As the new term ushers in another wave of drama, we at Cherwell have been busy checking out the latest batch of student productions hitting the Oxford stage.
Students start taking to the boards in Second Week with Flipping the Bird’s production of The Magic Toyshop (adapted from Angela Carter’s famous novel) opening at the Oxford Playhouse. We are promised a production that ‘fuses projection, physical theatre and a live quartet’; the project is certainly a must-see for all those interested in puppet adaptations of unpopular novels. Also running from Tuesday of Second Week is a production of Caryl Churchill’s Far Away (a play set in a war-torn dystopia) at the Burton Taylor Studio.
In Third Week two plays will be performed at the BT – Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me, Frank McGuinness’ 1992 play about three men imprisoned a
s part of an unexplained conflict, and Rhinoceros, Absurdist Eugène Ionesco’s dark comedy about inhabitants of a French town turning into rhinoceroses. There will also be performances of Equus (at the OFS Studio) and Macbeth (at the O’Reilly, Keble).
Fourth Week sees a more light-hearted musical interlude with productions of Little Shop of Horrors (the show about a man-eating plant) at Pembroke College and Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera Ruddigore at the O’Reilly. There’s still straight theatre on offer at the Burton Taylor where Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good takes the 19.30 slot.
The range of comedy on offer means that Fifth Week Blues won’t be an issue mid-term – there’s musical comedy The Boy Friend at Lincoln College, bourgeois comedy The Philanthropist at the BT and Noel Coward’s supernatural comedy of manners Blithe Spirit at the O’Reilly. It’s not all laughs and happiness though, there’s more Caryl Churchill (this time Vinegar Tom at the Moser Theatre, Wadham) and a piece of new writing (The Aphorist at the BT).
In Sixth Week, another student production team takes charge of the Playhouse stage – this time Old Street Productions with Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love. The Oxford Imps (with new show IMPerium) and Oxford Revue perform back-to-back at the BT and there are also productions of Yawn (at the OFS Studio) and Platform (at the O’Reilly).
Seventh Week is the week of the New Writing Festival – four brand new plays, chosen by Michael Frayn, are performed at the Burton Taylor before the overall winner is announced. Elsewhere, Martin Sherman’s Bent (a play about the persecution of homosexuals by the Nazis) will be onstage at the O’Reilly, Exeter College’s chapel is the setting for The Revenger’s Tragedy and Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding will be on at the Moser. Wrapping up the term in Eighth Week, David Harrower’s‘post-modern classic’ Knives in Hens will be performed at the Burton Taylor.
Don’t forget to check cherwell.org regularly. Every show, every first night, reviewed.
