By Maisie Jennings

On Monday night, I had the pleasure of watching DUCT’s production of Noël Coward’s Hay Fever, a century after its first performance in 1925. Hay Fever forms the sticky, hazardous web spun around the eccentric Bliss family, and each of their four guests who are inevitably tangled up in it. Coward’s script blends high farce, slapstick comedy, and a sharp, winking satire directed at the British upper-class – all wielded deftly by director Abby Greenhalgh and the play’s sparkling cast and crew. 

Taking my seat in the Assembly Rooms Theatre, I was struck by the cleverness of the set, effortlessly curated to emulate the jaunty untidiness of a bourgeois-bohemian family home. There are ornate lamps, a silver tea set, a piano – relics of Coward’s contemporary staging, but not anachronistic amongst more modern elements. The effect is wonderfully timeless – perhaps another convention eschewed by the Blisses. This is further emulated in the character’s costuming; a mash-up of jeans, linen shirts, slinky evening gowns, and a fabulous string of pearls allow the play some temporal movement, whilst retaining the careless, offhand nature of the Bliss’ old money fashion. When siblings Sorel (Martha Buttle) and Simon (Samuel Bentley) languidly move about the stage, foppishly draped on sofas, and waxing lyrical about vaguely artistic nonsense, their movements are organic and instinctive. Even as their spats intensify, there is very little loss of this sense of authenticity. As Sorel, Buttle is razor-sharp, energetically firing disdain towards the other characters with a bored precision. Bentley’s presence as Simon is just as lively – his snarky retorts and scornful asides are particularly funny moments scattered through the course of the play. 

It must be said that Alannah O’Hare’s portrayal of Bliss matriarch and retired actress, Judith, is a delight. She sweeps across the stage, demanding cigarettes and vigorously reenacting the stardom of her youth. Her vocal inflections are perfectly extravagant – a stunningly bad, breathy rendition of ‘Frère Jacques’ in the second act is particularly hilarious. David, her husband, played by Ben Oliver, has a more understated presence on stage. The minutiae of his gestures, body language, and vocal choices are affected, somewhat preoccupied, and more softly flamboyant. Judith and David exchange love and contempt like canapés for their guests; indeed, the guests themselves are also passed around in a strange game of sexual competition. Fun for all the family? 

The guests are also skilful actors, working with more subtle characterisation. Liv Fancourt is stellar as Jackie Coryton – airy, giggly, and startled. The painfully awkward small-talk between Jackie and Richard (Oscar Dunfield Prayero) particularly stands out. Both characters struggle under the restraint of manners, desperately trying to make polite conversation amidst the midsummer madness. Myra Arundel (Maariya Khalid) is cool, charming, and a challenge to the whims and commands of the Bliss household. She, too, has mastered the art of subtle, biting wit hidden beneath seemingly innocuous remarks. Sandy Tyrrell (Cillian Knowles) provides a grounding presence within the play’s havoc; he is endearing, naive, and hilariously steals toast from the Bliss’ breakfast tray. The breakfast tray, I must add, is carried about the stage by Cara Crofts as the Bliss’ French maid, Clara. Croft’s accent is mostly convincing, and she busies around the set breezily.  

The cast and crew of Hay Fever truly extract the very best qualities of Coward’s text and the result is wonderfully silly. I think it’s always a joy to see actors really having fun with their roles – the cast relished every line, and, meeting them with near constant laughter, so did the audience. 

By Edward Bayliss

Yesterday, I watched the first night of Walkabout Productions’ Room for Doubt. Watched, it seems, is the wrong word. As the UK’s largest immersive student theatre company, Walkabout have for almost three years been delivering interactive performances, wherein the audience play a part in the action. Co-founder of Walkabout Max Shanagher, funnily enough, was a Wayzgoose team member from 2023-2024.    

It’s 8:25 and the audience are sitting, standing, waiting – awkwardly – in a peculiar room in St. John’s College. We are told that the jury session will begin soon, but that we are waiting for ‘Patrick.’ Is this part of the show? I suspect so. The cast members (three of which are in the waiting room with us) attempt, painfully, to make small talk, and I don’t know whether to laugh, play along, or bury my nose in my notebook. We learn soon after, that according to the performance, we have just returned from a fifteen minute break and are back on jury duty.

