All for Love

at Oxford

A Garden Setting

for Dryden

Alexas . .... TONI PHILLIPS Ventidius . ..... GEOFFREY TETLOW Antony ....... ROGER CROUCHER Cleopatra ... .. ANNE JENKINS Dolabella .... . ADRIAN BRINE

Octavia ... .. BARBARA SCOTr Produced by NEVILL COGHILL. assisted

by STEPHEN AARON

FROM OUR DRAMATIC CRITIC

OXFORD. JUNE 18

A leafy garden may not be the ideal setting for classical tragedy, but on a still June night the calm seclusion of the walled garden in New College is curiously well suited to Dryden's All for Love. The serenity of the setting favours the measured periods in which the play bids us consider with decent formality and good sense the mixed motives and accidental pressures of circumstance driving a great Roman to renounce an empire for a woman. The players of the Oxford University Dramatic Society could hardly be expected to do more than rough justice to the dignity and propriety of Dryden's dialogue, but they do well enough, especially the men, and their performance certainly succeeds in suggesting the consummate skill with which a story we know best as a masterpiece of romantic irregularities is given classical coherence and nobility.

Mr. Nevill Coghill and his assistant Producer, Mr. Stephen Aaron, do not follow what has become common practice in recent years and mount the play as an imitation of an eighteentb-century imitation of ancient Roman and Egyptian manners, with the men in pseudo-classical armour and Restoration wigs and the women as though waiting for Lely to transfer them gracefully to canvas. Antony and his friends are dressed as modern playgoers like to believe Roman soldiers dressed; the Egyptians are in costumes vaguely suggestive of Egypt; and Cleopatra and Octavia and their maids wear gowns which are rather odd in design and very unhappy in colour but defy any imputation of archaeological pedantry.

The main action takes Place in front of a cluster of tall trees with long entrances and exits from either side, but such was the stillness of the evening that all the company were heard without difficultv in the tiered auditorium. The company bring out well the play's scrupulous unity of situation and its intensity of intrigue. Thev thereby reveal a weakness which works against it more insistently than its supposed lack of passion. The vacillations of Antony are so forcefully delineated that it is hard for us to find any point of sympathy with him. He is so pitifully vulnerable to the latest suggestion put to him that we begin to feel that his loyal friends are wasting their eloquence on him. Mr. Roger Croucher succeeds in suggesting strongly a mind into which passion has eaten corrosively, and though his curious prowling gait is unfortunate, the portrait remains clear cut and interesting.

Mr. Geoffrey Tetlow is an excellent Ventidius and plays the dominating Part in his famous scene with Antony. Miss Anne Jenkins is a Cleopatra...