Set in 1981, Seeing Hand Productions present Ben Jonson’s Volpone with an updated, and decidedly Northern, twist.

The action takes place in Blackpool, accentuated by the Kitsch and gaudy set that conveys an air of faded splendour. An ostentatious chandelier, tacky carpet, and neon lit sign capture the essence of a 1980s casino or bingo hall. Seeing Hand’s design team should be commended on a consistently excellent aesthetic, one that successfully situates the drama in director Sam Luker Brown’s nuanced choice of the 80s.

This striking aesthetic is reflected in the inventive lighting use throughout the performance. A use of blue and red tones marry well with the vibrant colours of the costume, and the use of more ambitious lighting, to signify split scenes, is a risk that comes off well.

The use of a live band within the performances, despite being perhaps a little loud at times, was a well thought-out decision, adding to the overall jovial ambiance of the performance. Milo Saville deserves credit for his delightfully befitting new compositions.

On the whole, there was not a weak link in the cast, with all performers tackling Jonson’s complex language with aplomb. Kate Weir, who played the eponymous Volpone, gave a very strong performance, signalling from the onset with her comically brilliant entrance that the play would be a witty farce.

The dynamic between Weir and Joe Peden, who portrayed Volpone’s parasitic sidekick Mosca, was excellent, carrying the play forward with a clear energy. A special mention should go to Daisy Hayes, who brilliantly characterised the elderly Corbaccio and was received by the audience with much hilarity.

To reflect the updated Blackpool setting, the cast adopted an array of Northern accents in an attempt to capture the Lancashire twang. Although in the majority of cases this was tolerable, in others, accents were hyperbolic to the point of becoming over-done and slightly irritating.

Despite the production’s many merits, Luker-Brown’s choice of a traverse staging was perhaps a hindrance, causing the cast to fall into a habit of unnecessarily pacing across the stage.

However, this is not to distract from the fact that Seeing Hand Production’s Volpone is an exceptionally well presented performance that director Luker-Brown should be very proud of. This performance of Volpone is a must see.

Intruding on the preparations for Volpone, showing at the Keble O’Reilly this week, the most noticeable thing was the sheer warmth of the rehearsal room. I am not referring to Univ’s central-heating system (although this also perhaps warrants some column-inches of praise) but rather the smiles, laughs, and creative energy which fizzled before, after, and between the scenes I was shown. The team behind this show clearly get on and the relish with which they brought Ben Jonson’s tricky farce to life before my eyes was infectious. It seems this is exactly the kind of production that cold Oxford students need in the throes of end-of-term blues.

To summarise a very complex plot, Volpone is a satire of human greed and lust. One of Jonson’s most-performed plays, it follows one conman who attempts to ensnare a handful of different characters by adopting various guises. As the details of their different schemes grow increasingly fraught, each plan begins to collapse before our eyes. It is a hectic, mad-cap farce and looks to be a whole lot of fun.

As director Sam Luker-Brown told me after the preview I saw, this sense of fun was at the centre of his artistic vision from the start. “That’s the key: fun”, he tells me. “It’s a macabre fun and its twisted and it says something” he adds (perhaps preempting the condescending judgement of Oxford students cynical about anything that wears its entertainment value so unabashedly on its sleeve) “but in a word that’s it.” And so it should be. Whilst Jonson always has points to make about the nature of city-capitalism, he does so in a way which seems to evade any definitive moral analysis. His work provides the model for a very specific authorial ambivalence and for a very potent type of dramatic humour, one which Luker-Brown and his team are certainly successful at recreating.

Indeed, one of the most exciting things about putting on a show of this sort is playing with the idea of theatricality. These are a set of characters that are constantly acting up, changing face, shapeshifting. In the scenes I had the chance to watch, for instance, lead-actress Kate Weir did just that. Weir, who has only just finished performing in another O’Reilly play, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, is already a remarkably versatile performer and watching her move up and down the promenade stage, slowly transitioning into the sickly old man Volpone pretends to be, provided an excellent opportunity for her to display the extent of these talents. As Luker-Brown describes, she has a “plastic face” capable of pulling off all sorts of dramatic or comedic tricks. To use his words, Weir has an “incredible virtuosity” and it was this faculty alone, he tells me, that led to the casting of a female Volpone. Whilst the team accept that this decision “immediately raises a lot of questions” which they have found interesting to explore, they maintain that Weir was first and foremost “the best person in the room”.

Alongside Weir is Peden, another established actor in Oxford who maintains the charisma evident in previous performances. Together he and Weir strut about in a hilarious double-act, commanding all our attention and evidently in control of fairly difficult material. They seem more than ready for show-week, far ahead of schedule by Oxford-standards.

Whilst cautious about drawing clichéd connections to current affairs, it is clear that Luker-Brown also believes in the political provocations the show might make, particularly with its updated setting of 1980s Blackpool. This he says is “show town”, full of “glitz and glamour” but also full of “melancholy”. The period, known for the birth of the free-market system that he sees reaping havoc today, automatically draws attention to “our capacity for self-deception”, the common motif of the play, and “the North”, I am reminded, “is a particularly good place to think about Thatcher”.

Luker-Brown jokes about calling it a “Brexit Volpone” but really his imagining is far more interesting than that. He uses a 17^th century text to tell us about the present day but rather than setting it in the here and now transports us to the late 20^th century to see where the world as we know it really started taking shape. I’m not certain that all of this will register with audiences but it’s certainly an original take.

