Michael Pennington's Sweet William - Oxford Playhouse, 27 January

If it takes ten thousand hours of practice to make a virtuoso then I’m not sure what that makes Michael Pennington - as stated in the subtitle to his show (and accompanying book) Sweet William he has spent ‘Twenty Thousand Hours with Shakespeare’.  If nothing else, it makes him an excellent companion on a whistle stop tour of Shakespeare’s life and works.

A show such as this could have been very dry - an hour and a half lecture repeating for the thousandth time that we know surprisingly little about the facts of Shakespeare’s actual life, punctuated with the occasional ‘to be or not to be’ and rounded with a sleep.  Instead, Pennington gives us his own personal experience of Shakespeare.  How he first encountered him on a family outing to see Macbeth when he was a young boy, then linking into Shakespeare’s portrayal of children.  How he believes that Shakespeare joined a travelling theatre company in those lost years between Stratford and London, then linking into his own experience of being in a touring Shakespeare company and the difficulty of transporting stage weapons in Hong Kong (a universal problem, surely).

Pennington’s passion is clear throughout the show, especially when he discusses Shakespeare’s language.  As we the audience love to have Shakespeare’s words in our ears, Pennington the actor clearly loves to feel the words on his tongue, deftly launching into a number of lesser-known speeches from a variety of the plays and sonnets, becoming a young boy, an old man, a spurned lover, all the while managing not to come across as an arrogant luvvie showing off his range.

Near the end of his talk Pennington describes Shakespeare as a master ventriloquist who created a multitude of voices.  Continuing with that metaphor, and not sounding like it but intended entirely as a compliment, Pennington is a master dummy.

Original review here

Latin! Or Tobacco and Boys - Burton Taylor Studio, 24-28 January 2012

In the days before Stephen Fry was a national treasure and generally beloved know-it-all, when he was still a student at Cambridge, he wrote the comedy two-hander Latin! Or Tobacco and Boys. And, as you would perhaps expect from a play written by a young male student, sex is never far from the forefront.

The Burton Taylor studio is transformed into a classroom (well, there are some benches on the stage for the brave) as the audience become the students of Dominic Clarke, ably played by Barnabas Iley-Williamson, a Latin master with a passion for his subject, for youth, and for one of his 13 year old pupils, Cartwright. His relationship with the boy is found out by the pipe-smoking Herbert Brookshaw, played by Louis Fletcher, who promises to keep his secret in return for a bit of late night whipping from Clarke and some activities with peanut butter that one can only assume wouldn’t involve toast.With that kind of subject matter it’s not that surprising that this play doesn’t get laid on very often.

There is a difficult balance to be held between simply getting laughs out of the shock of the controversial and getting laughs because of the witty writing. The steady stream of sexual innuendo was very funny, and the interaction between Mr Clarke and his imaginary students was entertaining, but I suspect that there may have been quite a few Latin sex jokes that went over my head. Either that or the rest of the audience were far more worldly than me.

Come the climax, I have to admit that I was left a little unsatisfied. I think maybe I just didn’t get the full thrust of the play. There’s no need for performance anxiety though. I’m sure it’s great, if you like that sort of thing.

Original review here

Earthquakes in London - Oxford Playhouse, 1-5 November

Earthquakes in London is unlike any play I have seen before. It’s An Inconvenient Truth, by way of Top of the Pops and Chekov’s Three Sisters, with some apparently naked ukulele playing thrown in for good measure (though don’t just go for the ukulele, the scene’s quite brief). 

We are in the company of three sisters in contemporary London. Eldest sister Sarah, the Environmental Minister for the current coalition government, is trying to block plans for a new runway at Heathrow Airport, while at home her marriage is crumbling. Middle sister Freya is about to have a baby. She has a loving husband, but can’t seem to see past her terror of the future. And youngest sister Jasmine is aimless and angry, struggling to deal with life. 

