The President's Husband's Drama Reviews

Are we in a new era of Falstaffs? In a recent interview in The Times , Ian McKellen said that he’d never ‘got’ Falstaff in the past. The standard, jovial ‘fat-man Toby-jug’ had never struck him as particularly funny or adorable. I felt the same. The Elizabethans’ fondness for this down-at-heel Father Christmas always seemed like something I’d have to accept, rather than experience for myself. But then McKellen realised that Falstaff is in fact thoroughly objectionable: a liar, a hypocrite, a glutton, a drunk, an emotional manipulator and a thief. It was a revelation. Once he stopped worrying about trying to make the audience love him, and instead embraced the character’s dark side, Falstaff came to life – and, paradoxically, also became more appealing. John Hodgkinson, in Blanche McIntyre’s hysterically funny and inspired production at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, has clearly come to the same conclusion. His Falstaff is never jovial. He cuts a sinister shape. Rather than being a Bunt...

This review appeared originally on The Reviews Hub . For a swashbuckling tale of bloodthirsty adventure on the high seas, there is something muted, almost cerebral, about this production. Forget the classic image of Captain Ahab’s lifeless corpse, festooned in his own ropes and lashed to the flanks of his nemesis. In Simple8’s production, Moby-Dick is but a whale of the mind, proceeding from Ahab’s vengeance-oppressed brain. Moments of intense violence are hinted at, but replaced by blackouts. Pain, exhaustion and suffering are expressed not through sweat, toil and action, but through the lyrics of an almost constant soundtrack of old sea-shanties, gently bewailing the losses and privations of a life at sea. Instead of howling winds and creaking boards, there’s a lone violin making scratchy sounds. Muted is fine. But is it effective? Partly. Herman Melville’s massive fish tale – the book is about the size of a baby whale itself – has never lost its power to thrill. Like Mary Shelley’s ...

If Pink Floyd is an important cultural phenomenon of the late 20 th Century – and it is – then all of their music matters. Not just the big hits like Wish You Were Here , Another Brick in the Wall and Comfortably Numb . This is the band that made its name with music so experimental and spaced-out that the BBC got them to play live in the studio while Apollo 11 set its controls for the heart of the Moon. But over the decades, in concert, they have confined themselves to the post- Dark Side era. (That, and taking each other to court of course.) Lazy. Greedy. There may never have been a band that so completely erased Chapter One of its own story. But the world is full of Floyd fans who cherish those early tracks just as much as the stadium standards. And for years they’ve been forced to watch the Greatest Hits over and over again... …Until drummer Nick Mason decided he’d had enough. Mason, the mild-mannered Derek Smalls of the group, wanted to dig out the psychedelic odysseys that the...

When Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s masterpiece, The School for Scandal , opened at Drury Lane Theatre in 1777, the sound of the audience laughing was so loud that passers-by in the street thought the building was falling over. William Hazlitt adored it, declaring, ‘Besides the wit and ingenuity of this play, there is a genial spirit of frankness and generosity about it, that relieves the heart as well as clears the lungs.’ Even as recently as 1995 one reviewer wrote that it is ‘such a superbly crafted laugh machine, and so timeless in delivering delectable comeuppance to a viper’s nest of idle-rich gossipmongers, that you’d practically have to club it to death to stifle its amazing pleasures’. Tilted Wig’s touring production doesn’t club Sheridan to death, but neither does it breathe much life into this most joyous of satires. On the plus side, passers-by on Beaumont Street can wend their way home safe in the knowledge that the Oxford Playhouse isn’t about to fall over. On the minus side...

With a title plucked from the back catalogue of Jacobean crooner John Dowland, and a plot somewhere between Marlowe’s Edward II and Game of Thrones , this tasty, twisty little play has a lot going for it. Steeped in literary references and historical assignations well away from your average History or English syllabus, it’s a story few will have encountered, but its political machinations feel only too familiar. Put simply, back in the early 17 th century, King James I "took as his favourite" (loving that euphemism) a young social climber called Robert Carr. Carr was actually working with his friend Sir Thomas Overbury who wanted to wield influence over the crown. But Carr got greedy, and abandoned Overbury after falling head-over-heels in love with the bewitching Lady Frances Howard. Together they plotted Overbury’s murder, and ended up in the Tower of London. An everyday tale of cutthroat landed gentry. In 2018, the Globe Theatre mounted a performance of Sir Walter Raleig...

Playing games is at the heart of improv. In its heyday, the ground-breaking Channel 4 show Whose Line Is It Anyway? won every comedy award going by presenting outrageously talented comedians with a series of game-like scenarios to turn into improvised sketches. And even today, there’s no doubt that the funniest panel shows on TV and radio are the ones that give genuine opportunities for improvised comedy. Just compare Radio 4’s The Unbelievable Truth with BBC1’s Would I Lie To You? Both are about trying to get lies past the opposing team. Both star David Mitchell. In fact, both are very funny. But Would I Lie To You? has the edge because it depends entirely on improv, whereas The Unbelievable Truth is built around prepared mini-lectures read out by the contestants. I promise I will get to tonight’s show in a minute. A bit more on improv first. As a TV comedy producer in the 1990s I was privileged to work with some of the funniest comedians of the last generation. The greatest of t...

This academic year has been bookended by two stonking productions of plays by Peter Shaffer. Back in Michaelmas Term there was Amadeus . And now there’s Equus , in a rendition so intense that it was only as the last spotlight flicked out on Ethan Bareham’s tortured face that the audience realised it hadn’t breathed for the last five minutes. Amadeus and Equus are linked by more than just performance schedules. Equus may be the wordier and denser of the two. But both plays give free rein to Shaffer’s overriding preoccupation: the limitations of ‘normal’ people. Just as Salieri stands up as the ‘patron saint of mediocrity’, here Dr Dysart confesses to his own ‘educated, average head’. Both plays are narrated by characters who, despite achieving worldly success in their own fields, bewail the gulf between themselves and those who live in a world of pure, celestially-driven inspiration. Not only do they glimpse their own petty boundaries, but, in a kind of earthly purgatory,  they a...