The President's Husband's Drama Reviews

This review was written for Daily Information, and appears on their website here .  Welcome to the 100 th President’s Husband’s Review. I decided to celebrate by… going to the theatre. There can’t be many theatre companies like Ockham’s Razor. They combine physical performance and circus skills to create bold, distinctive, beautiful experiences. They tell stories of human suffering, love, tragedy and emotional honesty, and they express all that through the medium of human pyramids, tumbling, rope-work, and even the occasional bit of clowning. Don’t expect red noses, enormous shoes or lion-tamers though. This is serious art, not Billy Smart. Ockham’s Razor’s latest production is Tess , an adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s tragic 19 th -century novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles . Even with a cast of only seven (almost supernaturally gifted) performers, the stage seems constantly full of activity as they roll, dance and climb over planks, walls and each other. The story is narrated by just one

Outside the cloistered confines of academia, you may never have heard of ‘boys’ companies’. But back in Shakespeare’s day they were all the rage: theatrical troupes made up entirely of eight- to twelve-year-old kids. They had their own plays specially written for them. They were sometimes sponsored by the more established companies like The Lord Chamberlain’s Men. And playwrights like Ben Jonson and John Lyly would even use them to create satirical pieces mocking each other’s work, leading to Elizabethan-style battles of the theatrical bands, played out by lovably energetic Mini-Mes. They were so popular that, as Professor Laurie Maguire points out, in Hamlet the travelling players actually complain that they can’t compete with these little tykes who ‘cry out on the top of question, and are most tyrannically clapped for't: these are now the fashion.’ Like all fashions, boys’ companies didn’t last. By 1615 the fad had passed. But it left a legacy of plays that offer a quirky and fa

Who decides when the year begins and ends in creative circles? It’s a meaningless marker. The Oscars, in March, don’t coincide with any kind of new life in the film industry. The Oliviers, in April, probably have more to say about the end of the West End financial year than the artistic one. And yet, in Oxford, there is something about the end of Hilary term. For many who have devoted their three undergraduate years to theatre, it’s the point when they put away their audition tapes and M&S sharing buckets of chocolate cornflake mini-bites (or whatever treats they like to bring to rehearsals) and settle down to focus on Finals. The old guard passes on. And Trinity feels like a new birth: plays sprout up in college gardens like young saplings, and a new OUDS committee looks to the future. So what better time for the President’s Husband’s Drama Review of the Year, taking in productions from May 2023 to March 2024? It’s been a year of astonishing output for Oxford student drama, with m

The Trail to Oregon has perhaps one of the most alienating premises imaginable to an audience of British Gen-Zers: a comedy musical based on an edutainment video game from the 1970s about the Oregon Trail. When I first watched it on YouTube, in a free-to-view full pro shoot just like every other StarKid production, I had no clue about the inspiration behind it. I was perfectly happy to go along with whatever this oddly conceived thing was, based on my familiarity with the theatre company and my trust that they’d deliver something entertaining. It was on the same basis that I came to The Mollys’ production of Oregon : familiar with the play and the people who made it originally, I was primed to root for a student-mounted version of it. And I was right to do so. The story of Oregon is one of a family of five: two parents, two kids and a grandpa, who leave their farm in Missouri to trek the dangerous Oregon Trail and seek their fortune. As these are video game characters, the audience has

This review was written for The Reviews Hub, and appears on their website here . Of all the pop music of the late 60s, none more joyfully captures the new vision of racial harmony generated by the US civil rights movement than that of The Drifters. Their music is a carefree celebration of the simple things in life, which young black people had been unable to enjoy in earlier decades: going to the movies, sitting wherever they wanted to sit, making out on beaches, lying on the roof looking at the stars; in short, just enjoying the novelty of free time. Their iconic album cover from 1973’s Greatest Hits sums up their naïve appeal: a comic-book-style collection of panels depicting a young man enjoying life (complete with chauvinistic tropes only too common at the time). That innocent pleasure persists to this day. At the last count there were at least 20 Drifters-style bands working the British tribute circuit, including The Ultimate Drifters, Let’s Drift and Soul Kinda Wonderful. In fac

In the hallowed halls of English literary analysis, allegory often gets a bad press. ‘This’ means ‘That’. ‘X’ means ‘Y’… Readers who yearn for a more nuanced, impressionistic view of life tend to turn their noses up at it. The Chronicles of Narnia are a perfect example. What could have been a flight of purest fantasy becomes a clunkily prosaic piece of doggerel as soon as you start realising that Aslan = Jesus and White Witch = Satan. But children know the truth. Children know that the secret of enjoying allegory is to forget or – better still – never to realize that it means something else; to enjoy the symbolism not for what it means but for what it is : a magical lion, a Green Knight, a corrupt pig. Symbolism can be beautiful and enticing, and once you stop worrying about what the symbols actually mean, you can truly appreciate their unreal beauty. That unreality is what The Sun King invites us to dive into . Uğur Özcan’s long, meditative play has at its heart a child: a young bo

This review was written for The Reviews Hub, and appears on their website here . Imitating the Dog have been hooked on horror for several years. Their Night of the Living Dead – Remix (2020) was an action-packed ode to cooperation, choreography and cinematography. Last year’s Macbeth again used experimental video techniques, and attacked Shakespeare’s text like an XL Bully with a rag doll. Imitating the Dog indeed. In true canine style, they investigate texts with innocence and fascination, then tear them to shreds with joy. But unlike a dog, the attack results in something new, imaginative and wondrous to behold. And with Frankenstein they complete their gothic horror trilogy. Like Victor Frankenstein himself, the company is renowned for its creative use of technology. But does its inventiveness breathe life into this ancient text? Appropriately for a story about a hybrid creature, this is a hybrid production, constructed from disparate living parts. It shifts between a conte

What do you get if you mix An Inspector Calls with Agatha Christie? The answer is And Then There Were None , a play in which an apparently respectable bunch of British society stalwarts are forced to confront their own wrongdoings by a mysterious agent of vengeance. As in Priestley’s play, they aren’t guilty under the law of the land: it’s moral justice that gets them in the end. This being Christie, the social justice element is of minimal importance. What really matters to Dame Agatha is the web of mystery, motive and misdirection that dictates the action. In her hands, plot is so all-consuming that it billows up like expanding foam, leaving her characters mere ciphers whose personalities exist purely to explain their roles in the unfolding puzzle. It shouldn’t work. But it does. Every time. Like a sharpened knife, Christie does one thing. But she does it so well that her stories have captured our imaginations for almost a century now. And Then There Were None is her best-selling bo