When I arrive at Pembroke auditorium to preview next week’s production of ‘Into the Woods’, the assistant director is a couple of minutes late. When he arrives, he apologises: ‘I’m very sorry, I was just building the beanstalk’. Certainly not an excuse you often hear.

Soon afterwards the characters come flooding in – Cinderella (Olivia Waring), Snow White (Julianna Ko), the Baker (Tommy Siman), the Baker’s Wife (Clemi Collett), Jack of Beanstalk fame (Christopher Breeze) and other fairy tale celebrities. In this 19-part ensemble there are no minor parts, so I am told organising rehearsals was a ‘logistical headache’. After a few vocal exercises to the refrain of ‘pop a caterpillar’, oddly fitting given the play’s subject matter, the cast get down to business.

The musical, which director, Wharton Chan and assistant director, Ross King, describe to me as Stephen Sondheim’s ‘hidden gem’, intertwines the plots of several Brothers Grimm stories. In the first act Cinderella wants to go to a ball, Jack wants his cow to give milk and the Baker and his wife want a baby. All pretty standard fairy tale stuff. However, in the second act things get a bit out of control, as the narrative explores the real consequences of the characters’ quests and wishes. In the words of Ross King, it’s fairy tale ‘gone a bit mad’.

‘Into the Woods’ may not have as much bloodshed or as many pies as Sondheim’s more famous musical, ‘Sweeney Todd’, but it compensates for this with  its humour. The first song which the cast perform for me is a duet between Little Red Riding (Ella Brown) and the Big Bad Wolf (Chesney Ovsiowitz). The wonderfully creepy wolf minces and growls his way around the stage, while crooning about how ‘there’s no possible way to describe how you feel, when you’re talking to your meal’.

In another scene Cinderella’s Prince (Sammy Breen) and Rapunzel’s Prince (Ross King) have a sing-off, arguing about which of them is experiencing more ‘agony’ at the hands of their fairy tale princesses. Not an inherently hilarious topic, but the boys manage to make it very comic.

Despite the childish guise of fairy tale, the musical is also extremely clever and complex. The storylines twist and weave with plenty of hidden motifs. For example, look out for the beautiful recurring 9-note motif of Rapunzel, played by the classically-trained Betty Makharinsky, or the fact that, unlike all the other characters, Jack doesn’t sing in rhyme, because he’s meant to be a bit dim.

I am assured by Wharton Chan that the production will literally transport the audience ‘into the woods’. Expect a giant beanstalk centre stage, characters hanging off balconies and the narrator getting dragged into the action (so meta).

Let’s hope this production gets the ‘happily ever after’ it deserves. 

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Arriving at a rehearsal for Collaborators, I am informed by the assembled company that they can’t start quite yet – we need to wait for Stalin to arrive. He’s at work, you see. Thankfully, Stalin, when he turns up, is in the form of Timothy Coleman, portraying the Soviet dictator in this production of John Hodge’s Collaborators, to be performed this weekend at the Oxford Union.

This slightly surreal moment nonetheless offers an intriguing way in to Hodge’s play, which deals at least in part with the difficulty of shaping creative expression around the very specific wishes of one man. This piece ultimately deals with some unsettling and almost always unacknowledged parallels between the control of an artist over his creation, and that of an autocratic leader over the lives (and deaths) of his people. Reassuringly, Coleman informs me he has not been doing any ‘method-acting’ in preparation for the role.

The play was still in the final stages of rehearsal, and it was clear how far the directors had already progressed in realising their vision, and the level of dedication being now applied to perfecting what are already compelling scenes. Jordan Reed portrays Mikhail Bulgakov with an affecting subtlety of emotion, which brilliantly captures the deteriorating physical and mental health of the morally-compromised playwright. Stalin is portrayed with a disturbingly childlike vein of psychopathy which is at turns darkly humorous and deeply unsettling. The characters’ emotional journeys through the framework of a totalitarian regime are thoroughly and compellingly realised. They constitute a testament to the aim expressed by the directors – Saskia Lumley and Bridget Dru – not to allow the historical and political context to overshadow the building up and tearing down of personal relationships on which the piece hinges.

The choice of the Union debating chamber as a venue is perhaps a fitting one – the directors explain one factor in their decision to stage it here being the chamber’s status as a political arena. The expansiveness of the space evokes a sense of power and grandeur, to be enhanced on the night by the hanging of Soviet banners. Nonetheless, care has been taken to retain the claustrophobia that lies at the play’s heart by keeping the actors hemmed in by the audience with the use of traverse staging.

When asked, the directors state they aren’t trying to convey a specific moral message. Rather, there will be plenty for the audience to consider, from the interpretative methods of both propaganda and play-writing to the disintegration of human values and relationships. With its blend of the surreal and the intensely psychological, Collaborators seems ready to take its place as a uniquely thought-provoking production.

The sonic backdrop of post-Collections revellers proves to be bizarrely pacifying during the final HANDY performance in Oxford. A battery-powered light installation by Dori Deng barely punctuates the darkness of New College Cloisters, and yet it manages to cocoon performers Laurence Tompkins and Dave Bainbridge, giving them full command of the space. 

This ethos of spatial adaptability is a crucial one for HANDY, with Tompkins and Bainbridge acting as self-styled C21st troubadours. The duo have been touring some of the more demanding performance spaces of the country with a harmonica, handheld electronics, a six-string banjo, and a set of saucepans which never fully betrayed whether they were the backbone of the next gig, or their next meal. Speaking to the boys after the show, I find out that their thirst for new spaces stems from a fear of being boxed in, both stylistically and physically. Having often performed in club settings in the past, the unplugged and portable nature of the HANDY concept offered liberation from the “freakshow at the clubnight” label.

