For those keen to start watching immediately, Noughth week offers a ‘powerful evocation of the British sex trade’ in the form of Edinburgh Fringe sell-out A Thousand Pieces, at the North Wall Arts Centre. For another light hearted start to Trinity, there’s Manon at the New Theatre, by the darkest of ballet choreographers, Kenneth MacMillan.
First week’s highlights will include an angry King Lear at the OFS. Then there’s His Dark Materials at the Playhouse. A triumph when it appeared at the National in 2004, we are excited to see how it transfers to Oxford. Bear the Imps in mind too, still at the Wheatsheaf on Mondays from First week.
For Second week there’s Betrayal by Harold Pinter at the BT: inspired by his affair with Joan Bakewell, it’s considered one of the Nobel Prize winner’s greats. In the late slot, a production of The Little Mermaid, based on the Anderson fairytale, plans to divide the audience with a fishing net! And at the OFS we have Fatboy, the tale, naturally, of Fatboy and his wife Fudgie and their rise to become king and queen of the world… Sunday also sees the Experimental Theatre Club’s annual Playday – a place for people to put on plays in a ‘safe environment’. Sounds ominous.
Third week will be offering us All’s Well that Ends Well at the Magdalen Garden Show, one of the great delights of a sunny Trinity. This years stars such as Roseanna Frascona and Hannah McGrath will light up Shakespeare’s blackest of comedies. Then there’s Collaborations at the Playhouse – four contemporary dances, based on John Donne’s ‘no man is an island’. The Oxford Revue also infiltrates the Playhouse on the Monday of this week.
At the Keble O’ Reilly Much Ado About Nothing is being shown in a ‘pretty madcap’ way, going from cafe, to street, to quad. One insider told the Cherwell that they plan to ‘parade around Keble gardens and juggle whilst improvising Shakespeare with rubber ducks’. Right.
This week has clearly been deemed crazy week, for Twelfth Night at the OFS will include performers breaking into slow motion and transfixed in dust, made, we’re told, out of light. And the BT has The Love of the Nightingale with an all female cast playing around with stuff from Greek myth and elsewhere.
Fourth week: Even the directors call The Pitchfork Disney (BT) a warped play. And from the description it sounds it: ‘twenty- eight year old twins locked up in their home eating chocolate and sedatives’. But at the Keble O’Reilly this week we will be considering profound questions in This is India, which looks at cultural collisions as British Sara settles into a family in India.
Fifth week has A Real Doll at the BT. This is the sex doll, Alicia, who becomes the companion of Jeffry until an electric shock brings her to life. He discovers that love cannot be ordered from the internet. Then there’s the great Renaissance play The Changeling at the OFS, showing Beatrice as she succumbs to the assassin De Flores. For all you Disney aficionados, The New Theatre has Beauty and the Beast this week.
Having languished with English for five whole weeks, Sixth week is a chance to change into French by watching Phèdre at the BT. The Cherwell’s going to tell you all about watching plays in foreign languages soon – so watch this space! This week also has Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus at the Keble O’Reilly – ‘Ugly hell, gape not! Come not, Lucifer!’
The OFS has Tick Tick Boom, a musical presenting a composer falling into oblivion, while Oriel Arts Week heralds a production of The Spanish Tragedy, a bloody and darkly comic play by Thomas Kyd. In Seventh week the BT offers Caroline Bird’s Uncivil Partnership about a female string quartet playing at an unconventional wedding. But it is the Keble O’Reilly which finally offers us a play by Trinity Term’s patron saint, Oscar Wilde: Lady Windermere’s Fan.
Last week we burnt books with Doctor Faustus, this week we shall drown them with The Tempest by acclaimed director Asia Osborne.
Krishna Omkar returns to Merton‘s garden show for Eighth week with Love’s Labour’s Lost, while Tim Hoare and Matt Ryan will certainly offer us something splendid this week with Trojan Women. The final week of term is not likely to slide away quietly amid our exhaustion.
In Trinity and Beyond
