Theatre
Whilst the three little words, 'new comedy writing', usually fill me with dread (pieces written by under-sexed students who think that rehashing every cliche known to man is worth a laugh) Everything Must Go...(nothing to do with the Manics) is a huge success. Concerned with the two most important aspects of the human condition (eternal judgement by our Lord Jesus Christ and shopping centres), the action takes place at BogCreek Centre (like Bluewater but nastier) where a pre-judgement day bash in is full swing.
Tom Cowell and Conor Ritchie (co-authors, co-directors and both actors in the production) have managed to distil the very best of comedy spoofdom. The writing doesn't have to try too hard to be amusing. It just is. Anyone who can think up the concept of a Gay Tolkien Society hidden away in the depths of a Games Workshop ('Didn't you see the sign on the door? "Lord of the Ring"! Would have thought it pretty damn obvious.') gets my vote. The play combines the essence of League of Gentlemen, Airplane, Austin Powers, Smack the Pony: inventive and intelligent humour that doesn't try and show you just how intelligent it is.
The Theatre Company (Modern Ballet, who 'preach minimalism, positive community action and 'tit-jokes'') do the writing great justice, giving a light-hearted yet still very professional feel. Hamster (Will Collinson), leader of S.T.O.A.T (Students Triumphantly Overcoming Autocratic Tyranny), is sublime: highly principled, highly motivated, highly OTT. I kept thinking, as the veins in his neck started to bulge and his face grew more and more like a beetroot, that he was about to burst, but no: the long tirades of wubble-woo-ised ('revolutionary' read 'wevwolooshionary') spiel trickled effortlessly out. Gandalf the Grey (Matthew Reynolds), convenor of the Gay Tolkien Society, is a joy to watch. With a deep, rich and powerful baritone, and a studiousness which takes fantasy gaming ridiculously seriously ('We do not play. We re-enact'), it's such a pleasure when golden and absurd lines are delivered with conviction.
It's difficult not to simply quote large chunks of the play, it's so good. If you're still not convinced, I'll leave you with S.T.O.A.T's protest song against Dixons (to the tune of Wham's 'Wake me up before you go-go'):
'Just say no to capitalism, Genetically modified embellism, If you want to buy a video recorder, You might as well go out and rape some kids...' Steven Vaughan
A flick through the details of everyone involved in this production prompts the highest of expectations. (Simon Woods best director at Cuppers 1999, . Lucy Foster best actress) and the production delivers on every front. Yet the choice of play is a risk - the two male actors involved, Mike Lovatt and Kal Aise, saw it in Edinburgh (where the play won a Fringe First) two years ago and managed to secure the rights to put on a production in Oxford.
Written by Adrian Shaplin, the play is a reaction against the Western world of cash signs and corporations. The play charts four characters boarding a plane, a premise for a collection of scenes that expose the cavities and decay behind the apparently gleaming smile of capitalism. References to Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan hover disturbingly around the peripheries of the script, providing a fitting backdrop to the world in the foreground of mindless conformity and distinctly right-wing values. As the Ku Klux Klan parade around in white, indistinguishable from one another, so the characters in the play mirror each other's speech and movements in a loss of individual identity.
Wrecking the Airline Barrier is confidently prepared to take a risk and triumphantly makes it pay off. The acting is excellent: the cues are tight and fast, the movement slick and perfectly synchronised, and the energy in every member of the cast pulsates out to the audience. Foster and Liz Chan both successfully mimic the irritating, nasal tones of tannoy systems and air-hostesses, with vacant eyes and bland smiles to match their hilarious voices while Mike Lovatt and Kal Aise have a natural gift for comic timing and facial contortions. The script whirls around, crescendoing to confusion as the plane begins to verge out of control, and the actors skilfully manage to keep the audience with them - laughing in the right places and eager for more.
Woods has ensured that the pace of the play remains at full throttle throughout, and that the fast-moving dialogue is underpinned by constant and varied use of space. The circularity of incessant questions without any answers is met by the actors marching round and round the stage. The four cast-members form pyramids and cross-shapes - at one point Chan is even lifted aloft as the plane itself, spiralling round the stage while the plane on which the characters are travelling crashes to earth.
