Reader, by Ariel Dorfman.

Old Fire Station Theatre, 13th-17th February 2001

The OFS plays host this week to the second of Ariel Dorfman's Resistance Trilogy plays. Reader was written to kick us out of our apathy towards systems of social control and censorship. This is a thinking man's play, and seemingly perfect for the Oxford stage. It is set in both the near and distant future, with characters merging from one reality into another. In the near future, Don Alfonso Morales (Ollie Buckley) works as a censor, deciding which books will be published, based on the number of trees they use up. His conservationalist drive leads him more to consider the quantity of paper wastage than the quality of the literature. In the distant future, Daniel Lucas, a film-censor, lives under a tyrannical ideology, which imposes excessively high moral standards on the individual. His job is to keep the viewing public morally pure and innocent by cutting all screen kisses to two seconds, and wiping sexual content which might lead to perversion. He and his boss, the Director of The Moral Resources Centre (Colm Maccrossan) are committed to eradicating a "plague" which has been "raging"- violence and sex on every screen for the past fifty years.

The link between the eras and personalities is provided by a subversive manuscript which describes the life of Don Alfonso Morales, the disappearance of his wife, and the terrible fate awaiting his son. In trying to rewrite it, Lucas discovers parallels between his own life and Don Alfonso's, and the temporal boundaries begin to blur as Lucas glimpses his own future suppression under the weight of the Director's ideological moral force.

Ariel Dorfman's script is an exercise in defying confusion, and if it were not for the South American accents (however poorly executed), this play would collapse under its own convolution. However, the quality of this OUDS cast rescues the play, and adds clarity to Dorfman's writing. Foster's Jacqueline and Irene are well developed, as are William Tosh's Nick/Enrique/Malko. This being Tosh's first Oxford play, his achievement in outshining his fellow cast members is even more remarkable. Ollie Buckley could have been a more explosive Don Alfonso, and a more tortured Lucas, but his performance did not detract from the play. If you are bored with paradise in Oxford this week, Reader might just shake your apathy.

Sherree Halliwell, 13-02-01.