Drama Preview
If variety is the spice of life, then Oxford drama is looking particularly hot this term. The plays available for your entertainment span several centuries, from Euripides’ Orestes at the Oxford Playhouse in fi rst week, to new writing in sixth week Cuppers.
Some favourite playwrights of the student stage make anticipated returns • Noel Coward’s Design for Living will be hoped to recreate the success of Private Lives last year, at the same venue of the OFS, with competition in its fi fth week slot from Top Gun (Devised) and Tape by Stephen Belber, fi lling the early and late slots at the Burton Taylor.
Other reliable names come in the form of Wilde’s An Ideal Husband a week later at the OFS, hoping to attract its fair share of English students as well as all those who trust the name of Wilde to provide an excellent evening’s entertainment. Mr Shakespeare makes, perhaps surprisingly, only a single planned appearance, with Measure for Measure at the OFS in seventh week. His temporal companion Christopher Marlowe is also to be seen at the OFS, with Doctor Faustus in fi rst week.
This theatre moves further from the traditional in eighth week, with Hedwig and the Angry Inch by John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask, and fi nds a middle ground with The Insect Play in fourth. Favourites for the philosophical or controversial clash in fourth week, with Albee at the BT, and Stoppard at the Moser. The clash may not be too catastrophic, however • whilst Counting the Ways sees Albee at his most ponderous, The Real Inspector Hound is more comical than philosophical.
And with several performances of each, one can easily see both. David Mamet sets the trend for this line of theatre in second week at the BT, with a double-bill of Boston Marriage and Sexual Perversity in Chicago, whilst Ayckbourn softens the BT’s tone in eighth, with Confusions. Fresh from cinematic success, Patrick Marber’s Closer appears at the Pilch Theatre in seventh. If you are in a more musical frame of mind, Gilbert and Sullivan can be hummed along to in seventh week.
The Sorcerer at the Moser should provide familiar tunes and lyrics which probably won’t appear in Orestes, but might, for the educated, in Kiss Me Kate at the O’Reilly in sixth week. Speewack’s production is based on The Taming of the Shrew, giving Shakespeare a covert second appearance.
Foreign theatre makes its usual arrival, with Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle in fi fth week at the Playhouse, Jean Genet’s The Maids at the BT in third, and Schiller’s Mary Stuart at the O’Reilly the week before. As the term draws to a close, the choices remain diverse, with Goldoni’s A Servant to Two Masters at the O’Reilly, Barbosa’s Almost Nothing and At The Table at the BT and the less continental Dick Whittington, performed by the OU Light Entertainment Society.
5th Oct 2005