There are six ‘core jurors’ (the cast) and the rest of us form the peripheral jurors; we are all given the chance to vote on three occasions as to the guilt or innocence of the defendant. At its crux, the performance is designed to cradle the euthanasia debate. The accused is a nurse, named but not seen, who has administered an overdose of morphine to her terminally ill patient. The production navigates evidence and testimonies which we, the peripheral jury, are invited to read aloud, and make our own judgement upon. The performance urges us to consider both flaws in the institution of British justice, and the flaws in jurors’ characters, both of which will provoke argument and debate.  

The immediacy of our involvement in the performance is mostly very effective. We all sit around a table as jurors might – the boundary between actor and audience is incredibly vague – initially, a fly on the wall observer would not be able to tell the difference. The cast also offer unscripted asides to their neighbours, met admittedly with mixed enthusiasm by last night’s audience, but which afford a greater sense of realism and often, humour.  

Room for Doubt’s writer, Raphael Henrion, studies deference, passivity, anger, frustration, and courage in the characters of his play. This pot of personalities boils over more than once. Alliances are formed, factions are established, and it soon becomes less about the case at hand and more about the jurors themselves. Gusts of rage from Mable (Grace Graham) swell as she bites back at her juror nemesis Alex (Noah Benson), both claiming to sit on the right side of justice in their assessment of the seemingly far off defendant, Emily Carter. The production however does not rely solely on loud confrontation and clash. Oli (Daisy Martin) gives convincing breaks as she cools the temperature of the room with her personal story of a terminally ill family member. The gravity of the situation jars bathetically against the ignorance and idiocy of juror Patrick (Matthew Lo), whose judicial laziness works as effective comedic respite. Overseeing the process is the long-suffering head juror Sasha (Orlin Todorov), who cues topics of debate, readings of evidence, and generally buttresses the performance with a sufficient sense of structure.

The show culminates in a final vote. We now realise we are voting on much more than the guilt or innocence of Emily Carter, but rather on the state of justice in general, and on the place of contextual morality within the unbending bounds of the law. Have no objections, this is quite a remarkable dramatic arrangement. So, get the chance to hear the case and cast your vote.

Performances are at 6:00pm and 8:00pm on 10th & 11th June in St. Johns’ Vasey Rooms.

By Matthew Dodd

Around halfway through The Phoenician Scheme – the latest feature from Wes Anderson – Benicio Del Toro’s lead character, the existential arms dealer Zsa-Zsa Korda, takes a pin out of a hand grenade, refusing to return it until his associate Marty, played by Jeffrey Wright, agrees to cover a substantial portion of a funding deficit in the titular infrastructure project. In response to this, Marty says somewhat drolly, somewhat earnestly, ‘I suppose I’m moved by this absurd performance.’ It is a sentiment which might as well apply to the film at large: a strange and often inscrutable work which, nevertheless, leaves an indelible emotional footprint on the heart and mind of the viewer. A madcap, globetrotting adventure replete with fez-wearing nightclub owners, sardonic terrorists and semi-incestuous second cousins, The Phoenician Scheme represents Anderson at both his most eccentric and his most clear cut.

Anderson has charted a strange filmic course over the last decade. With 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, it seemed that the cinematic establishment had finally accepted Wes Anderson as not simply an indie-darling, but a serious director, an auteur. Its nine Oscar nominations felt like his induction into the ranks of the great living filmmakers, regardless of the fact that Anderson himself went home empty handed. Since then, however, the director has refused to stay within the sweet spot of critical acclaim carved out by The Grand Budapest, instead moving further and further into the strange, idiosyncratic and divisive. 2024 saw Anderson win his first Oscar for the short film The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, the sole consideration the Academy has afforded him this decade. His last two films – The French Dispatch and Asteroid City – are marked by a deliberate complexity and emotional detachment which has left them somewhat controversial amongst his devotees. In many ways, The Phoenician Scheme is a move away from that convolution which has become staple and is, instead, a (broadly) straightforward espionage thriller about a father and a daughter. There are no meta-narratives, no plays-within-plays, no knowing winks to the camera to remind you that none of this is real. And yet, there is still an opacity about The Phoenician Scheme which can leave it feeling somewhat subdued. Whereas The French Dispatch and Asteroid City make a point out of their absurdity – the former as a sprawling ode to journalism and human life, the latter a narrative as thorny and overwrought as the melancholy of its characters – there is a sense in which this film finds no such certain footing from which to launch its hyperactive eccentricity. In short, it might seem there’s no method to the madness. 