Their lives develop and intertwine against the timely backdrop of the unsustainable stretching of the world’s resources, with reference being made to the earth’s population reaching seven billion this week. Their estranged father was paid off in the 1960s to talk down the catastrophic impact that increased air travel would cause to the environment (airlines do not come out of the play well at all) and he is now a prophet of doom, emphasising the spectre of apocalypse that haunts the play. 

The politics manages to avoid preachiness, and the relationships are written and performed brilliantly, but after a bleak and powerful first half, the second half crumbles slightly. There are some very moving scenes involving the family, but it seems that in order to stop the play from being incredibly depressing an unconvincing uplifting bit is tacked onto the end. Perhaps this was necessary, but I wish it had felt a little less like an afterthought. 

What saved the play from this fairly major flaw was partly the snappy, frequently funny dialogue, partly the innovative staging (including a well-used though slightly creaky revolving stage and a projected backdrop), and what I can only describe as the sheer bonkersness of the rest of it. Drunken dancing, surreal visions, terrifying yummy mummies on Hampstead Heath tormenting Freya to the backing beats of Goldfrapp, and a truly spectacular rendition of I Am Not a Robot by Marina and the Diamonds bring this play out of the rubble. 

Spectacle is the right word for Earthquakes in London. There is a lot going on, both plot-wise and ideas-wise, and exuberance carries it through. It might not change the world, but it may well leave you feeling differently about it, for a while at least. Until you get in your petrol car to go home to your central heated house, anyway.


Original review here

Sister Act - New Theatre, 18-29 October

(NB trailer does not feature the cast from this production)


90s San Francisco is swapped for 70s Philadelphia as the musical version of the Whoopi Goldberg film Sister Act comes to Oxford. 

I say musical version of the film, but this is perhaps misleading. The story is the same: A lounge singer, Deloris Van Cartier, witnesses her gangster boyfriend kill someone, so the police hide her in a convent to keep her protected until she can testify against him. Whilst there she teaches the nuns how to sing, they teach her about herself, the Pope gets involved, it’s all very uplifting. Add a bit of extra romance, an entirely new set of songs, and enough glitter to fill St. Paul’s Cathedral, and you’ve got the musical.

I was a little dubious when I heard that none of the songs from the film were going to be used in the musical. They were such a huge part of the film, I couldn’t see how any version of the story could work without them. But the shifting of the setting back to the 1970s is a brilliant move on the adaptors' part. As the film played with well-known motown songs, the musical remarkably achieves the same effect with completely original songs. By basing the new songs on the familiar sounds of 70s funk, soul, and disco, it still sounds like old favourites are being transformed into unexpected songs of religious worship.

The melodious jokes were great, but I did feel that quite a lot of the ‘normal’ jokes fell a bit flat. I didn’t really see the point of the comedy henchmen, but then there were many people in the audience who would have loudly disagreed with me, so I guess it’s just a matter of taste. Also character development was not exactly subtle, but with this kind of high energy romp I imagine that believable character arcs aren’t really a priority.

The cast were all excellent but the highest praise must go to Cynthia Erivo as Deloris, whose voice is amazing and who easily fills the habit left by Whoopi Goldberg.

As long as you don’t go expecting the film directly transposed to the stage, you will not be disappointed. With stained glass disco windows and a song involving the line ‘shake it like Mary Magdalene’, it would be a sin not to enjoy yourself.


Original review here

Mark Haddon: Swimming and Flying - Oxford Playhouse, 23 September

Mark Haddon was at the Oxford Playhouse on Friday performing a talk/essay especially written for the occasion, in support of the Playhouse‘s fundraising appeal. Haddon was alone on a stage set up for another play to be shown later that evening, there to deliver what was ostensibly an autobiographical talk, but what turned out to be a very intricately written, extremely engaging, and ultimately quite moving, work of poetry.

He ranged from school days, playing darts badly in the common room, to the moon landing, to strange fan mail after the success of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, via recitations of Henry David Thoreau and Louis MacNeice, with a bit of his own poetry seamlessly woven in.

