by Zad El Bacha I was cold and tired, searching for Saint Antony’s music room, when a vibrant singing called to me from across the quad. I stepped into the room, and the energy of the cast and the rich, vivid music overwhelmed me. This is how I was introduced to a preview of Talaash, […]
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Poignant, dark, and fun – Ishtar is proof that age does not matter, and that some stories are timeless. Bringing to life of one of the oldest poems in the world from Ancient Mesopotamia, Ishtar tells the story of the eponymous Goddess of Love and War (Leela Jadhav) as she ventures into the underworld to […]
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by Chloe Whitehead ‘Let the Bride awake!’ Intrigue and betrayal reigns in this adaptation of Federico García Lorca’s 1930s classic, Blood Wedding. The Burton Taylor Studio provides an intimate and compelling venue for the drama, with only two rows of seats before the scandal-riven world of rural Spain encroaches upon the audience. Despite only watching […]
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Review by Amanda Higgin Photos by Georgia Crowther Oriel’s College’s own Poor Print had the first set of eyes on this much-anticipated Playhouse production in dress rehearsal. Even without making allowances for the adjustments and polishing that will take place before opening night, Hedda was excellent. A carefully curated, visually stunning, compelling masterwork – it […]
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by Amanda Higgin It is often said that simple things are beautiful, and this show was certainly a Beautiful Thing. This straightforward but delicately told story brings its audience to three neighbouring flats in a London council estate. Jamie lives with his mother, Sandra, and her boyfriend, Tony. On one side lives Leah, who has […]
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by Chloe Cheung Picture this: it’s 1984 and the Two Minutes Hate is raging. A huge supra-stage screen shows an enemy of Big Brother being shot in the head. That was the Oxford Playhouse’s critically acclaimed production of George Orwell’s 1984, but even the most sporadic of theatregoers might be familiar with the growing […]
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by Jacob Warn Welcome to a world of music, of love, and of language. This is a world of drunken revelry and cross-gartered madness, overwriting a history inscribed with the vestiges of war, loss and social change. Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is just a comedy. Some say. But it is this kind of thinking that results in the generic […]
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by Jacob Warn WARNING: Contains plot details “The rendering is sublime: we watch in mounting and surmounting terror, during which the sole comfort is the divide between stage and pit, fiction and reality.” This is a play of love between friends. Of love getting between friends. But as a play – as a tragedy – […]
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by Jacob Warn As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams is a story about stories. It is a work that enthrals, entrances, and most thoroughly entertains. Having the opportunity to witness a preview of this upcoming production, uncertain and unknowing as I was, has set me in a state of delighted anticipation. “Lady Sarashina is story and story-teller, and […]
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by Chloe Cheung Readers are advised that this review makes details of the plot and production explicit. Not even Stewart Lee makes me laugh as much as I did at Christopher Luscombe’s new production of Love’s Labour’s Lost for the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). Hailed as ‘sparklingly funny’ (The Times) and brimming with ‘continual comic […]
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by Jacob Warn It is a play that broaches broad and pertinent questions. It is a dramatic presentation of the debates that take place as we increasingly attempt to reconcile a global mental health epidemic with a tendency to extreme, pharmaceutical medicalisation. It asks persistently, what is love? At other times, is asks, what is […]
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by Chloe Cheung Readers are advised that this review makes details of the plot explicit. The threat of nuclear war between the Cold War superpowers plunged the latter half of the 20th century into some of its darkest days. Tim Morton-Smith’s gripping new play Oppenheimer now brings the man behind the atomic bomb to the stage. […]
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The Poor Print 