Reviews by Jeremy Dennis
Feedback Loops
Jeremy Dennis
Part of Oxford Science and Ideas Festival, this dance explores medical feedback technology. It looks at how wearable tracking devices make the experience of illness visible, using a ...
6 months ago
Feedback Loops
Macbeth and Much Ado About Nothing
Jeremy Dennis
June in Oxford is Shakespeare season, and what better way to
spend a hot summer night than watching the brightest of Shakespeare’s comedies
and the darkest of his tragedies? Macbeth
takes the ...
11 months ago
Macbeth and Much Ado About Nothing
24, 23, 22
Jeremy Dennis
Doug Dean’s tight two hand piece (three if you count the DJ)
24, 23, 22 was a play conceived during lockdown, and some of that desperate, claustrophobic
time still clings hard to this story of ...
a year ago
24, 23, 22
Nell Gwynn
Jeremy Dennis
The story of Nell Gwynn, London’s first superstar actress,
mistress to merry King Charles and sometime orange-seller is well-known. Like
any celebrity, her life is spin and legend, with more tall ...
a year ago
Nell Gwynn
The Golden Cockerel, An Opera by Rimsky-Korsakov
Jeremy Dennis
Scandalous in its day, banned for years, sharply satirical and perfumed with more than a whiff of scandal, Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Golden Cockerel is an unexpected and startling delight to find in ...
a year ago
The Golden Cockerel, An Opera by Rimsky-Korsakov
Transcience
Jeremy Dennis
The phone rings. It’s an unknown number. But for once it’s not sales, spam or a random; it’s a quiet, calm voice that draws you, image by image, into shifting lines of a half-glimpsed story. ...
a year ago
Transcience
Diana: The Untold and Untrue Story
Jeremy Dennis
Slip on your revenge dress, adjust your pearls, and flick that hair; for tonight is time for the Lady Di that never was but really should have been. We all know the story of Lady Di, the triumph, ...
a year ago
Diana: The Untold and Untrue Story
The Crick Crack Club presents: The Girl in the Dog
Jeremy Dennis
Down an Oxford backstreet, turn right at the phonebox, head through the arch into the clouded courtyard: congratulations, you’ve found The Story Museum! While it’s more famous for regular and ...
2 years ago
The Crick Crack Club presents: The Girl in the Dog
The Tempest
Jeremy Dennis
Follow the sound of swifts into the depths of University Park for a night of magic, mayhem and laughter with Oxford Theatre Guild in this gentle and kindly humorous Tempest. Performed in the ...
2 years ago
The Tempest
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Jeremy Dennis
This Midsummer Night’s Dream has everything; low comedy, furious falling outs, costume mishap opportunities galore and a magnificently rubbish lion. This solid evening of laughter and silliness ...
2 years ago
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Speaking Out and Fitting In
Jeremy Dennis
Alice d'Lumiere is just another commuter on the train
through life; sensible shoes, a practical dress, and a mask, if guidelines
require it. But a free-standing hoop, a flash of electric blue satin ...
2 years ago
Speaking Out and Fitting In
Nothing Happens (Twice)
Jeremy Dennis
Nothing Happens (Twice) is absurdly entertaining and tragically hilarious. Acting is an absurd business. Mercè Ribot and Patricia Rodríguez know this only too well. As they battle disinterested ...
2 years ago
Nothing Happens (Twice)
My Car Plays Tapes
Jeremy Dennis
Time moves on and the gigs get further apart and further away. The visits to London pubs with more successful friends begin to space out and become stranger and more awkward. Work ceases to be a ...
2 years ago
My Car Plays Tapes
Rambert2
Jeremy Dennis
Shows are returning, finally, and at the Oxford Playhouse,
Rambert 2, ambitious young sibling to the famed dance company, has landed with
a crash and a bang.
The opener, Home, is set in a dark ...
3 years ago
Rambert2
Josephine
Jeremy Dennis
The life and times of one of the great performers of the 20th Century are brought to life in this restless, glamorous, fabulous all-ages show. How do we talk to children about race? Taking its ...
3 years ago
Josephine
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Jeremy Dennis
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is, in so many ways, the perfect, uplifting, lazy summer evening show, and BMH Productions channelled a joyful Butlins/festival vibe, with flowers hung on Oxford Prison ...
3 years ago
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Hildegard Transfigured: A medieval trance for the 21st Century
Jeremy Dennis
This soaring exploration of devotion, passion and exquisitely close harmony rises effortlessly and astonishingly, bridging the 12th Century and the 21st in ecstatic celebration of the life and work ...