As well as being an author, Mark Haddon also teaches students how to write, and he explained how he tells them that specific details are what brings writing to life, but that the gaps that the writer creates for the reader to fill are just as important. He subtly illustrated his own point by flowing undetectably from his own poem, Great White, about a terror of sharks, to a story about how he loves to swim in the Thames. This story wove in and out of another story about how he tried to combat his fear of flying by learning to fly himself. He would keep returning to these stories, and to a particular image of a single drop of rain on a floating feather, teasing poignancy out of the seemingly mundane.

Haddon managed to create a sense of wonder in tiny details, and clearly never wanted to lose his own sense of wonder at the universe. In writing, and in his approach to life, he said that it is not so much the answers that matter, but understanding the enormity of the questions. If said questions are being asked by Mark Haddon then I certainly want to listen.


Original review here

Unmythable - Ashmolean, 27 July 2011

As part of the Ashmolean’s current exhibition, 'Heracles to Alexander the Great', Temple Theatre Company let us walk in the company of legends as they performedUnmythable among the statues in the Ashmolean's Atrium.

It was a spectacular, though not entirely practical, setting (it was quite difficult to see sometimes) as the three actors, after welcoming us with olives (though sadly no plate smashing), invited us to enlist in the crew of the Argonauts. So we joined Jason and his crew as we – though mainly just Jason, as heroes don’t really share their glory with their friends – went on a quest for the golden fleece.

On the way, after successfully getting through the Symplegades by chanting the famous Greek phrase “Go, dove, go” as the bird (man) flew through the rocks (ran up the Ashmolean stairs), we learned a bit about the quests of Heracles, and Orpheus, about the creation of the world, and my particular favourite, the story of Persephone being taken to the underworld and the creation of the seasons. Demeter and Persephone were played by one actor, and Hades and Zeus by another, with very funny results.

It was no mean feat to represent such a number of characters with no props or costumes, and I thought all three actors were thoroughly entertaining in their light-hearted treatment of the myths.  My friend found it a bit laboured and over the top, but that’s grumpy people for you.

The exhibition itself displays recent discoveries from royal burial tombs and the palace at Aegae, the ancient capital of Macedon, and some of the items are stunning.  There is a crown made of gold oak leaves and acorns that looks like it would crumble in the breeze, it is so intricate and delicate.  That this is so beautiful and is still in one piece is just remarkable.

Maybe Unmythable wasn’t as remarkable as a 2,500 year old crown. But it was good fun, I promyth.  And the exhibition is certainly worth a visit, make no mythtake.  Exzeus me, but no I will not Apollo-gise for the puns.

Communicating Doors - Oxford Playhouse, 20-25 June

One hotel suite. One old fashioned, camp villain. Three women, in three different points in time. But sometimes two are in the same time. And at one point all three are, but one doesn’t belong. Or is it two? Hang on, let’s travel back to the beginning. 

The revival of Alan Ayckbourn’s Communicating Doors, on now at the Oxford Playhouse, is a time travelling romp of a comedy thriller. Dominatrix Poopay Desir is called to a hotel suite, and ends up witnessing an elderly man’s confession that he had his two wives murdered by his assistant Julian (an excellently creepy Ben Jones). Julian returns to the room and tries to kill her too, so she escapes through the (simply and effectively staged) communicating door. As she pops out the other side she finds herself in the same room, twenty years earlier. 

Here she meets the elderly man’s second wife Ruella, on the night she is to be murdered no less, played as a wonderfully no-nonsense, practical heroine by Liza Goddard (yes indeed 1990s children, Liza Goddard from Woof!  Didn’t everyone want to be able to turn into a dog when they were eight?). In a wry nod to the ridiculous set up, Ruella explains that everything does make sense, it just has an “unfamiliar logic”. 

The tone of the whole play is balanced to perfection, the comedy and thrills enhancing each other. But what drives the play is its heart. Ayckbourn said that he believes that your own good fortune in life often resides in the people you meet along the way. The relationship that grows between Poopay and Ruella is very moving, as they both learn how to be better people from each other. 

