Latest news with #OxfordPlayhouse
The Guardian
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Macbeth review – something wicked this way whizzes as dynamic duo play all the roles
A significant scattering of teenagers attend this show by Out of Chaos, not just because the play is a GCSE staple but also because the touring production trails a reputation for stripping the story to its bare essentials. Staged by Oxford Playhouse's artistic director Mike Tweddle, this Macbeth was developed with students in mind. Two actors take all the roles in a show that is focused to the point of almost miraculous brevity, coming in at just over 80 minutes. The actors in question are Hannah Barrie and Paul O'Mahony (artistic director of the Hove-based Out of Chaos) and yes, they are the only people we see on stage, though they do seek infrequent and low-intensity bits of audience interaction. Straightforwardly blunt devices are used to carve a path through the play's comings and goings: the actors announce the entrance and exit of every character, and resort to some intricate hopping from one stage mark to another when a bit of back-and-forth dialogue is required. With the stage bare other than a lit back wall (with prominent captioning), some bravura lighting from Ashley Bale, much of it impressively atmospheric, and neat creepy-movie style sound dubs from Matt Eaton, the show makes a little go a very long way. O'Mahony (who plays Macbeth) and Barrie (Lady Macbeth) master the mercilessly pruned playtext. Both are tremendous, as they negotiate the contours of overweening ambition, bloodthirsty carnage and paranoid, nightwalking guilt. Amazingly, both manage to switch effortlessly into the lighter bits, with Barrie doing an amusing drunk porter and O'Mahony a nicely snivelling Ross. Clarity and narrative are the main drivers. With everything so compressed there are inevitable sacrifices: gloomy gothic grandeur is largely absent (apart from the dry ice that envelops the auditorium at the start) and more expansive shows would no doubt give more in terms of spectacle. There's no moving forest or spurting gore. Likewise, the weird sisters are pared down to briefly heard disembodied voices (seemingly pre-recorded) that float out of the murk. Some scenes whiz by – you only just register Banquo's ghost before it's on to the next one – but with every ounce of fat trimmed you get one 24-carat scene after another in a seemingly endless profusion. It's like eating the richest steak possible. Macbeth will tour in 2026
The Independent
06-04-2025
- Health
- The Independent
How I found my way after losing my husband to a shock cancer diagnosis
To lose one husband may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness. That is, of course, a bad paraphrasing of one of Lady Bracknell's famous lines in The Importance of Being Earnest. But I did lose my husband – to cancer, in the summer of 2023. And then I lost what some people would call my 'work husband' the following year, following a bruising and lonely journey through grief. The Oscar Wilde reference is relevant because that play was a critical part of my recovery: I threw myself into the part of Lady B in a production at the Oxford Playhouse following a life-changing course of events. In the summer of 2023, I had been preparing for what was to come – the life after the empty nest, the life after 25 years of marriage. Then my husband, Brian, felt unwell and went to the GP. Blood tests revealed something was wrong, and at the Day Assessment Unit of our local hospital, he was told that he had cancer which had spread to his liver. Within a matter of days and a blurry reckoning of our past, present and future, we knew that in the nomenclature of cancer diagnoses, he had the one you absolutely do not want: small cell carcinoma. His prognosis was a year at best. We reeled in shock – our youngest was still at school, sitting exams. There was a slight delay before treatment could commence, and in that time, the relentless march of this thief of hope and joy took him out. He was gone on a Saturday morning, just six weeks after his diagnosis. While I raced around our city trying to find him prescription medications for the pain, our eldest sat by his hospital-at-home bed and watched him die. I will never forget that call from my son as I stood in line at the chemist: 'Mum, he's gone. He's dead.' I arrived home to a tableau of hysterical kids around his bed. I took one look at him and knew there was nothing more I could do. The people in the room needed me now. What followed was what I thought at the time was the right thing to do. I took just one week off from my demanding role as a global publishing director for an international firm before throwing myself into change management and contingency planning while leading the biggest team in the company. It is only when I look back now that I