The President's Husband's Drama Reviews

In the final years of his tumultuous life, poet laureate Ted Hughes turned to the classics, producing translations and palimpsests of Ovid, Euripides and Aeschylus. It's Hughes' version of Agamemnon , part one of The Oresteia by Aeschylus, that Connor Mulley has wisely chosen as his text for the production that graces Magdalen Chapel this week, in a near-sacrilegious bloodbath of pre-Christian polytheistic poetry. * I am no classics scholar, and I can't tell you whether Ted Hughes' translation captures the tone and spirit of the original. What I can tell you is that it certainly makes for better theatre than the scores of over-respectful editions promulgated by desiccated academic perfectionists of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. This is ancient Greece sieved through modern Yorkshire. There are Myrmidons on the streets of Mytholmroyd. Their music is honest and down-to-earth, and it may never have been so beautiful to an English ear before. It's not surprising tha...

A couple of weeks ago, I received an invitation to Julie’s birthday party in my pidge. The obvious question flashed in my mind – do I know a Julie? – before I realised it was a flyer for what looked like a club night. In fact, Polly Stenham’s Julie is a play, and an immersive one at that. The play begins curtain-up with an ensemble of girls dancing to 'Heads will Roll', among other bangers. The stage is set with a DJ booth which doubles as lighting and sound, and a central stage which doubles as a dancefloor, much like the cheese floor of years gone by. This fifteen minute long pre-opening leaves us to gaze upon the ensemble’s interactions with one another, while they tried to make us join in with the fun. But as soon as Julie formally begins, this immersive club setting is stripped away to reveal a thoroughly domestic drama set in the final hour of a houseparty. The play, a modern adaptation of August Strindberg’s 1888 play Miss Julie , begins with an intoxicated Julie (C...

Mid-term meta madness reigns at the Burton Taylor Studio. Last week, Sergio Blanco's play-within-a-play-within-a-coffin When You Pass Over My Tomb gave us a meditation on death so laced with self-referentiality that I left uncertain where truth ended and fiction began. This week, Oisin Byrne treats us to Unprofessional , a laugh-out-loud meta-comedy that is so stacked with artificial layers of deceptive truth that, this time, I left uncertain whether I myself were fictional or not. (I checked with Rob the Front of House Manager on the way out and he gave me a look that instantly returned me to reality.)  Unprofessional feels very much like playwright Byrne in relaxed mode. His last play, The Blue Dragon , while still stocked with absurd humour, hit deep with its themes of guilt and unknown destinations. This time he just wants to play with us. But beware. It's like a cat playing with a mouse. We are at his mercy, and he's ready to pounce.  Four actors, Aaron Gelkoff, Cael...

My esteemed colleague Anuj has already reviewed this show - and by the way, Anuj is approaching the end of his PHD (President's Husband's Drama) tenure, so I'd like to take this opportunity to say a very big and shamelessly public "Thank You" to him for his brilliant, perceptive and gently witty pieces over the last several months. Thank you, Anuj. Anyway, since we've already covered it, I just wanted to add a few words having seen Angel this evening, because it's so good I can't restrain my enthusiasm. Co-writer and actor Susie Weidmann always gives her piercing and uncompromising best. She has an instinctive purity as an actor, a confrontational but relaxed presence that should take her far. In this play she wrangles both horror and comedy from her character with what seem to be no more than offhand remarks and everyday gestures. Her script had me trapped, stretched to breaking point, between the twin poles of laughter and tears. One moment she'...

There is something dystopian about the racket of a tube’s approach. The gust of stale air which presages the beastly roar of its arrival, and then the descending scale of its slowing to a stop. Angel , a piece of new writing by Susie Weidmann and Jacob Potter, takes the Underground as the setting for its own modern dystopia. A thirty-odd woman, Sara, takes a seat on the tube to make a ten minute journey down the Northern line to Angel, where she has a doctor’s appointment to attend. Sara (Susie Weidmann) tells us that she’s going to find out whether the lump in her breast is cancer or not, before directing the stranger sitting next to her to feel it for himself. Angel plays out as a concatenation of laughably awkward moments like this one. Weidmann’s Sara monologues at the audience in real-time, like a subterranean Fleabag , while her journey is interspersed with flashbacks from key moments in her life, all of which also took place on trains. In each of these flashbacks, Sara is play...

The last time I saw Romeo and Juliet in Oxford, I was in it: 1984, at the Catholic Chaplaincy on St Aldates. Unlike Peter Sutton's beautifully restrained interpretation for the Jesus College Shakespeare Project, ours was wild and violent - basically a series of rolling street fights between rival mobs of troublesome Italian ultras. During the dress rehearsal I was actually knocked unconscious by a scrawny second-year mathematician who is now the Oxford Professor for the Public Understanding of Science. I woke up in the Radcliffe Infirmary with a doctor tickling the soles of my feet and saying, 'Can you feel this?' All of which goes to show that directorial caprice can be a dangerous thing. For this production, the latest in Jesus College's thirteen-year quest to perform all Shakespeare's plays in order of composition, Sutton has taken the remarkable, almost unprecedented, step of avoiding any sort of 'angle' on the play at all. It's not set in a sink ho...

