To be honest, if you haven’t heard about this show by now, you must have been living under a stone, working far too hard, or not reading Cherwell (shame on you if so). So I won’t bore you by recapping what it’s all about. Three orphaned children must go to London to live with their mysterious uncle Philip in his London toyshop, where he rules as tyrant and master, forcing them to watch his sinister puppet shows. While it might be very easy to think that, from the hype, this play might be an example of style triumphing over substance, I am happy to report that, though this play is stylish and visually stunning, it demonstrates a consistently high quality of acting, and as a production, reaches a level of polished togetherness that is to be applauded.

Bella Hammad shines as Melanie, our fifteen-year-old female protagonist, whose perilous and prematurely instigated ascent into adulthood forms the structural backbone of the piece. For an actress so new to Oxford’s scene, she has truly gripped it fervently and, judging by this performance, will become one of our most in-demand performers. She manages to capture the character’s paradoxical attributes of cautious innocence, enforced maturity and sexual curiosity, while still maintaining a great deal of humour. She spends much time alone on the stage, especially in the first act, but her great confidence and believability as an actress lends her a presence that I certainly relished. At the other end of the scale, Will Spray must be mentioned for delivering a truly terrifying performance as Uncle Philip.

The original score by Hertford second-year Laurence Osbourn is written for string quartet, which worked well, despite my previous suspicion that a show so fantastical and at times zany would need more instrumental colour. The score channels Shostakovich’s quartets quite strongly, definitely bringing out a certain sobriety and mournfulness, but also creating a sense of disquieting timelessness. However, though I very much enjoyed the fractured, relentless counterpoint of the score, I found some of the recorded sound effects unnecessary and haphazard, especially the lengthy plane noises and shaken radio sounds at the beginning. It was also a shame that the climax of the play – the uncomfortably beautiful swan scene – was let down by the choice of the Swan Lake Prelude to accompany it. It seemed a lazy choice, and I wonder whether Osbourn might have been able to come up with something more fitting, referencing the Tchaikovsky, instead of simply blasting the piece into the audience.

Choreographer Fionn Cox-Davies is largely successful in his attempts to make puppets come to life on stage, though sometimes the female puppets lacked the presence of Joel Phillimore’s towering performance. The latter’s movement was excellent the whole way through, while the other two seemed to lose poise from time to time. This doesn’t, however, detract from the fact that the physical aspects of the play are exceptionally tight (despite a few ungainly scene changes) and the very early apple-tree scene is as beautiful and fluid a piece of theatre as I have seen for a very long time.

The Magic Toyshop will always be a boy-meets-girl tale, says Theo Merz, who adapted the play from Angela Carter’s novel. We do get a very strong sense of the romance that underpins the danger, and there is a genuine warmth about the two young lovers that Merz seems to bring out well.

Throughout, I kept having to remind myself that this is a student production, so beautiful and professional was the staging and the use of lighting. The Magic Toyshop is a play whose failings are small, whose methods and ambition have been nothing short of incredible, and which deserves to do well.

Four stars

The Magic Toyshop is at the Oxford Playhouse until Saturday.

‘But, if Ye wish her gratefu prayer,
Gie her a Haggis!’

Last weekend a whole series of events took place across Oxford, celebrating the life and works of Scottish poet Robbie Burns.

Here we bring you photos of festivities at Balliol, taken by Cherwell photographer Wojtek Szymczak.

Balliol Burns Night Dinner: the piper leads the procession of the haggis to the High Table.

‘Gie her a haggis!’
‘To the haggis’ by Burns read out by Scottish Balliolite, Chris Miller.

Burns Night in Balliol: Scottish reeling in the Balliol MCR.

The bagpipes!

Procession past the Sheldonian.

Parading along Broad Street.

Got some photos that you’d like to share with the rest of Oxford?
Why not send them in to [email protected]?

The Ashmolean’s first artist-in-residence has recorded its redevelopment, from the beginning of expansion in 2006 to its completion and opening last year. While it’s not always clear if the medium suits the content, He’s work is striking for its human sympathy within scenes of mechanical mess.

The first thing you see is a wall mural, which manages to convey the noisy, dusty chaos of a construction site within a carefully balanced composition. Bits of brickwork, wooden planks and workers carrying objects to and fro make the image bustle with activity wherever you look, but each area includes just enough white space for it to remain legible. I wanted to stand up close to the mural, but unfortunately the curators have a placed an odd batch of laminated extra drawings all along the floor in front of it. These obstruct both the mural and one of the best mounted ink drawings, on the wall to the left: its sharp tonal contrasts, unique in the exhibition, create a sense of the new building’s vast depth.

He seems to have made himself a quiet observer of daily life during the redevelopment, and much of the work on show here – not originally planned, one suspects – comprises portraits of construction workers and museum staff. The exhibition information is keen to reconcile He’s ancient Chinese ink and paper techniques with his images of a contemporary and Western world, but this didn’t entirely seem to work. Particularly in the portraits, the use of traditional ink to depict people in crumpled suits in front of laptops drew attention to its own anomaly in a distracting way. However, the ancient world of the Ashmolean’s concern is frequently suggested too: one of the portraits shows a museum conservationist retouching a large vase which sits on her office desk, in charming contradiction.

The most striking works are the woodblock prints, which exploit the hard, opaque lines to emphasize the rigidity of construction scaffolding. The scaffolding itself often acts a compositional grid laid over each picture, contrasting with the fluid expressiveness of the workers’ bodies as they twist, bend, reach and loll about.

Indeed, He manages always to highlight the humanity of his subjects in their industrial surroundings. His images are intricate, and nearly always rendered in stark black on white. Yet there is something in the loose smudginess of the lines, and the slightly cartoon-like workers’ bodies, which conveys the friendly camaraderie between everyone involved. The overwhelming sensation is of human warmth, underlined by the myriad further portrait drawings included in the catalogue: one depicts a pregnant woman sitting quietly, another a man with Star Wars toys all over his office desk. The tone is softly humorous, and He seems to genuinely love the people he draws.

(four stars)

Image: Ashmolean Builders VI, woodcut printed with oil based ink, Weimin He