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"You Got Me". Burton Taylor

There have been some deeply moving films and plays about dementia. Iris chronicled the real-life degeneration of novelist Iris Murdoch. Still Alice focussed on the horrors of early-onset Alzheimer’s. And perhaps most powerful of all, The Father painted a terrifyingly convincing portrait of the experience of dementia itself, as the audience experiences the same loosening grip on reality as its octogenarian central character. But, for young people, it’s still a far-off disease: one to worry about decades in the future. Not now. Not when there are bops to go to, disses to write, hearts to break. Please not now. Alzheimer’s is for grannies. Enter Oliver Martin, who asks the unthinkable question: what if it wasn’t? The idea is disarmingly simple. You Got Me asks: what would it be like if people got Alzheimer’s in their twenties? And after an emotionally draining hour in the Burton Taylor, the panic and disorientation of this unforgiving plague feel closer and more relevant to young liv...
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"La Voix Humaine" Burton Taylor Studio

Vox Humana is the name given to the key on an organ that is designed to simulate the human voice. This play is like that key: a plaintive, mournful tone that is at once convincingly human and self-consciously artistic. It's a vulnerable, lyrical song of despair that catches the rhythms of real speech. Jean Cocteau's 1930 'monodrama' was created as a one-woman piece: a phone conversation with an unseen, unheard ex-lover who is about to get married to someone else. But in Eva Bailey's finely judged production it spreads beyond that solo voice, with a second actress adding echoes in French. As the play unfolds, it becomes clear that this second, ghostly figure is none other than the lover herself, and rather than being a wilful betrayal, the impending wedding is an act of patriarchal entrapment. Updating La Voix Humaine to be about a single-sex relationship is not just a modern twist for 21st-century sexuality. In the original, the lover on the phone is freighted with...
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"Red" Pilch. Review by Victoria Tayler

'What do you see?’ It is so hollow an opener in the mouth of Ollie Gillam’s sour, pontificating Mark Rothko, who stands inhospitably in the middle of the stage taking up (and indeed taking in) his own painting. It is so delicate a question in the eye of director Ezana Betru, who has deftly risen to the challenge of ‘Red’ with a rich production which, much like Rothko,, invites you to interpret every detail as meticulous and deliberate. One stops short at claiming ‘divinely inspired,’ but Betru certainly experiments with divine themes. A surge of classical music and some heavenly white lighting, and one feels the heavy legacy of a renaissance painting tradition shouldered on one self-absorbed artist’s squared shoulders, even if they have never cared for Rothko’s behemoth red rectangles. It is but a small moment in a play embroidered with artistic decisions: it certainly never feels tired. As the blacklight switches on and our heavenly painters become luminescent, athletically smothe...
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"We Could Be Here A While". Burton Taylor Studio

I was due to see ‘Red’ at the Pilch this evening, but it was cancelled because of a leaky ceiling. That’s the second play in two weeks that’s been affected this way. Either there’s a problem with Balliol’s plumbing, or the students in the rooms above have got seriously blocked toilets. I’m not sure I want to think about it. Instead, I ran across town and got to the Burton Taylor Studio just in time for Root Ginger Productions’ ‘We Could Be Here A While’. They generously gave me a complimentary ticket at the last minute, an act which merits both gratitude and honesty. On this occasion, the former is easier to give than the latter. So, to Root Ginger, a genuinely huge thank you for the seat. ‘We Could be Here A While’ is a newly-written comedy by Charlotte Ward about people in an air-raid shelter during World War Two. While they wait for the all-clear, they meddle in each other’s love lives, try to get rid of a pigeon, go and defuse a bomb that hasn’t gone off (first sign of poor histor...
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"The Constant Wife". Oxford Playhouse

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Since taking over the artistic direction of the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2023, Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey have brought a new playfulness to the job. Rather than being weighed down with the responsibility of it all, they behave like unusually gifted children who have been given the keys to the biggest dressing-up box in the world. They’re having a lot of fun. And one of the games they’ve enjoyed the most is reframing classic plays for modern audiences. With The Constant Wife they’ve dug up a dusty old Somerset Maugham tome from the archives and, with a sprinkling of adaptation from Laura Wade, revealed it as a theatrical gem, with a female central role directly descended from Shakespeare’s Beatrice. Maugham is usually seen as one of those stalwarts of the English stage, who plied the pre-war years with drawing-rooms, drinks tables and upper-class tiffs. Like Rattigan, Priestley, Barrie and Galsworthy, he was blown away during the cultural revolution of the 1960s, and, like them...
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"William Shakespeare's Walking With Dinosaurs". Oxford University Natural History Museum

In a week when you can see the National Theatre’s runaway hit Dear England at the New Theatre, Sondheim’s classic musical Company at the Playhouse, and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in the Holywell Music Room, William Shakespeare’s Walking With Dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum is most definitely the odd one out. If you didn’t catch it (and there was only one performance, so don’t go getting any ideas now) then you might be wondering what it was all about. Maybe some weird combination of Shakespeare and dinosaurs? Yep, absolutely right. Originally devised by Adam Lindholm, a palaeobiologist with a particular interest in vertebrate paleontologymacroecologyichnology (and author of Persistent body size bias in the fossil record of Cenozoic North American mammals ) it’s a charming, intellectual parlour piece that unites Adam’s academic work with his other passion: the Bard. Proudly declaring that it’s here to celebrate the 25 th anniversary of the BBC’s seminal series Walking With Dino...
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"Company". Oxford Playhouse

In 2018 there was a revival of Sondheim and Furth's 1970 hit Company in the West End. It featured international stars like Patti Lupone and Rosalie Craig. It was directed by the master practitioner Marianne Elliott. And it won almost every award going, from the Evening Standards to the Oliviers. I saw it. And to compare an amateur student show with one of the most lauded productions of the last decade would be patronising and reductive. But I'm going to anyway: This student show is better. Company was the first ‘concept musical’. Rather than a conventional narrative, it’s a sequence of interconnected vignettes revolving around the pitfalls of married life in 70s New York. All the couples are friends of the central character Bobby who, at the age of 35, has still not settled down with a partner, and isn’t sure he’s ever going to manage it. The show unpeels the emptiness of marriage as a rite of passage, and questions the wisdom of following the crowd in matters of the heart. I...
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