My only complaint, if I’m being very picky, is that there’s an anachronistic reference to videos in 2010. Who watches videos in 2010? But saying that, if the only complaint in a play involving murderous plots and time travel is about a throwaway reference to videos, I think it can safely be said that the unfamiliar logic is in very good working order. And it’s got Liza Goddard in it! From Woof!! That’s surely worth the price of a ticket alone.


Original review here

A Row of Parked Cars - Burton Taylor Studio, 1-4 June

As I was waiting in the queue for my ticket to A Row of Parked Cars in the Burton Taylor Studio, I overheard someone describe it as ‘an examination of the human condition.’ Oh joy, thought I. An examination of the human condition, written by a second year Oxford student. This isn’t going to be pretentious and heavy going at all. But, despite being about the seemingly ubiquitous ‘angry young man’ and his suicide attempts, writer Matthew Parvin manages to avoid ponderous cliché with a witty script and lightness of touch to make this a very enjoyable night out. 

The short play is in five acts, each one a counselling session of sorts between the Reverend Regis, played by Sam Smith, and troubled youth Jeremy, played by Jeremy Neumark Jones. It is perhaps unfair to single out one actor in a two-hander play, and much, I’m sure, is due to the writing, but Jeremy Neumark Jones is an incredibly engaging presence on stage. He skilfully captures the arrogance and disdain of Jeremy, while never losing the audience’s sympathy. The two actors do bounce off each other well though, and obviously relish the blackly comic lines such as: 
Regis: What do you want to be in the future?
Jeremy: Dead, I thought that was obvious. 

The big themes of suicide, and the futility of life, are not particularly original, but Matthew Parvin is brave enough to make numerous nods to writers who have covered these subjects before, including Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot. In the wrong hands this could have been horribly grating, but coming out of the mouth of the self-proclaimed ‘five-dimensional mind’ of Jeremy, potential accusations of pretentiousness are neatly sidestepped. 

A production worth crossing the road for. Just remember to look both ways first.


Original review here

Bronte, Oxford Playhouse, 24 March - 2 April

Considering the Brontë sisters’ lives were devoid of much ‘living’ as such, it is astonishing how much vitality Polly Teale extracts from the story of the family in the new run of her play Brontë, which has started at the Oxford Playhouse this week.

The play examines the rise of the three sisters, and the fall of their idolised brother Bramwell, played against a backdrop of industrial revolution and social upheaval, but set within the domestic space of their home at the Parsonage at Haworth.

The play may be set almost entirely in one room, but all life is here. Sibling rivalry, repressed passions, a desperate desire for life, but without the means. Anne says she writes to “turn life into words”, but the other two sisters find life from their words. Their soaring, intensely-felt inner lives become real through the characters they create, as fictional and real characters are mixed onstage. The play powerfully merges their novels with their lives: the passionate Bertha Rochester bubbling beneath the surface of staid Charlotte; the wild and elemental Cathy that Emily longs to be, mouthing along with her own words as she watches her creations take life in front of her.

All of the cast embody their parts perfectly. Emily is the most sympathetic sister – a free spirit who writes in order to exist, not in order to be known. Charlotte is the ambitious one, the one who recognises Emily’s talent but cannot bear to acknowledge it; who baulks at the thought that the world might think that she wrote such unhinged, uncouth subject matter. But though she is the colder, more aloof and business-like sister, her loneliness at the end is heartbreaking.

Perhaps I would have been moved anyway. The story of, and stories by, the Brontës are devastatingly powerful on their own. But the way the two are weaved together here is masterfully and beautifully done. At the end, Charlotte writes that she has finally managed to find contentment in the ordinary. This play is far from ordinary.

Original review here

Sweeney Todd - Pembroke College, 8-10 March

I went into Pembroke College to see Sweeney Todd with low expectations. I was sure that a student production of Stephen Sondheim’s complex musical, the notoriously gory story of the demon barber of Fleet Street, was bound to be a fake-blood-splattered disaster. Never have I been so pleased to be so completely wrong. 

The musical tells the story of Sweeney Todd, newly returned to London after 15 years in Australia, due to transportation on false charges. After he discovers that his wife poisoned herself after being raped by the judge who wrongly transported him, he vows revenge. 

