Drama
Writing in Ox2 last week, Nick Pierpan, winner of this year's New Writing Festival, admitted that "...Too Much The Sun is not an easy play." He wasn't kidding - it requires concentration, interpretation and a good deal of cognitive effort from its audience. If you like your theatre with a healthy dose of intellectual substance, then you'll find plenty to get your teeth into here.
TMTS follows the life of an epileptic thief who returns to his old village in Northumberland to take a job offered by an eccentric clockmaker. His uncomfortably realistic fits (reminiscent of The Lost Prince) are always preceded by music from Sammy Davis Jr, and serve as metaphors for the way some of us live our lives "looking at the stars" in an attempt to answer the bigger questions of our existence.
The majority of dialogue is presented in monologue format, and any movements on stage are simple, resting on the strength of the writing rather than any great leaps of directorial imagination. Indeed, one gets a feeling that it would be as equally rewarding to sit down and study the script.
This isn't intended to take anything away from the cast, who all know how to deliver a line or two. Beau Hopkins looks natural, yet slightly haunted, maintaining an intimate relationship with his audience throughout, and Tom Eastcott (an old man, still afraid of the dark) offers a shattered portrait of neurotic vulnerability from behind his wonderfully impressive facial hair. Ross Burley achieves realism, difficult given his role as an old seaman, and tests a nerve or two with his eerie tales of fishermen drowned at sea.
My only criticism is the slight over-kill of monologues - when the Sergeant, wistfully gazing into the distance, embarks on yet another story with, "...there once was a house..." there is a temptation to ask him politely to keep moving things along, rather than settling into another rant.
Overall, TMTS is a subtle, thought-provoking production that will have synapses firing all night. Remember this Pierpan bloke; you'll probably be hearing his name again.
Lady Windermere's Fan may well be regarded as one of Oscar Wilde's wittiest and most ebullient plays, but, in its depiction of the 'fallen woman' Mrs Erlynne, and her effects on the hypocritical Victorian society that she finds herself in, there is a bleak, cynical edge to the goings-on, which is only sporadically presented in the Oscar Wilde Society's staging. By and large, this is a solid, traditional and mostly rather unsurprising production of a well-known classic, and its greatest virtue - that this is not another revival of The Importance of Being Earnest or An Ideal Husband - also disappoints in the final analysis, as the two aforementioned plays tend to be far more bearable when done without the verve that Wilde's work demands.
The performances are all perfectly competent, but the actors often fall into the easy but regrettable trap of making the lines sound as if they are witty aphorisms, rather than exchanges of dialogue, leading to an occasionally stilted quality. While Lucy Tulloch gives the impression that she would be more aptly cast in The Importance of Being Earnest as Cecily than Lady Windermere, giving a misjudged and unintentionally comically petulant air to the character, Elisabeth Gray is perfectly manipulative and poignant as Mrs Erlynne, and rather steals the show as a result. Ultimately, this is a play for Wilde aficionados, or anyone who does not want to be shocked by the excessive sex and violence that have dominated Oxford drama lately. Personally, though, I'd rather go and see Popcorn again.
Student theatre in Oxford seems to be developing a worryingly obsessive streak. The Blue Room: obsessed with sex; Bent: obsessed with rocks; now [box] obsessed with, well, boxes. The set is boxes, the props are boxes, the BT itself will be turned into a giant box as the inside of a pin-hole camera, bisected throughout the play by a single ray of white light.
[box] has been devised around three strands: the story of Pandora's Box, a plane crash in the Pacific in January 2000, and the development of a picture from a pin-hole camera. The point of all this is to use improvised theatre (and yes, boxes) to examine how we structure chaos, and the difference between myths, history and reality. Director Kate Fowler deserves credit for attempting such an innovative offering, as do the cast for their usually smooth transition from one persona to the next. The work is still in progress but already there are some scenes of particular merit: the story of Pandora's box as rendered by Pandora, her husband and some (box-) hand-puppets was both original and funny; and Prometheus' monologue as he examined the ritual of his torture held the stage with charisma. Unfortunately, [box] just didn't rivet my attention. My near-permanent state of borderline confusion meant by the end I was just plain bored.
The piece is punctuated by irritating 1970s-style instructions for how to build a pin-hole camera that sound like a bad Blue Peter flashback, the acting was solid but not amazing, and I utterly failed to see the relevance of, for instance, the interlude where the cast appear to be line-dancing. While some of the speeches were engaging, the lack of a plot, or even of any consistent characters, meant that fairly soon my mind was wandering back to the conclusion of my essay. When, as [box] reached its end, Prometheus' lover declared "I would like a plot" it was all I could do not to shout out "me too. God, me too!"
20th Feb 2003