The President's Husband's Drama Reviews

This review was written for Daily Information, and appears on their website . Western filmmakers have for decades plundered the works of Akira Kurosawa for new ideas. Most famously  Seven Samurai  provided the template for  The Magnificent Seven , and when Sergio Leone brazenly plagiarised  Yojimbo  for the first of his  Dollars  trilogy he ended up in court. Even  Star Wars  feels the force of Kurosawa, taking inspiration from  The Hidden Fortress  with its tale of a battling princess aided by two droid-like comedy lackeys. So it’s a relief to see that  Living  openly declares itself to be ‘based on’ Kurosawa’s  Ikiru  ( ‘To Live’ ). However, even that statement falls somewhat short of full disclosure, because  Living  is not just  based  on the Japanese original. It’s a  translation  of it – and a clever one too. Ikiru  is possibly Kurosawa’s most powerful film. It’s not an ep...

This review was written for  Daily Information  and appears on their  website . Following two years of covid-induced slumber, drama has reawakened in Oxford like a Blue Peter tortoise after a winter of enforced hibernation. The flowering I've witnessed this term has been beautiful, inspiring and triumphantly creative. Of the twelve shows I’ve seen in the last few weeks, nine have been original pieces of work. That in itself is impressive – but on top of that, the talent on display has been remarkable. And even when shows haven’t come off, at least they went down fighting. Dead Man’s Suitcase is an original musical, written and directed by Felix Westcott. It’s packed with toe-tapping tunes, its lyrics are genuinely witty, its story is instantly relatable but at the same time totally fantastical, and its company of just four performers carry the whole thing off with aplomb. In other words, it’s a treat. Our hero is John, an everyman in a literal dead-end job. He writes obi...

This review was written for Daily Information and appears on their website . 'The Skriker' had to cancel this week, raising the prospect of the Burton Taylor being briefly unoccupied. What to do to avert this tragedy? What play can be cast, rehearsed, learnt and mounted at three days' notice?  Cops & Robbers, the improv group, to the rescue. All this three-strong team have to work with is the basic idea that they're putting on a musical. Beyond that, at the outset of the show, they clearly have no idea where they're going. There's no script, no roadmap to follow. The only vehicle they have is their trust in each other. What more do you need? Answer: nothing. 'Spools' is fifty minutes of ephemeral joy built on nothing more than a genuine commitment to and confidence in improvisation. It was pretty sobering fighting through the queues shuffling into 'Mama Mia' at the New Theatre round the corner, on the way to the BT this evening. How much does...

The President and I are approaching the end of a long quest: to see all of Shakespeare’s plays in performance. Before this evening, we had just two to go*. Thanks to Jesus College’s Shakespeare Project we’re now down to the last one – and what a way to get there! This production oozed class from beginning to end. Henry VI, Part One is not often performed as a standalone piece. On those rare occasions when it sees the lights of an auditorium it’s normally truncated with Parts Two and Three into a conglomerate Wars of the Roses compendium. This is a real pity, because it makes for a thrilling play in its own right. It has battles with the dastardly French, heroic deaths, bitter infighting amongst the English lords, Machiavellian love-scenes, and even Joan of Arc. Joan of Arc! This production was deceptively simply staged in Jesus College Dining Hall. I say ‘deceptively’ because it seemed so natural in execution that the bold directorial decisions underpinning it made perfect and immedi...

This review was written for Daily Information  and appears on their website . Robert Louis Stevenson’s original novella 'The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' came out in 1884. In that same year the Pitt Rivers Museum was founded. It took 138 years for these twins to discover each other, but after this evening, it feels like they’ve never been apart. You’ll never see this production anywhere else. It is knitted into the fabric of the Pitt Rivers as tightly as Jekyll himself is bound to his alter ego.  The Gothic horror of Jekyll and Hyde fits perfectly with the knotty Victorian curiosities on display in the original 19 th -Century cases of the museum: Jekyll’s laboratory is surrounded by antique masks; Hyde howls in agony in front of a case labelled ‘Roaring Bullwhips’; the audience members, filtering through the defiles and around the displays, peek at scenes of human dissection across displays of teeth and bones. The Pitt Rivers has never been used for a theatrical pro...

Before I say anything about how good or bad this show was, let’s salute a company of students who have the sheer energy, bravery and ambition to mount not just a musical, but an original one. That in itself is a remarkable achievement. Experienced professional organisations with millions invested frequently cock it up on a massive scale. Carrie the Musical was mounted by no less a body than the Royal Shakespeare Company, spent four years in development, and closed after five performances. And Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark was so troubled that despite having a host of award-winning figures at the creative helm it had 182 previews, multiple rewrites, and at least six hospitalised actors. And it was critically panned. So musicals aren’t easy. Musketeer Productions aimed big with Troy Story , taking on the entire ten years of the Trojan War. Of course it’s not possible to turn the whole Iliad into a single evening of entertainment, so this is a kind of Highlights from Homer , and its p...

There’s something nasty in the woodshed in Headingham, and it all comes spilling out the night before the annual village fête. Fêtid starts off looking as though it’s going to be a gentle tale of country folk, like a bumper edition of The Archers . But it ends up more like Emmerdale on acid, as age-old recriminations, feuds, treacheries and concealments come rising to the surface in one tumultuous night, like courgettes in summer. The background music while the audience take their seats is a collection of haunting English country ballads so beguiling I was on the verge of asking the sound guy for the playlist. And this theme is picked up by Faye James’ lyrical guitar, strumming and singing while the characters gently dig their allotments. However, English idylls do have a habit of masking uglier truths. And in Fêtid it doesn’t take long for utopia to evaporate. The first sign is some particularly spiky nettle tea, and before long alcoholism, infidelity, neglect, grievous bodily harm ...

