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"Dial 1 For UK". Burton Taylor Studio

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...
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"Breaking the Code". Oxford Playhouse

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...
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"The Bacchae". National Theatre

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 ...
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"The Party Girls". Oxford Playhouse

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...
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"Jane Eyre: an Autobiography" Burton Taylor Studio

Live Wire and Roughhouse Theatre's travelling, one-woman adaptation of Jane Eyre is a perfectly serviceable introduction to one of the greatest, most well-known (and most frequently adapted) novels of all time. But it's not an 'inventive exploration of the status of women in society', as the publicity claims. It's more like a frenetic, 80-minute episode of Jackanory . Alison Campbell plays all the parts with charm and dedication. In fact, the next time an audiobook of Jane Eyre is being recorded, she would do a fantastic job. The only trouble is that, unlike the book, the show itself feels depressingly short on original ideas, theatrical inventiveness or deep insight into the text. Minor characters like Mrs Fairfax, St John Rivers and his two sisters become northern stereotypes rather than rounded individuals. Campbell pushes a luggage trunk around the stage to create different scenes, but each of them simply looks like a luggage trunk from a slightly different an...
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"Measure for Measure". Royal Shakespeare Theatre

Emily Burns’ version of the ultimate ‘problem play’ is, in many ways, the perfect Shakespeare production. It’s bursting with creativity and original interpretations, but not a single one of them feels forced or capricious. Burns finds a modern relevance for the play which is not hung on it like an arbitrarily chosen, ill-fitting suit, but rather brings new depths of understanding without stretching credulity. It has deep respect for the original text, but doesn’t shy from playing fast-and-loose with it when it needs to. In short, it’s completely brilliant. Opening with a sequence of video clips including Epstein, Trump, Clinton, Prince Andrew and Harvey Weinstein, there’s no doubt from the very start what this Measure will be calling to account. The modern setting feels not arbitrary but urgent, vital, current and accusatory. Burns has stripped away the parade of minor Viennese characters – bawds, cutpurses and sexworkers – that make parts of Measure For Measure feel like a sixteenth...
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"Born With Teeth". Wyndham's Theatre

There’s no actual evidence that Shakespeare and Marlowe ever met. But inklings down the ages have tickled the imaginations of authors and scholars for generations. There’s Shakespeare’s fanboy tip of the quill in As You Like It , where he addresses his mentor directly: ‘Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might: who ever loved that loved not at first sight?’ As well as betraying familiarity with Hero and Leander , that line positions Marlowe as a fondly remembered figure of respect and authority. Thematic links abound too, with Barabbas from The Jew of Malta paralleling Shylock, Dr Faustus preparing the ground for Prospero, and even Edward the Second casting an effeminate glow on Richard II. In 1998’s Shakespeare in Love , Rupert Everett’s Marlowe gives Joseph Fiennes’ Shakespeare a few tips on how to improve his play Romeo and Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter , thus setting him on the path to greatness. Most significantly, in 2016, the New Oxford Shakespeare for the first time declared M...
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