The President's Husband's Drama Reviews

What's the most important element of a musical? The story? The acting? The directing? No. As every original cast recording from Oklahoma! to Chicago will tell you, it's the music. And this production of Jason Robert Brown's millennial melodrama The Last Five Years is a musical masterclass. One glance at the programme is enough to prove just how much expertise has gone into the musicianship and vocal performances for this show. The director, producer, sound designer and two of the four actors are full-time music students (and a third performed in West End musicals before coming to Oxford). Director Louis Benneyworth is Resident Conductor with the OU Sinfonietta, and his original score for A View From The Bridge will be heard on the Playhouse stage a few weeks from now. Rebekah Devlin, who played Cathy at the performance I saw, spent ten years training at Belfast School of Performing Arts before coming to Oxford. (In fact, with so much focus on the performers’ credentials...

This week Keir Starmer signed a multi-billion-pound deal with India to produce three Bollywood blockbusters in the UK. It is, he hopes, a new dawn for British-Indian cooperation and economic success. But at the Burton Taylor Studio, there’s a different, and perhaps more down-to-earth, perspective on offer. Dial 1 for UK offers us a sad little tale about an illegal migrant from India trying to make his way in the UK. Like so many before him, from Dick Whittington on, he arrives believing the streets are paved with gold, but he ends up buried in the shit. Devised, written and performed as a one-man show by the likeable and effervescent Mohit Mathur, the story is presented as an autobiographical account by disillusioned call-centre operative Uday Kumar (the double-meaning ‘UK’ of the title). Back in Delhi, his job is scamming panicked callers to the Goldmine Crypto GB Helpline for virtually no remuneration. But he fantasises about coming to Britain himself, seduced by naïve images of fis...

This revival of the late Hugh Whitemore’s 1986 play about the life of Alan Turing (the man who broke the Germans’ Enigma Code during World War Two) is as timely as it is gripping. Ironically, the title is itself a cryptic clue. The Code it’s referring to is only partly the secret messages from U-boats. Much more important to the play is the other code Turing was instrumental in breaking: the oh-so-English societal code that branded homosexuality as depraved, evil and illegal. The pivotal event in Whitemore’s play is not Turing’s dismantling of German passwords, but his arrest in 1952 for sodomy. Turing himself, as portrayed by Mark Edel-Hunt, is a magnetic, vivacious, obsessively focussed and irrepressibly jolly figure. Even when explaining that the English legal system has given him a choice of two punishments for his acts of gross indecency (imprisonment or chemical castration) he conveys a self-effacing charm that almost stops you realising how horrifically he was treated. Edel-Hun...

For a show that’s touted by the National Theatre as ‘bold, visceral and unlike anything you’ve seen before’, director Indhu Rubasingham’s and first-time playwright Nima Taleghani’s reimagining of Euripides’ The Bacchae is surprisingly tame. The whole thing is conceived as a kind of Hellenic rap battle, with the Bacchanalian women givin’ it large, all signs of the horns and plenty of shits and fucks. ‘Oo are yer? Oo are yer? Oo are yer?’ yells Clare Perkins as Head Bacchant Vida, and the response comes: ‘Bak-ak-ak-ak-aiii!’ If Rubasingham’s masterplan as new Artistic Director of the NT is to attract younger audiences by making the classics more relevant to their lives, this approach seems designed to do the exact opposite. It’s a middle-aged person’s idea of what young people are like, and as an approach it’s as awkward and embarrassing as seeing your Dad turn up at a disco with a baseball cap on backwards, holding his groin and swinging a skateboard. Janet Street-Porter tried this in ...

It's Sisters Week at the Oxford Playhouse. While the Brontës are dying of consumption in the Burton Taylor Studio at the back of the building, the Mitfords are going full Adolf in the main house. The British have an abiding fascination with the Mitford Sisters. They’re like monsters in debutante form, Frightening Young Things. Buried barely 18 miles from the Playhouse Box Office in the chocolate-box village of Swinbrook, pretty graves all in a row, they are proof that some corner of a British field is forever fascist. We just can’t get enough of them. There are at least thirty books that tell their story, from the Collected Letters to Hitler’s Valkyrie . As recently as this summer, TV audiences have been treated to Outrageous , which explores the lives and loves of this bizarre family. But Amy Rosenthal’s new play wisely avoids tackling the whole saga, and focuses on the heroic Jessica (Emma Noakes in a performance oozing dignity and wit), who revolted against the family tradition...