“An Italian summer romance that goes wrong” – this is how Crocodile Tears was first pitched to me by its writer, Natascha Norton, when I sat down with her and director Rosie Morgan-Males. But it soon became clear that this simple description understates the latest offering from Labyrinth Productions. Crocodile Tears delves into a raw, emotionally charged relationship between two characters on the edge of romantic possibility, even if everything around them seems to be falling apart. While Natascha was careful not to give too much away, she hinted that the play deals with questions of infidelity, loyalty, and what makes betrayal feel justifiable. 

For Labyrinth Productions, coming off a run of boundary-pushing shows, Crocodile Tears might be their most ambitious project yet. The play knits together film, theatre, and music into a multimedia experience, treading a fine line between emotional realism and immersive abstraction. Expect projection sequences, animation, snippets of Italian, and much more.

Rosie explained: “It’s like running a short film, but not one that’ll be edited into a standalone short film – something interwoven with theatre.” This is certainly an ambitious blending of mediums. Theatre is immediate, whereas film is slow and meticulous. “That’s the challenge,” Rosie told me. “Theatre asks: how do we get emotion in the moment? Film says: let’s colour grade for four days.

“We want to pull those emotional beats of film into a live, theatrical space. I think our generation has lost that sense of film as a collective experience. Film is not really seen as a shared experience anymore, and I’d love to flip that on its head and bring people back together.”

That cinematic inspiration is everywhere in Crocodile Tears, from the lingering, dreamlike shots of Fellini’s 8½, to Joachim Trier’s existential tragicomedy The Worst Person in the World. “Think Luca Guadagnino,” they told me, pointing to his evocation of summer desire in Call Me by Your Name, sun-drenched and full of longing.

I wanted to hear more about the writing process. Natascha explained how the play grew out of her time living in Italy during her year abroad, a personal touch that brought emotional authenticity to the script. Of course, transforming something so personal into a collaborative project came with its challenges.

“We had some honest conversations,” Natascha says. “‘Take it in whatever direction feels right’, I told Rosie, because I totally trust her vision. I say this all the time, but seeing what she did with Closer, I’m in awe.”

Coming at it from a directorial position, Rosie added: “From my side, it’s hard transforming something personally motivated into theatre. When you’re in it emotionally, it makes great material, but turning it into something theatrical takes distance. The only reason it works is because of the professional and personal bond we have. We can access that emotion without needing five years of hindsight.”

Given the emotional terrain Crocodile Tears covers, I was curious how Rosie’s recent experience handling intimacy in Closer, at the Pilch earlier this term, fed into this project. 

“Closer was very much ‘you get what you see.’ It was about downplaying physical intimacy to highlight narrative,” Rosie explained. “This is about what happens outside of narrative. I was just rehearsing with our lead and talking about internal monologue. How do we project that outside the body and let everyone in on it? That’s what makes this piece unique – sitting with thoughts and panic that usually stay internal. Closer was about external events; this is about inner life.”

This is why they leaned into multimedia. While the stage helps with immersion, film is perfect for communicating those abstract emotions, dreams, or intrusive memories. Closer was intimate in a physical sense, yet Crocodile Tears aims to tap into a ‘collective intimacy’. 

I asked them both what they hoped audiences will take away from the show.

For Natascha, “it’s about finding comfort in discomfort – or making discomfort comforting. Yes, it’s an escape, but it deals with intense emotions. The most impactful art is when you relate to it on a personal level, even if it doesn’t reflect your reality. I want audiences to feel something, maybe not always pleasant, but cathartic. To recognize themselves in something they thought would make them feel isolated.”

Rosie agreed. “Yeah, it’s saying it’s okay to overthink. We all spiral, and just because you can’t always express it to your friend doesn’t make it any less real. The themes are tough, but we’re presenting them in a way that’s digestible. It lets you sit with them for a bit, not overwhelm you. It’s a different kind of art form.” 

Labyrinth Production’s staging of Crocodile Tears will be running at the Burton Taylor Studio, 10th-14th June. 

Sophia Eiden’s production of Simon Levy’s script of The Great Gatsby is an undoubted triumph. I was, if only for a moment, transported back to the Roaring Twenties; to a bygone era of excess, extravagance, and endless exhilaration. The setting of Trinity College gardens only heightened this sense of temporal dislocation. One could easily imagine such scenes playing out there a century ago. The costume and set design team, led by Mikela Persson Caracciolo and Naomi Flexman, struck a delicate balance: faithful to the period yet refreshingly tasteful to the modern eye. Most impressive of all was the live band – a rarity in student theatre – which injected the performance with an energy and vibrancy that elevated the entire production.

Directors Izzy Moore and George Loynes have coaxed exuberant, nuanced performances from the cast. Isabel Clarke imbued Daisy with such quiet anguish that even the glint in her eyes seemed to ache, pulling the audience into her heartbreak. In her, I could feel – and I don’t know whether this was intentional – fragments of a certain Princess of Wales, who was equally trapped in a loveless marriage. Alexander McCallum brought a nervy, moral intensity to Nick Carraway, exposing the shallowness of the Jazz Age with each incredulous glance. I was left utterly terrified by Gillies MacDonald’s Tom Buchanan, whose handsome rage was both palpable and authentic, whose silence often spoke louder than his words.

