The President's Husband's Drama Reviews

Tracy-Ann Oberman’s grandmother and great-grandmother stood on the front line in the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, shouting ‘You shall not pass!’ at the ranks of British blackshirts marching under Oswald Mosley’s fascist banners. Oberman herself has been the subject of vicious antisemitic abuse, and in 2022 movingly addressed a House of Lords event celebrating women campaigners against racism. Oberman’s family history shows that present fears are no less than horrible imaginings of the past. Mosley’s thugs may have gone down with the Nazis, but antisemitism is alive, well and living in a university, a political headquarters or a football ground near you, today, right now. So this production of The Merchant of Venice is a passion project. Transplanting the story to the time and place of her own family’s suffering, and casting herself as the mater familias , a female Shylock, casts an aura of personal significance over the play. Oberman isn’t just acting Shylock; she’s consciously por...

If, like me, your idea of a good meal out is a Sunday Roast at a country pub or a Tibetan curry from the Gloucester Green street food market, then you might find the following a slightly out-of-body experience. A visit to Raymond Blanc’s double-Michelin-starred gastronomic paradise on the fringe of Oxford is rare, exquisite and utterly delightful. Why rare? Because the price, at £205 per head for lunch (not including drinks, tips or optional cheese) means most of us are not going to be popping in all that often (although it was completely full during our visit). But once you’ve swallowed the bill, the rest of what they offer is a pleasure to consume. In fact, the bill is part of the experience. Handing over a thousand pounds for a four-person lunch was a unique sensation: daring, insane, thrilling, almost transgressive – not unlike the horseradish sorbet that accompanied the second of our seven courses. The Quat’ Saisons reall...

This review was written for Daily Information, and appears on their website . Is there anything more British than sitting in a municipal park on a summer’s evening, getting soaked to the skin watching Shakespeare? There’s a magic to it. Sure, balmy sunsets with whispering zephyrs are nice in their way. But listening to Beatrice and Benedick harangue each other while the water pools in the folds of your kagoule and the diverted freight trains chunder past every fifteen minutes is so quintessentially part of the English summer that I think I actually prefer it. You get your tan from standing in the English rain. And by the end there’s a sense of community in the audience, almost a Blitz mentality, that means we all go away having shared a taste of Shakespeare that hasn’t changed for four hundred years. Much Ado About Nothing contains a line that blatantly embraces the pitfalls of outdoor performances (as of course all the earliest productions would have been). Borachio says to his partn...

Trevor Nunn is the last generation’s Sam Mendes: equally at home with frivolous (or serious) musicals as he is with the classical repertoire. In 2004 he followed up Hamlet with Acorn Antiques the Musical , and both were nominated for Olivier awards. He brought us Cats and Les Miserables as well as Judi Dench’s once-heard-never-forgotten scream of despair as a sleepwalking Lady Macbeth. And now he brings to the stage, in musical form, the film regularly voted greatest British movie of all time, The Third Man . Graham Greene and Carol Reed’s thriller about an innocent American getting caught up in a crime ring run by his erstwhile best friend in post-war Vienna doesn’t seem the most obvious candidate for musical adaptation, but then, neither did Carrie . I was slightly trepidatious on the way in. The film of The Third Man has a unique and distinctive tone: tongue-in-cheek while still affording glimpses of the deserts of vast eternal despair that lie in the pasts and futures of its ch...

Did Brian Michael Bendis and Sara Pichelli have any idea what they were starting when they innocently dreamed up Miles Morales in 2011? Their intention was to create a positive role model for children of colour in a Marvel Universe dominated by Middle-Aged Men In Lycra (except these particular MAMILs didn’t spend weekends hauling their skintight-clad paunches along country lanes on unnecessarily expensive bikes: they had epic battles with other, more evil, MAMILs instead). What Bendis and Pichelli set in motion was a universe-bending series of unfortunate events that would forever change the status and significance of everyone’s favourite wall-crawler. He would never be your friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man again. He would be your amicably-unpredictable, dimension-and-universe-spanning Spider-Man instead. The reason for this was that Miles Morales didn’t fit into the Marvel Universe that already existed. So to accommodate him – to make his existence explicable – the whole thing had to...

As You Like It is traditionally a play about young love. Of the four couples who get married in it, three were smitten the moment they first laid eyes on each other. And Phebe’s Marlowe-inspired exclamation, ‘Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?’ captures not just the joy of love, but the thrill of experiencing it for the first time, eyes locked across a sweaty disco floor. It’s all the more surprising, and remarkable, therefore, that the RSC’s latest iteration turns that principle on its head, and doesn’t just succeed, but reveals new tones, shades of meaning, expanses of joy and corners of poignancy in the process. This As You Like It is performed by a troupe of gracefully aging thespians (supported by a gaggle of young helpers in minor roles). But if that were all it was then the point of the production would be disappointingly limited. It would effectively just be saying, ‘Old actors can play young roles too, you know’, to which the answer would be, ‘Yes, we know.’ Ian ...

If ever there was a show of two halves, this was it. At the interval I was toying with the idea of sneaking out (and that wasn’t just because the people sitting next to me had spent the first ten minutes consuming an entire takeaway meal). By the end I was dabbing away tears and cheering as each actor took a bow. How did this miraculous conversion take place? What was so wrong, and what so right? It was only too clear that a huge amount of work had gone into this production. The set is an impressive Art Deco creation, there’s singing, dancing, and a bold twist on the original book. But in the first half it just doesn’t come together. The deliberate anachronism of using modern songs to populate the aural landscape of 1922 wears its Luhrmann heavily on its sleeve, and the clash of flappers and 70s crooning, for me, simply jarred. The dancing seemed superfluous and exposed: this wasn’t a musical, so why did it briefly behave as though it was one? Half the audience politely clapped like yo...