Top Girls By Caryl Churchill Directed by Max Stafford-Clark One of the seminal plays of the twentieth century, Top Girls flashes with razor-sharp wit and ingenious theatricality. 1980, England. Go-getting businesswoman Marlene is hosting a dinner party to celebrate her promotion to MD of the Top Girls Employment Agency. Her guests, all powerful women from myth and history, make for an extraordinary gathering. Max Stafford-Clark directed the premiere of Top Girls in 1982 and this brand new production received rave reviews in the West End in 2011. As relevant today as at its inception, Caryl Churchill's witty and daring landmark play is a moving study of success and reveals the chilling reality of those left behind. OPINION Out of Joint, led by Max Stafford-Clark, has been at the forefront of championing new plays for years and Top Girls is one of the best. This remarkable play deserves its place in the literary canon and speaks as strongly to the audience now, as when it was first staged.

I was delighted to see the new Theatre open at the Old Fire Station on Tuesday evening. The old one, shabby though it was, had seen many a fascinating and rewarding dramatic production. The building now has been refurbished as a result of the government’s Places of Change Programme and houses the Crisis Skylight Centre as well as the new theatre. Everything is bright, colourful and cheerful, and with the Christmas trees and decorations sparkling, it gave us a warm welcome.

There is nothing like a good musical to brighten up a cold and damp Oxford December evening, which is what you get from attending South Pacific at Oxford’s New Theatre. Certainly, this Lincoln Centre production of South Pacific set on the island of Guadalcanal, put a smile on the face and a spring in the step of the audience, as they left (7 December 2011) at the end of this exciting performance.

If you are looking for good old-fashioned family Christmas fun, then going to see Mother Goose at the Oxford Playhouse certainly fits the bill. Both kids and adults will enjoy this story, full of humour, political comment and fun. Even the song and dance routines were enjoyable. It was great to see and hear the audience laughing, clapping and singing along to the songs that ranged from The Monkey’s ‘I m a believer’ to the Mikado’s ‘Three little maids from school’.

As with all Gilbert and Sullivan productions, this Opera della Luna performance delivers what is best in good entertaining social comment and satire on the class barriers that lovers face, even today. The production was originally set in the Victorian period. Jeff Clarke the director of this performance has updated it to the 'flower power' era. However, I felt many of the observations made could have equally been applied today in this class and celebrity obsessed world we live in, where much of the ruling political, entertainment and business elites, is still dominated by Oxbridge graduates from wealthy families.

Last night’s, Oxford’s Theatre Guild’s performance of Macbeth was full of percussive bashing of swords and Shakespeare’s magical language that made this two and a half hour performance simply come alive! Macbeth, who was played with passion by Peter Malin, is the man who would be King of Scotland, who struggles with ambition, doubt and his conscience as he takes the treacherous path to kill King Duncan and many of his family and supporters.

This production of Aeschylus’s tragedy, The Libation Bearers, here re-titled Clytemnestra, is the Oxford Greek Play - a triennial event in which students perform a classical drama in the original language. Although most of the audience had to follow the text in translation on a screen, the performance was still rivetting and the story largely told itself in mime and through a daring and original musical score composed and directed by Alexander Reut-Hobbs.

Location, location, location, It can make a production and it can also do its best to kill it. Creation Theatre’s new production of Antony and Cleopatra is splendid in many respects, and the lead actors, Tom Peters as Mark Antony and Lizzie Hopley as Cleopatra, both give memorable and distinguished performances of their complex, demanding roles. Antony, unkempt and louche but tough under it all, is aware that his obsession with Cleopatra is sapping his effectiveness as a soldier and a ruler. He chain-smokes his way through the tense confrontation with Octavius, and thoroughly enjoys carousing on Pompey’s ship when a timely truce is made with the enemies of Rome.

If you saw last year’s production of The Tempest by the Oxford Shakespeare Company, or their hilarious and memorable Twelfth Night the year before that, you will have high expectations of their new show, The Comedy of Errors. And you will not be disappointed. From the very first moment when the show bursts into life with a dance, it is full of energy, vitality and verve. There is not a hint of reverence anywhere for this early comedy by Shakespeare - the lines are there, yes, but transformed into a rip-roaring entertainment with clowns, puppetry, absurd sound-effects, and cheeky visual jokes.

You won’t be able to go and see Conor Lovett’s one-man performance of First Love because it was on for only one night. The morose, gloomy, ribald black humour, the emphasis on death and animal existence, even scatology, was too much for two women in the audience who walked out half-way through, unable to stand it when the protagonist recalled inscribing his beloved’s name on a cow-pat, which he calls a “heifer-pat”. Perhaps they had hoped to see a play based on Turgenev’s story “First Love”, and if so they would have been very disappointed. A tramp meets a tart on a bench near a canal, moves in with her to get a roof over his head and then leaves when she gives birth to a child as he can’t stand the noise. That’s all there is to it. It’s not great passion. “Either you love or you don’t,” it concludes abruptly.

Mark’s performance, last night (13 September 2011) at the Oxford Playhouse was what you expect from an accomplished and professional performer. It is clear he really loves his work. He certainly has a passion for film. It is not surprising this film critic is a popular guest for BBC Five Live and the Culture Show. Mark certainly provides value for money.

Mike Bartlett’s play “Love, Love, Love”, currently on at the Playhouse, is not one I can honestly recommend. For a start, it is not a good evening’s entertainment. The dialogue is bland, the action is static and none of the actors are outstanding. The two females in the cast, Lisa Jackson and Rosie Wyatt, both have harsh unattractive voices and they shout throughout as if they were addressing a deaf person. Jackson over-acts in a somewhat unsubtle way. The story is meant to cover a period of forty years, yet by the end the central characters have not put on a pound in weight or got one grey hair between them. What’s their secret?

"Bronte", Polly Teale's play about the Bronte family, is being performed at the Oxford Playhouse by the Shared Experiencecompany which is now the theatre's resident theatrical company. http://www.sharedexperience.org.uk/

This production by Creation Theatre Company of Marlowe’s tragedy Dr Faustus takes place in the unusual venue of the Norrington Room at Blackwell’s Bookshop in Broad Street. The underground place, stuffed with thousands of books, is appropriate for many reasons.

This highly original, prize-winning play about the legendary soprano Maria Callas uses the idea of a master class to recreate her powerful personality and tell her life story in retrospect.Towards the end of her life, when she could no longer perform, Maria Callas gave a few master classes at the Juilliard School of Music in New York. For the students in the play, this is a privilege that can turn out to be an ordeal.

The Seagull is a classic and this production is unmissable. Chekhov is one of the absolute greats and there are people who buy houses in Oxford for the chance to see this sort of production of a truly wonderful play. Set in an isolated country house in the Russian provinces, hundreds of miles from Moscow, the story concerns the aspirations and rivalries of various artists and writers who gather as the guests of the elderly Sorin. His sister, Madame Irina Arkadina, is a celebrated actress and a rather awful person. A successful woman with a liberated lifestyle, she is also vain, selfish, affected, and insensitive to the needs of younger people.

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.