Cherwell’s verdict: Hackneyed, heavy-handed hokum.
In an opening scene of The Last Tutorial, Esther, the play’s heroine, paces her dorm room, arguing with her friend Stuart.
“That’s hokum!” she cries.
“Who says hokum these days?” he deflects.
“I do!” she replies.
I might borrow the word to describe The Last Tutorial, a comedy written by Robert Holtom and directed by Matthew Shepherd that was in its second week of rehearsal when I got a sneak peek of a few of its scenes.
In it, Philly Howarth plays Esther Jones, an Oxford undergraduate convinced that her tutor did not kill himself as assumed but was in fact murdered, and sets out with Stu (Xander Brehm), a reluctant Watson to her overzealous
Sherlock, to investigate.
Hokum describes that which is stock, even hackneyed, and at times the play manages to be both. Eager to dislodge stereotypes, it appears unlikely to succeed. In one scene, Esther and Stu attend a cocktail party, hoping to glean some clues from Theo (Leo Suter) and Tamara (Alessandra Gage), two students whom Esther suspects know more than they let on. Stu sneers that he is less than eager to suffer the company of “the overprivileged conforming
to stereotype.”
“Stop jumping to conclusions,” Esther chides him. “It’s very unphilosophical.” However, Stu hits the nail on the head. Tamara fits the “American sorority girl” stereotype of his prediction tediously well. Theo, an Eton-educated psychology major, is unexpectedly sympathetic but no more unique. When Tamara drawls that something is “hilarious – literally hilarious”, she is much like the script: funny, but heavy-handed.
To its credit, The Last Tutorial makes no claim to subtlety. It pokes fun at Inspector Morse, the quirky detective of the book and television series set in Oxford, and student life in equal measures. Those who are unfamiliar with the
show can still enjoy the inside jokes derived from the latter.
Whether these can sustain the play for its running time of an hour and twenty minutes remains to be seen. If not, however, I suspect the cast is strong enough to make it bearable: they held my attention far more than the mystery that Esther sets out to solve does.
