Reviews by Penny Boxall
Oxford Beethoven Festival 2020
Penny Boxall
Symphony & Concerto Cycle I, Sat 25th January 2020
Oxford is bursting with Beethoven. I take a stroll around the city on Saturday and (aside from being staggered at the number of tourists in town ...
4 years ago
Oxford Beethoven Festival 2020
WNO Autumn Season 2019
Penny Boxall
The Cunning Little Vixen, Thu 21st November
One December when I was young I had the perfect advent calendar. Depicted on the front was a snow-bound forest, the day fading over faraway hills. Small ...
4 years ago
WNO Autumn Season 2019
Scandinavia! Oxford Chamber Music Festival 2019
Penny Boxall
Tord Gustaven Trio, St John the Evangelist, 8th October 2019 Tord Gustavsen trained as a psychologist before turning to jazz, and it shows. He opens the evening (and the 2019 Oxford Chamber Music ...
5 years ago
Scandinavia! Oxford Chamber Music Festival 2019
Hot 8 Brass Band
Penny Boxall
When a band member comes on stage wearing a sousaphone like an
enormous absurdist snail-shell, accompanied by two drummers also sporting their
instruments and, with deadpan expression, starts ...
7 years ago
Hot 8 Brass Band
The Dark Room
Penny Boxall
This is serious. We're - all what, fifty of us? - trapped in a dark
room, and we don't know where we are, what's going on, or who, when he bounds
on to the scene, this stud-corseted, leather-trewed ...
7 years ago
The Dark Room
Golem
Penny Boxall
Theatre company 1927 have something of a reputation to live up to. Known for their intelligent, quirky, jazz-laced productions which incorporate live action, projection and stop-motion - they were ...
7 years ago
Golem
Villiers Quartet Lunchtime Concert
Penny Boxall
Sometimes it's hard to know what to do with a lunchtime. An hour for yourself: spend it stomping around in the park, or eating out of Tupperware in the corner of a college garden? Nice options are ...
7 years ago
Villiers Quartet Lunchtime Concert
A Monster Calls [12A]
Penny Boxall
An eleven-year-old boy – thin, tired-looking, young for his age – is fixing himself some breakfast. There's something in the preoccupied way he sorts this out that shows he is practised at it; no ...
7 years ago
A Monster Calls [12A]
The Wedding Present
Penny Boxall
Opening for The Wedding Present last night at the O2, Welsh indie group Melys plug us in to an evening delivered straight out of the 90s. They career onto the stage with a sound that is built on a ...
7 years ago
The Wedding Present
Charivari Agréable - A Musical Offering
Penny Boxall
It's 8 o'clock and 27 degrees on the second-hottest night of the year. The air has a limpid, hushed quality. We've left our bikes in Brasenose Lane after one of those languid cycles through town ...
8 years ago
Charivari Agréable - A Musical Offering
Til Debt Do Us Part
Penny Boxall
Debt – it's no laughing matter, is it? The average total debt per household was £54,636 in April 2016 (which includes mortgages, but still). That's around £13,520 of personal, non-mortgage debt ...
8 years ago
Til Debt Do Us Part
Public Image Ltd, The Beat
Penny Boxall
'You never listen to a word that I say You only seen me
For the clothes that I wear
Or did the interest go so much deeper
It must have been
The colour of my hair.'
So sings Johnny ...
8 years ago
Public Image Ltd, The Beat
Clybourne Park
Penny Boxall
A review is a strange beast. To judge from the slew of four- and five-star offerings bestowed upon Bruce Norris' 2010 Clybourne Park (not to mention the awards – the Tonys, the Oliviers, the ...
8 years ago
Clybourne Park
King Lear
Penny Boxall
Max Webster's King Lear starts with a bang. Literally - Cordelia, played by a gentle Beth Cooke, strides onto the stage with a rifle and blasts it into the audience, releasing a shock that will ...
8 years ago
King Lear
Bed Time Tales
Penny Boxall
Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin... to try to conjure the effect of this strangest of evenings at the Burton Taylor Studio. Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups is ...
8 years ago
Bed Time Tales
The Italian Play: Fiabe Italiane
Penny Boxall
We arrive in the Burton Taylor – a small studio above and behind the Playhouse, and until this evening an unknown quantity to me. 'Intimate' is the word; it's a sleek black space bounded on three ...
8 years ago
The Italian Play: Fiabe Italiane
