The President's Husband's Drama Reviews

I’ve only seen a trailer for the HBO screen version of the original production of Every Brilliant Thing . So it’s not really fair to compare. But based on that trailer, I’d have to say that what I saw tonight at The Pilch was better. Why? Because tonight Leah Aspden walked a tightrope between depression and hilarity, while balancing tragedy and comedy in her hands, without ever falling off into sentimentality. It was a remarkable, funny, powerful and moving performance. And it was, both emotionally and literally, truly involving. Duncan MacMillan’s play confronts the terrible issue of maternal suicide (or, to be more precise, suicidality – the tendency to submit to suicidal intent) and its impact on a child. Not exactly the stuff of humour, you might think. But Lydia Free’s brilliant and deceptively simple production swings you from laughter to horrified silence with incredible ease, like a toddler falling off a swing. It’s a one-actor show, but Aspden cajoles the whole audience into t...

Before The Fabelmans even starts Steven Spielberg pops up on screen to address us, like Alfred Hitchcock warning audiences not to reveal the twist in Psycho . But this is no warning. It’s a welcome. The former enfant terrible now grand-père amicable of Hollywood wants to thank us for coming. More particularly, he wants us to know that this is his most personal film. Spielberg could have put up a title card saying ‘based on a true story’, but that would not be entirely accurate. It’s not true ; it’s personal , and he really wants us to understand that. Otherwise it would just be any old tale about a kid with a family growing up making movies. It’s the fact that it’s Spielberg’s own story that makes it interesting. You need to be invested in him, his work and his cultural significance to enjoy this to the full. Spielberg of course realises that, and he wants to guide our perspective. He’s not just a director of actors; he’s a director of audiences too. The received wisdom is that a f...

What on earth was going on with home invasion theatre in the 1960s? They just couldn’t get enough of it. Harold Pinter had The Caretaker , Frederick Knott had Wait Until Dark , and Joe Orton had Entertaining Mr Sloane . Maybe Chubb keys were yet to be invented, and coming home to find strange people in your house was an abiding fear for everyday folk. For whatever reason, it certainly provided the theatre with a steady stream of paranoia-drama, based on the idea that our little lives are rounded with not so much a sleep, more a nightmare. What makes Pinter and Orton particularly unsettling is that they’re not just paranoid and threatening; they’re also – and at the same time – very funny. Every dramatist has a wavelength. And it’s the job of a production to find that wavelength, get on it, and ride it to the end. One company may do it completely differently from another, but they must find that true relationship, that sense of just what the author was on about , or their show will foun...

Ciana Russo is a student of English Literature, and with her first film Questions in a World of Blue she’s created what is effectively a snapshot of visual poetry: an Ode on a Passing Boy. Two girls sit in a coffee shop, encaged in black and white, chatting somewhat pretentiously and snobbishly about the humdrum lives of the people they see around them. A boy walks past the window, and for one of the girls, the world turns to colour. She constructs a love story around this fleeting glimpse. Androgynous and irresistible, his life dances before her in swathes of paint, flowers, images imposed upon images…. until he’s gone, and the world is once again in monochrome. What a neat, lovely, little daydream, and the ideal subject for a 12-minute short. The concept driving Questions in a World of Blue is the idea of the ‘female gaze’, the antithesis of the ‘male gaze’ identified by Laura Mulvey to describe the depressingly still-rampant objectification of women in the media. But I’m not sure ...

This review was written for Daily Information and appears on their website . I left Evita tonight in a state of overpowering confusion. I’d just watched one of the most famous musicals of the last fifty years for the first time in my life, and I hadn’t really followed it at all. The audience around me were cheering like the Argentinian electorate taken in by Eva Perón’s glamour, a dull clink resonating from the disposable champagne flutes allowed into the auditorium as they toasted the performance. But I. Just. Didn’t. Get it. The Oxford Operatic Society without doubt has the highest standards. For an amateur organisation they’re a lot more professional than many theatre companies. The programme positively oozes with ability, each of the creative team involved having years of varied and impressive experience. The performers were not just talented but also bursting with enthusiasm. The company even has a Travel Package Scheme, which picks up audiences at designated points around the c...

This review was written for Daily Information , and appears on their website. The title of this concert made it sound like it was going to be the classical music equivalent of Highlights from Hamlet : maybe we’d get the theme from Elvira Madigan , Eine kleine Nachtmusik , Twinkle Twinkle Little Star , and home by 8.15. Instead, it was a brilliant and full rendition of three stunning Mozart pieces that don’t normally find their way onto Now That’s What I Call Classics . But this concert was more significant even than a clutch of Mozart meisterworks: the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra is celebrating its Silver Jubilee in 2023, and this was the first concert of the year. Tonight’s conductor, Marios Papadopoulos, was the founder of the OPO, and has been its Musical Director ever since; and the piano soloist, Alim Beisembayev, was born in 1998, the same year as the orchestra itself. These details lent the evening a sense of joy and significance that matched the music. Marios Papadopoulos him...

This review was written for Daily Information, and appears on their website. For a crime as despicable, sickening and inhuman as lynching, it has resulted in some astonishingly powerful, moving, and even occasionally beautiful, works of art: Abel Meeropol’s 1937 poem Strange Fruit , and its hauntingly lyrical 1939 embodiment by Billie Holiday; Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird ; 1947’s guilt-ridden Western The Ox-Bow Incident . Even EC Comics addressed lynching head-on in their 1953 story The Guilty . Most relevant to this film, there was Bob Dylan’s hastily-penned protest, The Death of Emmett Till . What unites all of these poems, songs, books, movies and comics is their passion and their dignity, their urgent need for change, to stop a practice which, although illegal, was still carried out with impunity in America’s deep south. Dylan sang, If you can't speak out against this kind of thing, a crime that's so unjust, Your eyes are filled with dead men's dirt, your mind i...