In a sentence, Up Styx Creek is an elongated, Aristophanes-themed Horrible Histories episode. Importing the sketch-cum-variety show formula wholesale, the play strings together musical numbers and skits summarising all of Aristophanes’ surviving comedies and, rather neatly, conveying them in modern-ish terms. At the centre of any good variety show is an emcee who exudes charm and comedy in equal measures, whose overarching monologue weaves together the seemingly random array of content (think Rattus Rattus). For Up Styx Creek , Aristophanes (Cameron Spruce) himself made a logical choice. In Spruce’s hands, Aristophanes is – oddly – not Greek at all, instead coming across with the aspect of an ex-Footlights comedian doing Live at the Apollo, breezily commanding the stage and berating his critics. As the play begins, our Aristophanes takes his seat in an onstage audience to watch a mindnumbingly boring rendition of The Wasps. Beside him, Classics finalist Sophia (Macey Pattenden) lo...

"Nothing is in greater opposition to life, than art", playwright Sergio Blanco tells us at the climax of his kaleidoscopic piece of multi-self-referential theatre, When You Pass Over My Tomb . And he's right. Art freezes life in portraits, approximates it in dialogue, traduces it in seductive verse. Go and look at the ornate rooms of the Garrick Club in London, and you'll see hundreds of great actors from across the centuries hanging on the walls, captured in moments of high drama by artists, every one of them lacking any spark of the life they so skilfully embodied on the stage. And so this play is a paean to death: its inspiration, its freedom and, daringly, even its sexual allure. Blanco, a French-Uruguyan master of the avant-garde, has created a piece of theatre more dazzlingly complex in its structure than anything I've ever seen before. It doesn't just break the fourth wall. It builds fifth and sixth walls, knocks them down, installs windows in them, and...

Every so often, I find myself watching a newly-written play dramatising Oxford student life. They often express an anxiety about life after graduation, or use getting into Oxford as the apotheosis of characters’ coming-of-ages. The Secret does away with such tropes, mutating the city into a horrifying world of bumbling TV-style detectives, cannibalistic tutors, and a counselling service that aims to depress. The Secret is padded with an armour of well-timed quips about uninterested tutors, unattended laptops in the RadCam, and ineffective welfare initiatives, mostly delivered by Michael Gormley, writer, director, and – in the play’s world – the comically evil head of a student support service that procures students for cannibalistic dons.  The play begins with a student (Cathy Scoon) in tears as she reports her friend missing. “Maybe she’s just gone home,” both a police officer (Ed Dhanowa) and a counsellor (Jem Hunter) suggest to her. The symbolism is clear: as my time of Oxford w...

St John's College only puts on one play a year,* but it's worth waiting for. Their resident undergraduate director Elspeth Rogers has an inspiring philosophy: everyone who auditions will get a part. This is inclusivity in action, and it means people who may never act in another play during their entire university careers will get a chance in the magnificent surroundings of the Garden Quad Theatre. Elspeth, we salute you.  St John's has developed quite a reputation over the last two years for mounting plays about the downfall of powerful but criminal American men. Last year it was Frost/Nixon , and now we've got ENRON , Lucy Prebble's breakthrough play about the demise of the evil energy corporation and its firebrand figurehead Jeffrey Skilling. What next? An adaptation of Netflix's Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich ? Please, no. ENRON is a meticulously researched expose of the false accounting, embezzling and corporate bullying that dragged Enron from being a multi...

St Catherine's (otherwise known as Catz) is renowned as one of the most fun-loving colleges in Oxford. These days its buildings are infected with RAAC, and the whole place is populated with faintly depressing temporary structures. But does that stop the students having a good time? Omigod you guys, of course not. And as if to prove it, their staging of Legally Blonde froths, bubbles and ultimately boils over with pure joy. Laurence O'Keefe and Nell Benjamin's 2007 musical based on the 2001 movie needs no introduction from me. It won every award going, and continues to spread the feelgood vibe with waves of revivals sweeping the country like a new, and particularly welcome, virus. Its story of a ditzy West Coast prom queen who conquers Harvard Law School is wish fulfilment dialled up to eleven. It's funny, toe-tappingly catchy, and disarmingly unpretentious. But there are certain things you need if you're going to stage a full-on musical like this. You need performe...

