The President's Husband's Drama Reviews

Out of all the Old Testament heroines to make your poster-girl, the one the Tudors lost their heads over was Queen Esther. Her bravery led to comparisons with Elizabeth the First. Her humility was depicted in embroidery. Christians saw her as a proto-Virgin Mary. A tapestry at Hever Castle long thought to depict Mary Tudor marrying the King of France has turned out be Esther's wedding to King Ahasuerus in an allegorical link with the Royal couple. Theories abound as to why the Tudors were so obsessed with Esther - and they are described in fascinating detail in the programme for this latest revelatory production from the unique Edward's Boys. She was a role model; she was devout; she defended her people; at a dinner party she was the ultimate hostess. But as far as both Henry the Eighth and Ahasuerus were concerned, she was also completely irresistible. She literally won a beauty contest to become Queen. Esther is the wellspring of every search-for-a-princess narrative in Weste...

The chapel of St John's College is a magnificent setting for this most stately of all Shakespeare's regal plays. (Even its battles are far off-stage, happening between rather than during the scenes.) And Tom Allen's production takes full advantage of that ancient splendour, with a version of the play presented in proudly traditional style. Saleem Nassar, up in the St John's organ loft, pipes out steady funeral dirges and musical announcements that seem the perfect embodiment of that ubiquitous renaissance stage direction, "Alarum". If the current Edward the Second  in Stratford-upon-Avon is a royal court full of back-biting, action and unadulterated snogging, this one is closer to a sequence of tableaux, where the focus, to the exclusion of almost everything else, is on verse, verse, verse. The actors' diction is perfect. Trochees and spondees are observed with rigour and respect. The iambic pentameter is king here, not Richard or Bolingbroke. You can almo...

Daniel Raggett’s production in the Swan Theatre is as short, sharp and fiery as a red hot poker up the butt. Raggett has reduced the normal three-hour running time of Christopher Marlowe’s tragedy of a gay king to just over ninety pulsating minutes, and in the process has done the playwright several huge favours. Instead of sprawling with inter-courtier debate, this production feels like a train hurtling to hell. It’s reduced to cause and effect, not exactly Elizabethan Tiktok, but picking up lessons of brevity and allusion from the world of microvideos, and putting them to powerful and effective work. Effective, because Marlowe, left to his own devices, doesn’t do depth all that well. His language occasionally soars skyward with radiant poetry, but his characters stay stuck to the ground. They are who they are. They don’t change or develop, and they don’t peel away psychological layers. They’re like chess pieces: once you know what their abilities are, you know them. His plays are lik...

The last time I saw a production of Hamlet, I spent a long evening at the Almeida Theatre in the presence of Andrew Scott. He had meandered seamlessly between fits of emphatic rage and brazen tears in a spine-tingling, if at points gruelling, four-hour stint. Hamlet is Shakespeare’s longest play; Robert Icke did not let me forget this on that evening in 2017.  Director Seb Carrington’s adaptation, however, does not succumb to this challenge. From the moment I was greeted with the titular character strapped into a chair in the centre of the rather stifling Denis Arnold Hall – decked out in a straitjacket of sorts – right to his grisly end, I was left both relieved and impressed at the tight production. No discrete glances to the time to be had here. On the contrary, the audience feels immersed in a delightfully ambiguous world that feels at once familiar and enigmatic.  Carrington had an ambitious vision for taking on the Everest of Shakespeare’s plays. It was to be a bold, hig...

The Merchant of Venice is the most problematic of all Shakespeare's so-called problem plays, and it's even more of a problem now than when he wrote it. Back in 1596, Jews had been banned from England for over 300 years, and they were the ideal bogeymen: strange, dangerous, exotic and alien. Depicting a Jew on the London stage was not unlike a 16th-century British artist painting a hippopotamus: the final portrait may not have been based in reality, but it was sensational. These days almost every production of The Merchant makes it about antisemitism. The humanity wired into Shylock by Shakespeare unlocks caverns of prejudice in the other characters. And the disproportionate cruelty of his final humiliation is matched only by the naked glee with which the "Christians" mete it out. Now, in a UK society where racist attacks on Jews have tripled in the last 18 months, what does a student production do with this hot, and very unkosher, potato? In the case of director Cic...

 The Gondoliers, St John’s Auditorium Many profess to be lovers of musical theatre, but few love it enough to get to its comic opera roots. Cue Oxford’s Gilbert and Sullivan Society, which has spent most of the last century running through the duo’s repertoire. This term’s production was The Gondoliers, a slightly absurd piece of theatre which follows a pair of singing dancing gondolier brothers who choose their wives while blindfolded, only to be propelled to kingship minutes after their marriage. The rest of the plot is far too complex to pithily summarise. In a sentence, it revolves around many more such instances of paupers becoming princes, princes becoming paupers, and princesses loving paupers. The result is slightly ridiculous, and extremely hilarious.  At times, the predictable constraints of staging what would once have been a piece of mass entertainment as a student company felt evident – for example, in the lack of set design and absence of the twenty-four flower g...