3 years ago
Hildegard Transfigured: A medieval trance for the 21st Century
Wild Things
Jeremy Dennis
Audience participation is always on the menu with improv, but no need to worry about carefully picking a safe seat with this show. The House of Improv - previously seen at Brighton Fringe, Edinburgh ...
4 years ago
Wild Things
Don Giovanni
Jeremy Dennis
Don Giovanni. The music, excellently performed, and instantly familiar from a thousand variations, incidentals and adverts. But from the outset, a decision must be made about the story. The lyrics, ...
4 years ago
Don Giovanni
Nuclear Future
Jeremy Dennis
We live in nuclear crisis. The doomsday clock stands at two minutes to midnight, thanks to the “new abnormal” of emboldened autocrats, leaky security and political paralysis. This devolving state ...
5 years ago
Nuclear Future
The Tempest
Jeremy Dennis
It is strongly recommended that you both book early and arrive on time for The Tempest, curated by Creation Cruises, disembarking from (what is probably now not) a very secret location just over the ...
5 years ago
The Tempest
Offbeat Festival 2019
Jeremy Dennis
RawTransport, Oxford Playhouse W Lucy Room, Wed 19th June Oxford’s Offbeat festival explores the unexpected, and this new show from Electrick Village, fresh from the Wandsworth Fringe, squirreled ...
5 years ago
Offbeat Festival 2019
Richard III and Romeo & Juliet
Jeremy Dennis
In a country riven by deep divides, ambition and backstabbing rip the rulers apart. On the battered streets, anxious families struggle to protect their children from gangs, knife crime, suicide. For ...
5 years ago
Richard III and Romeo & Juliet
The Cave, by Beryl Korot & Steve Reich
Jeremy Dennis
It begins abruptly; a sharp-voiced duet between words in the darkness and a miked-up typewriter, percussion drilling into the text under consideration; sections of the Bible, the Talmud and the Koran ...
5 years ago
The Cave, by Beryl Korot & Steve Reich
Club Tropicana
Jeremy Dennis
Ah, the '80s. Lovely Lorraine (Karina Hind, Sun-In'd and bender-curled) is staring at her Lady Di-a-like wedding dress, surrounded by '70s wallpaper and her mother’s expectations, while her bluff ...
5 years ago
Club Tropicana
Richard Alston Dance Company Farewell Tour
Jeremy Dennis
Richard Alston celebrates his 50th year of making dance with a show that starts deliciously hard and uncompromisingly modern. Detour, a new work by choreographer Martin Lawrance, opens with ...
5 years ago
Richard Alston Dance Company Farewell Tour
Macbeth
Jeremy Dennis
With big names, big staging and a big, brutal, bloody vision, this new Macbeth from the National Theatre is very dark.
A dark stage conjures dim outskirts of sink estates in some nearby broken ...
5 years ago
Macbeth
We Can Time Travel
Jeremy Dennis
Dom has a time machine made of synthesisers and he's ready to go back to our future (his past) Dom is here with you in the theatre, in the past (his past). But Dom can time travel. The secret is all ...
6 years ago
We Can Time Travel
Super Hamlet 64
Jeremy Dennis
Edward/Edalia Day likes computer games. They really like computer games. Hamlet, I’m not so sure. In this two-act one-player show, Hamlet is shredded, exploded, cut up and chopped down – with a ...
6 years ago
Super Hamlet 64
Anything Goes
Jeremy Dennis
Bunting, sea-mist and a tiny life preserver set the stage
for Anything Goes, a ditsy and delightful musical of (mainly) romantic
misdemeanors on a cross-Atlantic cruise. Eloise Grieve plays Reno ...
6 years ago
Anything Goes
Othello & Much Ado About Nothing
Jeremy Dennis
BMH Productions return to Oxford Castle for another super-speedy Shakespeare double bill. This time they’re taking on Othello, one of Shakespeare’s darkest tragedies, and in contrast, Much Ado ...
6 years ago
Othello & Much Ado About Nothing
Romeo And Juliet
Jeremy Dennis
Romeo and Juliet examines
young people failed by those who should support them; SquidInk’s
setting, a failing women’s prison, sharpens the context. It also turns
standard Shakespeare on its ...
6 years ago
Romeo And Juliet
Thoroughly Modern Millie
Jeremy Dennis
The glittering skyscraper fantasy of Thoroughly Modern
Millie
drops into the New Theatre Oxford this week as if designed for its swooping deco
curves; the upwardly (and oddly sideways) mobile ...
