The President's Husband's Drama Reviews

After two years and six consecutive productions filled with war and gore, Jesus College’s project to perform all Shakespeare's plays in chronological order has finally moved into a new phase. This year is all about love and comedy, with A Midsummer Night's Dream , Romeo and Juliet , and, first of all, Love's Labour's Lost . Traditionally, this play is neither the most popular nor the most accessible of Shakespeare's comedies. The central concept (a group of young noblemen foreswearing the distractions of the fairer sex to coop themselves up in a castle and devote their lives to study) seems bizarre and remote. The minor characters - schoolteachers spouting convoluted Latin, dim-witted but amiable constables, Spanish swordsmen whose braggadocio thinly conceals a rich seam of gay subtext - can be confusing and hard to relate to. And the idea of a bunch of irresistible women happening to turn up and besiege the castle with romance, while the reclusive scholars instantl...

It's Autumn Incest Season at the Pilch, with last week's brother love-in Moth being followed by one of the most notorious sibling sex plays of all time, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore . They're very different. Where Moth is brand new, 'Tis Pity is nearly 400 years old. Where Moth is about coming to terms with one death, 'Tis Pity features multiple gruesome murders before our very eyes. Where Moth has scenes of eating breakfast cereal, 'Tis Pity has people literally eating each other's hearts. What unites these two plays is that they both have the courage to explore a taboo relationship, and make it the most innocent part of their story. That, and also these particular productions are both insanely brilliant pieces of theatre. I have seen 'Tis Pity a couple of times before, and it is a challenge for any director. The outrageous violence and over-the-top sex scenes usually produce at best titters and often brazen guffaws from the sceptical audienc...

How to Date a Feminist is a 2016 play by British writer Samantha Ellis, and at times it feels a relic of a time just long enough ago to be démodé, but not long enough ago to be nostalgic. Its scenarios (costume-parties and coffee shops) seem at home in the era-defining medium of the YouTube mini-series, and the play brims with the existential questions that were once hot topics of discussion: How can a man be a feminist? How should a feminist reconcile sexual desire with sexual politics? Nonetheless this production, directed by Robyn Patterson and Ivy Stephens, managed to resonate. The rom-com’s titular ‘feminist’ is actually the male love-interest, Steve (Esther O’Neill), rather than its central strong, independent woman, Kate (Bella Bradshaw). This is revealed in the very first scene, where in a disorienting turn of events, Steve proposes to Kate by apologising for patriarchy. As with most rom-coms, the play turns swiftly to the couple’s marriage. Here, the slightly cringe princ...

Saoirse is not for everyone. That is by no means a value judgement, for the play is quite brilliant, but it is a content warning. A piece of new writing by Molly Hill and James Hunter, the play follows Grace (Sophia George), a young actress, and Mr Clarke (Cameron Maiklem), Grace’s school drama teacher. Their story is presented through an interview, which at points swings into interrogation. Asking the questions are the offstage voices of a psychoanalyst and a journalist – both voice recordings – but the actors respond and interrupt these tapes fluidly. As a result, the questioning voices grow aligned with us as the audience, so that they seem sat with us, or perhaps just behind us, in the cramped Burton Taylor. Between the set of question-and-answers come sequences of dialogue between Grace and Clarke, where they recount and deliberate the circumstances of their relationship. These changes of format are well demarcated through the quick switching of lights: white and blaring in int...

It’s a great week for powerful, thought-provoking drama in Oxford. The meaning of love (in About Love ) and the impact of bereavement (in Moth ) are both on display in stirring productions. Now Sap addresses the victimising of bisexuals in a play that reimagines Ovid’s Metamorphosis of Daphne in a modern-day environment. Unlike those other two plays, Sap was not written by a current Oxford undergraduate. Rafaella Marcus was a Magdalen student fifteen years ago, and yet this is her debut play, first staged in 2022. Why it took her so long to put pen to paper I have no idea, as Sap is a bold, virtuoso piece, brimming with passion and purpose. Its theme is the exclusion of bisexuals from the LGBT+ community, in this case specifically the prejudice encountered by a bi woman from her lesbian partner (and her treatment at the hands of that partner's brother). The remarkable – and I mean phenomenal – thing about Sap , though, is the demand it puts on its central character Daphne, pla...

