song “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”. It’s a bold claim: to do justice to a song that contends with finding beauty in impermanence and wonder in existence is no small feat, least of all within the hour. Worse still, to convey such existentialism shrewdly to a 9:30 pm crowd – dinner-fatigued and ready to switch their brai...
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