From the first scene it is clear that this is not going to be a shambling amateur production. It starts with just the piano, joined by the double bass, then solo singers build up until the full company is singing on stage, handling the intricate harmonies and rhythms with apparent ease. This powerful opening scene sets a high standard that the cast manage to maintain throughout. 

In a stellar cast, extra special mention must go to the two leads. Both hold the audience’s sympathies, despite their dark deeds. Amanda Williams plays Mrs Lovett as a savvy business woman, just as immoral, and just as cunning, as the man she foolishly, and hopelessly, loves. Mrs Lovett’s song ‘Beside the Sea’, where she imagines the couple retiring by the seaside, presumably on the money they make from their human pies, is a definite highlight. 

But star of the show, undeniably, is Liam Steward-George as Sweeney Todd. His presence on stage as the vengeance-obsessed barber is remarkable in its confidence and intensity. A very talented individual who I look forward to seeing in productions in the future. 

Clever staging means that there are no awkward set changes, clever lighting means that there is no ridiculous gore (a trap too easy to fall into with this sort of play), and all in all this is the best student production that I have seen in Oxford by far. In fact, to call it a student production is to do it a disservice, as it could hold its own against the professionals easily. Catch this razor sharp show while you can!


Original review here

Oxford Poets - Oxford Playhouse, 12 November

Encompassing Geoffrey Chaucer and Michael Rosen, and taking in Ancient Greece and the shops of Oxford High Street along the way, Live Canon really impressed at the Oxford Playhouse on Friday. They performed Oxford Poets, poetry and the occasional song by men and women with some connection (however slight) to Oxford. 

The initial thought of going to a poetry recital made me slightly nervous. In my mind I had images of people draped in black, a fog of cigarette smoke, maybe the odd beret and a set of bongos in the background. Live Canon are nothing like this (though I do mourn the lack of a bongo player). The three of them are young, energetic, and wonderfully engaged with each other and the poetry, and therefore with the audience. 

It is an increasingly rare thing to be able to hear classic and modern poetry performed, and I am a new convert to its joys when it is done well. It does take work from the audience, but the rewards are great. Listening to poetry takes a different type of concentration, and it did take me a good ten minutes to tune my brain into the rhythms in order to understand, well, anything to be honest, but once I managed that it was a really special experience. Lines that could have seemed indecipherable on a page came to life when spoken aloud. 

Massive congratulations to Live Canon for delivering a lovely performance, and managing to seamlessly move between themes of education, war, love, even existence itself, with barely a pause. I will certainly be looking out for their work in the future. Despite the lack of bongos.


[For fear that I am not obeying my terms and conditions, the original of this review is here.  All of my other theatre reviews are at dailyinfo.co.uk too.  I don't think there are many of you reading this that I wouldn't have directed to dailyinfo first anyway, so I can't imagine I need to worry about copywright issues.  But we can pretend that this is proper, can't we?]

Journey's End - Keble College, 9-11 November

Set entirely in an officers’ dugout close to the front line towards the end of World War I, Journey’s End tells the moving story of a small group of officers as they wait to go over the top. We watch how the relationships between the men develop and shift over the course of a few days, and learn how they cope differently with the pressures of war.

The production of this play by Sinclair Productions is particularly timely, with the final performance set for Remembrance Day. And despite being a different country, a different century, and a considerably different way of fighting, the examination of the horror of war is particularly important today.

The way that themes can be applied to contemporary war is perhaps part of the reason why the play is still a GCSE set text. And this is where Sinclair Productions begin their own battle. The challenge of putting on a text read in schools is that the audience will naturally be made up of a large proportion of school children. And school children are probably the most difficult audience to please. There is much to commend in this production, with excellent set design, imaginative lighting, and decent performances, but the cast really struggled to keep the audience’s attention.  The funny scenes just weren’t funny enough, whilst scenes of real poignancy fell sadly flat as the tension was broken by mistimed giggling. It is easy to blame the children for not keeping quiet, but then maybe if the diction had been a little clearer, and the connection between the cast and the audience had been a  little stronger, it would have been much more difficult to become distracted.

