Reviews by Peter
Tess
Peter
This is my hundredth review. I decided to celebrate it by… going to the theatre. There
can’t be many theatre companies like Ockham’s Razor. They combine
physical performance and circus ...
a month ago
Tess
The Maid's Metamorphosis
Peter
Outside
the cloistered confines of academia, you may never have heard of ‘boys’
companies’. But back in Shakespeare’s day they were all the rage:
theatrical troupes
made up entirely ...
a month ago
The Maid's Metamorphosis
The Sun King
Peter
In the hallowed halls of English literary analysis, allegory often gets a bad press. ‘This’ means ‘That’. ‘X’ means ‘Y’… Readers who yearn for a more nuanced, impressionistic view ...
2 months ago
The Sun King
And Then There Were None
Peter
What do
you get if you mix An Inspector Calls and Agatha Christie? The answer is
And Then There Were None, a play in which an apparently respectable
bunch of British society stalwarts are ...
2 months ago
And Then There Were None
The Phantom of the Opera
Peter
Before the curtain went up on the first night of Phantom of the Opera at
Keble’s O’Reilly Theatre, producer Finley Bettsworth and his crew were
terrified. The dry ice company couldn’t find ...
2 months ago
The Phantom of the Opera
The Pact
Peter
You know how most musicals start with a big, catchy number to hook the audience in and get them in the mood? Well, The Pact doesn’t do that. In
fact it does the complete opposite. It starts with ...
2 months ago
The Pact
The Zone of Interest [12A]
Peter
Reaction to The Zone of Interest has
been polarised. On one side there are the Igeddits: "They live next to
Auschwitz and they’ve become desensitised to the violence – I geddit!" For them, ...
2 months ago
The Zone of Interest [12A]
Vanitas
Peter
One of the running gags in the late-1960’s US TV comedy show Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In was a German soldier who would pop up without warning and, in response
to the previous sketch, say, ...
2 months ago
Vanitas
The Storyteller
Peter
The Storyteller is
more a work of philosophy than theatre: a meditation on the nature of
eternity, and a Socratic dialogue between one who merely sees the
future, and one who lives forever. The ...
2 months ago
The Storyteller
Titus Andronicus
Peter
Titus Andronicus is a famously violent play, and the warning notice outside the auditorium in Jesus College reads: ‘PLEASE BE AWARE THAT THE PLAY CONTAINS BRUTAL DEPICTION OF R*PE AND MUTILATION ...
2 months ago
Titus Andronicus
Best Years of Our Lives
Peter
Well, that was depressing. Annabel Baptist’s new play The Best Years of Our Lives takes
its ironic cue from the 1946 film of the same name. Where that post-war
dose of reality revealed that US ...
3 months ago
Best Years of Our Lives
Poor Things [18]
Peter
There’s a lot of neat critical packaging of this film as ‘FrankenBarbie’. But that does a disservice to both Barbie and Poor Things (and Mary Shelley too). Greta
Gerwig, in all her films to ...
3 months ago
Poor Things [18]
Frost/Nixon
Peter
St John’s College is full of surprises. The
first is that it’s like a rabbit warren. Getting from the front door to
the auditorium in darkness involves endless zig-zags round pillars and ...
3 months ago
Frost/Nixon
Having the Last Word
Peter
There are moments in Jessica Tabraham’s new play Having the Last Word when
the characters open their hearts to each other, albeit briefly, to say
what they feel, not what they ought to say. At ...
3 months ago
Having the Last Word
Alice at the Asylum
Peter
Adaptations of Alice in Wonderland seldom
work out well. They always sound intriguing, but normally fall
disconsolately flat. Tim Burton’s 2010 film version sacrificed
the book’s minimal ...
3 months ago
Alice at the Asylum
The Bacchae
Peter
It’s not every night you get to see the greatest play ever written – except, that’s not true. The Bacchae, first performed over 2400 years ago, is probably on a stage somewhere on this planet ...
