The President's Husband's Drama Reviews

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...

In The Detention five high school students have been given Saturday detention, and none of them knows what for. Their mysterious teacher Mr Fairton informs them that they will stay there until they know why. Over the course of the play each teenager reveals a secret that transforms how their classmates view them. But will it be enough to release them back into the weekend? If the structure of The Detention sounds familiar, then it should. It's based squarely and unashamedly on John Hughes' era-defining school drama The Breakfast Club , with Mr Fairlot adding a soupcon of Inspector Goole from An Inspector Calls . But where The Breakfast Club ultimately rejected the social stereotyping of schoolchildren, The Detention accepts those stereotypes, and uses them to confront a number of issues our youngsters grapple with during their formative years. It's The Breakfast Club if written by Jacqueline Wilson. So our five misfits - a class clown, a nerdy bookworm, a spoilt mean g...