4 – 6 March
Theatre magic has arrived on this Oxford stage. Ockham’s Razor has taken Thomas Hardy’s tale and run with it, using extraordinary circus skills to carry us deep into its tragic heart. Two performers play the heroine. Storyteller Anna Crichlow walks the stage as the speaking Tess, her calm, clear West Country lilt a perfect frame for the fluidity and beauty of Lila Naruse’s dance. Together with five skilled and talented stage artists, they conjure the crowded world of the Wessex countryside in all its joyful, struggling complexity. They mime, leap, cartwheel, somersault and create mind-boggling human towers. But in line with the company ethic, these feats, choreographed by Nathan Johnson, are intended not primarily to impress, but to create an imaginative landscape in which every movement has a dramatic purpose.
The set for this travelling production consists of wooden planks and torn domestic linen, such humble items serving both as dwellings for humans and beasts and as physical and psychological paths and obstacles in the lives of the characters. A constantly moving semi-abstract back projection suggests the changing seasons and the passage of time. And a shifting colour palette of creams, blues and gold, hints at the distant view across the Blackmore Vale.
As in the book we are often awake with the dawn, the time of birdsong, grey light and mystery. As day breaks, the light sharpens and the birdsong melds into a wider soundscape. Composer Holly Khan uses English folk melodies as her starting point, swelling into more complex walls of ambient sound to fit the mood.
Hardy’s style lends itself to dramatic treatment. His books are memorable for their striking visuality. The first major plot point is the death of the Durbeyfield horse in a collision as Tess rides sleepily to market. Here the shock and horror of the accident are powerfully recreated through a tour de force of puppetry and acrobatics.
Elsewhere, visual effects are used as metaphor. When Alec D’Urberville (Joshua Frazer) first appears, he spins onto the stage inside an enormous golden hoop, an emblem of power and money. With consummate artistry, he illustrates an instinct for display which quickly becomes a desire for control as he sweeps the unsuspecting Tess into his orbit.
Another show- stopper is the desperate attempt by the milkmaids to attract the attention of the cerebral Angel Clare (Nat Whittingham). They display their perfect young bodies, grinning and laughing, hanging upside down on a wall of planks, their long hair streaming behind them in golden showers. Oblivious to their charms, he lounges on the floor below them with a book.
All dramatic adaptations of literary texts must lose something of the original. Here there is no dialogue, and so we miss the heart-breaking confrontation between Tess and Angel after their fractured wedding night. Instead, we witness Clare’s hypocrisy through his breakdown which becomes even more vivid than the dagger thrust of pain in Tess. But, like all literary masterpieces, ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’ has a life beyond its original telling, and Ockham’s Razor, directed by Alex Harvey and Charlotte Mooney have given us a riveting reimagining of this fictional archetype of love, loss and the abuse of power.
★★★★★ Ros Carne 5 March 2025
Photography credit: Daniel Denton,