3 months ago
The Bacchae
Carrion
Peter
If Shakespeare was indeed an upstart crow, then he’s alive and well in Max Morgan’s latest play Carrion at The Pilch. The dramatis animalia consist
of a bear, a fox and a crow, all fighting for ...
3 months ago
Carrion
The Cherry Orchard
Peter
Precisely one century ago Anton Chekhov’s final play, and greatest masterpiece, The Cherry Orchard, reached the British stage. It was a momentous and significant event in the history of this ...
3 months ago
The Cherry Orchard
The Holdovers [15]
Peter
Everybody hurts. It's
Christmas 1970, somewhere in New England, at a boarding school for
rich, young, white men. For some of them, reality and Vietnam, like the
snow, are edging ever closer. In ...
3 months ago
The Holdovers [15]
Carmen
Peter
At the curtain call of Ellen Kent’s Carmen at
the New Theatre, the cast, who hail from Kharkiv, unfurl a Ukrainian
flag and sing their national anthem with passion and power. It’s a ...
4 months ago
Carmen
Macbeth
Peter
McKellen. Finney, O’Toole, Peck, Williamson, Pryce, Stamp, Jacobi, Howard, Sher, Hicks, Stewart, Cumming, Branagh, McAvoy, Fassbender, Eccleston, Kinnear, Washington, McArdle, Fiennes… ...
5 months ago
Macbeth
Milked
Peter
Before tonight I had never heard of Simon Longman or his 2013 debut play Milked,
but I’m grateful to Matchbox Productions for spreading the word. It’s a
dark two-hander (with an extra, ...
5 months ago
Milked
Richard III
Peter
All
hail the Jesus College Shakespeare Project. In just over two years it
has become an Oxford institution, a standard-bearer for high-quality
Shakespearean drama, and a long-term social ...
5 months ago
Richard III
Amadeus
Peter
Back
in the 80s, each term’s roster of shows would always include one that
was designated the ‘OUDS Major’. It would have a big budget, a top
director, and a clutch of Oxford’s best ...
6 months ago
Amadeus
Faust
Peter
This week Oxford is offering up two giants of Germanic art.
Presenting, in the Keble corner, Wolfgang Mozart and his nemesis Salieri
in the Peter Shaffer classic Amadeus; and, in the Pilch ...
6 months ago
Faust
Bodies
Peter
Deborah Acheampong’s last play, Love Me?, was a big, hot mess with loose ends, plot holes and a gifted dramatic mind writhing and yelling at its centre. Her new one, Bodies, has cleaned up the ...
6 months ago
Bodies
Dial M for Murder
Peter
Dial M for Murder (1954) was the only film Alfred Hitchcock made in 3-D. There is one terrific moment in it when Grace Kelly gropes for a pair of scissors to stab her assailant, and she seems to ...
6 months ago
Dial M for Murder
This is How We Walk on the Moon
Peter
The title of this astonishingly brilliant piece of theatrical experimentation is a song by Arthur Russell. Have you heard of him? I hadn’t until tonight. (Some of the other audience members I spoke ...
6 months ago
This is How We Walk on the Moon
Sci-fi Show
Peter
It takes about thirty seconds to figure out what The Sci-Fi Show is about. And when it hits you, you realise you’re in for an enjoyable, galaxy-spanning ride. ‘John B. Stevens’ is a TV ...
6 months ago
Sci-fi Show
Medea
Peter
The director’s programme notes for Medea ask the key question about this tragedy, first performed 2500 years ago: what is it that keeps audiences coming back to it, year after year, century after ...
6 months ago
Medea
Toad of Toad Hall
Peter
Just under 70 yards from the Michael Pilch Studio, in the
picturesque and leafy surroundings of Holywell Cemetery, lie the remains
of Kenneth Grahame. The author of The Wind in the Willows was ...