Less convincing, however, was Dominic Murphy-O’Connor’s portrayal of the titular character, Gatsby. At pivotal moments, his performance faltered; not for lack of talent, but for a want of emotional depth. Some of his most charged scenes were undermined by audience laughter, and the lack of chemistry between him and Clarke made their supposed romance difficult to believe. I was, however, moved by the love affair – albeit brief – between Nick Carraway and Tessa Yates’s Jordan Baker. Yates’s performance was sharp, poised, and deliciously sly; her Jordan had McCallum’s Nick chasing his own tail.

As great as the rest of the production was, I must express some misgivings about the choreography. The problem isn’t that Elektra Voulgari Cleare and the directors failed to create convincing movements that utilised the extraordinary space they were provided. Quite the contrary, in fact. The overall flow of the play and complete immersion of the audience from all directions were huge strengths of the production. However, the cast – especially the leads – did not seem to be very committed to the few dance sequences, and it gave the impression that dancing was a box to tick rather than an extension of the performance.

The true standout performances of the show, however, were those of Jane Brenninkmeyer and Fynn Hyde. Brenninkmeyer’s short but powerful portrayal of Myrtle moments before her death sends shockwaves through your bones and brought me to the verge of tears. I could feel her (and George Eustance’s George B Wilson’s) desperation in their circumstances and the feeling that they’ve lost control over their own lives. At the same time, I was completely mesmerised by Hyde’s Chester McKee. Though the role was minor, Hyde brought compelling complexity and fantastic flair to a character who has long intrigued readers, myself included, and he offered a version of McKee that was richly idiosyncratic. In some ways, Hyde was exactly how I had imagined Mr McKee, and more.

Altogether, this production is a dazzling indulgence, a celebration of all that makes Fitzgerald’s work so enduring. Everyone involved should be deeply proud. For those lucky enough to catch it, this is a Gatsby worth getting lost in.

Having heard on the grapevine (and even receiving word from the producer himself) about Troilus and Cressida falling victim to a last-minute casting upheaval, I decided that I needed to go into this play at the Burton Taylor with an open mind. This turned out to be a fortunate attitude to have armed myself with. Moribayassa Productions promised ‘an anti-garden play’ that would be a ‘violently shortened and mutilated’ version. Their promotional video was edited in a distinctly brain-rot style: Justin Bieber’s ‘I Feel Funny’ as the soundtrack, pictures of old men flashing over the blue-toned video, hearts edited onto eyes. Over the course of the play’s 2 hours, it swung from the comically absurd to the melodramatically serious, with varying levels of effectiveness. 

This production transposed the play to a surreal world of video games and crocheted balaclavas instead of helmets. As I entered the space, I was struck by the use of music that sounded like digital bleeps and at how the bare set had a box TV as the focal point of the stage. During the play it was used variously as a display for the litany of Trojan warriors, as a karaoke machine, and as a method of further alienating the outsider, Thersites, who existed only in the videos that were played on it. The sped-up editing of him whizzing around on different playground equipment to techno music (a style that would have made Baz Lurhmann proud) was one of the many early indicators that this show was seeking to subvert the audience’s expectations.

The figure of Pandarus (the actor has chosen to remain ‘anonymous’), an unsettling cross between C-3PO and Lucius Malfoy, was a highlight of this production’s aim to unnerve. With his iPad in one hand (lines needing to be near as a very recent addition to the cast) and a vape in the other, he spoke his lines liltingly between his blackened teeth. Even his most serious speeches were punctuated by him pausing to take a puff of his vape – a move that never failed to make the audience laugh. His conversation with Alexander (Benjamin Helmer), who laced his lines with an inexplicable southern drawl and a smirk, was one of the funniest moments. Similarly, his karaoke performance of Wanda Jackson’s ‘Funnel of Love’, with his voice swerving between a ludicrous falsetto and chesty bass, had me laughing for minutes on end, even after the next scene had begun.

Cressida (Georgie Cotes) did very well to maintain a dynamic performance when dealing with this absurd Pandarus and shuffling Troilus (Rufus Shutter). Alongside her varied performance, her dress worked to highlight the chameleon nature of her character, changing from black to red to brown depending on the colour of the lights Cotes was standing under. However, the performances of both Cotes and Shutter did tend to be still tableaus of emotion rather than believably reactive, most noticeably in the second half. Their parting scene especially failed to elicit any sympathy from me, as I simply did not believe in their romantic connection – a significant problem given this production had whittled the play down to just their love story. The distress of Troilus that took up much of the second half of the performance felt unwarranted and became monotonous very quickly.

Ultimately, the play failed because it attempted to be sincere – subverting my expectations for the worse. After the first act, I happily believed that the show was one big trolling of the audience. The second half’s lack of absurdity (except a moment when actors onstage converse with the recorded Thersites on the TV) and overemphasis on the tragedy of the lovers was a slap in the face – and a lacklustre one at that. The tone switch had already been undermined given that the first half had worked to inhibit the audience creating emotional connections with the characters through its engagement with the absurd and the quite frankly boring directing of the actors, many of whom were lying down for scenes at a time. In a play that had started so bizarrely, it was remarkable that by the end I only felt one emotion: boredom. This was a play of two halves where the second half tried to doggedly claw its way back on track instead of committing to the bit. Rather than the TROLL-us and Cressida I had hoped for, I left utterly unsatisfied.