The Phoenician Scheme tells the story of the plutocrat Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro) and his attempts to curry favour from various business associates to fund his massive infrastructure project in the Levant, the eponymous scheme. He is accompanied by estranged daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton) and tutor-cum-secretary-cum-spy Bjorn (Michael Cera). The whole affair is deliberately silly: Korda tries desperately to cover ‘the gap’ caused by a supra-national business council artificially inflating the costs of the ‘bashable rivets’ needed for construction. Along the way, the Scheme itself becomes secondary to the emotional journey Korda goes through. Constantly the subject of failed assassination attempts, Korda’s becomes a tale of a man rebirthing himself. He is dogged by strange visions of a heavenly courtroom at which God (Bill Murray) litigates the matter of his eternal soul. Liesl, his daughter, has become a nun since last seeing her father, and it is the reformation of their relationship which forms the emotional heart of The Phoenician Scheme. In a sense, the film retreads the path of Anderson’s 2001 The Royal Tenenbaums, another story about a deadbeat dad trying to make amends. In a more obvious sense, however, this is a wholly different beast. There is no moment in The Phoenician Scheme as obvious as Chas Tenenbaum breaking down and telling his father ‘I’ve had a rough year dad’ or as joyous as Royal and his grandsons riding on the back of a garbage truck to Paul Simon’s Me and Julio down by the Schoolyard.  Instead, this later Anderson builds up a world of cumulative absurdity out of which the reality of emotional connection faintly shines. 

In a heightened, exaggerated and very silly way, The Phoenician Scheme tells the story of a man who wants to move past the errors of his ways and forge a new path. Being a Wes Anderson film, this quite straightforward story has of course to be submerged under metric tonnes of pastel interiors, fast-talking bureaucrats and pristinely fitted suits. It is, to its credit, one of Anderson’s most unabashedly entertaining films. The performances – especially those of Threapleton and Cera – are ecstatically joyful, the narrative is outlandishly fun, the direction and production design is typically magnificent. And yet, moreso than others of Anderson’s work, the obfuscation of the film’s emotional centre can leave it feeling, at best, subdued and, at worst, detached. The walls of hyperreality are never quite punctured by sincerity in the way of his other films. 

Zsa-Zsa Korda is a character who ought by rights be dead and ought by rights to deserve it. The drama of the films comes from Korda’s post-death reinvention – as a father, as a Catholic, as a good man. This is a tale of male egos, pasts and presents, mutable identities and empathy. At each stop, Korda is forced to give up something in pursuit of success, whether it be an emotional confession, his own blood, his hand in marriage or, finally, all his worldly possessions. The film itself acts as a judgement of the character’s soul, sanctifying his spirit at each turn. Indeed, the film’s primary antagonist – if we can call him such – is Benedict Cumberbatch’s Uncle Nubar, a character who is set up explicitly as a monitory double for Korda himself. Nubar is described by Korda as ‘the son of my father’ and, quite possibly, the father of his daughter. They are one and the same, with Nubar representing the excess of that moral deficiency which Korda has long inhabited. Defeating him, he defeats himself. Throughout the film, various stone-faced assassins make attempts on Korda’s life, to which he dryly comments ‘I think I recognise that assassin.’ He is, quite literally, haunted by the ghosts of his pasts. Korda begins the film viewing his daughter as a business partner, a probationary heir. By the end, he accepts their connection as one beyond the mere biological, assuring her that, regardless of her real parentage, she remains his daughter. In many ways, The Phoenician Scheme constitutes Anderson’s most spiritual film. Liesl’s faith is the subject of numerous jokes throughout the film – early on, her rosary beads are replaced with a garishly bejewelled secular equivalent – but ends up central to the thematic conclusion. Owing to the influence of his daughter, Korda converts to Catholicism, a conversion cemented by an over-the-top action set piece which ends with a model dam bursting and dousing him in a tide of water. He is, in this way, baptised. He rejects riches and power for family and simplicity. The ending is a classically Christian one of humility and moral rectification. That said, where the traditionally religious narrative might land its hero in a monastery, Anderson favours an art-deco bohemian restaurant. The aesthetic and the spiritual are not, for Anderson, mutually exclusive.