6 months ago
Toad of Toad Hall
Angels in America: Millennium Approaches
Peter
Angels in America was last staged in Oxford at the end of February 2020 (in the Keble O’Reilly Theatre). Although barely three years ago, it might as well be an eternity. It was the last student ...
6 months ago
Angels in America: Millennium Approaches
Bedbugs
Peter
We all go to bed. It is, in every sense, the great leveller. And in Bedbugs we get to see what a bed witnesses, in its silent, non-judgemental vigil on the ups and downs of humanity. Actually, we ...
6 months ago
Bedbugs
Breaking Bod
Peter
Breaking Bad finished – finished – ten years ago. But such is its cultural impact that it feels fresh, relevant and a go-to text for students who were still at primary school when Walter White ...
6 months ago
Breaking Bod
Cathleen Ni Houlihan
Peter
In English folk-tales, whenever a supernatural being appears,
it’s an enemy. Dragons fighting St George, giants fighting Sir Gawain,
giants living up beanstalks, giants being killed by Jack. ...
7 months ago
Cathleen Ni Houlihan
Sampi
Peter
The Burton Taylor Studio can do many things. It can host musicals, classical plays, stand-up comedy and annual drama competitions. But if there’s one thing that underscores its very reason for ...
7 months ago
Sampi
Still Life
Peter
Noël
Coward is famously summed up by the title of Sheridan Morley’s
biography, ‘A Talent to Amuse’. But as the years go by, his talent seems
to grow deeper and more significant. He ...
7 months ago
Still Life
Scaramouche Jones
Peter
Food
For Thought is a pioneering theatre company that mounts productions in
unconventional venues around Oxford. Going to see their plays is not
just
a dramatic experience but a historically ...
7 months ago
Scaramouche Jones
Mozart Masterpieces
Peter
Oxford is on a cusp at this time of year. The tourist town is giving way to the student town. The bright clothes of summer are turning to the sub-fusc of fall, and academics drift around the streets ...
7 months ago
Mozart Masterpieces
The Merchant of Venice 1936
Peter
Tracy-Ann
Oberman’s grandmother and great-grandmother stood on the front line in
the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, shouting ‘You shall not pass!’ at
the ranks of British blackshirts ...
8 months ago
The Merchant of Venice 1936
Belmond Le Manoir Aux Quat' Saisons
Peter
If, like me, your idea of a good meal out is a Sunday Roast at a country pub or a Tibetan curry from the Gloucester Green street food market, then you might find the following a slightly ...
10 months ago
Belmond Le Manoir Aux Quat' Saisons
The Third Man
Peter
Trevor
Nunn is the last generation’s Sam Mendes: equally at home with
frivolous (or serious) musicals as he is with the classical repertoire.
In 2004 he followed up Hamlet with Acorn ...
11 months ago
The Third Man
As You Like It
Peter
As You Like It is traditionally a play about young love. Of the four couples who get married in it, three were smitten the moment they first laid eyes on each other. And Phebe’s Marlowe-inspired ...
11 months ago
As You Like It
Spider-man: Across the Spider-verse [PG]
Peter
Did Brian Michael Bendis and Sara Pichelli have any idea what
they were starting when they innocently dreamed up Miles Morales in
2011? Their intention was to create
a positive role model for ...
11 months ago
Spider-man: Across the Spider-verse [PG]
The Great Gatsby
Peter
If
ever there was a show of two halves, this was it. At the interval I was
toying with the idea of sneaking out (and that wasn’t just because the
people sitting next to me had spent the first ...
12 months ago
The Great Gatsby
Hedda Gabler
Peter
This is the second time I’ve seen Patrick Marber’s adaptation of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler.
The first was in its original London run at the National Theatre in
2016, when it came across as a ...
12 months ago
Hedda Gabler
Blue Dragon
Peter
Like Midnight Express, The Polar Express, and even the Orient Express (the Agatha Christie one I mean) The Blue Dragon is both a train and a metaphor*. And like all trains, it knows exactly where ...
