The President's Husband's Drama Reviews

'What do you see?’ It is so hollow an opener in the mouth of Ollie Gillam’s sour, pontificating Mark Rothko, who stands inhospitably in the middle of the stage taking up (and indeed taking in) his own painting. It is so delicate a question in the eye of director Ezana Betru, who has deftly risen to the challenge of ‘Red’ with a rich production which, much like Rothko,, invites you to interpret every detail as meticulous and deliberate. One stops short at claiming ‘divinely inspired,’ but Betru certainly experiments with divine themes. A surge of classical music and some heavenly white lighting, and one feels the heavy legacy of a renaissance painting tradition shouldered on one self-absorbed artist’s squared shoulders, even if they have never cared for Rothko’s behemoth red rectangles. It is but a small moment in a play embroidered with artistic decisions: it certainly never feels tired. As the blacklight switches on and our heavenly painters become luminescent, athletically smothe...

I was due to see ‘Red’ at the Pilch this evening, but it was cancelled because of a leaky ceiling. That’s the second play in two weeks that’s been affected this way. Either there’s a problem with Balliol’s plumbing, or the students in the rooms above have got seriously blocked toilets. I’m not sure I want to think about it. Instead, I ran across town and got to the Burton Taylor Studio just in time for Root Ginger Productions’ ‘We Could Be Here A While’. They generously gave me a complimentary ticket at the last minute, an act which merits both gratitude and honesty. On this occasion, the former is easier to give than the latter. So, to Root Ginger, a genuinely huge thank you for the seat. ‘We Could be Here A While’ is a newly-written comedy by Charlotte Ward about people in an air-raid shelter during World War Two. While they wait for the all-clear, they meddle in each other’s love lives, try to get rid of a pigeon, go and defuse a bomb that hasn’t gone off (first sign of poor histor...

Since taking over the artistic direction of the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2023, Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey have brought a new playfulness to the job. Rather than being weighed down with the responsibility of it all, they behave like unusually gifted children who have been given the keys to the biggest dressing-up box in the world. They’re having a lot of fun. And one of the games they’ve enjoyed the most is reframing classic plays for modern audiences. With The Constant Wife they’ve dug up a dusty old Somerset Maugham tome from the archives and, with a sprinkling of adaptation from Laura Wade, revealed it as a theatrical gem, with a female central role directly descended from Shakespeare’s Beatrice. Maugham is usually seen as one of those stalwarts of the English stage, who plied the pre-war years with drawing-rooms, drinks tables and upper-class tiffs. Like Rattigan, Priestley, Barrie and Galsworthy, he was blown away during the cultural revolution of the 1960s, and, like them...