The President's Husband's Drama Reviews

After fifty years of theatregoing, you’d have thought there were few canonical classics I haven’t seen. But some have slipped through the net. And one of these is Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov. I know, it’s inexcusable. But thanks to Fennec Fox’s highly original production at Keble’s O’Reilly Theatre, another one is off the list. And Uncle Vanya is so Chekhov. It’s like a dry run for Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard . All the tropes are there: a once-wealthy Russian family forced to sell off its woodland – check; a group of women desperate (but psychologically unable) to escape the confines of their rural idyll – check; visiting, idealistic men whose ideals will take them nowhere – check; characters obsessed with their own petty problems and unable to sympathise with others – check ov! In fact, if it weren’t actually by Chekhov, Uncle Vanya could almost pass as a parody of the master. It even has a Chekhov’s Gun (of which more later). Joshua Robey’s production is a daring balan...

Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest cynical broadside on American values is one of his most enjoyable films yet. Masquerading as a high-octane thriller, it delivers a satirical stealth bomb to Trumpian policies, while Leonardo DiCaprio has the time of his life inverting the role of the action hero. In fact, in one of the film’s multiple flashes of self-referential comedy, Benicio del Toro encourages DiCaprio to jump out of the window of a speeding car by imagining himself as Tom Cruise. As well as being a Hollywood in-joke about the self-stunting superstar, it’s also a moment that sums up this whole movie: it knows action. It does action. But it’s smarter than action. Rather than cosily introducing us to the characters and their lives at the start, Anderson throws us into the heat of battle from frame one, leaving us desperately scampering to figure out what the hell is going on, as some sort of revolutionary army led by Teyana Taylor (as the brilliantly-monickered Perfidia Beverly Hills) s...

 “Your Funeral”. BT Studio Ask me my dramatic genre of choice on the way to a fourth Hamlet viewing of the year, and I’ll tell you honestly: “Ninety minutes, no interval.” For all the allure of playing esteemed theatre critic over a glass of house red in a humming West End bar, if I am sharing the Tube home with clubgoers just starting their nights, I know something’s gone wrong along the way. So, in a world of sprawling five-act-long plays and playwrights who’ve taken Pinter’s pauses to the very extreme, director Nick Samuel offers a welcome respite with his second original play.  Your Funeral is a 60-minute, one-act play inspired by Neutral Milk Hotel’s cult song “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”. It’s a bold claim: to do justice to a song that contends with finding beauty in impermanence and wonder in existence is no small feat, least of all within the hour. Worse still, to convey such existentialism shrewdly to a 9:30 pm crowd – dinner-fatigued and ready to switch their brai...

Before tonight I was only familiar with Kobo Abe from his extraordinary 1964 film Woman In The Dunes , a magical realist piece of new-wave independent cinema about a man voluntarily trapped in a pit. It hangs heavy with symbolism, but its strident, anti-commercial standpoint goes hand in hand with detailed, realistic settings and humane direction from Hiroshi Teshigahara, and it's a fascinating, disturbing experience.  The three one-scene plays that comprise The Man Who Turned Into A Stick clearly come from the same pen. Driven by fervent, socialist idealism, they use surreal plots, absurd scripts and symbolic events to shake up the Japanese art world of the late 1950s. Above all, like Woman In The Dunes , they feature men trapped in impossible prisons. It's Kafka meets Beckett halfway up (or down) an Escher staircase. In Part One, The Suitcase , two women debate the pros and cons of breaking into a large piece of luggage that contains a man who represents the ancestors of one...

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...