The Virtuous Burglar

Burton - Taylor Theatre

It was one of those performances where the cast practically outnumbers the audience, which is a shame because they play itself was highly enjoyable and the performances impressive.

The story was not simple, neither was it original - a typical relationship farce in which the three married couples are paired in almost every possible permutation during the course of the play, with the highest possible degree of misunderstanding between them. . But the confusion was depicted very convincingly by the actors with some very nice comedy touches in the performances, and there was genuine amusement at each twist and turn in the story.

Most of the actors betrayed nerves at some point in the play - fluffing the occasional word - but this is only to be expected on a first performance and it in no way distracted from the enjoyment of the performance. They were all evidently talented actors with definite potential. The husband (one of the better performances) reminded me of Hugh Laurie - a bumbling "well-bred" panicky character who was increasingly unable to manage the intricate web of lies that he was creating in order to hide his affair from his wife, His mistress (another very good performance) really came into her own when she discovered that the burgler was indeed a burgler and she found this somehow arousing (the actress was disturbingly convincing at this point). The burgler, too, certainly had character which was evident from the first moments of the play, when purely visually he frantically portrayed the tortuous dilemma of whether or not to answer the phone in the house he was burgling.

The fact that the theatre was so small was disappointing at first, but the advantages of such a venue soon became clear. The action was taking place so close to me that I could literally have reached out and touched the actors if I had wanted (and if I didn't mind the embarrassment), so it had an immediacy that is impossible in most theatres.

Overall then, a very enjoyable evening which reinforced my determination to support this sort of small-scale production in Oxford. As well as being good fun, where else can the actors of the future cut their teeth?

Guy Shahar 20/11/01