EWAN CAMERON picks out two fascinating music shows, fusing the Korean, and the Celtic, with the modern
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Toffs at each other’s throats
Never too far from a farce this ideological enmity gets a serious meaning on the WWI battlefields of Flanders, writes MAYER WAKEFIELD
TOFFING IT OUT: Joe Gill as Keith Rae and Nikolas Salmon as Billy Grenfell
[Mark Douet]
BENJAMIN POTHIER suggests that Palaeolithic cave paintings in Spain point to the ceremonial use of hallucinogenic flora
The bard confirms that the right has a humour bypass, and replays the English Revolution on period instruments
MARIA DUARTE and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Sunny Dancer, Tony, Songs of Forgotten Trees, and The End of Oak Street
JOHN GREEN relishes a powerful and moving drama that explores the lived realities of west London’s Punjabi community
MARTIN HALL welcomes a plea for greater compassion between believer and non-believer via the framework of philosophical enquiry
Into Battle
Greenwich Theatre
HUGH SALMON’S debut is a play of two distinct halves welded together by the extraordinary real-life experiences of its characters which far surpasses its billing as “the true story of a bitter feud at Oxford University.”
The first half is fundamentally concerned with the battle of ideas taking place in the upper echelons of British society at the beginning of the 20th century. The battle is causing ruptures in Balliol College where Etonian toffs are running riot while in the background the House of Lords have just voted to block Asquith’s “People’s Budget.”
It’s difficult to ignore the ironic relevance over a century on.
The often drunk and always irksome Billy Grenfell (Nikolas Salmon) trashes the halls while his virtuous “chief opponent” Keith Rae (Joe Gill) is establishing a Boys’ Club to bridge the social divide between the college and the slums of Oxford.
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