The President's Husband's Drama Reviews

Before tonight I had never heard of Simon Longman or his 2013 debut play Milked , but I’m grateful to Matchbox Productions for spreading the word. It’s a dark two-hander (with an extra, non-speaking role for a large cow). The play is extremely funny, and also has a lot that’s serious to say about men’s relationships, mental health, career prospects for graduates, and the disadvantages of living in Herefordshire. Declan Ryder and Isaac Wighton play Paul and Snowy, two friends stuck in the middle of the countryside with impressive degrees and no job prospects. Pushy parents lurk in the background as Paul desperately and doggedly grinds his way through scores of fruitless job applications, vaguely searching for Something In Media, only to be kicked back at every turn. Outside, in a field, lying there like the giant symbol she undoubtedly is, is an enormous, sick cow called Sandy. The men try to cure her, to move her, to feed her, to kill her, but she is impassive in her invalid state: the...

All hail the Jesus College Shakespeare Project. In just over two years it has become an Oxford institution, a standard-bearer for high-quality Shakespearean drama, and a long-term social experiment. In case you don’t know, the Project is mounting all Shakespeare’s plays in (as far as possible) chronological order of composition, one per term. It was the brainchild of Jesus College Alumni Engagement Manager Peter Sutton, and he also directs all the plays. By my reckoning he’ll be done in another eleven years, at which point presumably he can get back to engaging with the alumni – or possibly retire. Why ‘long-term social experiment’? It’s because performing the plays in order, spaced out at four-month intervals, gives a hint of something that hasn’t been seen or experienced since Shakespeare wrote them: continuity. Not just thematic continuity, but also human continuity, both for the audiences and the actors. For the audience, nowadays we are used to seeing Shakespeare packaged up into ...

Back in the 80s, each term’s roster of shows would always include one that was designated the ‘OUDS Major’. It would have a big budget, a top director, and a clutch of Oxford’s best acting talent. Clarendon Productions’ staging of Amadeus would have been the OUDS Major of this term. It was classy at every level: great fun, brilliantly original, wonderfully scored, wittily detailed, and helmed by performances that could give pros like Lucian Msamati, or even (going back to the original production) Paul Scofield a run for their money. Coincidentally, there are two German-adjacent shows on this week, with Goethe’s Faust down the road at the Pilch. Faust and Amadeus are joined at the thematic hip, and Salieri is a genuine Faustian hero. Both start with the central character performing an invocation (Faust invokes Mephistopheles, while Salieri invokes the ghosts of the future). And both of them go on to forge a terrible pact: Faust with the Devil, and Salieri with God. The pact is to gi...

This week Oxford is offering up two giants of Germanic art. Presenting, in the Keble corner, Wolfgang Mozart and his nemesis Salieri in the Peter Shaffer classic Amadeus ; and, in the Pilch corner, Mephistopheles himself in Johann von Goethe’s magnum opus Faust . I recommend you go and see both. Sadly I had to choose one, and having never seen Faust before, I made a grab for the Goethe. I have no regrets. This Faust is an intense experience. It’s a slow burn to start with, but it climaxes in a raging conflagration with the fires of both passion and Hell. By the end the audience were reeling. The history of literature of course has at least two famous Fausts. The English version, Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe, is a staple of the British stage. But I’ve always found it deeply frustrating. It has a mind-blowing opening, with the summoning of the Devil, and it has a cataclysmic close, as Faustus is dragged down to Hell for all eternity, begging for his sentence to be commuted t...

Dial M for Murder (1954) was the only film Alfred Hitchcock made in 3-D. There is one terrific moment in it when Grace Kelly gropes for a pair of scissors to stab her assailant, and she seems to reach right out into the audience. Apart from that, Hitch’s special effects are largely limited to surrounding the Wendices’ oppressive living-room with foregrounded drinks cabinets and sofas. This production of Frederick Knott’s original 1952 play could do with some of that three-dimensionality. It’s flat. This isn’t entirely the fault of the cast and crew. The source material, now 71 years old, feels awkward, stagey and hopelessly old-fashioned. Although a big hit in its day, this is sub-Agatha-Christie fare, with one of the most tortuous, elaborate and unconvincing twists at the end that you’ll ever see. It opened in the West End in the same month as Christie’s The Mousetrap , and it closed three months later. The Mousetrap is still running today (and no, I’m not going to tell you who did ...

Deborah Acheampong’s last play, Love Me? , was a big, hot mess with loose ends, plot holes and a gifted dramatic mind writhing and yelling at its centre. Her new one, Bodies , has cleaned up the mess, but the power and imagination are intact, and if anything even stronger than before. Set in the near future (I’m guessing 2026 because there are a couple of references to 2025 as being the recent past) Bodies takes place over one fraught evening in which three people tussle over relationships, love, commitment, sex and desire. It happens in thousands of homes, day in, day out. But, this being 2026, they are accompanied by the latest Virtual Assistant, an AI called ‘Home’. Home is an algorithm so advanced that it is (quite believably) beginning to take baby steps beyond mere factual assistance and in the direction of actual human emotions. Over the course of the play it begins to give advice, declare its own feelings, and make judgments on others. Think HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey – b...

