Burton Taylor

Tuesday 2nd, Thursday 4th, Saturday 6th, 7.30p.m.

“Revival is both delightful and thought provoking in its half-playful, half-elegiac exploration of the boundaries and relations of whimsy, truth, creativity and authenticity.” Erin Greer ★★★★★

“The whole experience was oddly stripping and intense – I felt as though, as Tyler and Crispin and Fred were revealed as spinners of fantasy, we were too; the spotlight shone on our increasing investment in the play as a kind of reality, an escape from in Tyler’s words, ‘Life. The world. Everything that exists outside those doors.’” Olivia Reilly ★★★★★

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Revival ★★★★★

Written by Carla Neuss

Review by Erin Greer

From the beginning of Revival, it’s clear that we’ve landed in a fantastical alternative world, where the mood evokes a Fellini film and the action is presided over by a bartender suggestive of Willy Wonka. We are in Crispin’s bar, where the menus have been replaced by imagination, and patrons ‘order’ drinks by telling Crispin a story that will inspire his variety of mixology. Crispin’s bar is a place that privileges whimsy over truth, that seeks to revive old decorum, lost grace and the possibility of the bar as a quiet refuge from the harsher realities of the world outside. This character of the bar is particularly important to its first patron, Tyler, a master storyteller whose only self-disclosure sneaks in with the shadows of his stories’ heroic knights and explorers. It is Tyler, not Crispin, who is most jarred by the shift in the bar’s ambiance that begins with the arrival of two new patrons. A priest named Fred tracks in a bit too much evidence of his actual life and the stresses of his clerical services. The other, and more disruptive, addition to the bar clientele is Josephine, a classic femme fatale, mysterious and clever and radiating sexual energies that alter the imaginative space shared by the men. Together, Josephine and Fred threaten the delicate exclusion of contemporary reality from Crispin’s bar.

Revival is both delightful and thought provoking in its half-playful, half-elegiac exploration of the boundaries and relations of whimsy, truth, creativity and authenticity. The performances are all quite strong, but the two stand-outs are Alex Harding’s flamboyant, mysterious and enthralling Tyler, and Ella Faye’s sultry and vulnerable Josephine. Both shine every time they offer Crispin a story to inspire a drink, and Carla Neuss’ versatile writing talents are most fully displayed in these brief narrative monologues. The costumes and extravagant staging perfectly suit the play’s surreal cross between melodrama, farce, and philosophy. There are a few weaker moments when the tone falters and the looseness of the dreamlike allegory gives way to cliché or heavy-handed significance. Fred, for instance, undergoes an unlikely transformation from a shy, mouse-like nerd who keeps to the sidelines, to a genuine preacher, animated and discordantly evangelical as he turns a cocktail into a sacrament. Josephine, too, teeters precariously toward the stereotypical femme fatale whose sharp mind gives her a cynical air of detachment from her own sordidity, and whose emergent background will seem a bit too tidy and familiar to anyone who enjoys pop feminist criticism and films noirs.

Overall, though, this play is well worth seeing. The acting is sharp, the writing both entertaining and stirring, and the ending perfect. Revival challenges the audience to think about the ways we take refuge from our real lives, the ways we tend to cower in the outlines of dreams or roles we play, rather than risking an intermingling of our dreams and our selves. Ultimately, and fantastically, it dares us to leave Crispin’s bar, and find out how our fancies can play into the world that hasn’t been scripted.

Revival ★★★★★

Written by Carla Neuss

Review by Olivia Reilly

The performance of Revival at the BT was the first of the New Writing Festival and the excitement was intense – so much so that shushing started at the slightest sign that it might be beginning before the chatter rose with even more energy than before. Behind the bar was Crispin, the bartender who will mix you any drink you like from a story or an inclination (no vodka allowed) and, leaning on it, Tyler, his regular and the master storyteller.  All of us on and off stage were united by the breathless sensation of waiting for something to begin.

At first however, I was concerned – the freshness of the press preview was missing and Crispin, Tyler and Fred seemed little more than students dressed up in fancier clothes. The magic tricks created anxiety that no amount of rehearsing could dispel and which communicated itself to us – we held our collective breath not with amazement but with fear in case it wouldn’t work. But after about ten minutes the actors began to relax and we followed suit. The onstage choreography of simultaneous gestures became collective as our heads moved to follow the actors as they told tales that gripped our attention in short sentences that conveyed as much as projected films. Even the lighting became meaningful having at first seemed a little clumsy – red for fantasy, white spotlight for individual reality. By the time we came to Jo’s monologues the red had taken on a symbolic quality that indeed pervades the whole performance in the red foam balls and playing cards that represent drinks that in turn gesture towards an object of desire, whether it be fantasy or a lover or a religious belief. The whole experience was oddly stripping and intense – I felt as though, as Tyler and Crispin and Fred were revealed as spinners of fantasy, we were too; the spotlight shone on our increasing investment in the play as a kind of reality, an escape from in Tyler’s words, ‘Life. The world. Everything that exists outside those doors.’

Ella Flaye played the down-trodden escort cum English student, Jo, with sophisticated flair, combining fragility and defiance without succumbing to stereotype, and providing through Carla Neuss’s perceptive and penetrating writing a complex picture of a woman in a space ruled by ‘mostly men’, drawing attention to the sordid possibilities of fantasy, sexually objectified (by herself as well as by circumstance), silenced even by a supposedly liberating and morally enlightened rule that means that only women can address men. Far from allowing her a voice, the rule means that the men can’t tell her there is a rule and so her alienation from and potential to destroy the male safe space is unavoided. The maverick Tyler was presented with intensity and charisma by Alex Harding, and Crispin (Ben Zelenka Martin) was the glue that held it all together, managing to be inscrutable and mysterious and at the same time schoolboy-ish and naive. For me, however, it was Matthew Goldhill as Fred who really stole the show, his acting consistent and unselfconscious, with a sensitivity that never allowed the gradually revealed fact of his religious profession to define the role by slipping into sonorous pedantry or a certainty that would have been jarring, his sole moment of religious confidence all the more striking in contrast with his previous doubt and sense of burden.

Revival is a play that treads a tight-rope between falling into self-parody on the one hand and farce on the other and it is exactly this balance (which was managed almost to perfection) that creates the intoxicating buzz that the performance ultimately achieved. The enormous round of applause at the end said it all and when the actors returned for their bow it was to the realisation of time and distance traversed since the slightly ropy beginning, all par for the course on the opening night. Come to Crispin’s bar and see the talent present right here in Oxford – I did and I won’t be going back to the library tonight – my head is full of stories and inclinations and I’m not ready to go back to reality just yet.