A Review of Oxford Playhouse’s Adult Company’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle

When I stepped foot in an empty auditorium on Saturday evening I’ll admit to having been momentarily confused and a little stunned by the silence of the place so close to the beginning of a performance. But with the direction of serveral ushers, I stepped through the doors to the stage and found myself upon the Oxford Playhouse stage for the first time in eight months. Transformed into a traverse space that wasn’t quite black box but wasn’t a complete breaking of the fourth wall, the stage looked both familiar and oddly alien.

Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle tells the story of a violent uprising in a city one Easter Sunday and of a servant’s journey to save the abandoned infant of one of the town’s leaders. It is a story of political turmoil and conflicted loyalty that ultimately boils down to one of love and family. It is a lengthy narrative that despite only being two hours feels like it drags slightly. Perhaps this is due to the endless travelling of the first half. This first half is carried by Jasmin Anderson’s Grusha, while the ensemble weave in and out, adding context and narrative where needed. The traverse set up of the stage works well for this constant movement, the journey taking Anderson back and forth along the length of the space. While this could feel repetitive, director Emma Webb’s staging doesn’t feel boring or inhibiting for sight lines.

By contrast, the second half of the play is centred around a single location, which allows the action to progress far more smoothly. Christopher Eddie’s Adzak channels something of the madness and physicality of Robert Carlyle’s Rumpelstiltskin, doling out justice with a drunken restlessness. After the seriousness of the first half, it is a welcome shift of tempo and definitely adds some fun to the ending of the play. What can be said for certain is that the entire cast are thoroughly enjoying themselves upon the Playhouse stage. Even when sat along the edges, they are engaged with the proceedings and there were certainly moments of subtle corpsing when things went a little wrong.

There are little moments of fourth wall breaking, but this is more in a pantomime sense than that which I would more typically expect from a Brechtian performance. In fact, this whole show is wonderfully tame. Which, although this breaks with what the playwright no doubt would have wanted, made a front row reviewer feel far more at ease. There is some creeping in of the practitioner’s style, but this is mostly to be found in the opening and ending soundscape, the parodos style use of a chorus promising something which slips away as the show progresses.

On the whole, this is a show which centres on community and enjoyment, the team coming together to collaborate on a project for the sheer joy of it. It’s always nice to see actors of any calibre truly having fun when performing and this was clear to see here. What is a pity is the strange choice of translation, which is a little jarring at times given the modern expletives amongst the fairly traditional language.