February 11, 2009
Tucked away in the relative anonymity of the Michael Pilch Theatre, off Mansfield Road, The Cactus Where Your Heart Should Be is a clever and humorously innovative one-act play. Written by second year English student Sarah Hand, who drew inspiration from her own mundane experiences with plants, the play combines this theme of botanical absurdity with the overlay of a murder mystery dinner party.
The play itself doesn’t move very far; in fact, the characters spend most of the time inside a greenhouse. The party thrown by husband and wife Ronald and Anactoria McDonald (Struan Murray and Harriet Tolkien; name pun intentional) comes to an unexpected twist when avid horticulturalist, Ronald, locks them all in the greenhouse to discover who has been killing his beloved plants. With shock of orange curls and energetic, maniacal presence, Murray stands out, pulling off the eccentric at times too well. As cabin fever descends between the stagnant middle-age marriages, more than simply the murderer’s identity is revealed amongst the party.
The script is bitingly witty, with one-liners like “Oh no, he’s got a trowel!”, it is deliciously tongue-in-cheek in its exaggeration of social stereotypes, portrayed in the handful of characters on stage. An unbridled mockery of the suburban middle-class social life, It gives us what we all fear we shall descend to when trapped in middle-age or above: characters such as delightful socialite Joyce (Leila Molana Allen), senile Ivy (Catherine Reeves), and Eric (Richard O’Brien) a downtrodden husband with a rather endearing eating disorder. Tolkien as the long-suffering Anactoria was a splendid performance.
One of the most intriguing, and interesting features of the play is its use of set, a lively soundtrack, and most notably the large projector screen that fills the background: the play begins through the medium of cinema, opening credits rolling on a short black-and-white pastiche of a silent film. The play’s stage action is cleverly interspersed with black and white film scenes (some filmed around familiar Oxford sights such as the Botanic Gardens) with great comic effect, giving a surreal, eccentric experience of cinema and theatre.
Though an inventive and witty play (Hand’s first), the action sometimes drags at times, when we sigh in exasperation with the guests as Ronald refuses to let them out of the greenhouse, but still has no solution to his own mystery; at other times it shines hilarious. The pathos of the conclusion is one you still want to laugh at, hollowly though, taking home from the tragedy, as Ronald does, the moral that plants don’t talk back.
The play itself doesn’t move very far; in fact, the characters spend most of the time inside a greenhouse. The party thrown by husband and wife Ronald and Anactoria McDonald (Struan Murray and Harriet Tolkien; name pun intentional) comes to an unexpected twist when avid horticulturalist, Ronald, locks them all in the greenhouse to discover who has been killing his beloved plants. With shock of orange curls and energetic, maniacal presence, Murray stands out, pulling off the eccentric at times too well. As cabin fever descends between the stagnant middle-age marriages, more than simply the murderer’s identity is revealed amongst the party.
The script is bitingly witty, with one-liners like “Oh no, he’s got a trowel!”, it is deliciously tongue-in-cheek in its exaggeration of social stereotypes, portrayed in the handful of characters on stage. An unbridled mockery of the suburban middle-class social life, It gives us what we all fear we shall descend to when trapped in middle-age or above: characters such as delightful socialite Joyce (Leila Molana Allen), senile Ivy (Catherine Reeves), and Eric (Richard O’Brien) a downtrodden husband with a rather endearing eating disorder. Tolkien as the long-suffering Anactoria was a splendid performance.
One of the most intriguing, and interesting features of the play is its use of set, a lively soundtrack, and most notably the large projector screen that fills the background: the play begins through the medium of cinema, opening credits rolling on a short black-and-white pastiche of a silent film. The play’s stage action is cleverly interspersed with black and white film scenes (some filmed around familiar Oxford sights such as the Botanic Gardens) with great comic effect, giving a surreal, eccentric experience of cinema and theatre.
Though an inventive and witty play (Hand’s first), the action sometimes drags at times, when we sigh in exasperation with the guests as Ronald refuses to let them out of the greenhouse, but still has no solution to his own mystery; at other times it shines hilarious. The pathos of the conclusion is one you still want to laugh at, hollowly though, taking home from the tragedy, as Ronald does, the moral that plants don’t talk back.