The President's Husband's Drama Reviews

Poor old Johann Georg Faust (1466-1541) had no idea what he was starting. A hard-working, itinerant mountebank, he trekked around Germany reading horoscopes, doing magic tricks, and selling fake medicine (once being denied entrance to Nuremberg on the basis that he was a ‘great necromancer and sodomite’). He died when one of his own experiments exploded in his face in a pub near Baden-Württemberg. But somehow the legend got started that he’d sold his soul to the devil. And now look. The Faust parable – a pact that exchanges earthly success for eternal suffering – reaches into our psyches, shows us temptation, and warns us of its consequences. And Western culture has two great dramatic works that tell the story: Goethe’s vast epic Faust and Marlowe’s rather sprightlier five-acter, Doctor Faustus . Of the two, I prefer Goethe. His Dr Faustus has noble ideals: he seeks a moment of perfect transcendence that will elevate him from the drudgery of mankind, and this leads to ruin and horrifi...

When I first looked at the programme for The Players  I was a trifle sceptical. "We are a theatre collective and artistic community", it claims, and "We strive to remodel the way that drama is traditionally structured." Really? Give me a break, I thought. This is, after all, Splinters Productions' first ever show. How many times have I read overblown statements like that, only to find they're so much hot air?  But then I looked closer. And I realised that this was that one in a hundred cases where it's all actually true. Co-creators Sasha Ranawake and Camille Branch really did write two different versions of their scenario, and then compile and debate them over the summer. They really did get four separate editors to expand, enhance and deepen their ideas. They really did invite a cavalcade of artists, poets and essayists to respond creatively to their script, and they've gathered all this ancillary work together in a gorgeous, thought-provoking, col...

Squat would be a great name for a nightclub, and heading into the Pilch this week that looks like what it is. Clubbers off their faces accost you on the way in asking for a light, red-necked bouncers demand ID, and once inside there's a scuzzy, stained, chequerboard dance floor, some monumentally cute disco lights and a thumping rave track that has all the early arrivers nodding their heads in mute rhythm as they check their phones. It's the closest I've got to a nightclub for years, but things don't seem to have changed much since the days of The Hitman and Her (look it up) . Except... it's not a nightclub. It's a memory of last night's nightclub. And as the cold light of day cruelly illuminates the filthy domestic setting of Juliet Taub's phenomenally enjoyable, sinfully pleasurable new play, we realise that our cast of five frenemies are in fact living in a squat. As with Orla Wyatt's A&E , playing this week at the Burton Taylor Studio, Squa...

From its strobe-light-manic opening to its primal fuck-scream of an ending, A&E is a dizzying cascade of wit, pain and razor-blade social satire. Considering the main thrust of the plot is that nothing happens in it - it's literally just people waiting in A&E - the personal stories it unveils pack more revelations than St John the Divine. It's a comedy so dark it should have a 90% cocoa warning on the door. It makes fun of middle-class do-gooders, drug addicts, the NHS, the Police, the education system, the audience, and even itself. But it does all that somehow with both bitter contempt and forgiving compassion in equal measure. And it's been written by a student, Orla Wyatt, who has never penned a play before. How that alchemy happens is beyond me. I'm just privileged to see the result, and to celebrate an unimpeachable hit. The premise is so simple: we are in the A&E department of Woolwich Hospital in South London. No, really, we all are: captions on the...

Well, this was lovely. Ted Fussell’s adaptation of Dylan Thomas’s raucous-cum-elegiac radio play about the inhabitants of a small Welsh fishing village called Llareggub (‘Buggerall’ backwards) quite brilliantly bucks the trend of student productions that dispense with stagecraft and trust entirely to performance. Instead, Fussell’s Under Milk Wood draws on a myriad of theatrical techniques as distinctive and multifarious as the village characters themselves. Let’s get the one gripe out of the way: the voices (with one or two exceptions) are just too quiet. When there is an almost constant musical underscore, a traverse staging – meaning the actors have to face away from half the audience much of the time – and it all takes place in a big hangar of a venue like the O’Reilly, then amplification is needed. While Thomas’s witty and evocative language comes through much of the time, quite a lot of detail is lost. This is a shame. But it’s more than made up for by the sensitively created jo...

In a week when scientists discovered, in a gob-smacking instance of life imitating art, that Hitler really did only have one ball, along comes Full Moon Theatre to dust off Bertolt Brecht’s comedic story of the world’s foremost mono-testicled tyrant. Director Milo Marsh has dug deep for contemporary relevance. The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui does, after all, track the rise of fascism, and with right-wing populism popping up all over the world, now seems a fitting moment to heed a warning from history. The vestibule of the Pilch is accordingly plastered with newspaper front pages stretching from 1929 to the present day, drawing comparisons between Hitler’s thuggery, Trump’s bullying diplomacy and a number of other prime suspects. (Hitler’s closest modern-day comparator, Putin, is strangely missing, despite his propensity for fixing elections and invading/annexing his neighbours. Netanyahu is well-represented.) The pre-start entertainment is a treat. In place of Brecht’s so-called ‘ep...

“Look like the innocent flower but be the serpent under’t”. “To What End” , with its many nods to Shakespeare’s tragedy, heeds Lady Macbeth’s caution from the curtain-raiser. As a couple (Georgina Cotes and Luke Carroll) waltzes under a warm glow to the tune of Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again,” all RP accents and poised prose, the audience may very well assume they are immersed in a cushy love story set in the shadow of World War II. They would be mistaken. The illusion swiftly curdles as two directors stride onstage, revealing that we are, in fact, witnessing a play-within-a-play. What follows is a shrewd deconstruction of the very machinery of theatre; its clichés, self-importance and rituals are all delightedly laid to waste, revealing the stark insecurity and self-consciousness that always seems to lurk beneath the act of making art. If you managed to catch my previous review, you will be aware of my newly discovered favourite theatrical genre: the 60-minute, one-act play. That s...

Is there anything quite so enjoyable as a bit of meta-theatre? Oxford has been spoilt with it in recent times. When You Pass Over My Tomb used realities within realities to address the fuzzy line separating life from death. Unprofessional demolished the fourth wall in its hilariously tongue-in-cheek critique of personal achievement. And The Writer gave us a central character who tries to make sense of her own life by fictionalising it in her art. Now the writing/directing team of Billy Skiggs and Billy Hearld, collectively known as ‘The Billys’ (and I can’t help thinking that they get a tiny kick out of having a shared name ending in a y that doesn’t change to ie in the plural despite having a consonant before the final letter) have produced a gloriously twisted piece of self-referential entertainment called To What End? Ostensibly the title refers to the fact that the characters in the Billys’ play have lost the final page of their own script, and they literally need to know What...

In her concise, passionate and perceptive programme note, director Rosie Morgan-Males talks about the rhythmic power of Arthur Miller's language, how it manages to deliver unbearable emotion beneath the cadences of everyday speech. She's right. Miller gives poetry to those who cannot express their feelings, and a voice to the inarticulate, without ever departing from the rhythms, words and slang of 1950s Brooklyn harbourmen. A View From The Bridge  started life as a one-act play entirely in verse. Labyrinth's production at the Oxford Playhouse may be the two-act prose version, but the performances, the staging and the music are at times so lyrical that this feels like pure theatrical poetry. It's intense, tragic and deeply unsettling. The story focuses on veteran harbour-worker Eddie Carbone, a man around whom the post-War world is changing fast, and who fears what those changes will bring. His niece Catherine is 17 and ready to fly the nest. The illegal immigrant to wh...