Simon Evans is that rarest of breeds, the modest comedian. Softly-spoken and self-effacing to a fault, he admits to being out of step with the mainstream, but insists that does give him a clear perspective on society – which he regrets is steadily…
‘I’d like four candles, please,” says a customer in Alderman Fitzwarren’s shop, reprising one of Ronnie Barker’s best jokes (now commemorated in the name of JD Wetherspoon’s pub in George Street, Oxford.
FOUR STARS
Chipping Norton Theatre's production of Don Giovanni is a considerable achievement. Scaling down an opera of this magnitude to fit small venues is no easy task, but director Caroline Sharman and her design team have managed to make it seem as though the…
Tolstoy wrote his short novel The Kreutzer Sonata at a time of great personal upheaval.
Adam von Trott was a principal figure in Count Claus von Stauffenberg’s bomb plot of 1944 to assassinate Adolf Hitler. He paid a terrible price for its failure: after days of torture by the Gestapo, he was executed by hanging from a meat hook,…
Jessica Leighton’s work is an intense exploration of the landscapes that fascinate her. She describes it as about shapes and patterns, and she intends each piece to work close up and from a distance, which indeed is the case.
There have got to be very few comedians who utter the sentence “You know, it really is a glorious time to be alive” in the first few minutes of their act. And even fewer still who manage to get away without sounding like either a nauseating…
Perhaps the only beneficiary from the scandal that followed the leaking of MPs’ expenses, aside from the Daily Telegraph, has been the viewing figures for Armando Ianucci’s political comedy The Thick of It.
After its excellent 2007 production of Arthur Miller's The American Clock, the Oxford School of Drama returned to Chipping Norton Theatre last week with a far more familiar offering from the repertoire. Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, with its gallery of…