Woods's most important input, however, is the way in which he has ensured that the production is always funny. The bottom line is that this is a comedy, albeit one that makes a searing attack on Western life, and accordingly the play should be judged on whether it will make you laugh. This it undoubtedly does, which should be the biggest selling point for the production. It is short and intense - packed into an hour and twenty minutes - so if you need a laugh to lighten the stress of summer exams, or just an antidote to working in stale libraries, then go down to the Old Fire Station next week, fasten your seat belts and be transported into a very strange world that leaves you feeling thoroughly bowled over.
Alistair Sooke
Sheridan's The Rivals is one of the progenitors of the satirical 'comedy of identity. At its locus is the relationship between Captain Jack Absolute (Sam Critchlow) and Lydia Languish (Laura McNaught). In a rebelliously romantic flourish, Lydia refuses to marry the upper class suitors chosen by her guardian. As a result, young Absolute must pose as a destitute ensign, preying on and eventually exposing the essential hypocrisy behind her position. She obviously falls for the poseur, unable to see three feet beyond her upturned aquiline nose.
Sheridan's text might have had much to say to an audience of idealist middle-class youths, questioning the very foundations of our 'liberalism.' This is especially true, as Absolute and Lydia's relationship runs parallel with that of Julia (Nivedita Velamati) and Faulkland (Vachan Kashyap), where one's inane moral reserve and the others' obsession with the ideals of heroism almost confine their love to the mire. Here are four youths sunk neck deep in their parents' antiquated standards and tradition of hypocrisy. However, Murray misplays her cards. Attempting to highlight the tragedy inherent in both turbulent affairs, she seeks to emphasise the sincerity of feeling that lies at their centres. Critchlow and McNaught in particular strive towards the conveyance of authentic feeling, yet inevitably prove unable to escape the conventions of melodrama. This ultimately raises the question: within an age of irony, how do you renew so oft parodied types with any semblance of pathos? Faced with this question, Murray's production buckles, eventually allowing the limping authenticity of the plot's centre to be consumed by peripheral farce.
This, however, proves its saving grace. The fraternity between Sir Lucius O'Trigger (Paul O'Mahony) and the loveably bumbling Acres (Tom Connor) thankfully steal the play's focus away the central affair. Though O'Mahony's accent tends to flank the spectrum between Gabriel Byrne and Fat Bastard, and Connor often appears a bewiged Screech Powers, they thankfully embrace their typologies, pushing them to the very brink of hilarious explosion. Their conspiring, along with the Steven Barrett's hilarious turn as Mrs. Malaprop, engage the audience in tantalising games with language. Through embracing the conventions of the comedy of manners, the peripheral characters eventually reach such cartoonishly gigantic proportions that they dwarf the text's potential for contemporary relevance.
However, sitting in Magdalen's President's Garden on a cool summer evening, all criticisms seem to drift away. The summer Garden Show ultimately forces text and concept to take a back seat to the 'event'. Murray's production, though often soft and disjointed, is essentially fun with wigs and words in a gorgeous garden, the kind of thing that makes you realise, after the complacency ultimately bred in this place, that we are in fact part of intriguing tradition.
Paul Matthews
'Making History' initially struck me as a competent production of a good play. It tells the true story of a failed Irish rebellion, focusing in particular on the role of Hugh O'Neil. The details of the story (of which I knew nothing) do not quite grab, the details of his controversial marriage to an English settler and the development of the rebellion are interesting rather than compelling. Similarly the actors do not seem to quite fill their roles, relying rather on over-emphasising aspects of character. It would be easy to write it off as a tight period drama. However the script introduces ideas which build on top of the actual historical action. The play is a challenge to our perceptions of history and its portrayal in text. The roles of those discarded by history, the truth behind our heroes. As this retrospective awareness is introduced the play transcends its immediacy forcing the watcher into a re-analysis of their own judgement of the play so far and of history itself. This is after all just another subjective presentation of events. Now of course the acting is the perfect accompaniment to this theme, and the judicious weighting of Matt Rushmore's direction becomes apparent. The men themselves failed to live up to their roles as we have imagined them. The facets of their characters which seem overplayed are those selected by history. In this context the performances of deliciously smug and pious Lombard (Ben Robinson) in particular and the cast as a whole become more poignant, characters struggling to assert themselves in the weight of historical pigeon-holing.
Andy Bull
17th May 2001