A slightly loopy professor locks three couples in his house and prods them with psychoanalysis until they break. The concept is the stuff of psychological horror, but writer Sasha Ivanova’s About Love somehow morphs this unsettling idea into charm, with smatterings of the profound. T he play, directed by Ivanova herself alongside Priya Toberman, is bookended by the monologue of our mad scientist’s wife, Lara (Lara Ibrahim), who forms the beating heart of the play. Lara feels like the realest character when set alongside the various ‘types’ represented by the others – young and old, ostensibly perfect and really perfect, and, for some reason, a closet case – and Ibrahim’s performance in the role was subtle yet touching. Indeed, most of the play consisted of monologue prodded on by intense questioning, sometimes by the scientist Frank (Rohan Joshi), and at other times by other characters. Moving beyond the drabness of staging a set of couple therapy sessions with an analyst, the three s...

The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals is a bit of a clunky name, but it is usefully descriptive. But musical haters beware, this show is very much a musical, and a fabulously joyful one at that.  The show tells the story of Paul, a small-town guy who doesn’t like musicals, who bumbles around his office (which has an array of The Office style co-workers) and punctuates his days with visits to the coffee shop for a glimpse of his ‘latt-ay hott-ay’ love interest, Emma. On the night a touring production of Mamma Mia! comes to town, a meteor strikes, infecting the townspeople with a singing-dancing-murdering hivemind. It is up to Paul and Emma (and Paul’s co-workers) to save themselves from the existential threat of joining the inescapable chorus line – for nobody can stop the beat.  By the ending, the musical-virus reveals itself as a code for a sort of Trumpian jingoism that infects this slice of Nowhereville, America. As we stand at the edge of a second term, this felt as timely a...

This is Alec Tiffou’s second play. The first, Daddy Longlegs , was showered with praise, and Moth proves that Tiffou is no one-hit wonder. What a privilege to witness such prodigious talent at such a formative stage! Moth casts a spell over the riveted, focussed audience in the Pilch. Caught in its power we are helpless, like pinned moths ourselves. We laugh, we cry; we are by turns shocked, touched, bemused and horrified. Moth reveals its secrets with masterfully-controlled pace, so there will be no spoilers here. But it’s an incredibly intense four-hander, following a problem-ridden family through difficult times. Careering from outrageous confessions to superficially humdrum statements, it almost feels like the play is beating you up emotionally. I found myself bursting unexpectedly into tears at a moment of heart-piercing honesty one moment, then seconds later laughing out loud at an adroit piece of incongruity. The theatre is barricaded with content warnings for this show, so I...

There are some plays where you can’t help feeling that the majority of the audience is missing the point, and this is one of them. It’s not their fault. The Royal Shakespeare Company is marketing The Red Shoes as a Christmas treat for all the family. There were under-10s in the auditorium of the Swan Theatre this evening, and they were watching something that might best be described as a fairytale staged by Angela Carter in partnership with Tim Burton. There were boiled-sweet-chomping, red-faced couples laughing with uproarious determination every time the psychopathic Clive swung his axe at a cat. There was even one man behind me who, in what has to rank as the evening’s most disturbing moment, responded to the sight of the heroine Karen being viciously slapped across the face by shouting out, ‘Do it again!’ Meanwhile, the more sensitive members of the audience weren’t entirely sure how to react to what we were watching. This adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s phenomenally distu...

