The Playhouse was packed last night. Six-hundred bottoms on six-hundred seats for this one off performance by our Palin-founded troupe of funny men and women, and two of their rival groups (whom they very diplomatically call “friends”) the Durham Revue, and the Cambridge Footlights. Things started off, then, on an optimistic note. The Playhouse were even generous enough to provide me and my companion (a reviewer from a rival publication) a voucher each for two free drinks, allowing us to rather enjoy ourselves in the circle bar during the interval.

The lights went down. The crowd demanded pleasing. Unfortunately, this was only half delivered. The Durham review started off, all dressed in a dull kind of school uniform, and delivered a series of quite short but rather predictable sketches based on, among other things, jazz music and its risk to drivers “jazz can go off the beat; driving can’t”, and an astronaut asking “are we there yet”. Actually, that last sketch was quite good, but should have cut after the admittedly-hilarious line “because you’re a fucking astronaut” instead of spinning out the dim-space-traveller for another three or so minutes, resulting in the bizarre and unfunny revelation that our astronautress had swapped oxygen canisters for Doritos. Yawn.

Durham weren’t always great, but at least when it wasn’t sweet, it was short. Cambridge, on the other hand, could have done with some of Durham’s briskness. They opened with an unattractive man (whose name , unfortunately, I cannot remember and am unable to look up in the nonexistent programme I was given) who did a slow stand-up routine. A rather sad joke about Marmite set the ball rolling. After, their act delivered a series of cumbersome sagas, though I should point out that Footlights’s Girl-with-big-blonde-hair did exceptionally well to rescue the show after an health emergency in the stalls meant the lights had to go on, leaving the audience confused, laughing nervously. Her “Shakespeare Poem” was amusing. Though it was an awful poem.

Cambridge picked up just before the interval: on came a Michael-MacIntyre-lookalike, whose light-hearted treatment of ‘lol’ etymology (etymo-lol-ogy, you could perhaps call it?) went down well. After a brief and, for us, quite inebriating break, The Oxford Revue literally danced onto the stage. It was a silly and wonderful breath of fresh air after a first half of what were quite similar-sounding sketches. And they got better and better as time went on. Religion, and Catholicism in particular, was the butt of many of the troupes’ jokes, yet only the Revue’s sketches handled it in a seriously funny manner. A priest being ordained is ordered to “down it, down it down it”, before swigging down his chalice and being greeted by cheers of “You’re a priest, you’re a priest, you’re a priest” before running off to bother the choirboys. Excellent. Skits about the North/South divide (“Think of it as the ceiling of a sewer, but upside down”) and a obstinate steak (“I ordered it rare” – “would you not say it was rare for a steak to talk?”) that ended up seducing its owner’s dinner date definitely drew a considerable laugh from this considerable audience. The Revue were also the only ones who harnessed the situation and played on the very-much-present mutual rivalry, announcing in a sketch about mental arithmetic “There’s always a place for you at Durham”.

The home team played well in the home arena, drawing an enjoyable evening to a zany close. Though my companion complained that she had seen some of their sketches done before, I was quite happy overall, and went away reminded that the Oxford Drama Scene is not all about three-hour Greek epics or painfully trendy adaptations of feminist novels. It’s also about fun and silliness too: giant orange hats and shits in handbags.

Impressively round characters with pigs under their arms

A play about the tension between an Irish village with a small school, and its English masters in 1833, Brian Friel’s Translations is the place to explore the meaning of cultural differences. But it has the potential for two flaws: political correctness, and comical stereotype. Kate O’Connor and Tim Kiely’s production manages admirably to avoid the former, but doesn’t quite steer clear of the latter.

The lack of understanding between the Gaelic-speaking villagers and the visiting English cartographers is marked by giving the villagers Irish accents. Unfortunately, this means that a large part of the cast speaks an unnatural accent, and the English and ‘bilingual’ characters have to play up their pronunciations as well. Thus the English sound like they have planks in their trousers, the Irish like they have pigs under their arms, and naturalism suffers.

