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✮✮✮✮ A middle-class dinner party farce. Monkey suits. Zorba the Greek. It all sounds like comedy by the book, but James P Mannion’s electric script and a confident cast propel Surprise into a league of its own; it’s a chaotic descent into hallucinogenic insanity in which the pace never flags for an instant. As a […]
Continue ReadingWhy Timon in Magdalen Hall? Gabriel Rolfe (Director): The Magdalen Players began brainstorming what kind of material suited the uniquely immersive potential of the space of the Hall, and Timon was chosen largely owing to the two dramatically explosive banquet scenes, with the natural spatial drama of Magdalen’s Medieval Hall and high table. I never […]
Continue Reading“Semi-fictional heretical retellings of the Passion” is not a theatrical trend that’s easily spotted, but after last year’s Master and Margarita dramatically re-told the story of Jesus’ last hours (amongst other things), the Easter story has returned to the cavernous Barbican theatre in a searingly intense adaptation of Colm Tóibín’s novella The Testament of Mary. […]
Continue ReadingSet design is no longer in the background of theatre production (well, figuratively anyway). In a recent talk at St Catherine’s College, the critic Michael Billington listed the growth of technically impressive staging and set design amongst the theatre’s most important developments over the last 50 years. In drawing the audience’s attention away from the […]
Continue Reading✮✮1/2 “Why people have to complicate a thing so simple I can’t make out,” remarked Beckett on the multitude of different interpretations which sprang from his play. Perhaps so, but as this two-and-a-half hour whale swims interminably along, it’s difficult not to find its religious and sociological overtones a little tiresome. The fine cast […]
Continue Reading‘Lungs’ is a compelling experimental project that attempts to break the barriers of medium (it was originally a radio play) and of a passive audience. Originally written by Duncan MacMillan, it follows a nameless couple played by Emma D’arcy and Leo Suter as they anxiously mull over their decision to bring a baby into the […]
Continue ReadingYou’ve adapted a stage play for the screen, and now vice versa – what are the challenges of adaptation? Adapting something is pretty much like writing anything only someone else has done 80% of the work. Thinking up a story, inventing characters and dramatic situations is the hard bit. Adapting something is really employing the […]
Continue ReadingWhy should people come to see the show? What can they expect from it? People should expect a uniquely Sondheim experience: black comedy, genuine hilarity, as well as deeply moving moments. The show is all about growing up, and moving on. They can expect several show stopping solo numbers as well as a couple of […]
Continue Reading✮✮✮✮ Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler – a tale of academics, alcoholism, and frustration – is a perfect fit for Oxford in Juliano Zaffiono and Krisztina Rakoczy’s production. General Gabler is now an ambassador; George Tessman is George Desmond; and there’s the obligatory joke at the expense of Cambridge, but the timelessness of the tale remains. The […]
Continue Reading✮✮✮ ‘Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.’ The words of Albert Camus echo with special resonance after John Hodge’s 2011 play Collaborators, which dances as much in the infinitude of space between truth and fiction as did its protagonist, Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov, in his […]
Continue ReadingFreshers from Regent’s aren’t the most obvious candidates to be making waves on the theatrical scene and beyond, but Oluwafemi “Femi” Nylander has kept himself very busy indeed this year, and the results are starting to show. Coming out the other side of Regent’s disappointing Cuppers production of Bacchanal not only unscathed, but with a […]
Continue Reading✮✮✮✮✮ The first thing the audience sees as they get in are white cubes: a simple and majestic scenography for indeed a powerful play, though anything but simple. The number of meanings, allegories, and symbolic allusions is impossible to count. But what makes the play so great is that it embraces and at the same […]
Continue Reading✮✮ For most of its history, opera has been and continues to be a very exclusive art form. With most of the world’s glittering opera houses found almost exclusively in major metropolises, it’s only a small segment of the population who by dint of location, financial means, and education can get out to experience opera […]
Continue ReadingAlice Troy-Donovan✮✮✮✮ Ten years ago The History Boys opened to rave reviews at The National Theatre. The play about a northern grammar school in the Thatcherite eighties and its various approaches to preparing post- A Level students for life was deemed both hilarious and profound in its exploration of the value and meaning of education. […]
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