The President's Husband's Drama Reviews

Precisely one century ago Anton Chekhov’s final play, and greatest masterpiece, The Cherry Orchard , reached the British stage. It was a momentous and significant event in the history of this country’s theatre. And it took place right here, at the Oxford Playhouse, in a production mounted by students and professionals. How fitting it is, then, for a student production company to re-mount and re-imagine this play on the same stage. Its overriding themes, of the old giving way to the new, of modernity vanquishing tradition, and of a brutally monetised future laying waste to a more innocent, if misguided, past, feel as relevant today as they were a century ago. In his informative and beautifully-written programme notes, director Harry Brook, of An Exciting New Productions, describes his interpretation as ‘looking forward and backward with Janus-like faces’. It certainly does that, and it builds to a climax that is eye-poppingly original and simultaneously makes perfect sense. In the open...

In the spirit of this week’s production, a quick hello from me as Peter Kessler’s answer to Blackadder’s manservant Baldrick. Moving swiftly on… Green Carnations Productions and Kian Moghaddas bring the iconic Blackadder to the Michael Pilch Studio. The company that have previously given us Narcissus, A Poet and a Scholar , and The Mandrake of Machiavelli returns once again to the annals of history although this time with less intrigue and a lot more jokes about ‘thingy’s’. This abridged version of Blackadder draws on some of its most infamous storylines: Blackadder hosts the puritanic Whiteadders for dinner in Elizabethan England, loses the only copy of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary whilst serving the snorting Prince George, and finds himself under court martial for shooting a pigeon in the trenches of Flanders. Blackadder is a brave choice for a student production, and I’ll admit my apprehension going in. Whilst this performance doesn’t quite nail the stinging satire of the original se...

Everybody hurts. It's Christmas 1970, it's somewhere in New England, at a boarding school for rich, young, white men. For some of them, reality and Vietnam, like the snow, are edging ever closer. In writer David Hemingson and director Alexander Payne's gentle but sincere seasonal tale of redemption, Paul Giamatti plays the Scrooge-like figure of grumpy, uncompromising Classics teacher Paul Hunham. As with Scrooge, the failures and setbacks of Hunham's life have left him vindictive, stubborn and isolated. Over a Christmas break he may not be visited by three ghosts, but he certainly has three out-of-school experiences (visits to a hospital, a party and a city) which combine to turn the curmudgeon into a creature of compassion. Giamatti’s spirit guide on this journey is Angus Tully, a Year 12 student abandoned by his parents for the vacation, played by the disarmingly irresistible Dominic Sessa. He may not be Tiny Tim, but he too is handicapped, not by personal fail...

This review was written for Daily Information, and appears on their website . At the curtain call of Ellen Kent’s Carmen at the New Theatre, the cast, who hail from Kharkiv, unfurl a Ukrainian flag and sing their national anthem with passion and power. It’s a stirring climax, but unfortunately it’s also the best thing in the whole show. Passion and power are two qualities Carmen should exude from every sweat-drenched pore, but this production lacks both. It’s more bullfinch than bullfight. Unlike plays, opera productions have a way of being resuscitated on a regular basis. The set is hauled out of storage, the stage directions are dusted off, and a new cast of singers is inserted into the ready-made musical mould. This Carmen has been on hard rotation since at least 2015, and it shows. Like photocopying the same image over and over again, after too many iterations you end up with a pale imitation of the original. Whatever spark it once had has blurred, faded and vanished. Any direct...