If you walk along the same stretch of riverbank every day for six months, then you might be lucky enough to catch the magnificent sight of an otter once or twice. In the same way, if you go to the theatre four times a week for a year, then you'll be rewarded with very occasional evenings of pure magic. Summer 1954 , a pairing of two one-act plays by Terence Rattigan, is one of those special nights. "Terence Rattigan"... The name itself sounds so English, fustian and antiquated; the name of a purveyor of middling bedroom farces, perhaps, or sub-Agatha-Christie murder mysteries. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rattigan may have been less explosive than some of his wild-child contemporaries like John Osborne and his wife-beating angry young men. He didn't mess with the supernatural like J. B. Priestly. He wasn't the darling of the West End like Noel Coward. But still waters run deep. Rattigan, in his quiet, unassuming way, spoke about the everyday realities ...

Among the Big Three of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's comedies from the 1770s, 'The Critic' (1779) is the hardest for modern audiences to get their heads around. It's so full of direct, contemporary, satirical references, and personal attacks on real people who were famous then but are now long forgotten, that an awful lot of the script, if performed straight, must perforce go right over most people's heads. In the same way, comedy sketches on 'That Was The Week That Was' from 1960 about the Profumo scandal still make my 94-year-old dad chuckle, but most people under 30 would grasp only the barest hint of the wit - even though the language itself is still within living memory. 'The Rivals' (1775) has none of these barriers. Its characters are archetypes, eternally recognisable and inflated to hilarious proportions by Sheridan's puns, plots and provincial poshness. 'The School for Scandal' (1777) is more anchored to a specific and sordid Lo...

On paper, the plot of Lucy Kirkwood’s 2016 play The Children sounds quite extreme. A couple of sixty-something physicists living on the edges of a nuclear fallout zone receive a surprise visit from an old friend they haven’t seen in decades. New company, Fennec Fox Productions and director, Joshua Robey succeed in playing out this dystopia with superb realism and wit, prompting uncomfortable realisations while maintaining an atmosphere of entertainment. The play begins in the middle of things, with the breezy and nonchalant Rose (Alice Macey-Dare) nursing a nosebleed caused by a thump from the overbearing and antsy Hazel (Izzy Lever). It’s evident that they know, or once knew each other, but it’s hard to figure out how well they know one another, or how long it’s been since they last met. Later, we are introduced to Hazel’s brutish yet sympathetic husband Robin (Nathaniel Wintraub), who also knows Rose. For most of the play, we are forced to feel around in the dark for any semblan...

Harold Pinter was never happier than when he was writing about male-on-male relationships. 'The Caretaker', 'No Man's Land', 'The Servant', 'The Birthday Party'... they all allowed him to explore the games men play with each other - sexual, intellectual, coercive - untrammelled by the inconvenient presence of women. Sure, he did also write about women, but depressingly often ('The Accident', 'Betrayal') those portrayals were solely from the perspective of extra-marital affairs and how they impacted the lives of those poor, misunderstood men who were forced to seek love and solace beyond the marriage bed. When his women do have any agency at all, it's usually as guardians of conventional, middle-English family values. All of which makes 'The Lover' a fascinating outlier. Written close to the start of Pinter's career, 'The Lover' is a two-and-a-bit-hander in which the woman gives as good, or as bad, as she gets...

“Pushes the Boundaries of Student Theatre” Musicals are notoriously difficult to clobber together on a shoestring, student production budget. It follows that putting on a Stephen Sondheim musical at the Playhouse with a live orchestra is, perhaps, the most ambitious thing a student production can attempt to do. Into The Woods , which first hit Broadway in 1986 and was made into a Hollywood blockbuster in 2014, is the original musical adaptation and deconstruction of a fairytale. Sondheim weaves together the fables of Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, and Elph-, I mean The Witch, in the lawless, morally grey, and sexually promiscuous space of the woods. Each cast-member had palpable talent and evident love for the show. Many of the show’s best laughs were delivered well: the campy scene where Jack (Ronav Jain) finally manages to milk his cow (Caitlyn Fraser), Red Riding Hood’s (Thaejus Ilango) Matilda -esque song, “I Know Things Now” after she is cut o...

In the opening minutes of his new show Stewart Lee frets, with his customary potent mixture of truth and artifice, that there's a critic in the theatre and the jokes are already going down worse than last night. He needn't start worrying - and I'm quite sure that he isn't really. I don't think there has ever been a comedian more at ease with the vagaries of audience reaction, more attuned to the slightest shift in the intensity of laughter, and more adept at identifying it and turning it to his advantage. In his earlier years he sometimes consciously set out to stop audiences laughing as much as possible during his routines. As a comedian, when you've invited death into your home, it no longer holds any power over you. I have been watching Stew from his earliest days, and there was no danger tonight of him looking bad in front of 'the critic'. I can recall pissing myself with laughter at a tiny gig of his in Manchester in 1988, when no one else in the a...