Author: Alice Troy-Donovan

Rough-Hewn Theatre Company lives up to its name in Devised Play One: FEAR: the play eschews smoothing over unattractive issues, confronting personal and collective fears in their purest, most terrifying forms. Whether the issue is child pornography or the slightly more flippant filicidal mother, it is the instinct, in the words of one of the […]

There’s been some serious hype around the OUDS New Writing Festival this year, and it all comes to a head in 7th week – the work of four of Oxford’s hottest new writers, battling it out in the BT for the coveted Best Play award. Speaking to the writers themselves and the directors who brought […]

✮✮✮✮ Without beating around the bush too much, Commensal’s production of John Ford’s play Tis Pity She’s a Whore is a resounding success. The seventeenth century tale of incest and blood is rendered in a way that preserves the integrity of the original text, it’s serious shock value, but paints the play (using ketchup and […]

Pterodactyls by Nicky Silver is a new project funded by the Oxford Revue and comes to the Burton Taylor Studio at 7:30pm Tuesday-Saturday in 8th Week. The show marks the first time in a long time that the Revue has funded an existing comedy show, and the Oxford Student caught up with Pterodactyls director Kieran […]

✮✮✮ Howard Coase shines as writer of Polly, part of the OUDS New Writing Festival at the Burton Taylor Studio. He has delivered a witty script, but the production occasionally misses a beat. The play, under the direction of Daniel de Lisle, revolves around the dysfunctional relationship of Harry and Natalie, who have the parish […]

✮✮✮ Lover’s Suicide – Jamie Biondi’s entry into the OUDS New Writing Festival – toes a difficult line. It gives time to the dramatic-potency of its characters’ self-destructive impulses, but also injects some much needed dark comedy into what could otherwise be, let’s be honest, a bit of an emotional slog. As the title would […]

✮✮✮✮ Contemporary playwright Laura Wade stands accused of a facility for language – something any company aiming to put on a performance of one of her plays should monopolise. Without understanding the need to play on the nuances of dialogue that permeate her writing – without pivotal pauses, stutters, and crescendos – any performance would […]

A ship arrives from Australia, bringing a thoroughly disenchanted man to London. Equipped with shiny silver razors and assisted by one Mrs. Lovett, Sweeney Todd sets on a murderous spree, targetting those who had wronged him. Such is the opening of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street which comes to stage at Keble O’Reilly in […]

“When a man has lost all happiness, he’s not alive. Call him a breathing corpse”. If the quote from Sophocles that inspired the title of Laura Wade’s gothic drama doesn’t sound too bright and breezy, its because its not – and neither is her play. Far from the former’s lofty tragedy, though, the latter is […]

✮✮✮✮ Are you aware of what examples you set to young girls around you? Do you worry that you tell them to be natural and yet slather make-up on every morning? Bryony Kimmings does. The result is Credible: devised and performed by Kimmings and her niece Taylor, it is a “story of a year of […]

✮✮✮ It’s safe to say that ‘In Her Eyes’ – a new hour-long student production boasting music and lyrics by Toby Huelin and direction by Lucy Fielding – is a show that doesn’t fool around.  Centering on the inner life of a lonely teenage girl named Freddie (Rachel Coll) as she embarks on a romantic […]

✮✮✮✮ Tartuffe is “the patron saint of swindlers” – a charming rogue who takes centre stage in Molière’s farcical satire, charming his way into possession of a gullible aristocrat’s daughter, wife, and entire estate. Despite the opulent de rigueur eighteenth-century attire and self-consciously versified speech, Molière’s Tartuffe is a timeless treatment of hypocrisy, gullibility, and […]

Out of the vast body of work produced by the American writer Reginald Rose, the court room drama Twelve Angry Men is the most well-known and frequently adapted piece on stage, film and radio, and has become an inherent part of many a literature course’s curriculum. Amongst the various adaptions and remakes are several theatrical […]

One theatre group, two nights, six plays. Almost Random Theatre (ART) is barely twenty months old and has begun 2014 with a stomping start. On offer were six brand new pieces: four from the winners and runners-up of two playwriting competitions two plays by ART founder and producer Chris Sivewright. Sivewright’s School Assembly explores the […]

The stage is where left becomes right and right becomes left. With its confusing sense of direction, slang and superstitions, the stage can seem like another world. But is it? Medieval mystery plays were presented on travelling carts complete with a collapsible set featuring a strikingly metaphysical topography. On the left side of the stage, […]

✮✮✮ “Finished, it’s finished. Nearly finished.” The opening line of Beckett’s absurdist icon Endgame is a neat illustration of the play’s style: razor-sharp, black-as-hell wordplay and self-reference combined with an utterly bleak existential outlook. It is a titanic text to attempt to do justice, but Will Felton’s production with Fools and Kings Theatre attacks it […]

Scrolling through the list of casting calls in 5th week’s University Drama Officer’s newsletter, female actors didn’t have much to get excited about. Of the 37 roles that stipulated gender, only 12 were female. 6th week has done much better, with 13 roles for women and 10 for men; thumbs up to Toby Huelin’s musical, […]

Any discussion of Saved, Edward Bond’s 1965 play about class and social strife in 1960s working-class London, ultimately has to address the 800-tonne gorilla in the room: by the end of the first act, a group of otherwise normal people have stoned a baby to death in its pram. And none of the characters are […]

One of the challenges that every museum faces is connecting – with a variety of people, and not just students and scholars. For this, it is vital that the museum becomes not only a space of scholarly research but a dynamic, interactive platform which connects past cultural traditions with modern sensibilities. Live Friday, a monthly […]