The President's Husband's Drama Reviews

How do you bring something as titanic as The Great Gatsby to life? This production does it with an addicting mix of inventive choreo, cinematic acting, some well placed umbrellas, and costume to boot. It walks the line between tragedy and parody, and the result is delightful, light-hearted, but touching, immersive, real. Perhaps the best part of this production is that it just exudes excitement. The band is loud and joyous. The cast really gets into the dance numbers. They flounce around in sequined costumes, arms extended. It’s a play made with love (or perhaps adoration), and the enthusiasm gives it the flavour of indulgence, glamour, and euphoria which is the essence of The Great Gatsby. Who needs a Broadway set? George Lyons and Izzy Moore can conjure an aeroplane out of pure imagination, create a dance hall out of grass, build a car out of dresses and umbrellas. I watch them play with reality and remember why I love theatre. The Trinity Players’ Gatsby is both familiar and surpris...

How long is a piece of string? Growing up, my Dad would ask me that all the time, a casual riddle in answer to anything asked too earnestly or too impatiently. “How long till we’re there, Dad?” “How long is a piece of string?” Witty, if a little maddening, definitely watered down by the frequency with which he said it. I think he mainly pursued that line of enquiry for the 10 minutes of peace it afforded him while I pondered the impossible question. Impossible questions (and pondering) is also the name of the game for Deja Vu Productions’ newest show, as one may guess from its provocative, rhetorical title: “Are You Sure?” Penned by writer-director-actor F.C. Zeri, “Are You Sure?” struck a chord with me, obsessed as it is with similar imagery: string, fathers, unanswerable questions. Although here we are not preoccupied so much with the length of a piece of string as we are with cutting it (in half, and in half, and in half again), the puzzle is the same. The answer is either infinitel...

Is it allowed to like a play just because all the people in it seem to be extremely nice? There's a lovely feeling of friendship holding Bush - The Musical  together. It includes the actors grinning at each other and having fun with their roles, the musicians stifling giggles at the silliness being enacted before them, and even the stage manager turning off the house lights with undeniable charm. It all feels refreshingly unpretentious, unserious and unimportant, which, given the amount of Arthur Miller and Shakespeare filling term-cards this summer, makes for a welcome change. The Mollys production company has carved out a special niche for shows that wanna have fun in the often soul-wrenching world of Oxford drama. They were behind Breaking Bod  (the story of a reluctant drug dealer set amid the dreaming spires) and The Trail to Oregon  (a loving homage to the US-based parody musical maestros StarKid). They've learnt a lot from their performing predecessors, and Bush ...

Arthur Miller for a garden play? I’ll admit I was hesitant. Garden plays in Oxford tend to follow a certain, uninterrupted niche. Shakespeare is a classic, and there is the occasional, colourful and often comedic outlier like Queen College’s yearly Eglesfield musical, Exeter's own previous rarity ‘The Mandrake’, and Trinity's forthcoming 'Great Gatsby'. Rarely do people take the opportunity to go in earnestly on a garden play, and All My Sons , as a play about war and disillusionment with one’s father, is definitely on the dour side. But this production was a delight. All My Sons follows a seemingly happy family in a semi-rural town, in mid-century, middle America. Joe Keller (Tristan Wood, in his Miller era after Death of a Salesman ) is a family man, a hit with the neighbourhood kids, and suspected of greenlighting a war-time manufacturing disaster which caused the death of twenty-one pilots (not the band). He was acquitted (just) but rumours follow behind the Keller...

When Patrick Marber sat down with the Independent in 1998, he outright rejected the notion that “Closer”, which follows a quartet of strangers stretching the fabric of infidelity to its fraying edges, “is about betrayal”. This, he maintained, is but a drop in the ocean. Marber directs his actors, above all, to “love each other”. When they fall short, it is not because they are callous, but because love never obeys the neat rules we delude ourselves into prescribing. Director Rosie Morgan-Males was under no illusions about the magnitude of her responsibility: to wade through flagrantly outrageous behaviour and emerge on the other side with something as sincere as Marber’s masterpiece. Indeed, in her own words, Morgan-Males set out to “peel back the layers and find something honest inside the mess”. It would have been all too easy to present a stylishly shallow replica of the 2004 movie, which, for all its defects, is a study in how much a perpetually pouting Jude Law can make a per...

