Review: ‘For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy’ At the Apollo Theatre
Bodies intertwining under blue lights, the sound of a jazz saxophone rising from glittering synths, six Black men begin to voice their desires. “Let a Black boy dance, and let him take up as much space as he needs.” In Ryan Calais Cameron’s astounding and poignant play For Black Boy
OUDS takes the Fringe
Former OUDS President and current Peach Productions producer James Newbery walks us through the process of taking a show to the Edinburgh Fringe in the first part of an ongoing series. So, you want to take a show to the Edinburgh Fringe? The prospect of taking a production to the world’s largest p
The Act You’ve Known for All These Years
“John Lennon came into the NME [New Musical Express] to see me in disguise. He’d got a false beard and he was dressed in the most ragged clothes you’ve ever seen. He said, ‘I don’t want to be recognised by anybody. Let’s go and have a cup of tea.’ We went to Julie’s and sat
Anarchic Humanism: Alice Neel at the Barbican Art Gallery
Alice Neel sits naked in front of me. In oil-paint form, that is, but the effect is no less striking for it. The artist’s first self-portrait, created when she was in her 80s, epitomises the irreverence, the subversion and the brash humanity that pulses within her work. These urges are somewhat te
A Fantastic Alchemy: In Conversation with Composer Rachel Portman
There’s a video circulating on the internet, of Lord Voldemort’s return in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, where Ralph Fiennes holds aloft a reptilian skull, eye sockets sunken like trenches. Except Patrick Doyle’s sinister, sweeping score has been replaced by the synthesised tickle of Sp
Review: Bark Bark
Vasco Faria stands centre-stage, his dog leash fixed to the floor, and quips about post-war industrial action. But we are not looking at him. We are looking at Shaw Worth. The assistant director is standing stage right, barking into a microphone. Somehow, it all makes perfect sense. It all makes sen
A Million Miles from Marvel
People study comics at Oxford. Postgraduates, doing research on everything from Holocaust literature to the influence of Gothic texts on teenage girls, pore over the ever-expanding world of graphic literature, and get DPhils for it. Undergraduates reading English or Modern Languages frequently choos
Review: Blue Dragon
Those of you who have been to Oxford’s Burton Taylor Studio know how cramped it can be. For most productions, this is a problem that they must work around, but for Blue Dragon, a new dark comedy written by Oisin Byrne and directed by Harry Brook, it’s an asset. The play unfolds on a single
The Age of the ‘Subversive’ Great Gatsby
Sometimes it seems our epoch is slowly running out of ideas. First came the slew of remakes – Disney films, old Hollywood classics, all went under Netflix’s dollar-bloated hammer. Now, when adapting the classics for the screen or for the stage, there seems to be a desire to find some unique angl