The President's Husband's Drama Reviews

Too many cooks, in the words of the great Arthur Smith, make shows on BBC2. Is there too much Shakespeare in Oxford? Since I started writing reviews just over two years ago, I've seen sixteen Shakespeare plays, and that represents considerably less than half the bard-based productions that go on in gardens, parks and castles around the town. Truly, he doth bestride the Radcliffe Camera like a colossus. As if to recognise this dramatic dominance, Chris Goodwin, Ali Khan and Tom Pavey, coralled like cats by directors Tom Freeman and Felix Westcott, have rebirthed the great post-Shakespeare improvalike comedy extravaganza that was, and is, The Complete Works (Abridged) . Appropriately enough, this show began life as an idea dreamt up by some students in the 1980s. They quickly formed a company called the RSC (Reduced Shakespeare Company) and their creation ran for years in the West End. They followed it up with lots of sequels, abridging everything from the story of Hollywood to Wagne...

How ironic that a play written by Sir John Vanbrugh, architect of Blenheim Palace, that most extravagant and baroque of all British buildings, should be mounted in the de Jager auditorium in Trinity College. It's a beautiful space, designed primarily for lectures and music. But it's restrained, cool, and unostentatiously modern. Putting on a Restoration Comedy in here is akin to holding a rock concert in an operating theatre. The acoustically-tuned, light oak woodwork crushes any illusion of another world, which meekly tries to stand its tiny ground, obscured by echoes of all the preceding day's powerpoints. This room shows you why lecture theatres are great for lectures, films, music and even stand-up comedy. But not for theatre. You either need to conquer the space (which means spending a huge amount on set decoration), or use a room which better reflects the style and mood of your play. Trinity's chapel is the first college chapel ever to be designed in the Baroque s...

If you thought Oxford University's recent election of a new Chancellor was a badly-run, drawn-out affair full of backbiting and skullduggery, well, just be grateful it wasn't a new Pope. If Conclave is to be believed, what those cardinals get up to would horrify even Peter Mandelson. Edward Berger's adaptation of Robert Harris's Vatican intrigue novel is a tense, twisty political thriller with one foot in 12 Angry Men and the other in The Da Vinci Code . The Pope is dead, and 108 naughty, squabbling, Catholic leaders assemble in Rome under the world-weary eye of Ralph Fiennes' Cardinal Lawrence, to decide, in the time-honoured fashion of forming secret alliances rather than holding a democratic debate, who should be the next Supreme Pontiff. The paper they burn to tell folks outside how far they've got in their decision-making is either black or white. But really it should be blue, because the process ignites an unholy ecclesiastical fireworks display of epic ...