The President's Husband's Drama Reviews

Before the curtain went up on the first night of Phantom of the Opera at Keble’s O’Reilly Theatre, Producer Finley Bettsworth and his crew were terrified. The dry ice company couldn’t find the door to deliver their dry ice; the QR code for the online programmes took you to a completely different website; and the giant chandelier, due to drop down on the audience at the climax of Act One, was hanging in the wrong place. On top of that, Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s Really Useful Group (R.U.G. – but maybe the ‘U’ should stand for something else – Uncooperative? Ultra-greedy?) had charged them thousands of pounds for the right to put on the show, and then had insisted that they have a larger orchestra even than the one in London’s West End. Finley had to negotiate for days just to be allowed to change the background colour on the posters from black to blue. So it must have come as something of a relief when, two hours later, the audience rose to their feet as one, in a standing ovation for one o...

Reaction to The Zone of Interest has been polarised. On one side there are the Igeddits: ‘They live next to Auschwitz and they’ve become desensitised to the violence – I geddit!’ For them, the film is repetitive and, once the scenario is clear, boring. On the other side are the Masterpiecers: ‘Never has the banality of evil been so truthfully and disturbingly portrayed – it’s a masterpiece!’ The truth is: both are right. The Zone of Interest sets its stall out in the first few minutes, and it proceeds to repeat its message through different scenarios until the end. The narrative progression is more vertical than lateral: it gradually takes us deeper into the lives and mindsets of its characters, while their story shifts only slightly from beginning to end. It finds different ways to depict the same horror, just as the Nazis found different ways to enact it. The experience is more like visiting an art exhibition than having a story unfold before your eyes. By the end of the Royal Acad...

You know how most musicals start with a big, catchy number to hook the audience in and get them in the mood? Well, The Pact doesn’t do that. In fact it does the complete opposite. It starts with a somewhat mournful bit of exposition, which is then repeated, word for word, in a dirge-like recitative , by the entire cast. The energy feels low, the on-stage presence static. After five minutes the audience was shifty and nervous. Is this going to be ninety minutes of slow-motion soul-searching? No need for alarm. The sombre start is in fact a bold decision to go against tradition, and that boldness sets the tone for what is to come. The Pact follows the journey of two high-school Oxbridge candidates, Ava and Maxwell, as they prepare for their applications and interviews, and it reverses expectations all the way through. The English teacher Maurice (played by Ollie Carter) who at first seems unbearably smug and unsympathetic, turns out to be sensitive and committed. The two students, who ...

One of the running gags in the late-1960’s US TV comedy show Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In was a German soldier who would pop up without warning and, in response to the previous sketch, say, ‘Very interesting…. But stupid!’ (It’s only five seconds, and it’s here if you’d like to check it out .) That German soldier would not have been out of place in Vanitas . The setup is intriguing. A group of strange characters with bizarrely exaggerated behavioural tics gather at the headquarters of a religious cult. Shortly afterwards the skull of the cult’s founder goes missing, and his ghost is summoned to help find the thief. What could it all mean? Is it a commentary on the exploitative nature of society? An exposé of charlatan psychics? An analysis of the needy souls who seek out such organisations in the first place? No. It’s just very, very silly. The cast members embrace the silliness with enthusiasm and skill. Roman Pitman as Augustus the cult leader gets big laughs from his almost-Mrs-Mala...

The Storyteller is more a work of philosophy than theatre: a meditation on the nature of eternity, and a Socratic dialogue between one who merely sees the future, and one who lives forever. The publicity says it’s Samuel Beckett meets Cormac McCarthy, and that’s a fair description. But does it make for a great play? Patrick Painter’s strange and elusively compelling creation shows us what it feels like when you’ve outlived not just your family but the entire universe too, by presenting us with an eternal character called The Storyteller. She sits in icy resentment at the end of time, and pours out her ire on The Astrologer, a Loki-like imp who conferred immortality on her billions of years previously. The Storyteller’s quandary is reminiscent of the travails of Neil Gaiman’s Endless . Lily Massey, in a great performance, sits in despair in a wasteland of clocks, musty books and forgotten machinery, reflecting on what it all meant, and how it can ever come to an end. There’s a feeling ...

In 1954, the poet T.S. Eliot remarked of Noël Coward’s writing: “There are things you can learn from Noël Coward that you won’t learn from Shakespeare”. The modernity and latent queerness of his work has always made it ripe for reinterpretation and lends itself marvellously to rapidly evolving notions of gender and sexuality. Queerness, in Coward’s world, is not a subtle tool; it’s a scythe by which to slash through the mundanity of the heteronormative and, as Andrew Scott (who played Garry Essendine in the 2019 revival of Present Laughter ) noted, “sort of says it’s okay to live a life that’s less ordinary”. Whilst that blade of innovation is present in Clarendon Productions’ adaptation of Present Laughter , it all too often falls flat. To pay tribute to Coward’s larger-than-life creations is to deviate from them and subvert the subversive into something wholly modern for the 21 st century. This production, at points riotously funny, lacked the sense of passion and drive rampant with...