6 years ago
Thoroughly Modern Millie
On The March
Jeremy Dennis
In 1913, the Great Pilgrimage of the British Suffragist movement marched through Britain over six weeks, finally converging in a 50,000-strong Hyde Park rally. On route, they marched through Oxford ...
6 years ago
On The March
Sweet Charity
Jeremy Dennis
More Man from U.N.C.L.E. than Austin Powers, this pretty student production of classic Broadway musical Sweet Charity has a heart too big to break and really brings the laughs. The live band is ...
6 years ago
Sweet Charity
The Corridor
Jeremy Dennis
Arriving early for the Oxford’s premiere of Harrison Birtwistle’s contemporary single act opera The Corridor, a notice on the door encourages us to explore the pitch black cloisters of New ...
6 years ago
The Corridor
All That Fall
Jeremy Dennis
From the initial eruptions of villagey noises to its final
despairing howl, Beckett’s exploration of the cold comforts of explosive
cantankerousness in the face of age, infirmity and the dark ...
6 years ago
All That Fall
The Tiger's Bride
Jeremy Dennis
Darling of the A-level syllabus and origin of every dark
fairy tales television series, Angela Carter’s short story collection
The Bloody Chamber is iconic as The Handmaid’s Tale, and ...
7 years ago
The Tiger's Bride
The Marriage Of Kim K
Jeremy Dennis
Romantically reimagined for 2017 with a slimmed-down cast
and staging, this sharp-tongued, irreverent, foul-mouthed Marriage of Figaro rework sees talented actor-singers compete hard with non-stop ...
7 years ago
The Marriage Of Kim K
Twelfth Night & The Tempest
Jeremy Dennis
Summer Shakespeare at Oxford Castle Unlocked comes this year from BMH productions, complete with a substantial and multi-talented cast, a live band and an eye-poppingly weird Caliban.
But before ...
7 years ago
Twelfth Night & The Tempest
Autopilot Saves Model S
Jeremy Dennis
Autopilot Saves Model S, a new opera by Marco Galvani and Leoe Mercer, is at the Mathematics institute, in an acoustically unforgiving café space under a crystal ceiling based either on the graph ...
7 years ago
Autopilot Saves Model S
Rambert - Ghost Dances & Other Works
Jeremy Dennis
Leading dance company Rambert is on tour with a contemporary trio of works, two recent pieces accompanying Christopher Bruce's iconoclastic 1981 piece Ghost Dances. Ghost Dances is about atrocity, ...
7 years ago
Rambert - Ghost Dances & Other Works
The Winter's Tale
Jeremy Dennis
Time waits, slumped like a bored teenager at a bus stop. The stage illuminates into intense, lonely pastels. The players filter in, fresh faced and besuited like career politicians hitting power too ...
7 years ago
The Winter's Tale
The Thing That Came From Over There!
Jeremy Dennis
"If you don't like really terrible things," warns Alys Torrance at the outset of the evening's entertainment, "then you should leave, right now!" Seduced by the mystery of a self-powering overhead ...
7 years ago
The Thing That Came From Over There!
The Nether
Jeremy Dennis
The Nether is a play thick with challenging themes; child abuse of course (the plot follows a cyberdetective investigating a man running an online immersive fantasy "realm" where people abuse avatars ...
7 years ago
The Nether
Anything Goes
Jeremy Dennis
Cole Porter's much-loved musical Anything Goes is a delirious challenge; familiar belters, huge ensemble set pieces, masses of comedy and a tricky emotional path for the lead actors. Fortunately and ...
8 years ago
Anything Goes
The Eulogy of Toby Peach
Jeremy Dennis
The Eulogy of Toby Peach opens with time; time we have and haven't got; time that is wasted, enjoyed, found and lost to cancer – the terrible one-man show where you play all the parts, in his own ...
8 years ago
The Eulogy of Toby Peach
Die Fledermaus
Jeremy Dennis
It is the glory and curse of Die Fledermaus that every note is absolutely and instantly familiar; the overture has soundtracked enough film, cartoon and television that it risks being dull with ...
8 years ago
Die Fledermaus
4x4 Ephemeral Architectures
Jeremy Dennis
For 4x4 Ephemeral Architectures, a ballet/juggling mash-up fresh from the Fringe (where punters queued round the block) world-renowned Gandini tosses live juggling into the midst of contemporary ...
9 years ago
4x4 Ephemeral Architectures
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Jeremy Dennis
Music, dance and a buzz of fairies! A Midsummer Night’s Dream has come to town, not to a fancy college garden, but to the infinitely flexible Old Fire Station, with its clever seating and inky ...
