OU Student Company Tip Top, Oxford Playhouse, Wed March 4th - Sat March 7th 2009

As a student of As drama and theatre studies, from all of the plays I have seen and had to produce notes from to write an essay later on , this performance was the most difficult to write about.

In comparison to other plays my Drama group and I have seen, it was possibly one of the worst ones we’ve seen performed on stage. The acting was poor e.g. Worthy, due to his slow reactions and lack of body movement and face expressions. I fully agree with Vespasian, that the changing of the scenes was very clumsy, loud and took a long time. This gap could be filled with an extra song or a piece of music to keep the audience entertained during those changes.

However, the costumes were very good as they clearly showed the time the play was set in (tights for men, white wigs, old fashioned and plain coats and dresses) and these helped to roughly show the personalities of each character within this play.

The stage design was interesting as it had two parts to it, the “main square” and a “wall” which came down from above, to represent the rooms of buildings. It was quite effective the way simple changes were made to the set to represent different rooms, such as a leather arm chair, different paintings, tables and a wooden globe on wheels.

Over all, I thought that the production of The Recruiting Officer could be much better, and more concise, as the audience began to lose interest because of the performance lasting for nearly 3 hours!

However I can clearly understand why this was portrayed as a poor performance due to the cast not carrying on Drama as their University educational study.

E.Koreneva :) 10 Mar 2009

On the flipside, however;

The transitions and scene changes were clunky, full of dead space and could benefit from some suitable incidental period music: a harpsichord, a stylised guitar, a cow bell - ANYTHING. This was the main reason that the play dragged into nearly 3 hours.

My main concern is the direction of the piece. A valiant attempt was made to vocally fill such a space; some voices were projected better than others (quite an effort considering these are, after all, untrained performers) but there was no consistency amongst the company. Many of the principals and some of the supporting cast were not concerned with letting the audience in on what they were saying, through a lack of simple yet essential things: volume, clarity, clear intonation - in short good old fashioned storytelling. A successful execution of these would demonstrate an understanding of the text.

And finally, the term 'Period Drama' not only includes things like music, set and language but style. At no point were the actors told to lose their modern mannerisms nor did seem as if they understood the difference between today and the days of yore.

I try to be constructive when presented with a show not to my liking but in this case a few extra weeks of rehearsal and a firmer hand at direction would make this passable. Certainly not my pick of the Playhouse's current season.

Vespasian 6 Mar 2009

Farquhar's plays are sometimes classified as "Restoration Comedies" even though Farquhar was not even born when Charles II came to the throne. The Recruiting Officer really occupies a position between true Restoration Comedy and the more sensitive and realistic comedies which became the fashion later in the 18th century.

The play was first performed in 1706 and is set in Shrewsbury in 1704 just a few weeks after the Battle of Blenheim. The victorious leader of the Allied armies was the first Duke of Marlborough, whose Oxfordshire estate is named after his greatest victory.

But wars need soldiers and, in recruiting replacements, the officers concerned were not always scrupulous! This is one of the main plotlines of the play. The others are the parallel romantic adventures of Plume/Silvia and Worthy/Melinda. In both cased the women have recently found that they are or will be wealthy. This causes changes to their relationships with the men in (or, rather, not yet quite in) their lives. And so the scene is set for an intricate plot in which trickery and subterfuge abound.

The actors threw themselves enthusiastically into Farquhar’s romp, and there were many good performances. Guy Westwood made Balance into a much more engaging character than he initially seems when you read the play, and Pru Buxton and Paddy Devlin made the most of their comic rustics, Rose and Bullock. Edwin Thomas made an assured Sergeant Kite and did well to overcome the initial disadvantage of a low chair in the soothsayer scene, and also the later distraction when his world globe seemed likely to trundle gently off the front of the stage!

The two principal men were played by Tim Pleydell-Bouverie (Plume) and Maximus Marenbon (Worthy), with the foppishly extrovert Plume neatly counterpointing the comic inelegance of country gent Worthy. Opposite them were Amelia Martyn-Hemphill, whose petulant Melinda was encased in one of the largest dresses I’ve seen on the Playhouse stage, and by Harriet Tolkein as Silvia/Wilful/Pinch.

On the technical side, the changes between the indoor and outdoor sets are managed smoothly. The costumes, too, were effective, although it might have been good to add some braiding to Capt Brazen’s coat so that it was not identical to the one worn by Sgt Kite.

The Director, Helen McCabe, could also have focused a little more on choreographing the scenes; frequently actors found themselves standing in front of the person speaking – and quite a lot of the action seemed to take place extreme stage right which meant that there were occasions where any audience at the stage right end of the premium stalls seats could not see what was happening.

The Recruiting Officer is actually quite a tricky play to stage and TIPTOP made a good job of it, despite the long running time. Everyone in the cast – from principals to ‘chorus’ – was engaged from start to finish and that enthusiasm imparted itself to the audience.

Stephen Briggs 5 Mar 2009

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