The President's Husband's Drama Reviews

With a title plucked from the back catalogue of Jacobean crooner John Dowland, and a plot somewhere between Marlowe’s Edward II and Game of Thrones , this tasty, twisty little play has a lot going for it. Steeped in literary references and historical assignations well away from your average History or English syllabus, it’s a story few will have encountered, but its political machinations feel only too familiar. Put simply, back in the early 17 th century, King James I "took as his favourite" (loving that euphemism) a young social climber called Robert Carr. Carr was actually working with his friend Sir Thomas Overbury who wanted to wield influence over the crown. But Carr got greedy, and abandoned Overbury after falling head-over-heels in love with the bewitching Lady Frances Howard. Together they plotted Overbury’s murder, and ended up in the Tower of London. An everyday tale of cutthroat landed gentry. In 2018, the Globe Theatre mounted a performance of Sir Walter Raleig...

Playing games is at the heart of improv. In its heyday, the ground-breaking Channel 4 show Whose Line Is It Anyway? won every comedy award going by presenting outrageously talented comedians with a series of game-like scenarios to turn into improvised sketches. And even today, there’s no doubt that the funniest panel shows on TV and radio are the ones that give genuine opportunities for improvised comedy. Just compare Radio 4’s The Unbelievable Truth with BBC1’s Would I Lie To You? Both are about trying to get lies past the opposing team. Both star David Mitchell. In fact, both are very funny. But Would I Lie To You? has the edge because it depends entirely on improv, whereas The Unbelievable Truth is built around prepared mini-lectures read out by the contestants. I promise I will get to tonight’s show in a minute. A bit more on improv first. As a TV comedy producer in the 1990s I was privileged to work with some of the funniest comedians of the last generation. The greatest of t...

This academic year has been bookended by two stonking productions of plays by Peter Shaffer. Back in Michaelmas Term there was Amadeus . And now there’s Equus , in a rendition so intense that it was only as the last spotlight flicked out on Ethan Bareham’s tortured face that the audience realised it hadn’t breathed for the last five minutes. Amadeus and Equus are linked by more than just performance schedules. Equus may be the wordier and denser of the two. But both plays give free rein to Shaffer’s overriding preoccupation: the limitations of ‘normal’ people. Just as Salieri stands up as the ‘patron saint of mediocrity’, here Dr Dysart confesses to his own ‘educated, average head’. Both plays are narrated by characters who, despite achieving worldly success in their own fields, bewail the gulf between themselves and those who live in a world of pure, celestially-driven inspiration. Not only do they glimpse their own petty boundaries, but, in a kind of earthly purgatory,  they a...

There’s something fantastical in the air at Magdalen College this summer. Last week, in the college President’s Garden, Magdalen Players staged Neil Bartlett’s adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s fantasy novel Orlando . This week, Magdalen students venture further afield, to the Burton Taylor Studio. And once again, the play is an adaptation of a classic fantasy novel, this time Diana Wynne Jones’ children’s magical adventure, Howl’s Moving Castle . Of course, Howl’s Moving Castle has already been adapted, famously and gloriously, into one of Hayao Miyazaki’s most trippy and spell-binding animations. It’s easy to see the appeal of Wynne Jones’ book for Miyazaki: it’s a magical kingdom with steampunk styling, peopled by witches and wizards who subvert the traditional fairy-tale ‘crone’, instead finding roles for young heroes and heroines in these conventionally villainous characters. Miyazaki had been there before, with Kiki’s Delivery Service , and Howl’s Moving Castle was a gift-wrapped ...

The act of criticism is itself a dance with the impossible. The relaying of the visual, auditory, and personal encounter with performance via the textual simplifies it. Drama is experiential – any review is dependent on its author’s trust of themselves and their senses. When we strip away the act of seeing and the subjective truth of the knowledge of our senses, it begs the question: what are we left with? You’d be forgiven for thinking that there was only one production being staged in Oxford this week. Sir Gregory Doran’s bombastically assured production of Two Gentlemen of Verona has set itself up to be event-viewing since its initial announcement. For those that have attended, it’s a joyous reminder of the wealth of student talent on offer, wrangled together under the stewardship of one of Britain’s most revered directors. Two Gentleman exemplified the vitality of directorial vision – how amateur performances can be oxygenated by wacky and brave creative decisions. However, the M...

This production is about so much more than just two gentlemen from Verona. It is the cultural event of the summer in Oxford. For the students involved, it’s possibly the theatrical event of their entire university career. Sir Greg Doran, recently retired Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, is the Cameron Mackintosh Visiting Professor of Contemporary Theatre for 2023-2024. He is the 29 th person to hold that post, and normally the incumbent gives three lectures during their tenure, one per term. Greg didn’t want to do that. He doesn’t see himself as a great talker (although many would disagree). But it’s fair to say he does know how to direct plays. His productions have been the Gold Standard for Shakespeare for longer than any of the actors in this production have been alive. But throughout his illustrious career, there has been one play from the fabled First Folio that has always eluded him, and that is The Two Gentlemen of Verona . So Greg decided that, for his contr...