9 years ago
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Hamlet
Jeremy Dennis
It’s a crowded Shakespeare season this summer, but take time to leave the city centre and head up to University Parks, where, in their big top theatre tent (fear not the weather), English Repertory ...
9 years ago
Hamlet
Twelfth Night
Jeremy Dennis
For the rain it raineth every day is a risky refrain for an outdoor Shakespeare production! But the Oxford Shakespeare Company sings it, with bright confidence and cheerful defiance. The audience ...
9 years ago
Twelfth Night
Into The Woods
Jeremy Dennis
Technical reasons (or another spring downpour) chased us indoors for Into the Woods, an assured student production of the tragicomic Sondheim musical that puts a dozen fairy tales into the blender. ...
9 years ago
Into The Woods
The Five and the Prophecy of Prana
Jeremy Dennis
Everybody get ready! It’s time to put on your ninjapants, get your streetfight on, and show off your best #mangamoves. Oxford Playhouse is playing host to Blue Boy Entertainment and their lost ...
9 years ago
The Five and the Prophecy of Prana
Julius Caesar
Jeremy Dennis
Summer brings Shakespeare to Oxford, and vying for the most original presentation is Don't Hate the Players' near-future Julius Caesar, set in a brutal Britain dominated by squabbling ...
10 years ago
Julius Caesar
StorySmiths' Radical Women
Jeremy Dennis
If the Burton Taylor is the perfect venue for intimate shows, then Cornish company Scary Little Girls is the perfect pair to take full advantage of the cosy stage, which welcomes us scattered with ...
10 years ago
StorySmiths' Radical Women
The Mikado
Jeremy Dennis
How to perform The Mikado in the 21st Century, with its fabulous tunes, absurd plot and somewhat queasy context? Opera della Luna have stolen a frame from the original production’s lookbook, ...
10 years ago
The Mikado
Seven Brides For Seven Brothers
Jeremy Dennis
MGM's classic 1950s musical about seven "sobbin' women" seized from their home town by rough backwoodsmen could make for an uncertain offer in the 21st Century, but a steady ...
10 years ago
Seven Brides For Seven Brothers
Guys And Dolls
Jeremy Dennis
Sound the alarms and alert the authorities. Youth musical theatre company RicNic – a unique social enterprise where every aspects of the show is run by young people– are putting on ...
11 years ago
Guys And Dolls
Everyday Moments
Jeremy Dennis
Everyday Moments is playing at the Burton Taylor this week in strict twenty minute slots (and please turn up five minutes early as they need to keep the timings precise) for a cheap (£3) show, ...
11 years ago
Everyday Moments
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Jeremy Dennis
Oxford Shakespeare Company is triumphantly back in beautiful Wadham gardens with The Merry Wives of Windsor, a tale of formidable women and thwarted fornication reimagined as a sundown prank-fest at ...
11 years ago
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Adventures in Wonderland
Jeremy Dennis
We arrive and are given playing cards and papers, identity and instructions for the evening, by representatives of the Wonderland Department of Border Control, Tourism and Timekeeping, suitably ...
11 years ago
Adventures in Wonderland
No Man's Land
Jeremy Dennis
No Man’s Land is a long way from Pinter’s famously gritty kitchen sink dramas, a late play set in the luxurious home of a successful author, liberally soused with champagne and single malts, ...
18 years ago
No Man's Land
Fuente Ovejuna
Jeremy Dennis
This production of C17th Spanish playwright Lope de Vega's masterpiece of oppression and revolution opens on an attractive town square, thoroughly made over in Spanish rustic style, and the audience ...
18 years ago
Fuente Ovejuna
Michael Clark Company: 'O': The Stravinsky Project Part 1
Jeremy Dennis
In 1994, modern dance iconoclast Michael Clarke created O, to general acclaim. Over ten years later, he returns, to create a totally new framework for O, based on Russian-American ballet master ...
18 years ago
Michael Clark Company: 'O': The Stravinsky Project Part 1
A Clockwork Orange (Theatre)
Jeremy Dennis
This stage version of Anthony Burgess's infamous novella is based on the adaptation Burgess wrote after the film's release ("to cease the flow of bastardized Kubrickian stage versions"). Perhaps ...
18 years ago
A Clockwork Orange (Theatre)
Much Ado About Nothing
Jeremy Dennis
Summer Shakespeare in Oxford can be an expedition, and Thistledown Theatre’s fabulous garden venue could easily be missed were it not for a pair of effusive ushers shepherding the audience into a ...
7 years ago
Much Ado About Nothing