Royal Hunt of the Sun - Oxford Playhouse, 27-30 October

Royal Hunt of the Sun is a little performed play by Peter Shaffer. After seeing it, it becomes clear why. This is a play in which gold is a main character, in which the cast start off in Spain, end up in Peru, tramp through jungle, cross the Andes (yes, cross the Andes), massacre 3,000 Incans, and all the while conduct a deep and profound argument about the morals of invasion, and the place of religion in today’s society. And in this case, all on a student budget. 

The cast make a valiant effort, but in the first half I was completely lost. I think this was in part due to confusing staging, and in part due to the fact that in the first scene I couldn’t really hear what they were saying because of the ‘ambient’ noise of sweeping and blacksmithery. Then I was distracted by Incans on stilts.

Things improve vastly in the second half, thanks in no small part to the fact that it’s all set on the same continent so the staging can be much simpler. Also, Joe Robertson as the Incan god Atahuallpa is allowed to take off his Golden Grahams headdress and really shine as the son of the sun. Maybe it was part of the message of the play, but it was only when the god stopped being a distant figure on a pedestal in a comedy hat and became a man that I was really able to engage with their world, and thus with the play as a whole.

There are some really interesting arguments, and a couple of great performances, but for me the treasure was too far out of reach.

Hairspray - Oxford Playhouse, 12-23 Oct

Hairspray is without doubt the most fun that you can have with Brian Conley in drag and Les Dennis in ill-fitting trousers. If inane grins and tapping toes amongst the audience are a measure of musical success, I don’t think it could score any higher. The songs are infuriatingly catchy, the productions values are incredibly high, and the mood is incessantly joyous.

Hairspray is quite easily one of the cheesiest things I have ever seen. In my entire life. Baltimore, where the musical is set, looks pretty different in The Wire, it has to be said. But it is utterly aware of its campness, playing up to the fact constantly. In a musical where Brian Conley plays the main character’s mother, I think campness can hardly be a surprise. 

The basic story is that Tracy Turnblad is considered too fat to dance on TV. She makes friends with some black people, they make a stand and then everyone is allowed to dance together. The politics are handled with the sensitivity of a sledgehammer. A notable line was “We’ll set off sparks like Rosa Parks”. Had this been the type of show to have an important, ‘serious face’ message, it would have been cringeable (thank you The Apprentice series 6 for a handy new word). But the contagious sense of joy means that whilst the message of equality and ‘oneness’ is conveyed, it is made far less clunky by show tunes and jazz hands.

All the cast are excellent, but special mention has to go to Brian Conley and his ‘daughter’, Laurie Scarth, for their unflagging energy and infectious enthusiasm. It seems unfair to put a spotlight on mistakes, but the highlight for me had to be the duet between Les Dennis and Brian Conley as husband and wife, where we experienced lost slippers, giggles, and highly disturbing bodily contact that I think will give me nightmares for weeks.

My main warning: Go to this with your children and they will want to be in musical theatre when they grow up. Correction: Go to this and you will want to be in musical theatre when you grow up.

Will Self - Oxford Playhouse, 8 September

Near the beginning of his talk, Will Self said something to us along the lines of, ‘in a couple of hours you’ll look back at this and think it was all some sort of surreal dream’ (though he probably used a few longer words).  And he was completely right.  His talk (and seemingly his new book, Walking to Hollywood, from which he read a few excerpts) was a very entertaining, but for me quite disorienting, meld of fact and fiction.  A sort of memoir that contained so much fantasy that it was difficult to keep a sure footing.

He came onto stage carrying a plate of sandwiches, and handed them out to the audience, so that was nice.  He then got slightly distracted by the strangeness of clingfilm.  How can a man still be interesting whilst talking about sandwich covering?  I was impressed.

