Whatever else you are doing between now and next Saturday, drop it and ring Ox. 305305 immediately to book for TRAVESTIES at the Simkins Lee Theatre at Lady Margaret Hall. This hilarious show is unmissable and the funniest thing you will see all Christmas season.

At a time of winter chills and general insecurity, what could be more reassuring than taking the children to a bright, cheery and thoroughly traditional pantomime?

Anybody who saw the Creation Theatre Company’s Christmas entertainment given at the Cowley Mini-plant in the Mirror Tent last year will be keenly looking forward to this one. And they will not be disappointed.

When will directors learn that there is something unsatisfactory about a whole production in which the actors speak in assumed accents? No matter how good they are -or how much coaching they have had - the effect will rarely be wholly convincing and when the accent is Southern states of America, it may be a tiny bit comic too. In this student production the accents are not wholly convincing and the result is unfortunate.

Richard Bean’s new play, The Big Fellah, is about IRA activists in America in the 1970s and 1980s. It follows the story of a youngish Irishman called Michael Doyle who decides to get involved with the IRA in New York. He shelters an IRA fugitive called Rory who appeals to an American court to give him status as a freedom fighter rather than as a mere violent criminal.

The SILVER TASSIE, a play by Seán O’Casey, at the Oxford Playhouse. The visits to Oxford of the Druid theatre company are something anticipated with excitement by Playhouse fans. This time they have taken on the considerable challenge of Sean O’Casey’s 1929 play The Silver Tassie, set in the First World War. It is a strange play, lengthy, involved and wide-ranging, with a first act in naturalistic style and others in what can perhaps be called expressionistic mode, as the play struggles to present on stage the full hellishness of the battlefield and the lunacy of the war experience. The impact this has is considerable, and bearing in mind that this country in 2010 has been at war now for nearly nine years, I think that this play, sombre though it is, deserves to be seen. In fact, every young man who is thinking of joining the army and going off to Afghanistan, ought to go and see it.

“It’s seventy years ago! Ancient history! Can’t we just move on?” exclaims Sasha, the youngest member of the Jewish Roth family half way through this play, when the subject of the Holocaust threatens to take over an already tense and fraught family gathering. Just because they are Jewish, do they have to remain perpetually obsessed with persecutions that happened, in some cases, thousands of years ago?

This production of Shakespeare’s last major play is fast, bold, full of action and only slightly marred by eccentricities that will not stop the majority of people from enjoying it. It uses experimental music and sound to meet to create the strange, magical atmosphere demanded by the play, combining this with a certain amount of light-hearted fun. Both the story and the comedy have survived the somewhat drastic cuts of director Mick Gordon, although it must be admitted that the masque of the three goddesses has been ditched in favour of a quick song, and Prospero’s stern speech to Ferdinand, his prospective son-in-law, about the perils of pre-marital sex, has been fearlessly axed.

This production of Peter Schaffer’s classic play about the Spanish conquest of Peru is an exciting event with much to offer - spectacle, music, highly creative sets and costumes, symbolism and dance. It is a very ambitious undertaking for this student company and is in many ways a triumph.

If there has to be a last season of the Garsington Opera, Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the ideal work to celebrate everything unique and wonderful about this much-loved Oxford festival. This was quintessential Garsington.