Review search
42 results found.
An Inspector Calls
JB Priestly's critique of I'm-all-right-Jack individualism, in which a Northen industrialist and his smug family are forced to confront their complicity in the suicide of a destitute local woman, has gained a ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 20 May, 2013
The Cherry Orchard
The Cherry Orchard is a play about change. The owner of the Cherry Orchard estate, the fey, irresponsible Madame Ranevskya (Fiona Johnston, pleasingly histrionic), in order to stave off bankruptcy, finds that ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 28 February, 2013
The Sleeping Beauty
Fairy tales offer us the tantalizing possibility of remaking the world in the image of desire, in tapping into a childlike wish for magic and a belief in impossibility. They also often ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 20 February, 2013
Rope
The Macmillan Room in the Oxford Union with its plasterwork, barrel-vault ceiling and neo-Gothic fireplace makes a suitable and fun setting for Patrick Hamilton’s Rope from 1929, in that both space and ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 19 February, 2013
Kenton Theatre, Henley
The Kenton Theatre is a delight to visit. It’s centrally located on New Street and there's easy parking. I found the staff super-helpful, the auditorium is comfy and oozes olde worlde charm, ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 12 April, 2012
The Sleeping Beauty
On a chilly, damp night in Henley, Ballet Theatre UK’s The Sleeping Beauty at the Kenton Theatre on 4th April provided a warming entertainment for those with both casual and specialist interest ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 12 April, 2012
The Browning Version
For this centenary of Terence Rattigan’s birth there comes his little masterpiece of realism, The Browning Version. Mr Crocker-Harris, a public school master of Classics about to retire early through ill health, ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 30 November, 2011
The Birthday Party
Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party, his first full-length play, opened in London in May 1958 on a Tuesday and closed on the Saturday. Just six people turned out for the Wednesday matinee, ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 24 November, 2011
Cinderella on Ice
The Russian Ice Stars are in town for their Cinderella on Ice on a mild November night. The last Cinderella ice show I saw (at the Albert Hall) dared in its misguided ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 18 November, 2011
Oxford Proms 2011
For this Summer Prom the interior of the Sheldonian, following the recent facelift to much of its seating, sparkled on this sultry August evening.The programme kicked off with Handel’s sinfonietta Arrival of ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 23 August, 2011
Mapping Wonderland
UnderConstruction is a small Oxford and London theatre company specialising in promenade theatre – or “devised, site-based performance” as it modishly prefers to call it.
Stepping out from Radcliffe Square over the ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 11 July, 2011
Great Expectations
Great Expectations is Charles Dickens’ penultimate completed novel and also, handily for the theatre company wanting to turn it into drama, one of his shortest. The challenge for the adapter is to ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 6 July, 2011
Incendies [15]
Incendies obliquely chronicles the adult life of Nawal Marwan (Lubna Azabal), an Arab woman living in Canada whose death sends her two children to find the father they believed was dead and ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 27 June, 2011
The Maharajah And The Kohinoor
This is a piece about the latter history of the Koh-i-Noor diamond, mined in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh back in mediaeval times and until recently the world’s biggest diamond. ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 24 June, 2011
Glengarry Glen Ross
David Mamet's 1983 drama based on his own experiences as a salesman in sixties America examines a cut-throat commercial world devoid of humanity. It feels as immediate as it does unsettling for, ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 26 May, 2011
The Government Inspector
Corrupt and self-serving officials in a small town in the middle of the Imperial Russian nowhere have for donkey’s years been making merry with the funds and handing out jobs for the ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 25 May, 2011
The Deep Blue Sea
The Deep Blue Sea is one of Terence Rattigan's most personal plays. A psycho-drama of unrequited love set in the early 1950s, it focuses on Hester Collyer (Fay Lomas), a deeply unhappy ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 9 February, 2011
Magic Thamed Returns!