realise I was burning out. Just six weeks after my husband's death, I was attending an overseas crisis meeting. I had been very close to the owner of the business, and he was wonderful to me for a long time. Something changed. My grief was breaking over me like 'The Great Wave off Kanagawa' and anger and loneliness seeped through. I was confused, sad and angry – and driven. I ended up leaving the business and as a result, I lost the person whom, after my husband, I had entrusted with my deepest fears and vulnerabilities. I think somewhere back there, I unravelled. I was left with no insurance payout or coverage when my husband died, and the loss of my salary with three kids headed for university was a blow. I had to face facts, and not only the heartbreak of the loss of the job I loved, but also the connectedness I felt in the business. I hit a very low point – and then I stopped. All I had was within me, and it was my late husband who had told me to go on, to live and to do the things I was good at. I still had that. I reached out in my network and met the wonderful people I am now in a business partnership with, who could see my value and worth. They offered me the chance to launch and co-own a new publishing company, which we have named River Light Press. The Thames connects our two locations, and light is the thing we turn towards after the darkest night. It is also the Latin meaning of my name, Lucy. I am now acquiring my first titles for the press. I had felt doors slamming shut in my face at what is an exposing time for many women, but I now feel the warmth and pleasure of others opening up in their place. I can never move on from Brian, but I will move forward. My new partnership and new venture are giving me hope and purpose.
The Guardian
07-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Stewart Lee Vs the Man-Wulf review - fur flies as the beast is unleashed
'Sick of comedy, sick of me, sick of my own thoughts.' That's where we find comedy's most esteemed curmudgeon at the start of his new show, Stewart Lee Vs the Man-Wulf: disillusioned at the failure of progressive standup in a world dominated by '$60m Netflix comedians of hate'. What does the current ascendancy of Messrs Chappelle, Gervais, Burr – and indeed Trump – tell us about our relationship to comedy, to cruelty, to freedom of speech? To explore just that, Lee presents this new show in three parts, and through three personae: his normal 'metropolitan liberal elite' self; an obnoxious shoot-from-the-hip alter ego; and some experimental combination of the two. It's as improbable a show as we've any right to expect of a man 35 years into his career. The opening of its second act, which finds Lee in full werewolf costume, screaming unintelligibly into a microphone to a rock backing track, makes one wonder if he's staging his own midlife crisis. But no: this is no longer Stewart Lee, it's the Man-Wulf, a red-in-tooth-and-claw standup hawking bigotry and 'suck my dick' in a bad Noo Yawk accent. Just as unlikely is the following sequence, when Lee, new identity now abandoned, treats us to the slapstick spectacle of a knackered man in an outsized wolf suit struggling to mount a swivel stool. Lee as Mr Bean? Lee as Joe Rogan? The surprising new guises just keep coming. In response to the question 'Where are all the tough good guys?', there follows a section workshopping what touchy-feely liberal standup might look like if performed with shock-jock machismo. Well, as much machismo as a 56-year-old can muster when stood on stage in just a T-shirt, a pair of pants and a teensy prosthetic willy. There's a lot going on, in short, at least after the interval – and the novelty of Lee throwing these ridiculous shapes is quite enough to carry us through to the show's more reflective coda. Which is just as well, because the joke, both of the faux-reactionary Man-Wulf and of his lefty counterpart, is fairly basic. There's more nuance, and more of the usual pleasure that comes with a Stewart Lee show – that twisty pleasure of working out what he's up to, and why – in act one, when normal Stew tees up his project with meta material about vampires, Gregg Wallace and an encounter with a model at an exhibition of the surrealist paintings of Ithell Colquhoun. That anecdote posits an inner bully lurking behind Lee's bien pensant veneer, a conceit he returns to in the show's musical finale. The route there is circuitous, and deviates via more audience abuse, even more commentary on this or that joke's failure to land, than usual. It wouldn't be Stewart Lee (and tonight it's not always meant to be) if they were neatly packaged – but the ideas are rich in this lurid new show, which interrogates the worst evils of our nature, the left's scepticism of charisma, and the vexed relationship between cruelty and comedy. At Oxford Playhouse until 8 February, then touring.
