Previewing the top theatre shows for 2015

With the fairy lights and tinsel stowed away for another year, it is time to look ahead and prepare for exciting times on the local theatre scene during 2015.

Oxford Playhouse is ready to wring our withers with a couple of its early visiting productions. Stephen Mallatratt’s hugely successful adaptation of Susan Hill’s classic chiller The Woman in Black is on from January 26, to be followed a month later by Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

I am conducting an interview with Susan for publication in next week’s Oxford Times, so no more on this offering for the moment. Macbeth is coming from Filter, whose irreverent production of Twelfth Night will be remembered by many.

There will be laughter as well as shivers early on too. An adaptation of a PG Wodehouse classic Jeeves and Wooster in Perfect Nonsense comes from February 10, with a delightful plot concerning Gussie Fink-Nottle’s amorous ambitions and lots of silliness to do with a cow creamer. Direction is in the capable hands of Sean Foley.

This is followed the week after by a student production of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off, which most consider among the funniest comedies ever written. The story follows a hapless group of thespians putting on a production of Nothing On. There follows a hilarious sequence of forgotten lines, missed entrances and emotional ructions among the cast.

Not to be missed for me from March 10 is Oxford Theatre Guild with its production of Friedrich Schiller’s Mary Stuart, a play best known to me as the source of Donizetti’s opera Maria Stuarda. The action includes a meeting between Mary and her cousin Elizabeth, which, as everyone knows, never actually occurred. Still, why let the facts get in the way of a good story?

More politics, this time bang up to date, comes from April 8 with a production of David Hare’s The Absence of War from Headlong, the Rose Theatre Kingston and Sheffield Theatres. The play follows the career of Labour Party leader George Jones, who is planning a move into No 10, beset by a hostile media and divisions in his party. Sound familiar? George has three weeks to convince the great British public that he’s their man. But how much compromise is he prepared to make?

At Oxford’s New Theatre, the spring season features the traditional mixture of big-name one-nighters interspersed by top musicals, dance and opera.

In the first category comes the visits of Chas & Dave (February 16), Al Murray (March 9), Katherine Jenkins (March 13) Alan Carr (April 9 and May 7) and Michael Ball (April 8) The big shows begin today with the Russian Ice Stars and Snow White on Ice, followed from Jan 28 with the visit of the Olivier Award-winning musical Top Hat, with music and words by Irving Berlin, based on RKO’s motion picture.

Stepping into the shoes of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the lead roles of Jerry Travers and Dale Tremont, are Alan Burkitt and Charlotte Gooch, who both return to Top Hat having previously performed these roles in the West End. They are joined by Clive Hayward who returns as Horace Hardwick, the role he played in the West End, Rebecca Thornhill as Madge Hardwick, Sebastien Torkia as Alberto Beddini and John Conroy as Horace’s valet Bates.

Jerry Travers (Alan Burkitt), the famous American tap dancer, arrives in London to appear in his first West End show. Travers meets the irresistible Dale Tremont (Charlotte Gooch), the girl of his dreams, and follows her across Europe in an attempt to win her heart.

In a comparatively rare offering of a straight play, the New Theatre is also playing host to the National Theatre’s hugely successful production One Man, Two Guvnors, directed by Nicholas Hytner. The tale was adapted by writer Richard Bean from Carlo Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters, with the action shifted from Italy to Brighton.

Masterful: Jasmyn Banks, Edward Hancock, Gavin Spokes, Derek Elroy and Shaun Williamson in One Man, Two Guvnors

Fired from his skiffle band, Francis Henshall becomes a minder to Roscoe Crabbe. But Roscoe is really Rachel, posing as her own dead brother, who’s been killed by her boyfriend Stanley Stubbers. Francis spots the chance of an extra meal ticket and takes a job with Stubbers. But to prevent discovery, he must keep his two guvnors apart.

At the Pegasus Theatre, long noted for its adventurous programming, one highlight of the season will be Tyrone Huggins’s The Honey Man which is coming on March 12 and 13 from Judy Owen Ltd in association with Birmingham REP. The Honey Man is a funny, moving and compelling story of growing up and growing old. It tells of individual responsibility and shared history, of dying bees, healing herbs and the human need for friendship.

Honey Man is an ageing West Indian recluse who shuns the modern world and contents himself with saving bees, nurturing plants and concocting herbal remedies in a derelict cottage somewhere on the edge of rural England. Misty is the fiery, apparently self-centered, weed-smoking teenage daughter from hell. Rebelling against her aristocratic family heritage and preoccupied by her parents’ divorce, she Skypes and texts her way through her relationships, full of anger and anxiety as she contemplates an uncertain future. One summer their lives collide leading to an unlikely friendship and to the unveiling of a secret hidden in a painting, which links the past, present and destiny of these two sharply contrasting outsiders in ways they never imagined.