FOUR STARS

Productions of Sophie Treadwell’s influential 1928 play Machinal are as rare as hen’s teeth, so it is a remarkable coincidence that Oxford should have seen two of them barely six months apart.

The Oxford University Dramatic Society found an appropriate venue for a play that comes to focus on capital punishment by performing last August in the former Oxford prison. Last week students of the Oxford School of Drama gave their well-managed account of this important piece of expressionist drama at Pegasus Theatre.

That the two productions seemed very similar in style and tone obviously owed something to their both having casts of uniformly young actors. More important, though, is the fact that Treadwell’s stage instructions are very specific about what is required. An authority on the playwright has written of “the strong influence over productions that she infused in the script”.

So the cacophony of office sounds that begins the play, the robotic, staccato delivery of some of the lines and the machine-like movements of the actors are all specified by the writer to set a special tone from the start.

This all contrasts tellingly with the direct, natural way the story is told. In a series of nine episodes, with titles like At Home, Honeymoon and The Law, we follow the story of a Young Woman, as she is called, which is based loosely on that of convicted murderess Ruth Snyder whose trial was reported on by Treadwell in her role as a journalist.

Directing for the Oxford School of Drama, Robin Belfield took a bold decision in choosing to cast a different student as the Young Woman in each of the episodes. It was Alexine Lafaber in the first office scene where we learn she is being wooed by the boss George H Jones (Owen Jenkins), followed by Chloe Gass as she tells her mother (Lydia King) of her equivocal attitude to the romance, Emma Ballantine showing her decidedly uneasy with George and the idea of sex on their honeymoon and Flora Denman depicting her as positively neurotic after the delivery of her daughter.

Cassie Bradley’s turn sees her in a bar where a former colleague (Petrie Elizabeth Porter) introduces her to a young man (Ashraf Ejjbair) with whom she is shown (by Sophie Cookson) very soon to be in a sexual relationship. Lydia King takes over in the episode preceding the murder of the husband, Georgina Fairbanks for the very well managed courtroom scene at her murder trial, and Zelina Rebeiro for her final date with the electric chair.

While this might all sound rather confusing, the device in fact worked very well, with the Young Woman easily identified as each scene began by her wearing a bright red item of clothing to contrast with the monochrome costumes worn by other characters. That the woman remained convincingly the same character as the play went on was evidence of how well the Oxford School of Drama is teaching its students.

What was confusing, for those unfamiliar with the play, was the casting of a female student (Georgina Fairbanks) for the young man being picked up by an older predatory gay (a hoot in the OUDS production) in the bar where the Young Woman meets her lover. Here it seemed as if he was picking up a girl with a taste for wearing men’s clothing.

There is to be a further performance of Machinal at the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, at London’s Royal Court on Sunday, April 21.