12 months ago
Blue Dragon
The Mandrake
Peter
What
an extraordinary character Niccolo Machiavelli was. After acting as a
political advisor to some of the most powerful figures in Europe he was
arrested, tortured and exiled like someone out ...
12 months ago
The Mandrake
Window Seat
Peter
There is a famous episode of Porridge, the seminal, prison-set sit-com from the seventies starring Ronnie Barker, in which the two main characters, Fletcher and Godber, spend the entire episode in ...
12 months ago
Window Seat
By Proxy
Peter
Out on Gloucester Green at 7pm, the sun was still shining, and Oxford’s alfresco café culture was in full swing. Young lovers were dunking straws in their Aperol Spritzers. All was right with ...
12 months ago
By Proxy
Fragments
Peter
In Laura Swift and Russell Bender’s engrossing and profoundly thought-provoking play Fragments, a group of classical scholars attempt to piece together the plot of Euripides’ lost play ...
a year ago
Fragments
Henry VI, part three
Peter
This was more than a production of a single Shakespeare play. It was the culmination of twelve months of
productions. The Jesus College Shakespeare Project, with director Peter
Sutton at the ...
a year ago
Henry VI, part three
A Girl in School Uniform walks into a Bar
Peter
A Girl in School Uniform (Walks into a Bar) is a disorienting
title for an unnerving play. It sounds like it might be the first line
of a joke, but there’s nothing funny about the situation ...
a year ago
A Girl in School Uniform walks into a Bar
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 [12A]
Peter
I’m not a Marvel-basher. I loved the Marvel Cinematic Universe films right up to the end of Avengers: Endgame.
I applauded the fact that they understood what fans of the comics have
always ...
a year ago
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 [12A]
Macbeth
Peter
At the risk of stating the obvious, Macbeth is
An Extremely Well-Known Play. In Oxford alone it’s been produced at
least five times in the last decade. And if you’re going to mount it ...
a year ago
Macbeth
Dear Brutus by J.M. Barrie
Peter
J.M. Barrie’s enduring idea of 'the little boy who never grew up’ is an appealing fantasy of eternal innocence. But the truth is darker than that. James Barrie’s older brother David perished ...
a year ago
Dear Brutus by J.M. Barrie
Bare
Peter
Bare –
as its title suggests – is an emotionally revealing experience.
Stripped bare of irony, self-mockery or even sub-plots, its strength
rests in its honesty. It’s a coming-of-age rock ...
a year ago
Bare
Love and Money
Peter
Dennis Kelly’s 2006 play kick-started his career and simultaneously kicked traditional playwriting in the teeth. This week Love and Money is staged at the BT by newly-founded theatre company ...
a year ago
Love and Money
The Tempest
Peter
Perhaps
I should stop reading programmes. But no! They are the places where you
can find out who’s acting what role, and what else they’ve been in
(which shouldn’t be that interesting but ...
a year ago
The Tempest
Deuteronomy
Peter
Deuteronomy is the last of the Five Books of
Moses. It’s the one that repeats a lot of the things that were said in
the second, third and fourth books. In fact it’s known in Hebrew as Mishneh ...
a year ago
Deuteronomy
Punk
Peter
We’ve
all had the experience of waking from a bizarre dream that seemed to
make perfect logical sense whilst asleep, and then spending several
minutes clawing our way back to reality, ...
a year ago
Punk
Cruelty
Peter
I never managed to see Fleabag in
the theatre. But the experience must have been something like watching
Gabriel Blackwell’s first staged play, the astonishingly vivid, allusive
and ...
a year ago
Cruelty
Thamesis
Peter
Nathaniel
Jones scurries on to the Burton Taylor stage, arms full of
battery-operated candles and bits of script which he drops as he goes,
and nervously tries to arrange his tiny collection of ...
