Theatre

Review: Cyrano de Bergerac – ‘A clever adaptation of a timeless play’

I’m ashamed to admit I almost mistake Cuigy (Kate Burke) and Brissaille (Nancy Gittus) for incredibly dapper audience members before the play begins. The sweet jazz that pipes out...

Review: Medieval Mystery Play Cycle – ‘Comedy, choirs and inflatable hammers’

I wasn’t sure what to expect from a Medieval mystery play cycle. What I...

Staging the radio play: The audio-visual world of ‘Under Milk Wood’

“Love the words!”That was the crisp command from Dylan Thomas, the 20th-century Welsh poet,...

‘The Little Clay Cart’ brings Sanskrit back to life

As students left Oxford on the last weekend of Hilary, I visited St John’s...

Review: The Oxford Revue and Friends

To keep an audience laughing consistently at amateur comedy sketches for over two hours is the impressive achievement of the cast of ‘Oxford Revue...

Preview: RENT

I wouldn’t consider myself the biggest fan of the 2005 film RENT. I know, I know – I’m a bad musical theatre fan. But I tried...

Review: BOYS

Boys, by Ella Hickson, centres on a group of men at the crisis point between university and the real world. As both Benny and...

Review: Angels in America

“Holocausts can occur,” Larry Kramer asserts in his Reports from the Holocaust: The Making of an AIDS Activist, “and probably most often do occur,...

Review: Kafka’s Dick

When one mentions the play, Kafka’s Dick, needless to say, it raises a few eyebrows (at least in my experience). Though the title has some relevance...

Preview: Hero-Man

How flawed are the moral dynamics in children’s superhero cartoons, and can we critique them through the medium of rock opera? These are the...

Preview: Pleading Stupidity

As Storm Dennis raged, I wondered if it was strictly necessary that I went to the preview of Pleading Stupidity.It was a whole six minutes’...

Review: Shadows of Troy

Translating and adapting two Greek plays and then squeezing them into one production was an ambitious undertaking, but Shadows of Troy has pulled it off. The...

Queerness, Revulsion and Magic – the Dissonant Worlds of Angels in America

‘Children of the new morning, criminal minds Selfish and greedy and loveless and blind. Reagan’s children’  Angels in America is a play about bodies. Kushner revels in...

Review: Bad Nick

Nicholas is a critically acclaimed author, a literary genius, and a winner of no less than fourteen Man Booker prizes…except that all of his...

Review: ÜnkelGårf

Planning a holiday soon? Why not visit the prosperous, democratic and perpetually joyful nation of Orgislavia? They’ve hosted the Olympics for hundreds of years...

Shadows of Troy: Tragedies of the Trojan War reimagined

Shadows of Troy is a bold new adaptation of two giants of ancient theatre - Sophocles’ Ajax, and Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis. It presents the two...

Review: The Entertainer

"Stage Wrong’s performance draws us into the dysfunctional, haunted world of the Rice family and insightfully pulls apart their fractures." Alice Williams reviews The Entertainer at Keble O'Reilly.

What Light Through Yonder Theatre Breaks?

This week, we saw the death of theatre director Terry Hands, acclaimed for his founding of the Everyman in Liverpool among various other theatrical, notably Shakespearean, endeavours....

Review: Present Laughter

Present Laughter, a 1942 play by Noël Coward, recounts the days leading up to the departure of Gary Essendine, an actor, for his tour in Africa....

Review: Measure for Measure

In Measure for Measure, one of Shakespeare’s problem plays, Vienna is depicted as a city of vice and perdition, such that the situation seems...

Review: The Pillowman

Martin McDonagh’s jet black comedy is brought to life (and sentenced to a gruesome death) by Tom Fisher and his stellar cast. I coughed, continuously,...

The Place of Regional Theatre

The power of identity is arguably greater today than ever before. The stale, collective “British” identity is slowly being pervaded by the vibrant diversity...

Review: Merrily We Roll Along at the Oxford Playhouse

Merrily We Roll Along begins with a bang – the peak of Franklin Shepard’s career as a Hollywood producer while he relaxes (and then enters...

Review: Nutcracker

As a child, ballet lessons made me wince in pain, but two-and-a-half hours of The English National Ballet’s The Nutcracker passed in the blink...