The title of this astonishingly brilliant and immersive piece of theatrical experimentation is a song by Arthur Russell. Have you heard of him? I hadn’t until tonight. (Some of the other audience members I spoke to were even more clueless: they thought it was Walking On The Moon by The Police.) But Arthur Russell, who was making music from the mid-70s to the late-80s, was influential, avant-garde and fearless. Stylus magazine describes him as ‘a genius—never to be recognized in his own time, but to be enjoyed by generations to come.’ Here’s a link to the song itself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq5gjfN5lns&ab_channel=musiclover1394 According to one reviewer, ‘In Russell’s music, I hear the moments when we become acquainted with ourselves and our thoughts. It’s the music of our jumbled, confused insides, whether we know it exists or not.’ That is a perfect description of this play. It’s actually seven plays, each of them primarily a monologue, each written by a different studen...

This review was written for Daily Information, and appears on their website . It takes about thirty seconds to figure out what The Sci-Fi Show is about. And when it hits you, you realise you’re in for an enjoyable, galaxy-spanning ride. ‘John B. Stevens’ is a TV showrunner who found fame and fortune by rebooting the long-running sci-fi show Professor Where (have you got it yet?) But after four seasons he wants out. Constant battles with exterminating ‘Garlics’, resorting to the Professor’s standby props like the ‘sonic wrench’, and realising that the Professor’s predilections for invariably 19-year-old ‘companions’ are a bit weird has left John a disillusioned mess. This is the premise for a show that takes us from back-biting BBC production meetings to John travelling with the Professor himself aboard the Space Hopping Interplanetary Temporal Engine (or SHITE). As an Oxford student myself from 1982 to 1985 I acted in a couple of plays with Russell T. Davies, and we both found ourse...

This review was written for Daily Information, and appears on their website . The director’s programme notes for Medea ask the key question about this tragedy, first performed 2500 years ago: what is it that keeps audiences coming back to it, year after year, century after century, millennium after millennium, each time with renewed fascination? The answer is simple: it takes you inside the mind of a woman who does something so unnatural, so inhuman, so brutal, that her actions should be beyond all civilised understanding. And it makes you understand her. The text doesn’t excuse Medea, and nor does she excuse herself. Euripides won’t even grant that fig-leaf of human connection. Instead, he throws Medea at you, with all her sin, and he says, ‘Deal with it!’ We are left to contemplate a strength of purpose and a perception of injustice so intense and so clear-minded that our liberal sensitivities quail before it, and we leave the theatre in awe, unable either to condemn or condone. Thi...

This review was written for Daily Information, and appears on their website . Just under 70 yards from the Michael Pilch Studio, in the picturesque and leafy surroundings of Holywell Cemetery, lie the remains of Kenneth Grahame. The author of The Wind in the Willows was presumably devoured decades ago by Ratty and Mole. But would Grahame be spinning in his grave or resting at peace if he saw Peedie Productions’ new staging of his immortal story? Having seen A.A. Milne’s adaptation, Toad of Toad Hole , a couple of times in the past, I had been struck by its depiction of Edwardian male bonding. Yes, it’s very twee, with anthropomorphised animals portraying social stereotypes who bear little relevance to modern viewers. But it does suggest a loving bond between traditionally divided classes, and that gentle breeze in the willows hints at the beginnings of a wind of change. Previous productions have depended heavily on scenery and costume to create some theatrical magic, in the same way t...

Angels in America was last staged in Oxford at the end of February 2020 (in the Keble O’Reilly Theatre). Although barely three years ago, it might as well be an eternity. It was the last student production before Covid closed the theatres. The cast and crew back then would have had no idea how chillingly prescient their production was, its focus on the AIDS pandemic foreshadowing the suffering that was, as in the 1980s, just around the corner. So it’s great to see Angels taking wing once again, this time consciously reflecting on the parallels between those two plagues (both of which are still with us). Tony Kushner’s two-part epic is a breath-taking, bravura, mind-expanding display of theatrical prowess, and the first student production at the Playhouse this year doesn’t disappoint. The set is simple but effective: an impressionistic cityscape redolent of Manhattan’s Art Deco skyscrapers, but reduced to a dull grey that hints at the bleakness of the characters’ lives. It’s adaptable...

We all go to bed. It is, in every sense, the great leveller. And in Bedbugs we get to see what a bed witnesses, in its silent, non-judgemental vigil on the ups and downs of humanity. Actually, we don’t just see it. We’re part of it. The set of Bedbugs reaches out of the stage and envelops the audience, who are lounging on mattresses, rugs, pouffes, cushions and lilos. I myself reclined on a chaise longue that I have previously watched as a prop in at least eight other productions, so it was nice finally to get to know it personally. I felt like I really had a relationship with it. And that’s what this play is all about: the power of the bed over human relationships. Through a series of twinkling vignettes it takes us from minimum-wage workers at Benson’s Beds, to couples bickering before dropping into their pillows; from a bride-to-be in a hotel room who can’t pluck up the courage to call off her marriage, to a pair of students who wake up with a third person in their bed and can’t ...