Oxford PLAYHOUSE

★★★★☆ The first act consists of Tangent, where the dancers enact the movement of the seasons to Jason Ridgway’s piano music. It’s no reflection of the skill of the dancers or the quality of Ridgway’s acc...

★★★★★ Most enthusiastic Shakespeare fans are familiar with The Reduced Shakespeare Company by this point. Their fast-paced skit-based pastiches of Shakespeare and other major literary figures have been deliver...

★★☆☆☆ Vera is raging outside, desperate to penetrate a residential care home. No, this is not a thriller. Vera is a storm that threatens to engulf the world that exists for five elderly ladies in Gravesend, a...

The form of the evening was very much anecdotes about composers, royalty, or both, with appropriate musical interludes interspersed. Some were well known like Elgar (or Eljar, as Lanier spouts, disparagingly) and others ...

John Betjeman always feels like a safe pair of hands. His poems flow, seemingly classic in style, but then broken up by a little twist of humour. Sand in the Sandwiches echoes his poetry – nostalgic without being twee ...

Amidst all the furore of indecency and scandal which surround the history of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the romantic element of this story is often ignored or forgotten. This play chooses to emphasise that this is a love...

The play revolves around the Price family – Fran, the strong, often abrasive, matriarch; Bob, the gentle paterfamilias; Pip, the eldest, a career-woman and mother; Mark, the first-born son, something of a cipher to beg...

Some of the subtle humour of the play is in the gentle rivalry from area to area across Ulster, and the soft differences in regional accents are impeccable. There are no gimmicks here – very few props; a little (very e...

I think a sense of social consciousness and moral outrage makes A Tale of Two Cities the perfect play to stage in 2016 – a tale in which a bitter class struggle rages; where the fear of one’s own fellow countryman is...

Glasgow Girls tells the story of what it’s like to be an immigrant in a strange place, somewhere you’ve never even heard of. The girls of the play arrive in Glasgow and are allowed to live there for most of their tee...

Theatre company Spymonkey takes each of the 75 onstage deaths from Shakespeare’s plays and acts them out over a couple of hours. The production asks questions about the nature of theatre, and why we attend plays – to...

Mercury Theatre Colchester has arrived at the Oxford Playhouse this week with their polished, confident, and cringingly funny production of Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park. Set in the same suburban American house, with t...