Nevertheless, Translations does not fail to engage. It is an ambitious and well-executed project, staged in a sizable theatre, with impressive stage props and a cast of ten. Of these not all, but certainly most, act their parts convincingly. Many characters are often on stage simultaneously, and it is a joy to watch them all interact, even without a word. As a consequence they do get over the stereotypical flatness suggested by the accents. A very convincingly portrayed character is Doalty, a good-for-nothing schoolboy, who entertains better than his counterparts in the real world usually do. Schoolmaster Hugh’s performance is truly impressive. After Maire, an ambitious village girl, has held a monologue on why she wants to learn English rather than Greek or Latin, Hugh stares at her, tipsy and mortified. In silence, he pours himself a drink from his hipflask, downs it, and continues the lesson.

Translations, written in 1980, aimed to reflect upon contemporary as well as past Anglo-Irish troubles. It is a grim play still, but perhaps less politically so, and I think the directors have done well to focus on the play’s lively characters in any case. Translations is most convincingly about what is lost in translation. In a scene with great potential, the girl Maire flirts with the English lieutenant George Yolland, mediated by an interpreter. They say the same thing over and over to eachother in their respective languages. Notwithstanding the veil of culture shock,here we see the most profound translation problem of all: that between any one person and another.

Translations is at the Keble O’Reilly theatre until Saturday

It is a balmy evening in late spring, in the Master’s garden at University College. Candles star the flowerbeds, champagne sparkles into glasses, and the beautiful people of Oxford sit about like a court in exile from Czarist Russia. Between two fruit trees, the actors glide across the grass in extravagant period costumes, and the twilight is alive with the sounds of culture. The Way of the World has everything an Oxford garden play needs: a budget big enough to make Croesus’ eyes water, an idyllic setting, and a plot so intricate that not even the playwright really understood what was going on.

There is just the small matter of the acting. Congreve’s late ‘restoration’ comedy – actually written long after the Glorious Revolution – is a very demanding play to perform. Its language is patterned and immensely rich in irony and other precious metals, and the story is sufficiently elaborate to have fazed audiences in 1700, let alone today. To play The Way of the World properly, you need to know the precise value of every word and plot twist, and to make them come alive for the audience.

To give a grossly simplified summary of the plot, a young man called Mirabell is courting Millamant, but is pressing his suit on her aunt the Lady Wishfort to conceal his intentions. Mrs Marwood, who is in love with Mirabell, reveals his true intentions to Lady Wishfort. Lady W, in a fit of pique, declares that she hates Mirabell ‘more than a Quaker hates a parrot,’ and threatens to cut out half of Millamant’s inheritance if she marries her lover. Mirabell decides to force Lady W’s hand by marrying her to a fictitious uncle, ‘Sir Rowland,’ who is in reality his manservant Waitwell. Add to this the roguish Fainall, cuckolded by Mirabell and in love with Mrs M, and a supporting cast of assorted fops, and you have what Serj Tankian would call a ‘pyramid mindfuck.’

This cast have some way to go if they are to make all this convincing and watchable. Admirably, the producers have drafted in many students who have never acted before, but ten days before the play’s debut the new recruits had not been well drilled. Some of the actors cut quite a dash: Eleanor Lischka’s whimsical Lady Wishfort raises a smile and Tom Bradbury bustles about the stage as the blustery country squire Sir Willfull Witwoud. Others, however, seem to think that they are acting in The Importance of Being Earnest, and do not give their lines their proper emphasis. Much more imagination still needs to go into the characters, and the cast have yet to gel as a whole in spite of some commendable dialogues. One common fault is that the actors tend to speak the lines in the right tone without concentrating hard enough on the weight and meaning of the individual words.

In all fairness, however, the cast are rehearsing frantically, and with a bit more hard work and inspiration they could make something very beautiful here. I’d back them to pull it off. This will be a visually gorgeous production in a charming setting, and with any luck we will see a performance that lives up to its glamorous surroundings.

Verdict: a curate’s egg that could turn out sunny side up

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Saturday – University Parks Cat – Ursa Mali

Friday – Acis and Galatea St.Peter’s Chapel – Ollie Ford

Thursday – Gone… Rowing – Ursa Mali

Wednesday – Reflections in University Parks – Lauri Saksa

Tuesday – Biker on Banbury Road – Lauri Saksa

Monday – St Hugh’s Ball – Robert Collier

Sunday – The Ambling Band on Broad Street – Wojtak Szymczak