This review was originally written for The Reviews Hub, and appears on their site here. Playwright Michael Frayn himself talks with some bemusement about the enduring popularity of his farce-within-a-farce Noises Off . Despite having authored such classics as Copenhagen and Benefactors , it is this piece of theatrical insanity that keeps him a wealthy man. First staged in 1982, it is always being performed somewhere (normally Germany), and the royalties keep rolling in. According to Frayn, it is his Mousetrap . But, like The Mousetrap , is it beginning to show its age? After all, the West End into which Noises Off was thrust 42 years ago was replete with the sort of plays it pokes fun at. Ray Cooney farces were packing in the punters, and every other cupboard concealed a semi-naked young woman in fishnet stockings. Theatre has moved on, hasn’t it? Does Noises Off still make its voice heard? The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is a  resounding “Yes”. Noises Off is a deceptively si...

How is it that we touch the sublime? Our half-baked understanding of mortality and holiness prohibits us from any meaningful engagement or co-existence with it. We are condemned, eternally, to brief grazes with transcendence; a song lyric, a lookout-point, or, indeed, a play. This week, the Michael Pilch Studio has been the centre of a theatrical reckoning of biblical proportions. Stepping out, after the lights went up, into the heavy rain of Saturday night felt akin to phasing out of an encounter with the divine – Matchbox Productions’ Daddy Longlegs is a true triumph. This show represents the pinnacle of Oxford theatre; daring, bold, and engaged. A production scraping the cosmos that lands its audience, with a humbling thump, back in a world riddled with the same broken people that fill its stage. It’s simply magnificent . Following an anonymized priest’s (Will Shackleton) vicarious interactions through the netting of a confession box and the taped-up edges of a glory hole, Daddy Lon...

Titus Andronicus is a famously violent play, and the warning notice outside the auditorium in Jesus College reads: ‘PLEASE BE AWARE THAT THE PLAY CONTAINS BRUTAL DEPICTION OF R*PE AND MUTILATION AND ITS AFTERMATH, FREQUENT RACIST SLURS, SCENES OF MURDER, ASSAULT, SEXUAL COERCION, DISTRESSING DEPICTIONS OF CORPORAL AND CAPITAL PUNISHMENT, HUMAN SACRIFICE, GRIEF, DEATHS (INCLUDING THOSE OF CHILDREN AND ATTEMPTED INFANTICIDE), MENTAL ILLNESS, CANNIBALISM, VOMITING, WEAPONS AND SUDDEN LOUD NOISES.’ You’d think that would be enough, but they forgot to mention cruelty to animals, with one of the most famous scenes in the play revolving around the death by stabbing of a fly. Some productions literally wallow in blood. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s most recent outing went so far as employing a magic consultant so that they could convincingly depict Titus having his own hand cut off in full view of the audience. It makes for great spectacle, but one of the challenges facing any production of...

It’s the worldwide week of love and Oxford, however hard it may try to stymie the romance via essays and deadlines, is not immune. The high street restaurants are decked out in tables-for-two and carnations are briefly evading condemnation to a sad life wilting on a student’s lapel. Passion is in the air, across our streets, and on our screens. I’m sure many of you will have spent much of the week, like me, bingeing Netflix’s superb adaptation of One Day, tissues in one hand and Hinge in the other. In that same spirit, I hoped for a piece of theatre that would give voice to that magic or, at the very least, infuse St. Valentine’s Day with the sort of romantic ennui that makes it such timeless material. Unfortunately, Pigeon Wings Productions’ Best of Five couldn’t quite lift itself over the lofty parapets of love and instead ended up a bumbling mess (not too dissimilar to myself, upon finishing Ambika Mod and Leo Woodall’s devastating performances in One Day ). This production promised...

Well, that was depressing. Annabel Baptist’s new play The Best Years of Our Lives takes its ironic cue from the 1946 film of the same name. Where that post-war dose of reality revealed that US soldiers returning victorious from the front line encountered not joy back home, but alienation, depression and isolation, Baptist’s play shows that everyday students can go through exactly the same emotional trauma from the battlegrounds of Oxford’s academic expectations. The play follows the final undergraduate year of four friends living in a shared flat. Each of them occupies a different band on the spectrum of emotional instability. At one end we have Toby, breezing through life, well-adjusted and relaxed. One step down is Hannah, selfish and morbid: she likes to imagine death, but only as a way of getting her friends together round her bed. Further down the scale is Grace, a hard-working student whose tutor is not happy with her recent performance, and has (somewhat implausibly) summoned h...

405 BC was a great year for Greek theatre*. It saw the premieres of two of the most important plays Western culture has ever produced: Euripides’ The Bacchae and Aristophanes’ The Frogs : the first one of the bloodiest and most anarchic tragedies ever written; the second one of the oldest, and yet still one of the most modern, comedies of all time. Both of them won first prize at their respective festivals. And astonishingly, both of them star the same character, Dionysus. In The Bacchae , he is a murderous, hedonistic force of nature. And in The Frogs , well, he’s a buffoon. Coming out of the auditorium at the Kiln Theatre on Kilburn High Road, it was perhaps not a surprise to bump into Oxford Emeritus Professor of Classics, Oliver Taplin. Professor Taplin consumes Greek theatre wherever it can be found, and knows more about it than probably anyone in the country (almost definitely more than anyone in Kilburn). He and I agreed that the theatre company Spymonkey’s banner statement for...