The President's Husband's Drama Review of the Year

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 more plays being produced than at any time since before the onset of Covid. And if I had to apply just one word to the entire year it would be this: inclusive. The 48 shows reviewed by our little team over the last three terms have included actors and authors from a wide variety of backgrounds, first-timers working alongside old hands, some getting involved for fun, and others because it is their chosen career. We have seen people working as actors one week, who then pop up the following week as assistant directors, and then again a few days later simply scanning tickets at the door. There’s a sense of mucking in and being welcoming, and this has been a privilege to witness.

At the same time, there has been a palpable and welcome focus on enabling shows to get produced simply because the people involved want to have a go. Of course venues and drama societies are selective about where they put their backing. But they seem to have balanced this against a policy of accessibility, meaning that Oxford Drama looks more like a space to try out new ideas than at any time in the past. Again, a joy to see. And from where I sit, hunched and squinting at my notebook in the dark, it’s an approach that has already borne fruit, with writers like Deborah Acheampong and Max Morgan exploring and developing their craft, actors like Ethan Bareham and Maisie Lambert evolving into powerful, commanding stage presences, and plays as individual and obsessive as The Sci-Fi Show finding a slot alongside the near-professionalism of Amadeus.

This is all happening against a backdrop of immense change and exciting developments for theatre in Oxford. The Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities is shooting up so quickly that they’ve probably added a few inches even since I started writing this article. When finished it will house a purpose-built black box theatre with proper facilities: the first such space available (we hope) to students. It should be able to provide a crucial stepping-stone between, on the one hand, the darkened rooms, lecture halls and dining rooms that currently get used, and on the other hand, the wide-open spaces of the Playhouse stage. At the same time, the current Cameron Mackintosh Visiting Professor of Contemporary Theatre, Sir Greg Doran, is the first-ever holder of that post to mount a play with students, giving a rare opportunity not just to witness, but to participate in, the methods and expectations of a genuinely top-drawer director. Exciting times.

As the title suggests, it is the job of a critic to be critical. The policy of The President’s Husband’s Drama Reviews is to be honest at all times, and to assume that creative people mounting plays want to know what we truly think. Even when a production doesn’t quite work out as intended, it is our intention to be as constructive as possible, to recognise when a show has gone down with all guns blazing, and to celebrate the endeavour, just as much as to praise the (many) copper-bottomed hits that grace our stages. (Of course, on those very rare occasions when it seems like little effort has been put in, then it’s fair to point that out too.)

So. We have seen no fewer than 22 newly-written plays over the last year. That represents almost half of all the productions reviewed, and it shows the sheer level of creativity rampant at the university. Many of them, like Imee Marriott’s By Proxy and Annabel Baptist’s The Best Years of Our Lives are highly personal reflections on traumatic experiences. Others, like Oisin Byrne’s The Blue Dragon or Alec Tiffou’s Daddy Longlegs, are works of pure imagination. What unites them all is the bravery and dedication required to create a play (something I’ve certainly never done). So here – with apologies for any we were unable to see – is the roll-call of new writing we’ve had the honour to watch in the last year. Take a bow.

·        By Proxy by Imee Marriott – two schoolfriends diverge into career-driven and suicidal adulthood

·        Fragments by Laura Swift – an ancient Greek text comes to life and controls its translators

·        Window Seat by Cleopatra Coleman – mother and daughter bond while waiting for a plane to take off

·        Placeholder by May McEvoy – a ghost story about a woman torn between her living and dead partners

·        The Blue Dragon by Oisin Byrne – a surreal and hilarious journey on the train-ride to death

·        Sampi by Oliver Roberts – three friends prepare for a party while conversing with their own subconscious selves

·        Breaking Bod by Molly Dineley – Breaking Bad set at Oxford University

·        Bedbugs by Coco Cottam – the power of the bed explored through a myriad of different scenes

·        The Sci-Fi Show by Cassie Wicks – loving pastiche of Dr Who

·        This Is How We Walk On The Moon by Lily Sheldon, Leah Aspden, Coco Cottam, Max Morgan, Shaw Worth, Eulalia Marie and Gabriel Blackwell – seven very different stories intermesh around a mobile audience

·        Bodies by Deborah Acheampong – what it’s like to live with an AI in 2026

·        Carrion by Max Morgan – Othello meets Bambi as three forest animals fight for supremacy

·        Alice at the Asylum by Lydia Vie – a property developer encounters Alice in Wonderland in a former Victorian hospital

·        Having the Last Word by Jessica Tabraham – a dying woman comes to terms with her life through a sequence of visits from her past

·        Bucket List by Imogen Usherwood – a love story, except one of the lovers is dead

·        The Best Years of Our Lives by Annabel Baptist – things fall apart as Finals approach for four friends at Oxford

·        Best of Five by James Oakeshott – the romantic embarrassments of a student on a journey of self-discovery

·        Daddy Longlegs by Alec Tiffou – a priest’s vicarious interactions through both confession booth and gloryhole

·        The Storyteller by Patrick Painter – a meditation on the nature of eternity from someone condemned to live forever

·        Vanitas by Daniel Doyle Vidaurre – a group of cult members try to find the purloined skull of the cult’s founder

·        The Pact by Adrienne Knight – Stephen Sondheim meets Booksmart in a musical about what happens if you get into Oxford but lose your friend.

