The President's Husband's Drama Reviews

My most enduring memory of the late 1990s (yes, I'm really this sad) is going up and down tube escalators in London en route to work, and constantly passing the posters for Art at Wyndham's Theatre. The poster featured the three characters in the play, and it seemed like every time I glided past it, the actors changed. George Wendt, Nigel Havers, Warren Mitchell, Albert Finney. Over the many years of its run, Art became a who's who of the acting elite of the late 20th century. The final cast was the League of Gentlemen team. And, to my eternal regret, I never went to see it. So what a relief finally to put that right. But was it worth the wait? Art , in case you don't know, is the French play with the big white painting. Conceptual-art-lover Serge has bought this ostensibly blank canvas for 200,000 francs (that's about £25,000). His friend Marc is incredulous and describes the painting as 'shit'. And Yvan can't decide. Torn between his two friends, he...

How do you bring something as titanic as The Great Gatsby to life? This production does it with an addicting mix of inventive choreo, cinematic acting, some well placed umbrellas, and costume to boot. It walks the line between tragedy and parody, and the result is delightful, light-hearted, but touching, immersive, real. Perhaps the best part of this production is that it just exudes excitement. The band is loud and joyous. The cast really gets into the dance numbers. They flounce around in sequined costumes, arms extended. It’s a play made with love (or perhaps adoration), and the enthusiasm gives it the flavour of indulgence, glamour, and euphoria which is the essence of The Great Gatsby. Who needs a Broadway set? George Lyons and Izzy Moore can conjure an aeroplane out of pure imagination, create a dance hall out of grass, build a car out of dresses and umbrellas. I watch them play with reality and remember why I love theatre. The Trinity Players’ Gatsby is both familiar and surpris...

How long is a piece of string? Growing up, my Dad would ask me that all the time, a casual riddle in answer to anything asked too earnestly or too impatiently. “How long till we’re there, Dad?” “How long is a piece of string?” Witty, if a little maddening, definitely watered down by the frequency with which he said it. I think he mainly pursued that line of enquiry for the 10 minutes of peace it afforded him while I pondered the impossible question. Impossible questions (and pondering) is also the name of the game for Deja Vu Productions’ newest show, as one may guess from its provocative, rhetorical title: “Are You Sure?” Penned by writer-director-actor F.C. Zeri, “Are You Sure?” struck a chord with me, obsessed as it is with similar imagery: string, fathers, unanswerable questions. Although here we are not preoccupied so much with the length of a piece of string as we are with cutting it (in half, and in half, and in half again), the puzzle is the same. The answer is either infinitel...

Is it allowed to like a play just because all the people in it seem to be extremely nice? There's a lovely feeling of friendship holding Bush - The Musical  together. It includes the actors grinning at each other and having fun with their roles, the musicians stifling giggles at the silliness being enacted before them, and even the stage manager turning off the house lights with undeniable charm. It all feels refreshingly unpretentious, unserious and unimportant, which, given the amount of Arthur Miller and Shakespeare filling term-cards this summer, makes for a welcome change. The Mollys production company has carved out a special niche for shows that wanna have fun in the often soul-wrenching world of Oxford drama. They were behind Breaking Bod  (the story of a reluctant drug dealer set amid the dreaming spires) and The Trail to Oregon  (a loving homage to the US-based parody musical maestros StarKid). They've learnt a lot from their performing predecessors, and Bush ...

Arthur Miller for a garden play? I’ll admit I was hesitant. Garden plays in Oxford tend to follow a certain, uninterrupted niche. Shakespeare is a classic, and there is the occasional, colourful and often comedic outlier like Queen College’s yearly Eglesfield musical, Exeter's own previous rarity ‘The Mandrake’, and Trinity's forthcoming 'Great Gatsby'. Rarely do people take the opportunity to go in earnestly on a garden play, and All My Sons , as a play about war and disillusionment with one’s father, is definitely on the dour side. But this production was a delight. All My Sons follows a seemingly happy family in a semi-rural town, in mid-century, middle America. Joe Keller (Tristan Wood, in his Miller era after Death of a Salesman ) is a family man, a hit with the neighbourhood kids, and suspected of greenlighting a war-time manufacturing disaster which caused the death of twenty-one pilots (not the band). He was acquitted (just) but rumours follow behind the Keller...

When Patrick Marber sat down with the Independent in 1998, he outright rejected the notion that “Closer”, which follows a quartet of strangers stretching the fabric of infidelity to its fraying edges, “is about betrayal”. This, he maintained, is but a drop in the ocean. Marber directs his actors, above all, to “love each other”. When they fall short, it is not because they are callous, but because love never obeys the neat rules we delude ourselves into prescribing. Director Rosie Morgan-Males was under no illusions about the magnitude of her responsibility: to wade through flagrantly outrageous behaviour and emerge on the other side with something as sincere as Marber’s masterpiece. Indeed, in her own words, Morgan-Males set out to “peel back the layers and find something honest inside the mess”. It would have been all too easy to present a stylishly shallow replica of the 2004 movie, which, for all its defects, is a study in how much a perpetually pouting Jude Law can make a per...

Can I tell you a secret? I've always wanted to hear Caliban's ethereally beautiful 'The isle is full of noises' speech with Pink Floyd's Shine On You Crazy Diamond  in the background. David Gilmour's electric trills and sweet airs are a perfect complement to the fragile beauty of the verse. So thank you to Magdalen Players for (almost) making that midsummer dream come true. The music throughout this production of The Tempest  is gently overpowering, flowing with the natural rhythms of the island, while still providing a deep, electric thrum that crackles with pent-up magical power. And during that speech it becomes a gorgeous variation on Shine On . The full-colour programme looks wonderful, and sets the psychedelic tone for the evening, which is aurally expanded by Sound Designer Lucian Ng and composer/co-director Seb Carrington along with musicians Milo Holland, Kit Renshaw and Rei French. As Carrington readily admits, The Tempest  is an extremely tricky play ...