The epilogue, in which the family are plunged into poverty with father and daughter reunited around a barrel playing card games, though not as punchy as Max Fischer slow-mo dancing with the woman of his dreams or Van Morrison playing out Royal Tenenbaum’s funeral, nevertheless finds a steadfast emotional footing. Out of a narrative of exaggerated absurdity, we are left with the final image of our two heroes, a father and his long-estranged daughter, enjoying the simplest of life’s pleasures. Perhaps, this is The Phoenician Scheme’s message to us, that none of the pomp and ceremony, the excess of style and riches, matters so much as family, as kindness. It is a strange, wild and often underwhelming film, but I cannot deny that I was moved. 

Who’s who – Discovering Identity in Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme

By Emilia Brookfield-Pertusini

One of the hallmarks of a classic Wes Anderson flick, almost as notorious as a symmetrically staged tableaux with a camera pan from the left, is a roll call of all your quirky looking stars. Picture the scene; it’s the start of The Royal Tenenbaums, Ravel’s ‘String Quartet in F Major’ is plucking away against a flip-book of striking scenes, each muse placed slap-bang center with action swirling around them. ‘Ahhh! I thought I recognised them’. ‘Oh yes! [insert star’s name] is great.’ The clamours of the Anderson cast list ensues. Identity is key to these quaint pictures, and in the midst of his middle-life crisis induced scriptwriting, Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme launches into an attack of identity headlong. Like with Asteroid City, the film focuses on makeup and artifice, attempting to use the precision of each piquant shot to display the loneliness and shallowness beneath. The marching towards the next tableau is merely another way to move us on to a new crisis of identity.  Charming as each curation is, The Phoenician Scheme’s self-conscious concern with its appearance leaves us with a film that is timid, with a cliche sense of adventure, departing into the realms of boring deflation. 

The promise of an Anderson feature starring the ever-awkward Richard Ayoade seemed like a manifestation long in the waiting. However, I think I could only remember 5 things he said, if that. Likewise, a silent Willam Defoe in the background of the absurdity cliche heaven segways, the forgettable apparition of Scarlett Johanssen, and the overshadowed Riz Ahmed, dissolve into the ennui of the film’s tired sighing. The Phoenician Scheme essentially follows three archetypes; the nun (Mia Threapleton), the reckless plutocrat (Benedicto del Toro), and the awkward, sniffling academic (Michael Cera). Any other person is nullified by their totemic identities, becoming one-note statues in the background. The reluctance for any sort of meaningful character breakdown within the film further cements its stagnancy. Despite her fall from grace,  Sister Liesel’s material habits and power hungry stubbornness and insistence mean she is ever the troubled nun in our eyes; these characters never really change, despite the ego death the film cries for.  The currents that cause the ripples and lapses of character are shallow and overdone, providing us with little substance outside the basic, espionage plot. The nun is really rather dissatisfied with her life, confused due to her mother’s murder, and her cloistered existence acts to stubbornly reject a world she feels detached from. The billionaire uses vanity to create intelligence. The academic is a spy, and wants more than bugs in his life. This parade of personas based on dissatisfaction ultimately makes the film itself a dissatisfaction, as each insecurity breeds into a cliched attempt of reconciliation and change.  

The instance to enshire these identities to these understood archetypes provides a catalyst for an overwhelmingly one-note performance from all. Sister Liesl provides us with an unwaveringly dead face, shrouded in unhappiness and wanting to be anywhere else, always. Zsa-Zsa speaks as if he has one eyebrow raised, always. Bjorn speaks as if preparing to be struck, with a truly Scandinavian direction, always. The compounding of their identities means even when challenged by a break, a relife never arrives. The black comedy runs stale, growing harder to digest upon each minute of the runtime. 

Maybe I have grown too old for Wes Anderson. The crisis of a plane crash, and the angsty black and white shots of heaven no longer amuse me. Perhaps my identity has moved away from the tweeness and symbolic affect of each character, leaving their identities stifling and my want for the Wes Anderson of old left unsatiated. That being said, there is still hope, with 2023s Roald Dahl adaptations solidifying Wes Anderson’s identification as the hard hitting, mature maker of twee. The Phoenician Scheme remains to be solved, and was left to discover who it was without being given a foundation of chance.