·        The Sun King by Uğur Özcan – a boy on a beach meets a supernatural king every year, while struggling to accept his own identity

Some production companies, like Matchbox, Stellate and Clarendon Productions, have focused more on work by professional writers, ranging from household names like Peter Shaffer (a glitteringly rich Amadeus) and Andrew Lloyd-Webber (The Phantom of the Opera providing an evening of outrageous fun) to lesser-known figures like Simon Longman (Milked being a small-scale but harrowing two-and-a-half-hander). It was great also to see the work of Peter Morgan (Frost/Nixon knocking them dead at St John’s), Noel Coward (no fewer than two: Present Laughter and Still Life), Tony Kushner (a stirringly gripping Angels In America) and W.B. Yeats (with the rarely-performed but haunting Cathleen ni Houlihan). While it’s wonderful to see so much new work being mounted, these productions provided a valuable reminder that the existing repertoire has a lot to be explored and indeed learnt from.

The classics too were much in evidence this year. The Jesus College Shakespeare Project has become a byword for quality verse-speaking and imaginative-but-considered interpretation, and their productions of Henry VI Part iii, Richard III and Titus Andronicus were all thrilling experiences. In fact it was quite hard to see a Shakespeare play this year without bumping into actor Kate Harkness, who starred as Ophelia, Richard the Third, and Lavinia in Titus – all very useful for upcoming English exams. There were also productions of Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Midsummer Night’s Dream (in which the Magdalen College dog, Scrumpy, gave his first and last performance in the role of 'Dog', sadly leaving us at the grand cocker spaniel age of 13 a few weeks later) and Hamlet. I didn’t see all of these, but it’s good to know the Bard is well represented.

Other masterpieces from antiquity included the even-more-rarely-performed-than-Cathleen-ni-Houlihan comedy by Machiavelli, The Mandrake, a highly original Cherry Orchard, the fire and brimstone of a sterling Goethe’s Faust, a frankly stunning Hedda Gabler, and productions of the ancient Greek tragedies The Bacchae and Medea. Compared with the experimentalism surrounding new plays, Oxford students have shown massive respect for some of these classics. That is admirable, but I guess these old texts can probably take a bit more maltreatment. (A production I once directed at Merton of Sheridan’s The Rivals was described by a critic as ‘like taking the playwright out into the street and beating him up’. I’m not sure it was meant to be a compliment, but I was happy.)

The acting talent on display over the last twelve months has been so remarkably brilliant that it’s hard to believe this is a university where you can’t take Theatre Studies or Performing Arts as a degree subject. Historically, some of the UK’s greatest actors started out at Oxford, never so much as glancing at a drama school on their journey to international stardom. And that looks like a tradition that may well be set to continue. Everyone involved, whether a regular performer with one eye firmly trained on a future treading the boards, or a first-timer having a bit of fun, has contributed enormously to the acting success of the last year. The message is clear: come and have a go.

I have occasionally been reduced to possibly-over-audible tears at the raw emotion on display. And some people (Jules Upson, Cosimo Asvisio, I’m looking at you) seem to have decided to be in literally everything. I suspect there might be a competition going on to get in the Guinness Book of Records for Most Plays Acted In During One Academic Year. How they remember the lines is a total mystery.

If there is one field where the Oxford Drama community is sorely in need of more help, then it would seem to me to be on the technical side of theatre. Set design and set building have precious few opportunities for development here. On a recent trip to Chicago University with The President, we viewed their theatre facilities, and wandered slack-jawed with wonder through their endless scenery workshops, paint-frames, fly galleries and lighting control rooms. In Oxford people have to make scenery in their bedrooms, and the result is that we have a massive dependence on writing and performance, but little or no recourse to stagecraft. If the Schwarzman Centre or the Playhouse can help improve this, all the better.

So, finally, a message of massive respect and huge congratulations for everybody involved in drama at Oxford. You lack quite a lot of the three Fs that most university drama needs in order to survive: Funding, Facilities and a Faculty. But, week in, week out, you make magic through talent, dedication, creativity, inclusivity and utter joy in your work. I am looking forward to next term.