Can I tell you a secret? I've always wanted to hear Caliban's ethereally beautiful 'The isle is full of noises' speech with Pink Floyd's Shine On You Crazy Diamond  in the background. David Gilmour's electric trills and sweet airs are a perfect complement to the fragile beauty of the verse. So thank you to Magdalen Players for (almost) making that midsummer dream come true. The music throughout this production of The Tempest  is gently overpowering, flowing with the natural rhythms of the island, while still providing a deep, electric thrum that crackles with pent-up magical power. And during that speech it becomes a gorgeous variation on Shine On . The full-colour programme looks wonderful, and sets the psychedelic tone for the evening, which is aurally expanded by Sound Designer Lucian Ng and composer/co-director Seb Carrington along with musicians Milo Holland, Kit Renshaw and Rei French. As Carrington readily admits, The Tempest  is an extremely tricky play ...

 Bull is a funny play, which I mean in both senses. It’s out and out dark humour, and it’s finnicky, puzzling, delicate to balance. It shines a less than favourable light on the corporate world, reminding me all too well of the animalistic clamour of the University’s yearly law fair. And it’s Fight Club and American Psycho made British theatre, with a sharp light on classism and the airless world of feigned politeness. Riffing on the apparent dissimilarities, (actually similarities) between the allegedly civilized modern world and the violent prehistoric one, Bull depicts a world of money which is every bit as brutal and cutthroat as the imagined caveman past.  Our ‘leading man’ Thomas (Aidan Kane) is no Patrick Bateman, conspicuously lacking in the slickness or charm one expects the corporate world to radiate. In his oversized suit, sporting stains, stumbling over the social torments of his coworkers and self-consciously rubbing his face, Thomas is evidently set up for failur...

Until now, the Jesus College Project has been strolling in the foothills of Shakespeare. With the exception of Romeo and Juliet  the works they've so far given us have been rarer mounted plays like Henry the Sixth Part Two  and Titus Andronicus . With A Midsummer Night's Dream  the stakes are raised. Not a summer passes without the gardens of stately homes and Oxford Colleges being awash with rampant fairies and translated Bottoms. Against competition like that, can Peter Sutton and his dedicated, ever-evolving company of actors keep up their astonishing record of mesmerising productions? Will this be a dream of a show or a Midsummer murder? Why would you even worry? Without a tree in sight, in a bare room illuminated by domestic ceiling lights, without wings (neither of the fairy nor stage-side variety), without even, frankly, a stage, this show creates a kind of magic rarely seen in more lavish productions. It's a magic that comes not from special effects, but from an i...

  You can tell when a play is made with love. You can also tell when it is made with a healthy heaping of disdain.   Troilus and Cressida is somewhere in the middle: absurd, charming, incomprehensible, hilarious. Moribayassa Productions described the show as an 'anti-garden play.' I get the gripe. Oxford is literally crawling with summer Shakespeare chock full of melodrama and cliches, sometimes wonderful, sometimes all too familiar. Disdain for the stagnation of the genre gives this play its creative impetus and its charm. The creative liberties are extensive and the rewards are potentially great. The risks, well, they’re negligible.   It’s hard to say exactly what that charm is, only that I liked it. The play opens with Troilus (balaclava-clad) staring into the static on an old school, 32-inch TV, whilst Pandarus stares at the audience invasively from the corner, and Cressida waltzes around jaggedly. It’s pretty gripping. They follow up on that large aesthetic...

 Death of a Salesman, Pilch I thought I was done with Death of a Salesman. It was a relic of the past, a spectre of the English A-level specification. Drilling quotations into my memory over the long period of Covid lockdowns for exams which would never come just about did me in. As the play approached, those stagnant quotes were all I could think about. “Why must everyone conquer the world?” As graduation approached, I was thinking the same thing. “The jungle is dark but full of diamonds.” Much like the tumultuous OUDS scene, I thought wryly, (Spoiler alert: this is one of the diamonds). After imbibing quotations for two years, the characters in Death of a Salesman started to feel static, emblematic, unsurprising. The tragedy felt over-egged.  Tiptoe Productions saw a different vision. Their interpretation of Death of a Salesman, whilst true to Miller’s demanding and extensive stage directions, feels like discovering the play for the first time. Actually I’m quite jealous of ...

It is a truth universally acknowledged that British serial killers make great entertainment. Whether it's Sweeney Todd and his demonic shaving techniques, John Christie the landlord from hell, or Burke and Hare with their unconventional approach to laboratory support services, there's something about that combination of antimacassars and psychopaths that makes audiences squirm with vicarious disgust and pleasure. And the king of them all is of course Jack the Ripper. Subject of countless books, films, podcasts and, even before this week, at least three musicals, his brief reign of terror heralded the end of the macabre caricatures of Dickensian London and the arrival of the societal traumas of the 20th Century. (Even the fictional stars of This Is Spinal Tap toy with making a rock opera out of him, entitled Saucy Jack .) What all these productions have in common is their determination to answer the question 'Who was he?' And it's a somewhat pointless crusade, becaus...