The current production of Othello by the Royal Shakespeare Company is stolidly professional but has at its core a total and utter lack of interest in the play - and that sentiment bleeds through to the audience. This production, in the magnificent, medieval Dining Hall of University College, is the diametric opposite: it effervesces with enthusiasm, love, fascination for and original thoughts about the play, while being honestly and charmingly ‘anti-professional’. Anti-professional how? you may ask. Well, on the night I was there, half-way through the show they actually managed to lose the handkerchief - yes, the prop on which the entire plot turns. Characters were desperately producing rings and napkins to stand in for it. And here’s the thing: it didn't matter one jot . This wasn’t supposed to be as slick as a scene-change in the Olivier Theatre. It was a company of creative, cooperative, mutually supportive students exploring a dramatic masterpiece, and their passion was irres...

What’s the difference between Les Liaisons Dangereuses and the Oxford Union? One is an expensively costumed display of decadent sexuality, political manipulation and ruthless battles for power, and the other, yes, you guessed it, is Les Liaisons Dangereuses . Except, in Clarendon Productions’ interpretation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ perilously pre-revolutionary novel at the Oxford Playhouse, that’s not entirely true. This is no conventional eighteenth-century reenactment, but a bold, ambitious and imaginative liaison between modern technology and Baroque style. Director Lucas Angeli has taken the unprecedented step of turning Christopher Hampton’s script into a theatre-cum-live-cinema, multimedia experiment. The apparent politesse of high society is undermined throughout by telling details on the giant screen above the stage. So, for instance, while we see the scheming Vicomte de Valmont and his co-conspirator the Marquise de Merteuil affably chatting on stage, the cameras pick...

“Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished.” Not the play’s closing remark, but its opening gambit: Samuel Beckett’s Endgame makes no attempt at exposition or climax, the play is constantly and loudly conscious of its movement towards an “end”. One of Beckett’s more celebrated plays, though less known than Waiting for Godot , Endgame was first performed in 1957. The one-act play focuses upon the blind and senile Hamm – who, unable to stand, is confined to an armchair on wheels set in the exact centre-stage – alongside his used and abused manservant Clov – who, unable to sit, walks with a pronounced limp. Like Lear , Endgame presents itself as a play about agedness and disability. It differs, disconcertingly, by only showing disabled bodies: Hamm and Clov are joined by Hamm’s even more senile parents, Nell and Nagg, who are confined (and at most points, enclosed) in large bins and relegated to a state of infantility. Director Killian King successfully exploits the layout of the P...

I have no idea if Coco Cottam will go on to become a famous, successful playwright. The only famous, successful playwright I know didn’t write so much as a line of dialogue until ten years after graduating. The future’s not ours to see. But in so far as it’s possible to measure these things, Cottam seems to be going about it the right way. Nuts is her third play (the third I’ve seen anyway), and not only is each of them a gem, but they get better each time. Her previous works, Wishbone and Bedbugs (click on the titles to read my reviews), were more theme- than plot-driven, as non-linear and intriguing as they were funny and moving. With Nuts , Cottam has come down to earth, and created a piece of true narrative drama. It's a concentrated, character-driven scenario that reveals dark secrets from the past even as it moves forwards in time. Friends, business-partners and flat-sharers Eve and Nina need a new co-tenant, and it arrives in the shape of ‘hot male’ Liberty. But the appea...

Go Fish started life as a 1994 ultra-low-budget American movie about women meeting women. Think Clerks but with heart instead of balls. It’s funny, honest, straight-talking, and heart-warmingly tactile – full of hands clasping, toes touching and lips brushing. Although it didn’t make much of a splash when set against 1994’s other big gay films ( Interview with the Vampire , Shallow Grave , Heavenly Creatures to name but three) it’s a milestone in that, unlike those movies, its sexuality was not buried in subtext, but presented openly as everyday life. Where other films were still smuggling homosexuality into their hetero audience’s heads under cover of metaphor, Go Fish had the courage to play its queerness absolutely… straight. Now, thirty years later, Charlotte Oswell has lovingly adapted Go Fish for the theatre, and it still feels rare to see the lesbian community depicted on stage. For that reason, this play is both welcome and vital. Oxford students, by the way, regularly depi...