In purely musical terms, it could be said that no box can quite contain them. The show consists of two works: a meditative number by Aaron Parker in which Bainbridge struck his banjo with a soft mallet, as if commentating on the pre-recorded electronic track; and Tompkins’ own ‘Mylar’ – a two-movement composition whose material sublimated geographical and temporal borders with equal ease. The discernible musical influences include early 90s lo-fi, languidly de-tuned banjo licks which smacked of the Middle East, noise; and phasing, underscored by quietly pervasive electronics. Both musicians are keen to acknowledge the technical complexity and structural rigidity of ‘Mylar’, yet during performance there is spontaneous interaction between the parts, giving a more human edge to the motorised rhythms and sonic maelstroms.

In an age in which technological and structural devices so often clutter the space between performer and audience, the palpable intimacy achieved by HANDY offers a radical re-imagining of the live music experience.

One thing’s for certain – Alex Foster is a passionate director. No sooner have I met him and enquired innocently about how the play is going, than he begins to enthuse about the merits of his cast, how they have “bought into it completely”, and the ways in which they have coped with the at times very bizarre script. This enthusiasm is no mere fluff either – he is a geographer, and one of the first comments he makes to me is surprisingly technical for a director. “There is a thing in Geography called the precariat which often consists of people simply passing the time…having your daily life that goes on and on and on, and that’s what’s being echoed here in Godot”.

He has clearly not chosen to direct this play on a whim, and talks about the importance of immersing his audience in the characters of Vladimir (Stratis Limnios) and Estragon (James Mooney), the two protagonists whose repetitive and unfathomable lives we follow in the course of this surreal play. He hopes that this immersion can be created by holding the play “in the round” with the audience on all sides of his actors in the intimate Burton Taylor Studio.

When I ask him about the conception of Waiting for Godot as overwrought and ultimately boring, he assures me that this production will not suffer from such criticism. He hopes to play to the more humorous aspects of the play, since in his words “if you were there with your best friend for eternity, you wouldn’t be bored”. This is not, I don’t think, to say that the poignancy of some of the tragedy in the play will be lost – the protagonists contemplate suicide at two separate points, for example – but the emphasis on humour seems a genuine attempt to make the pairs of Vladimir and Estragon, and Pozzo and Lucky, more realistic, and to imply tragedy through the jarring humour rather than overbearingly drum it into the audience.

Many keen French students, for whom Prelims are lurking at the end of this term, will perhaps note with some glee that this is an opportunity to see one of their texts performed and feel like they are revising (despite the production being in English) while enjoying an evening of thought-provoking theatre. A clever marketing strategy there, perhaps, by the production team. Nevertheless, if even half of Alex’s eloquent zest for this play translates onto the stage, it will be a terrific production.

Just before I am about to leave, he gives me a sound-bite which could easily be a Prelims French essay question: “the hardest thing about waiting is that you know there will be more waiting to come. [Discuss.]” Not long to wait for this Godot, however, running at the BT Studio from Tuesday 6th May.

I went to the preview of Lord of the Flies, with some trepidation, having disliked the book which I thought was over-hyped by its key placement on the GCSE syllabus. However, the latest offering at the O’Reilly, directed by Dom Applewhite, has emphatically changed my opinion. Lord of the Flies should have the audience enraptured by its intelligent, thoughtful and complex interpretation of Golding’s classic novel.

The stand out member of the cast is undoubtedly the director, Dom Applewhite. Not only was his enthusiasm for his project catching and refreshingly genuine, but also, his vision for the production was pain-staking in its clarity and the result of much hard-work. Applewhite expressed with great ease his vision of the book, which had clearly affected him from his first reading; he sees Simon as the ‘philosophical’ character, yet he was determined to remind his audience that all of the characters of the play are children. He is obviously close to his cast; his warm-up exercises managed to mimic the childish excitement and creativity he clearly wishes his characters to express. It was uplifting to see such a well-bonded and talented cast, with a stand-out director.

The set of this production is simple; instead of attempting to create a jungle setting, an idea Applewhite labelled ‘tacky’, the set will be white. This is a homage to Peter Brook’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, but is designed to represent a void of character formation, an integral part of growing-up. However, don’t think that this means the rest of the set will be basic. There are to be special effects to capture the terrifying fire on the island and the cast will be wearing fifties period costume. From the description of the stage, it seems that the crew have captured the balance of simplicity and authenticity perfectly, although I’m not entirely sold on the special effects; we will have to wait and see.

However, undoubtedly the best features of the production is the cast. The actors were some of the most talented I have seen in Oxford. They managed to capture the ambiance of heady public-school boys in an instance. My favourite performance was Kit Owens’ interpretation of ‘Piggy’. Having seen him as Kit in the warm-up games I was shocked by his transformation within a few seconds of the preview; everything about his interpretation screamed ‘Piggy’. Owens’ accent and body langauge are flawlessly perfect. It was astonishing that the cast had only been rehearsing for one and a half weeks, as their knowledge and interpretation of their characters was faultless.

Lord of the Flies should be fantastic. I now understand Applewhite’s fascination with Golding’s classic; he utterly changed my perception. And nothing is more powerful than a play that can change your opinion and interpretation of something.