The problem I found was that I couldn’t tell if he was laughing at us all for being there in the first place.  When asked for his thoughts about the state of theatre today, he told a story of going to see a play and being more impressed by the part played by the audience, who were more convincing than any of the actors on stage.  They played their role as middle-class theatre goers with real passion.  They applauded in all the right places.  As did we.  At the end of an extract we applauded, and Will Self said he’d like applause when he got out of bed in the morning.  Was he laughing at us, a bunch of people playing the part of the audience, believing his readings were true until they would suddenly switch and he was fighting Daniel Craig’s body double?  Is it possible to enjoy something and be made to feel quite intense self-loathing at the same time?  I might go and read Walking to Hollywood to see if I can find any answers.  Probably a pointless task.  Sigh.

Spend Spend Spend - Oxford Playhouse, 5-9 October 2010

Spend Spend Spend!, on at the Oxford Playhouse all this week, is a musical of two halves. Two utterly entertaining, equally terrific halves, but two halves nonetheless. It is based on the true story of Viv Nicholson, a miner’s daughter from North Yorkshire, who in 1961 won the biggest sum ever won to that date on the pools. 

The first half is a riot, and hilariously follows Viv on her way from rags to riches, with coarse humour taking in bunny girls, a fireman with dancing pecs, and a song incorporating an impressively wide variety of ways to say sex. This gives way to a more moving (though no less funny) second half as riches return to rags, the raucous energy quieting a little to reveal a very timely message about the true value of money. 

The real strength of the show lies in the multi-talented cast. They create all of the music themselves, and the incorporation of the instruments into the staging is really well done. I also found myself humming the title song on the way home, and that is always a good sign. 

If I had to be find fault with anything, it would be that Karen Mann as senior Viv’s Yorkshire accent isn’t always perfect, but the heartbreaking performance she puts in as a woman full of regret, living on memories, more than makes up for it. I was also ready to complain about choreographer and director Craig Revel Horwood’s vanity in inserting a quick Strictly Come Dancing reference, but I have since learned that Viv and her husband Keith did actually receive their big cheque from Bruce Forsyth! What a small world. 

So, I urge you to spend spend spend your money on a ticket this week. Ba dum cha. Yes, if I were as talented as the cast and were holding a drum right now, I would say that was deserving of a rimshot. I thank you. I’m here all week. As is Spend Spend Spend

Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran: Writing for the Stage and Screen - Oxford Playhouse, Sept 17 2010

Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran have had a prolific television writing career for the past 25 years, their work including Shine on Harvey Moon, Birds of a Feather, and Goodnight Sweetheart.  But they are not here as television writers, but rather as Olivier nominated playwrights, and the talk takes place on the set of their newest play, written especially for the Oxford Playhouse, Von Ribbentrop’s Watch.


The play is inspired by a true story: Laurence Marks (who is Jewish) bought a watch for $200 and years later discovered that it originally belonged to Joachim von Ribbentrop, Nazi Germany’s Foreign Minister who was hanged for war crimes after the Nuremberg Trials.  It turned out that the watch was worth about £50,000.  Whether it would be morally right for him to make a profit from Nazi memorabilia developed over three years from argument with his friend and writing partner Maurice Gran, to art.

Aside from very engagingly selling their play (Saturday was unfortunately its last night in Oxford before it goes on tour), they also talk about their theatre career in general.  They say that chance encounters have played a huge role in their success, but how many of us can say that we just happened to sit next to Alan Ayckbourn at the Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival?  Their television career made these chance encounters, with the right people, possible.

On being a writer, Marks says that everyone in the room will have had a wonderful idea, but only one person will know that they have had it.   Von Ribbentrop’s Watch raises the question, what would you do if you discovered you owned some Nazi memorabilia?  Sell it?  Give the money to charity?  Donate it to a museum?  Or write a play about it?

PS. Goodnight Sweetheart: The Musical is coming.  You have been warned.

Apples - Burton Taylor Studio, 23-26 June 2010

Heartbreaking, and brutal, and funny, and shocking, the stage adaptation of Richard Milward's novel Apples is brilliant. 

A group of six teenagers are growing up and trying to cope with life the only way they can see how - they go out clubbing, get drunk, get high (the apples here are ecstasy), sleep around, anything to escape from being inside their own heads. 

