The President's Husband's Drama Reviews

Typical, isn’t it? You wait twenty years for a School For Scandal , then two come along at once. Last month’s production at the Oxford Playhouse flattered to deceive. With its garish colours, 1950s styling and gossip-mag-themed programme, it promised a satirical updating of Sheridan’s original. But it failed to deliver, by simply playing all the wrong notes when it came to the performance itself. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s approach also seeks out contemporary relevance for Sheridan’s comedy of bad manners. You might almost say it’s desperate to underline, with the boldest, pinkest pen it can find, the societal links between 1777 and 2024. Huge chunks of new text have been created and inserted into the play, rhyming monologues in which characters draw attention to our own obsession with social media, reality TV and culture wars. When the gossip journalist Snake (Tadeo Martinez) raises an eyebrow and tells us all to go and check our ‘digital devices’ during the interval, it should, ...

How do you turn something as apparently dry and dusty as a meeting of international bureaucrats nearly thirty years ago, at which a significant amount of time was devoted to impassioned debate over the placing of commas and square brackets, into quite possibly the most riveting piece of theatre of the year? Somehow, playwrights Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, of the ground-breaking Good Chance theatre company, aided by directors Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin, along with a laser-focused cast, have done it. Kyoto (even the title, sounding like it heralds a nostalgic travelogue of Old Japan, belies the electrifying urgency of what’s to come) tells the story of the diplomatic shenanigans that built up to that historic COP3 meeting, the Kyoto Agreement on Climate Change of 1997. The first half takes us through the years from the late 80s, when the issue of the planet’s health started to take hold of scientists and governments around the world. The second half focuses exclusively on the se...