a year ago
Thamesis
I Will Delete This Story
Peter
I guess the warning signs were there from the start. In
his programme notes (two full pages of tight text headlined THE HISTORY
OF THE PLAY) Noah Wild tells us that ‘everyone’ describes his ...
a year ago
I Will Delete This Story
Every Brilliant Thing
Peter
I’ve only seen a trailer for the HBO screen version of the original production of Every Brilliant Thing. So it’s not really fair to compare. But based on that trailer, I’d have to say that what ...
a year ago
Every Brilliant Thing
The Fabelmans [12A]
Peter
Before The Fabelmans even starts Steven Spielberg pops up on screen to address us, like Alfred Hitchcock warning audiences not to reveal the twist in Psycho. But this is no warning. It’s a ...
a year ago
The Fabelmans [12A]
Entertaining Mr Sloane
Peter
What on earth was going on with home invasion theatre in the 1960s? They just couldn’t get enough of it. Harold Pinter had The Caretaker, Frederick Knott had Wait Until Dark, and Joe Orton had ...
a year ago
Entertaining Mr Sloane
Evita
Peter
I left Evita in a state of overpowering confusion. I’d just watched one of the most famous musicals of the last fifty years for the first time in my life, and I hadn’t really followed it at ...
a year ago
Evita
The Genius of Mozart
Peter
The title of this concert made it sound like it was going to be the classical music equivalent of Highlights from Hamlet: maybe we’d get the theme from Elvira Madigan, Eine kleine Nachtmusik, ...
a year ago
The Genius of Mozart
Till [12A]
Peter
For a crime as despicable, sickening and inhuman as lynching, it has resulted in some astonishingly powerful, moving, and even occasionally beautiful, works of art: Abel Meeropol’s 1937 poem ...
a year ago
Till [12A]
Living [12A]
Peter
Western filmmakers have for decades plundered the works of Akira Kurosawa for new ideas. Most famously Seven Samurai provided the template for The Magnificent Seven, and when Sergio Leone brazenly ...
a year ago
Living [12A]
Spools
Peter
'The Skriker' had to cancel this week, raising the prospect of the Burton Taylor being
briefly unoccupied. What to do to avert this tragedy? What play can be
cast, rehearsed, learnt and mounted ...
a year ago
Spools
Dead Man's Suitcase
Peter
Following two years of COVID-induced slumber, drama has reawakened in Oxford like a Blue Peter tortoise after a winter of enforced hibernation. The flowering I've witnessed this term has been ...
a year ago
Dead Man's Suitcase
Jekyll & Hyde at the Pitt Rivers Museum
Peter
This production is a glorious, spine-tingling experience – and it’s a genuine one-off. You’ll never see it anywhere else. It is knitted into the fabric of the Pitt Rivers Museum as tightly as ...
a year ago
Jekyll & Hyde at the Pitt Rivers Museum
Henry VI, part one
Peter
November 26, 2022 My
wife and I are approaching the end of a long quest: to see all of
Shakespeare’s plays in performance. Before this evening, we had just two
to go*. Thanks to Jesus ...
a year ago
Henry VI, part one
Troy Story: Age of the Hero
Peter
Before I say anything about how good or bad this show was, let’s salute a company of students who have the sheer energy, bravery and ambition to mount not just a musical, but an original one. ...
a year ago
Troy Story: Age of the Hero
Fêtid
Peter
There’s something nasty in the woodshed in Headingham, and it all comes spilling out the night before the annual village fête. Fêtid starts off looking as though it’s going to be a gentle tale ...
a year ago
Fêtid
Wishbone
Peter
Remember when getting Covid meant you had to stay in for
seven days? For most of us, it was a week of emotional suspended
animation. Coco Cottam’s
new play, Wishbone, is anything but that. It ...
a year ago
Wishbone
Blithe Spirit
Peter
The magic of a great theatrical production is that it can redraw
the world around an old text, and not only make you see it in a
completely new light, but also make you feel that this is the way ...
a year ago
Blithe Spirit
