Too Much The Sun
by Nicholas Pierpan
Moser Theatre, Wadham 25-28.02.03

There are some things that are always difficult to do reproduce convincingly on stage. Sex, for one. Often such attempts embarrass the audience with sympathy for the actors going through the cringingly self-conscious and stylised movements as much as the poor saps themselves. This, the first performance of Nick Pierpan's play takes a calculated risk by opening with an epileptic fit. And it is an astonishingly convincing and chilling rendition. It is also curiously beautiful; Sammy Davis Jr's Mr Bojangles blares out as the scene is coated in a deep red light. This boy, whether he like it or not, got pure, uninhibited soul.
The epileptic, Lestaines, is a thief returning to his native Northumberland village. He takes a job offered by a friend of his dead father's, a clock-maker, and, without giving too much away, the scene is set for an intelligent and lyrical exploration of the past and the nature of the self and bigger picture.
Very much a writer's play, Too Much The Sun deservedly won this year's OUDS New Writing Festival. Both dense and emotionally precise, it is astonishingly self-assured, and the audience leave the theatre with pleny of intellectual food for thought.

It seems unfair to single out any one actor for praise; the acting is uniformly informed, restrained and excellent. Well done Beau Hopkins, Thomas Eastcott, Ross Burley and Fergus Eckersley. The direction too is equally well suited to the nature of the material, bringing home the points of the play in a beautifully understated manner.

Too Much The Sun may lack a traditional narrative, but it makes its audience work enjoyably hard to untangle its secrets. Such an approach, of course, only works if there is anything TO uncover. Too Much The Sun has it in truck-loads. See this rather than the hordes of mediocre, middle-class and middlebrow productions that Oxford University normally churns out. A true delight.

Munzar Sharif and Alex Murphy, 26.02.03