The idea behind this production is enticing and daring. The year is 1969. A theatrical couple famous for their tempestuous relationship (for which read Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor) is planning a new production of Macbeth . They invite their cast of louche thespians to a dinner party at their palatial country estate for an initial read-through. Then, in the words of the marketing spiel, 'As bottles of wine are emptied, plates cleared, and the script read aloud for the very first time, the line between drunken theatrics and sobering reality begins to fade. Hidden tensions, bitter resentment, and latent desire bubble to the surface as Shakespeare’s story of ambition, corruption, and seduction comes alive, and druidic forces descend upon a world of glamour and vice.' Sounds fun, doesn't it? A merging of Jacobean and hippie culture perhaps. Maybe it will be a newly written piece, in which the spirit of Macbeth is somehow conjured from the mists of time, and leads the uns...

“ If we want the rewards of being loved, we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.” This famous, usually misattributed, line, first appeared in an article by Tim Kreider for a June 2015 edition of The New York Times , but the sentiment has enjoyed an afterlife, reverberating around certain circles of the internet, undoubtedly well known to anyone who is (or was once) a Tumblr user. Those people (I’m sure there are many in Oxford) must see 113. 113 is a stunning piece of original writing by Ethan McLucas. It follows two people, ‘49’ and ’64,’ who find themselves mysteriously captive in two adjoining cells, unable to see each other but able to communicate. Are they imprisoned? Hospitalised? In purgatory? We don’t know. Crucially, they don’t either. Neither ‘49,’ nor ‘64,’ can remember who they are. Their names, memories, and identities are completely lost to them. Having been captive for some time (they are not sure exactly how long), ‘49’ knows the rule to the game: ...

I don't think Shakespeare liked dinner parties. There are three of them in his plays, and none ends well. In Macbeth the host descends into a hallucinatory fit and yells defiance at a blood-stained ghost. In Timon of Athens he serves his guests bowls of warm piss. And in Titus Andronicus he makes meat pies out of the sons of his main guest and feeds them to her before slitting his own daughter’s throat. Shakespeare's banquets are like George R. R. Martin’s weddings: bloody affairs where the awkward etiquette of a scenario we can all relate to transfigures into a scene of symbolic destruction. They are the dinner parties from hell. And in Max Webster's production of Titus Andronicus for the RSC the dinner party is the blood-red icing on a cake of brooding familial agony, pitiless torture and barren, grey vistas. The horrors of that climactic scene are accentuated with poignantly original touches that deepen the tragedy and heighten the insanity. Titus’ mutilated daughter...

If this production deserves one accolade, it is for precision, hard won through apt casting choices, sophisticated direction, and a flawless aesthetic. This is immediately evident from the very choice of production. “And Then There Were None” is OUDS’ 2025 BAME show, and it is an inspired pick.  The 1940s novel-turned-screenplay by crime writer Agatha Christie confronts us with its uncomfortable history. The play follows a ‘whodunnit’ murder mystery structured around a nursery rhyme from an 1869 Minstrel show, and originally made prolific use of the N word, in its title and key plot elements. It was later renamed, equally uncomfortably, to “Ten Little Indians,” (the name that saw it through its 1945 Broadway run) with its current title only coming into play in the mid-2000s.  The OUDS BAME production grapples with play’s history by oscillating between sincerity and parody, and employing Kevin Elyot’s 2005 script, where “soldier” stands in for the slurs of previous titles. The ...

Cyrano de Bergerac is that rarest of things, a perfect play: funny, tragic, action-packed, and boasting a larger-than-life hero you can't help loving. It bounces off the stage, as light and springy as one of Ragueneau the chef's souffles – and every bit as deliciously cheesy. Normally Cyrano is a big-budget extravaganza, with richly brocaded 17th-century costumes, piles of food, barrels of wine, romantic balconies and trench warfare. I remember one production which, in the final act, featured a huge tree gently shedding its autumn leaves on the characters, and turning from green to gold, to red and to grey as the evening sun went down. It was beautiful and evocative, but was it really worth the cost? Lara Machado's production shows that, even with a budget of zilch, Cyrano can still cast its magic spell. Why? Because this play is about poetry, not props. Every character in it, from soldiers to marquises, is obsessed with poetry. Cyrano himself duels with a hundred assass...