Theatre is filled with examples of the tortured, reclusive, and frankly weird persona of ‘the genius’ – both on and offstage. Good Work begins with one such genius in the form of a character, Felix (Eddie Jones). He sits at a table taking notes from a hefty stack of books, and his scholarly, hunched posture suggests that this is a regular pastime for him. As the play gets going, Felix is joined by his flatmate, Zach (Charlie Lewis). The two are best friends to the point of brotherhood, and together they anxiously anticipate the arrival of Felix’s sister, George (Orla Wyatt), who is visiting from London. George’s entry sparks a sheen of congeniality, which quickly gives way to awkwardness and resentment as George reveals the true purpose of her visit: she comes bearing their father’s will and a mission to make Felix come back home to London. Good Work , though just a three-hander, manages to crowd the small BT stage. The play is populated by three characters whose own confused iden...

King Lear is an odd choice of production for a student company. This is for a very simple reason: the play’s titular character is meant to be old to the point of senility, necessitating a performance that believably conveys mad rage, harmless confusion, and tender affection, sometimes all in the same scene. It follows that Lear is a hallowed role, reserved for the greatest actors who are still up for a challenge. How could a student ever hope to pull off such a feat? Director Alex Bridges’ attempt, the first in Oxford for over ten years (as the marketing professes), rises to the behemoth of Lear with some flair. The beating heart of the play is Scott Burke as Lear himself. Decked out with cosmetic wrinkles and baring suitably laboured expressions, Burke made for a believable, and therefore sympathetic Lear. As we watch the once powerful king succumb to his daughters and his own emotional instability, Burke mastered the sudden crescendos of madness and nailed Lear’s blossoming into ...

The votes are in, and the award for Scariest Theatrical Prop of the Year goes to... The Pillowman . I don't want to give too much away, but let's just say the prop in question is about seven feet tall, made of pillows, and features the deadest, most horrific smile you're ever likely to see. What's particularly chilling is that, out of all the characters in this inkily black comedy, the Pillowman himself is probably the kindest. Move over, Coraline. Those button eyes have been supplanted, and there's a new nightmare in town. And talking of Neil Gaiman creations, there's a tangible thematic link between Martin McDonagh's Pillowman and Gaiman's Sandman story, Calliope . Both of them squarely address the idea of cruelty and torture as the wellspring of creativity. But there's a vital difference. Where Gaiman's tale of a writer who enslaves a Greek Muse to gain artificially induced talent suggests that great art is built on shameful foundations (tal...

I had never heard of Flexicare before I was invited to review this concert. And, impressive as the music was, I came away even more impressed by the charity it was supporting. Flexicare provides a free, expert child-minding service for families in Oxfordshire who have children with disabilities. So that means, for example, if the parents have to go out to another child’s school concert or parents’ evening, then Flexicare will step in and look after their child with special needs until they get home. This is the sort of care that is often too specialised for grandparents or friends. And it allows families of children with complex needs simply to do things that other families can do without a second thought. It gives those families a few hours of assurance that their child is being well looked after, and it frees them to engage in activities that would otherwise be incredibly hard. They’re not a massive charity. But they make a massive impact. They support a total of 45 families. And wit...

 The Getaway Review At the heart of The Getaway is the worst couple you know. They hate each other, they hurt each other, but – somehow – they manage to channel that passionate hatred into frequent, intense, and loud love-making.  The play begins with the offstage noise that characterises this type of sexual frenzy. Suddenly, it stops, and our never-meant-to-be couple, Linda (Marianna Shullani) and Alec (Arun Ghosh), hurry onstage to greet their houseguests, Linda’s childhood friend Mary (Gabriella Bedford) and Alec’s fellow rugby lad Jamie (Ezana Betru). It is quite apparent that the get-together is farcical, and both Mary and Jamie frequently wonder aloud at why they were invited. We quite soon understand that they are being set up together as part of Linda’s ongoing project to fix everyone else’s lives.  As the controlling, unquellable Linda, Marianna Shullani thrived – shouting over everyone else, and stopping every so often to have a smoke. Her fiance, the insipid an...

The last time Rupert Goold directed Hamlet , in 2005, he took the audacious step of excising the avenging Norwegian prince Fortinbras entirely from the play, and creating a high-concept visual feast in which Denmark’s ruling dynasty played out their dysfunctional vendettas as a private family feud uncomplicated by national politics. Twenty years later he’s done the same thing. Again Fortinbras is nowhere to be seen, and this time all the action takes place aboard a private cruiser, the Good Ship Elsinore, on the 14 th of April 1912 (yes, the date the Titanic sank). Affairs of State are notably absent from this ruling court. Unlike David Icke and Andrew Scott’s Hamlet , which was oppressive with surveillance cameras and secret police, Luke Thallon and Goold’s is all heaving decks and vast receding horizons, a romantic, evocative and barren mindscape. When it comes to Shakespeare, Goold is the master of the ‘One Big Idea’ school of directing. His stunning Macbeth with Patrick Stewart w...