Not for Magdalen College the easy pickings of conventional summer garden theatre. They got that out of their system last year with A Midsummer Night’s Dream . Now they are delving into more experimental waters with a revival of Neil Bartlett’s eye-poppingly original 2022 adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s time-and-gender-bending novel, Orlando . The result is a production which, despite never being conceived as an open-air experience, finds new life and new meanings amongst the irises, statuary and roving cats of the President’s Garden. On the night I was there, Neil Bartlett, the playwright, was present. An alumnus of Magdalen, he has not returned since graduating in 1979. Back then he was a rebellious voice in the all-male quads and corridors of the college, awash with Etonians in black tie, mutely sharing their secrets of what they got up to in the dorms back at school. Neil wore bondage gear and a T-shirt with the slogan ‘YES, FAIRIES ARE REAL’ on the back. To him, and to other brave o...

If there's one thing you can definitely say about Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers , it's a hell of a story. It’s bubbling over with purloined necklaces, scheming cardinals, international intrigue, boy's own adventures, simmering revenge, fake executions, and enough toxic-masculinity-cum-gay-subtext for six musketeers, never mind three. Dumas actually employed hack writers just to add more plot to his novels, and with this one they were working overtime – all to great effect, I should add. So what better venue could you possibly find to stage this story of stories, than The Story Museum itself, a place dedicated to recounting tales and engaging children of all ages in the simple joy of telling a rollicking good romance? But then, finding unique, original and effective venues is what Food For Thought, the production company behind The Three Musketeers , is all about. They take spaces that you may have never heard of, or may never have imagined as a possible theatri...

If Shakespeare’s works were a huge mansion, and each play a room in it, Romeo and Juliet might be the Grand Ballroom, Hamlet the Old Library, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream the Parkland Walk on a warm, Trinity-term evening. King John would be somewhere in the East Wing. No one goes there very often. It’s dark and unfamiliar, and it smells of death. It's not often opened up nowadays. But on the basis of tonight's show, it undoubtedly should be. The Jesus College Shakespeare Project reveals King John to be not just a thrilling watch, replete with betrayal, murder, battles and unexpected twists, but also stylistically and thematically in step with our own cynical age. The Victorians loved this play (but then, they loved going to freak shows and subjugating entire foreign nations too, so they didn't always get it right). It was so popular at the end of the 19th Century that in 1899 it became the first Shakespeare play to be made into a film - silent, four minutes long, and ...

Sometimes you can go to the theatre and have an experience like visiting a Michelin-starred restaurant: all prancing style, surprises and dramatic flavours new to your palate, delivered with such impeccable professionalism that you stagger out slightly dazed, worrying about your heart. And sometimes it can be more like the dramatic equivalent of going to a simple tea-room, where the menu offers jacket potatoes and toasted sandwiches: undemanding, familiar, but good, honest nourishment. Dead End , a new play by Marie Doinne, falls into tea-room territory. Comparing this production with other recent pieces of Oxford new writing, there are no giddy leaps through time, no stunning revelations, no supernatural characters. There isn’t even a talking grizzly bear. Instead, there is a kind of Platonic dialogue between two clearly opposed points of view. Bea and Olivia grew up as friends, but while Bea has gone into the world of commerce and marketing, Olivia has become an environmentally-aware...

  “Art consists of reshaping life but it does not create life, nor cause life.” So said Stanley Kubrick, in an interview with Sight & Sound, whilst promoting A Clockwork Orange. His directorial touch was always inspired, from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Barry Lyndon , by a negotiation with the gap between performance and reality. Whether facing the vast night of space in 2001 or the orgiastic excess at the centre of Eyes Wide Shut , we are forced to ponder the performativity of our fear, our desire, and our sense of self. It is the performance of life within the boundaries of art that acts as a mirror, dangling us closer and closer to the edge of self-realisation.  Matchbox Productions’ staging of Manwatching is littered with references to Kubrick’s body of work. Penned by an anonymous British comedienne, Manwatching chronicles its writer’s journey of sexual realisation and interactions with the opposite sex in straight monologue. The choice to include Kubrick’s filmography ...

This review was written for The Reviews Hub, and appears on their website .  The late Roger Michell was Hanif Kureishi’s closest and most enduring collaborator. They worked together on at least four different films and TV series (including the award-winning BBC adaptation of The Buddha of Suburbia), and they started out together in theatre at the Royal Court. Michell himself was a resident director with the Royal Shakespeare Company for many years. So the big question is: why did he never attempt a stage adaptation of Kureishi’s era-defining novel? With this production, Emma Rice answers that question. You would have to be bonkers to try and squeeze this sprawling coming-of-age story into two-and-a-half hours of stage time. Roger Michell was inspired, but he wasn’t crazy. Fortunately, Emma Rice is. And what she has created is a joyous, turned-up-to-eleven merry-go-round of theatre in which characters, costumes and coitus flash past at breakneck speed. From her elegantly written, pa...

Walking into the Pilch to see Patsy Byrne is Dead! (Bitch Eat Bitch) is like stepping into the biggest dressing-up box in the world. Glitter hangs from every surface, mutely yelling ‘Fame is meaningless tat!’ – a neat summary of this play’s underlying message, that success without talent or hard work is as insignificant and hollow as a swathe of tawdry party decoration. Behind the glittery facade is a blank, featureless wall. This is both the truth and the ever-present fear that stalks the lives of ‘nepo-babies’: those who benefit from well-connected parents. They know they’ve got some talent. But they suspect it might not be enough to bring them the roles and rewards they relish. The evil of theatrical nepotism is not that it heaps fame and fortune on talentless twerps, but that it gently and continuously tips the scales in favour of those who don’t quite deserve it. And while they prosper, more deserving actors live a life of rejection. It's a fascinating moral grey area to ex...