The characters may not want to be inside their own heads but we do, and we are granted access as they tell us their stories via a series of dramatic monologues within the scenes. This works brilliantly as Adam reveals to us his OCD behaviour, his violent home life, and the fact that he can cope with all this because of Eve, with whom he is hopelessly in love. She barely knows that he exists. We are not in Paradise. The Garden of Eden here is a Middlesborough council estate, and behind the poetic and moving attempts to work out who they are lurks the threat of physical violence, and sexual violence, desperation, and bewilderment. 

The difficulties of being not quite an adult and not quite a child are dealt with very cleverly, moving seamlessly between mentions of drug-fuelled nights out and Scooby Doo and jammie dodger-fuelled days in. 

The staging is brilliant: the set is minimal, with just a few chairs and some screens which are used really innovatively. The music is brilliant, the lighting is brilliant, the actors are all brilliant, even the scene changes are brilliant, with them effectively being part of the performance. You may be able to tell, I quite liked it. 

Titus Andronicus - Corpus Christi College, 9-12 June 2010

Titus Andronicus, on this week at Corpus Christi College, is hilarious. Trouble is, I still haven’t worked out if it’s supposed to be. The story is extremely gruesome, and includes murder, rape, hands being chopped off, tongues being cut out, a bit of cannibalism. Did I mention the murders? There are quite a lot. When a play begins with a bowl of blood on the stage, and most of the cast have a red tinge to their clothes already, you know you're in for a dramatic time. 

And dramatic it certainly was. There was shrieking, and screaming, and growling, and moaning, and manic shouting. There was quite a lot of manic shouting. Corpus Christi auditorium doesn't really have the best acoustics for manic shouting. 

But for me, the incoherent words did not matter, and to be honest the plot didn't really matter either. The gore mattered. There was quite a lot of gore. I don't think violent scenes have ever made me laugh so much. Everything was played so melodramatically, it almost became farce. 

There is a line in the play, "Why dost thou laugh? It fits not with this hour". It probably came after a murder. But it made me wonder: was it Shakespeare's intention that the audience should be laughing? Maybe it was a comment on people finding entertainment in violence. Maybe in this production the actors and director were being extremely clever and had turned what is commonly thought of as tragedy into practically slapstick comedy. But, then again, maybe it was just brilliantly bad. 

Oh, and Titus and his brother Marcus are women, and there's a midwife with a beard. I have no idea why.

Dangerous Liaisons - Trinity College Gardens, 2-5 June 2010

Sex, manipulation, and revenge are the unholy trinity of players in Trinity Players' Dangerous Liaisons, performed in the beautiful setting of Trinity Lawns this week. (Apologies - I am slightly ashamed of that first sentence, but really, who can resist an unholy trinity of players? Not I, obviously). 

So, we are transported to late nineteenth-century France, where the Marquise de Merteuil challenges her friend/ex-lover/rival the Vicomte de Valmont to seduce the young and innocent Cecile, to whom another ex-lover of Merteuil has become engaged. This is partly as an act of revenge, but mainly just for her own amusement. Valmont however thinks this is too easy, and has his eye on the virtuous Presidente de Tourvel. The Marquise tells him that if he can obtain written proof of a sexual encounter with the Presidente de Tourvel, then his reward will be one last night with her. Thus the game begins. How seriously do they take it? Win or Die. 

The play is witty, dark, and sexy, and the Trinity Players just about pull it off, though hopefully the line-fumbling will lessen as the run continues. Chloe Courtney has the stand out performance as the cold, calculating Marquise, bored by and detached from the world around her. She manipulates all of her pawns, including Cecile and the man Cecile is in love with, Danceny, with a great air of ennui. 

The highlight for me has to be the sword fight near the end. Being on the front row I did fear for my life slightly, particularly as I'm sure that Danceny's fringe cannot have helped his hand eye coordination. 

Win or Die? Win, definitely. Join me, and don’t try to resist the unholy trinity in the glorious sunshine this week. Though do remember to pick up a blanket in the interval. It’s less fun to watch winning and dying with chilly knees.