After an hour spent with the Volpone team, I ask Luker-Brown one last question. Is there anything he would like me to include in the preview? He leans down to my laptop which I’m using to record our discussion and murmurs “Please come to this play”. Going back out into a cold, late-capitalist, winter-night I am left feeling like there are few things-on in 7^th week that I’d like to do more.

This is a disgusting and disquieting play – in the best possible way. As you might have guessed from the title, it is savage. It is far from easy-going entertainment, but its irony and absurdity put a smirk on my face in certain scenes: it is fun in a perverse way. There is no gore, but the release of tension is authentic and down-to-earth. After watching it, I felt liberated, even if emotionally exhausted. This play is effective, whether you like it or not.

God of Carnage is a modern play by the acclaimed French playwright Yasmina Reza, although it has already become an iconic masterpiece, resonating with the Theatre of the Absurd. The plot follows two married couples having a reunion to discuss the fight between their sons, in which one lost some teeth when the other hit him with a stick. Initially, the adults try to maintain a civilised conversation to sort it out, but the meeting spirals into bitter chaos, swirling with repressed marital problems, bigotry, and petty scoffs. Nobody is left unscathed – nothing is respected.

Even in this preview rehearsal, with myself as the only spectator, the actors gave it all they had, exuding the absurd barbarity that the text required. They all shouted at the top of their voices, hurled props around, and made a mess enacting the vomit scene – be prepared for vomit, among many other foul things, leaving the characters’ mouths with abandon.

Director Alex Matraxia pointed out how it was “cathartic” to put on this play and hoped the audiences would feel so too. The actors also remarked how fulfilling it was to break social norms, getting messy onstage. Considering that the play takes everyday life and well-rehearsed social standards as its basis, they exploit the modest limitations of a student production, keeping it ordinary, close to our reality, but still destroying our expectations of normality. Lee Simmonds said that it suits an audience of Oxford students well, “because you let yourself go bit by bit, until it gets crazy and animalistic, so it satisfies this urge to drop appearances and speak out what you feel, which is particularly necessary here in Oxford”. He is right.

The design was cleverly planned. Actors’ costumes are plain, but suggest emotions, with much black and some red. The set is whitewashed, so that in this apparently neat and clean environment the clashes (and vomit) will stand out more. Moreover, the atmosphere is claustrophobic throughout. It was partly because I was almost at arm’s length of the actors sometimes, in a smaller room, but it will surely be similar in the Burton Taylor Studio, with those high-strung characters stuck in the same place.

Yasmina Reza’s script drips with dark hidden feelings, so characters’ pathetic misogyny and stereotypes emerge, among other niceties, from both male and female characters. They did well in not hiding this. Nevertheless, there is brilliant irony in how the women had the most intense presence onstage, mostly thanks to Reza’s playwriting, but also because of the female actors (Joana Isabella as Véronique and Katie Cook as Annette).

They snarled, they talked over their husbands, they were reckless – probably more than the men (Alec McQuarrie as Michel and Lee Simmonds as Alain). Their performance shone while the men were anxious too, but didn’t reach such impact, as if holding themselves back slightly. The actors may switch from the civilised to the bestial mode too suddenly, except Véronique’s progression, but I’ll leave the benefit of the doubt, because in the preview they skipped minor scenes. Anyway, it surpasses most student productions.

If you get offended easily or are quite awkward and tentative in dealing with people, this play is calling to you. Still, everybody needs a bit of carnage in their lives, especially when you’re burning out in 7^th week. Buy a ticket and find yourself becoming wonderfully disturbed.

God of Carnage runs at the BT Studio from November 21st to 25th

Powerful story-telling takes centre stage in Retelling Tales. A stripped-back stage with no props or set allows us to focus on the monologue being told, emphasising the reality and personal nature of the stories, rather than performing them in the created world of a theatre set.

From transgender rights, to environmental issues and feminism, the stories are personal, powerful accounts that present individual strife as a part of the human experience in a number of different ways. Some are very personal – a mother’s tale of accepting her transgender daughter, for instance. Other stories are broader, looking at issues which affect the world – more than one touches on conservation and the importance of looking outwards beyond the self.

All of the stories told are TED talks, performed by the actors. Lucy Miles performs a monologue written by the playwright and activist Eve Ensler, which is an emotive and hard-hitting piece – starting with her survival of childhood abuse, through feeling dissociated from her body to cancer and finally looking out to the strife of others to bring her back to herself.

Poetically written, Ensler’s story escapes the potential of slipping into a story solely about her as an individual, but instead illustrates the importance of looking outwards and engaging with the world. Miles’ performance is strong and emotive but she avoids telling Ensler’s story as if she were solely a victim, instead conveying the importance of how personal stories are able to relate to others, and the necessity of perspective. Ensler writes of hearing the stories of people on her travels and having the revelation: “I suddenly understood that the crisis in my body was the crisis of the world, and it wasn’t happening later, it was happening now.”

Retelling Tales is certainly a unique production, with more than a few content warnings, it is not a light-hearted production. Nevertheless, it demonstrates the power of storytelling in a way that allows us to empathise with the storyteller. Although the stories are personal, they have been chosen for their ability to be applied to broader issues, the fact they are told by actors alludes to the broader importance of stories and reminds us that personal experience is part of the human experience.

Three different monologues will be told each night at the Burton Taylor studio, back to back, with the name of the pieces being performed kept a mystery. Retelling Tales will be performed at the Burton Taylor Studio from Tuesday- Saturday of 7^th week at 9:30pm, with student tickets priced at £5.