The President's Husband's Drama Reviews

This review was written for Daily Information, and appears on their website . Not long after I graduated from Oxford, a very close friend of mine tragically died. It affected me in ways I could not have predicted: I kept mistaking total strangers for her in the street, thinking I could hear her voice. It culminated in a strange and disturbing night when I dreamt that I ran her over in my car. In Placeholder my own experience was magnified many times. My friend Anna was just a friend, not the love of my life. But in a small way, I felt I could understand and sympathise with what the central character, Sophie, played with dignity, humour and depth by Francesca Kuczynska, was going through. Placeholder is – like so many plays in this rich, creative period through which we are fortunate to be living – a new piece of writing. The author, May McEvoy, has created something tender, fragile, beautiful and truthful. It addresses grief in an open and honest way, but it also does it with origina...

What an extraordinary character Niccolo Machiavelli was. After acting as a political advisor to some of the most powerful figures in Europe he was arrested, tortured and exiled like someone out of The Godfather . He then wrote The Prince , a treatise so searingly honest about how to achieve and stay in power that it reads like satire – but isn’t. His life lessons for top politicians gave rise to a term, Machiavellian, that has no adequate synonym. What’s less well known is that he rehearsed the same principles in the form of comic drama, and his play Mandragora makes for a gurning, twisted sibling to his more serious work. Oxford’s garden plays are a great summer tradition, and there have always been one or two forgotten classics from centuries past lurking amongst the Shakespeare comedies. It’s wonderful to see that Exeter College, and director Kian Moghaddas, are keeping this tradition going. This production of The Mandrak e was everything a garden play should be: light, fun, accomp...

This review was written for Daily Information, and appears on their website . There is a famous episode of Porridge , the seminal, prison-set sit-com from the seventies starring Ronnie Barker, in which the two main characters, Fletcher and Godber, spend the entire episode in Fletcher’s cell, in real time, just talking to each other. There’s an equally famous early episode of Seinfeld in which the characters do something similar: they spend the entire episode, in real time, waiting for a table in a Chinese restaurant. Both of those programmes went down in history because of their bold starkness. They rejected, for one episode, the normal expectations of their genre, and managed to create a petri dish of pure sulphuric comedy. Window Seat is an audacious attempt to do something similar. Two characters, a mother (Trix) and a daughter (Lois), sit down next to each other on a flight bound for Florence, and the entire play (apart from the odd loo break) takes place with them in those seats...

This review was written for Daily Information, and appears on their website . Out on Gloucester Green at 7pm, the sun was still shining, and Oxford’s alfresco café culture was in full swing. Young lovers were dunking straws in their Aperol Spritzers. All was right with the world. Meanwhile, just a few steps away, in the Burton Taylor Studio, By Proxy was painting a much darker picture. Less café culture; more coercive control. At barely 60 minutes, this is a little gem of a play from first-time writer and director Imee Marriott. It traces the relationship between two teenagers, Kit and Jo, as they leave school, go to university, and start to make their way in the world (or not). As happens with so many school friendships, their paths diverge, and what was once a deep bond of love ultimately evaporates. In the case of By Proxy however the parting of the ways between Kit and Jo is cataclysmic, psychologically disturbing, and complicated by betrayal, obsession and terrible secrets that ...

This was more than a production of a single Shakespeare play. It was the culmination of twelve months of productions. The Jesus College Shakespeare Project, with director Peter Sutton at the helm, has spent this entire academic year serving up Henry VI s: Part One in Michaelmas Term, Part Two in Hilary, and finally Part Three tonight. This project-within-a-project has stuck with the same company of actors, the same production style and staging, and even the same costumes throughout the three plays, achieving a consistency that you almost never see across such a span of time. It’s not uncommon for companies to perform all three plays together. But doing it one at a time like this, on a solar cycle that moves with the seasons, gives the entire trilogy a sense of unstoppable momentum, almost like waiting for the next Lord of the Rings film to come out (sorry if you’re too young to know how exciting that was). With Tarquin’s ravishing stride the Jesus Shakespeare Project has moved thr...

In Laura Swift and Russell Bender’s engrossing and profoundly thought-provoking play Fragments , a group of classical scholars attempt to piece together the plot of Euripides’ lost play Cresphontes . This isn’t entirely fiction. Cresphontes is a real play, and bits and pieces of it survive in scraps of papyrus and quotations from other writers, some writing long after Euripides’ death. These surviving snippets of text tease, tempt and trouble modern academics, and Swift and Bender’s play is as much about the experience of piecing those fragments together as it is about what the complete original play might have contained. We could not have a better-qualified guide to this specialised keyhole into a lost classical world. Laura Swift herself is a Tutorial Fellow in Classics at Oxford, and her professional work focuses on fragmentary texts and how we as readers and scholars deal with them. So Fragments is as much an imaginary work of autobiography as it is a detective tale about the sec...

A Girl in School Uniform (Walks into a Bar) is a disorienting title for an unnerving play. It sounds like it might be the first line of a joke, but there’s nothing funny about the situation here. It’s an unnamed dystopian future – or present – in which blackouts for which we do not know the reason occur regularly, young women are murdered, and there are constant oblique references from the two characters on stage to ‘the way things are’. It’s a clash of innocence and experience (a schoolgirl and a barmaid), and over the course of the play those two forces joust with mingled suspicion and affection. The title is also perhaps deliberately reminiscent of the ground-breaking 1932 German film Mädchen in Uniform , an early LGBT drama in which a schoolgirl and a young female teacher discover maturity and sexual awakening while the world outside the school is descending into violence and chaos. The power cuts and blackouts that dominate and terrify the population of this imagined world are a ...

I’m not a Marvel-basher. I loved the Marvel Cinematic Universe films right up to the end of Avengers: Endgame . I applauded the fact that they understood what fans of the comics have always known: that the appeal of Marvel is not in the fights and the super-powers, but in the human dilemmas, the self-referentiality, and – more than anything else – the sense of belonging to a community that brought fans and creators together. I’ve known this from my youth. One of my most treasured possessions is a personal letter to me from Stan Lee, in which he ended, ‘Many thanks for your interest and your enthusiasm, Pete. It’s true believers like you who keep the flame of Marveldom alive’. Yes, Mr Scorsese, they’re not the greatest films ever made. But they were the greatest super-hero films ever made. And that was no mean feat. But nothing lasts for ever. And I’ve watched the post- Endgame output with dwindling enthusiasm. The Spider-Man films continue to thrill, but by and large the juggernaut ...

At the risk of stating the obvious, Macbeth is An Extremely Well-Known Play. In Oxford alone it’s been produced at least five times in the last decade. And if you’re going to mount it again, in a town full of radical, deep-thinking, well-read audience-members, then you’d better make sure you’ve got a good reason for doing so. You might have a stunningly original interpretation, a powerful way to depict the blood, horror and ambition that soaks the script, or staging ideas that will take the onlookers’ breath away. You need something . Happier Years Productions describe their play as a ‘reinterpretation’ that reimagines Macbeth for audiences of today. That would be great, apart from… it doesn’t. Yes, they have the witches play a variety of roles, such as servants and doctors. But that doesn’t make them a manifestation of collective anxiety. It just makes them pop up more often, and if anything dissipates their role as embodiments of a fate that humanity cannot control. In an interview...