Remember when getting covid meant you had to stay in for seven days? For most of us, it was a week of emotional suspended animation. Coco Cottam’s new play is anything but that. It takes those seven days and turns them into a rollercoaster revelation of the relationship between two people, Ro and Ti. Moments before they test positive they are on the verge of breaking up. But at that instant of crisis they are forced to isolate with each other, and over a week of Scrabble, ravioli, shared memories, and ultimately a shared bed, they – maybe – begin to rediscover what they mean to each other. It takes courage to publicise your new drama with the words, “It’s a play about being mind-numbingly bored”. But for a show in which ostensibly nothing much happens, Wishbone is gripping, funny, and at times heart-rending. Each of the seven days of isolation makes a distinct vignette: one day is done as a rear-projected animation with speech-bubbles, another is almost entirely a monologue from Ro on...

The magic of a great theatrical production is that it can redraw the world around an old text, and not only make you see it in a completely new light, but also make you feel that this is the way it was always meant to be . Such is the case with A 2 ’s astonishing production of Noel Coward’s 1941 classic supernatural comedy Blithe Spirit . The only disappointment with this show is that Coward himself can’t be brought back from the dead, like the ghostly Evelyn and Ruth, to see it. Because he would have loved it. Alex Foster and the cast have delicately uncovered the gay subtext that Coward undoubtedly buried in his play, and have brought it to the fore with pride and sheer hilarity. Coward’s homosexuality, following the repressive conventions of his times, was never publicly acknowledged. Instead it found its way into his plays via queer coding that would have passed over the heads of the majority of his audiences. David Lean completely missed it in his somewhat staid 1945 film, and the...

The Duchess of Malfi is not a subtle play. It’s a brooding, darkly philosophical cesspit smelling foully of obsession, murder, incest, corruption and damnation. That’s why it’s so good. I’ve seen it several times, and I always feel like I need a good wash afterwards. Nathan Crewe’s production at the Pilch captures some of that evil. There’s some very creepy stalking from the malcontent Bosola, a haunting graveyard echo from the departed Duchess, and two brilliantly evil brothers in Jules Upson’s Count Ferdinand and Bailey Finch-Robinson’s Cardinal. These two in particular found ways into their characters that turned them into true theatrical creations: larger than life in just the right way. They embodied the grand guignol of Webster’s writing, and their performances uncovered moments of powerful drama: Ferdinand suddenly throwing himself to the floor to attack an imagined assailant, the Cardinal struggling to hold on to his veneer of respect while confessing that he's ‘puzzl’d i...

I’ve known You’re So Vain by Carly Simon for most of my life, and until tonight I always thought it was about Warren Beatty. Women You Know made me realise that’s an illusion. It’s a woman singing about another woman. And when she says those lines I’d previously seen as damning accusations (“You’re so vain”, “I bet you think this song is about you”) she’s not accusing. She’s celebrating. This is a short, sharp shock of a show. Simultaneously dirty and effortlessly smart, it features two women raking over their messy but somehow incredibly cool lives. They share in-jokes about guys called Greg, they remember their embarrassing first kisses, and they open their hearts to each other in ways only the closest of friends can, with shortcuts of language that we, the audience, are just about allowed to share. The men who are unwary enough to wander across their lives and beds are unremittingly witless and incapable of matching the cynical insights of the two women (who are never named by the...

School life has been responsible for an incredibly broad range of drama, from the musical nostalgia of Daisy Pulls It Off  to the life-affirming sparkle of Booksmart , to the social realism of Kes . (And let's not forget the suicidal hilarity of Welcome to the Dollhouse  while we're at it - one of the most painful and brilliant dissections of school bullying you'll ever see.)  Deborah Acheampong has added to the canon with a kind of fever dream of 6th-form catastrophe, in which a group of girls at an exclusive single-sex school drink, fuck, kill, party and impregnate themselves into oblivion. As one of them says, 'You're like a Boeing heading straight into the ground.' It's Heathers  meets Twitter while reading Donna Tartt. This is undoubtedly an ambitious project. The trouble is, it's almost too  ambitious. It flits between satire, drama, comedy and tragedy with no sense of control. It throws up morsels of plot that seem to be incredibly important, and ...

Plays about the impact of serious disease on normal people like you and me make surprisingly good (if frequently traumatic) theatre. Angels in America , People, Places and Things , The Inheritance , these were all heartstopping experiences. They also won loads of awards. Skin , the first play by writer/director Peter Todd, can stand proudly next to them. It doesn't have the pizzazz, the budget or the surreality. But it does have heart. So, so much heart. A simple, short story, told on a virtually bare stage, it traces the journey of a young woman, Sadie, from having a few moles removed to facing possible death. Sensitively, dramatically, with thorough research and heart-wrenchingly good acting, it takes us through the stages, and we feel Sadie's pain, anger and confusion every step of the way. I was at the opening night this evening, and there was a well-deserved standing ovation. Some audience members were left silently hugging each other in tears as the house lights came on a...