Posts

"The Constant Wife". Oxford Playhouse

Image
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...
Post a Comment
Read more

"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...
Post a Comment
Read more

"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...
Post a Comment
Read more

"Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons" . BT Studio

Imagine an alternative reality in which the government decides to limit the number of words you can speak per day to 140. And the public actually votes for it. That’s the world – or the UK to be precise – that Sam Steiner’s 2015 play envisions. Absurd, isn’t it, to imagine that the British people, in the mid-teens of this century, would knowingly vote for something that would obviously make their lives worse? Oh. Maybe not so absurd. But Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons isn’t about Brexit. It’s more cerebral, poetic and personal than that. This isn’t sci-fi as political satire, it’s human behaviour sifted through high concept. It also marks Lighthouse Productions’ debut on the Oxford stage: a confident, passionate and technically tight production that bodes well for the future. The play is a two-hander, examining the bond between Oliver (Kit Rush in his first acting role) and Bernadette (Caeli Colgan, veteran of many a great show). Through the ups and downs of their relationship, Bi...
Post a Comment
Read more

"Dear England". New Theatre

This review was written for Daily Information, and appears on their website. Gareth Southgate may never have won a World Cup (or any Cup at all in fact) but James Graham's play sets out to tell us that what came home to English football under his stewardship was much more important than silverware. He was never supposed to be England manager: just a stand-in after the disastrously short reign of 'Big' Sam Allardyce, the Liz Truss of English Football. But after eight years in charge, as recounted faithfully in Dear England , Sir Gareth had taken us to a semi-final and two finals. More than that: under his guidance, and before our very eyes, the England men's team changed from being a bunch of entitled, overpaid underperformers to role models for a nation. They took the knee to stand up to racism. They led projects to improve school meals. They spoke in interviews with judgement, modesty and honesty. And it all flowed from Gareth Southgate, the one England manager since 1...
2 comments
Read more

"Marty Supreme". Curzon Westgate

Josh Safdie keeps making the same movie. In 2017, Good Time was a techno-blasting surge of adrenaline that followed Robert Pattinson as a small-time crook making one terrible decision after another. Everything he tries backfires. In 2019, Uncut Gems followed Adam Sandler as a gambling addict getting sucked into a criminal whirlpool of his own making. Terrible decisions pour out of him so quickly, it’s as if he’s hell-bent on his own destruction. And now there’s Marty Supreme , in which Timothée Chalamet charges around New York, London and Japan making such terrible decisions that not only the audience but even the other characters in the film can barely believe how determined he is to screw up every opportunity that comes his way. It all goes back, apparently, to Safdie’s chaotic upbringing, immersed in the turmoil of divorcee parents, constantly travelling between his Italian-Syrian-Sephardic father in Queens and his Ashkenazi mother in Manhattan. But Safdie’s therapy is our enterta...
Post a Comment
Read more

"The Forsyte Saga" Parts One and Two. The Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

The words ‘Forsyte’ and ‘Saga’ have powerful connotations: the first with the late Bruce Forsyth, avuncular catch-phrase king of Saturday evening TV; the second with the kinds of interminable Norse epics beloved of JRR Tolkien; or, more recently, package holidays for the elderly. In short, this play’s title, though resonant, is scarcely enticing. Not having seen any of the TV incarnations of John Galsworthy’s nine-novel chronicle, I came to the RSC’s ambitious, two-part production anticipating some kind of decades-spanning period piece peopled by interchangeable, stiff-collared chaps with moustaches, and endless ladies in crinolines. Buttock- and brain-fatigue were due to set in at around the four-hour mark. But nothing could be further from the truth. Never mind Brucie: these Forsytes are playing their own traumatic intergeneration game. It’s spellbinding, tragic, redolent of an entire age, and yet at the same time deeply personal. The word that comes to mind is hamartia . Every GCSE ...
Post a Comment
Read more