Lights Over Tesco Carpark: A Play About Looking Up
Walking into a rehearsal of Poltergeist Theatre’s latest production, Lights Over Tesco Carpark, is a bit like walking into a room of sunshine, but somehow more surreal. Director Jack Bradfield, and his...
View ArticleTalking to the Writers of Cyrano de Bergerac
Sam Norman is the playwright and Aaron King the Composer and Music Director of Oxford’s new musical, Cyrano de Bergerac. What kind of involvement have you had with theatre in Oxford? SAM: My...
View ArticleCrime and Punishment: Ideal Viewing for Sleep-Deprived Students with Axes to...
Fyodor Dostoevsky described his titanic novel Crime and Punishment as a ‘psychological account of a single crime’ – and this adaptation, put on by the Corpus Christi Owlets, distils the story down...
View ArticleCyrano de Bergerac at Keble O’Reilly
The latest collaboration from Sam Norman and Aaron King, a new musical adaptation of the classic French tale Cyrano de Bergerac, is undeniably an entertaining showcase of musical and theatrical talent,...
View ArticleLights Over Tesco Car Park: Is Anyone Out There?
Poltergeist Theatre is back with a piece which makes us work even harder for a payoff. The premise? Telling the story of their interactions with an Oxford man who sighted a potential UFO in the car...
View ArticleBrutal, yet unquestionably brilliant: The Lieutenant of Inishmore
Playing in 5th Week from Wednesday, November 8th, to Saturday, November 11th, at the Keble O’Reilly Theatre, The Lieutenant of Inishmore is Tightrope Productions’s full text performance of Martin...
View ArticleCandide: a wonderful, whimsical adventure
This term, the Oxford Playhouse is putting forward a dynamic cure to 5th Week Blues: a light-hearted romp across the 18th-century world, complete with a motley crew of characters who gather around the...
View ArticleLady in the Sheets: A ‘sex-drenched’ production at The Michael Pilch
Lady In The Sheets is a deeply probing study of the joys and plights of female sexuality. It tears off the veils of social propriety and sanitised euphemisms to reveal in all its uncomfortable truth,...
View ArticleGod of Carnage: a crafted explosion of anguish and humour
“A living room. No realism. Nothing superfluous.” From this first line of stage directions onwards, Yasmina Reza’s internationally-acclaimed God of Carnage seems a perfect fit for student productions:...
View ArticleYellow: the startling adaptation breathing new life into Gilman’s classic text
Yellow is a startling twenty-first century adaptation of Perkin Gilman’s 1892 The Yellow Wallpaper, the text which challenged the treatment of women’s mental health in the constrained perception of the...
View ArticleWNO’s Eugene Onegin: a psychological portrait of unrequited love
The world of opera is in mourning. It has just lost one of its titans, one of its most beautiful voices – the voice that belonged to Dmitry Hvorostovsky. For decades, the Siberian-born baritone had...
View ArticleA Very Old Man With Enormous Wings: a unique dramatic experience
As soon as I had entered the Burton Taylor studio, I was immediately aware that The Wax House adaptation of García Márquez’s A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings would be unlike any dramatic work I had...
View ArticleLovesong at the Michael Pilch Studio
Upon being ushered into the Michael Pilch Studio for Notorious Cow Productions’s fascinating performance of Abi Morgan’s 2011 play Lovesong, the first thing you see are the dead, autumnal leaves...
View Article‘The biggest, most challenging and most rewarding acting job I’ve had yet’:...
Could you tell us a bit about yourself? I’m an actress from Nottingham, which is also where I trained as an actor at the Television Workshop and where I went to university to read English at the...
View ArticleThe Ferryman at the Gielgud Theatre – 5 stars
At the beginning of this wonderful new play by Jez Butterworth, a man and a woman sit around a kitchen table, by turns drinking, laughing, and playing haphazard games of Four by Four. The radio is on,...
View Article‘Shock Therapy’, OUDS New Writing Festival: thought-provoking yet hopeful
Shock Therapy took the audience through various ways of understanding our past, our present and our future, with all three perspectives conditioned by a certain degree of pessimism, disappointment,...
View Article‘The C Bomb’, OUDS New Writing Festival: chlamydia has never been so funny
To say I went into The C Bomb – a comedy about chlamydia – with reservations would be an understatement. To say these reservations were obliterated within minutes would not be an overstatement. In...
View Article‘The Polycephaly Monologues’: untraditionally entertaining
A trio of monologues anchored by the motifs of insanity and fruit had the potential to be nauseatingly pretentious and boring. Remarkably, the deranged ramblings forming The Polycephaly Monologues...
View Article‘This Much I Know’, New Writing Festival: a warm portrayal of family politics
The concerns at the centre of This Much I Know may strike very close to home for an audience of students on the brink of adulthood. Our measures of success and failure, of genius and mediocrity, and...
View Article‘Dinner with Aurora’, New Writing Festival: AI at a party makes for a...
Lee Simmond’s new writing play, Dinner With Aurora, has everything you could want from a student play – a beautiful set, housing a powerful script, brought to life by excellent actors. But Dinner With...
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