This show was presented by two fresh-faced local magicians, Richard Young and Sam Strange, together with a 'special guest' Paul Megram ("25 years in the business") in the homely surroundings of Thame's Players' Theatre.My show ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 8 February, 2011
The Graduate
There's no getting away from the fact that Half Full Theatre's staging of The Graduate, adapted by Terry Johnson from the 60s novel by Charles Webb, operates with the big shadow of ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 3 November, 2010
Not For The Faint Hearted
This walkabout play from Confused Productions is billed as a A Promenade Horror Comedy and fulfils wonderfully well that promise of a box of theatrical delights. Once one has grasped that the ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 27 October, 2010
The Silver Tassie
The Silver Tassie dates from 1929, after Sean O'Casey's creative star was already on the wane. Compared with O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock and The Shadow of a Gunman the play is ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 21 September, 2010
The Australian Pink Floyd Show
It was as good as it possibly could have been. As the last flickers of light and clouds of dry ice drifted away, the audience rose to its feet in rapturous acclaim ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 6 May, 2010
Edward II
Despite being Marlowe's most consistently accomplished play, Edward II (c. 1592) is not often seen these days. Obviously Shakespeare has the market in history plays pretty much sewn up, and the reviewer's ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 15 April, 2010
Going Down
The 1960s are revisited by 4FRONT theatre company with their short (1 hour 20 mins, no interval) play Going Down, written and directed at the OFS studio by Darren Furniss. We have ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 27 January, 2010
The Red Shoes [U]
Lermontov: Why do you want to dance? Vicky Page: Why do you want to live? Lermontov: I don't know exactly why, but.. I must.Vicky Page: That's my answer too. Here is the ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 21 December, 2009
Alice's Adventures Underground
Given the intimate association of Oxford with Alice, Tuesday night’s decent-sized OFS audience must have come in most cases not to meet but to renew acquaintance with Lewis Carroll’s larger than life ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 9 December, 2009
Spring Awakening
Wedekind's play was written in 1891 but owing to its theme - a critical description of how the emotionally repressed German society of his day dealt with the sexuality of its young ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 25 November, 2009
Charles Dickens' Barnaby Rudge
Barnaby Rudge is an early Dickens' novel dealing with the private and public faces of the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots, published between The Old Curiosity Shop and Martin Chuzzlewit when Dickens was still, ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 6 November, 2009
Mesrine: Killer Instinct [15]
L'Instinct de Mort, together with its sequel L'Ennemi Public N°1, make up the two-part Jacques Mesrine gangster saga made by Jean-Francois Richet. This is a bio-pic set in the 1960s and 70s, ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 9 August, 2009
Notorious [U]
"Wonderful tosh". Tosh? Oh Miranda, how could you?This great b/w Hitchcock film from 1946 is a film in search of a category. Not a spy story, despite wearing the trappings of one ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 17 July, 2009
Sweeney Todd
Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, a 1973 play by Christopher Bond, is given a rousing revival at The Old Fire Station by a cast of nine 17 and 18 ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 25 June, 2009
Fermat's Room [12A]
Sudoku, the mysterious stranger and the classic locked room puzzle all come together in this Spanish thriller.Little is what it seems as several Spanish mathematicians receive details of a puzzle on the ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 22 June, 2009
Lady Windermere's Fan
Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) was Oscar Wilde’s first commercial success, and within four years his quartet of glittering comedies had appeared in the theatrical canon where they have remained ever since. Though ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 11 June, 2009
Doctor Faustus
A good production of Doctor Faustus, though unusually for a student production I thought the direction superior to the acting. Set design was imaginatively metallic, the mesh panels allowing for nice silhouette ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 7 June, 2009
A Clockwork Orange (Theatre)
This playscript version by Anthony Burgess of his now-notorious novel comes in at 1 hour 30 mins and is played without an interval and in the round (or rather, square) in the ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 5 March, 2009
Confusions by Alan Ayckbourn
Alan Ayckbourn has written over 70 plays in a career that seems to be as long almost as that of old Methuselah himself, and I thought it quite odd that producer and ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 27 February, 2009
Playhouse Creatures
April De Angelis's rumbustious dark comedy explores behind the scenes of 17th century theatre life and finds a world where a woman must play as many parts offstage as on, if she ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 3 December, 2008
Dracula
I am told that this project took 6 months from idea to fruition, the adaptation of the 1897 novel having been written by three of the "crew". Alas, I felt the play ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 30 November, 2008
The Baader-Meinhof Complex [18]
Very disappointing. I believe the makers of this spent hundreds of hours exhaustively researching the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, but the problem is the director seems to want to put on screen most of ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 23 November, 2008
Romeo & Juliet
The night I saw this, the threat of rain had changed the venue to St Columba's Church. Director and cast coped really well with the more cramped space (and intrusion of pulpit ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 31 July, 2008
Oklahoma!
I belatedly agree with the other two reviewers. This was a first-class show because, not for the first time with one of these student productions, I left the theatre feeling the cast ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 4 June, 2008
Sense & Sensibility
Ultimately a disappointing evening. The damp atmosphere, mud underfoot and uncomfortable portable seating were of course outside the production's control, but the 20 mins delay in getting under way was not, and ...
Andrew Bell (DI Reviewer) - 30 May, 2008
