There is a corpse in the Bodleian…
John Schad and Fred Dalmasso’s adapted “play of voices”, Last Train to Oxford, is an incredibly daring exercise in transgression. Writings are the rebar that run through the foundations of this marvellous play, which pushes drama to its trembling limits.
Schad prefaces the drama with a biographical prologue in which he explains that, as his father was terminally ill with Alzheimer’s, he (the ‘Son’) began to notice uncanny parallels between the disturbing fragments of speech uttered by his father and the granulated philosophical writings in Jacques Derrida’s Envois, which lead him (the ‘Son’) to pull on certain historical threads that unsuspectingly untwined ravelled stories of British intelligence in the Second World War, Oxford, and a mysterious childhood trauma.
The stage is set out like a press conference for a Kafkaesque cacophony of voices; a polylogue of unconnected characters, forced to face the prodigal questioning of the ‘Son’.[1] We have a Virgilian sense-making narrator, a ‘Son’ doggedly demanding answers, a ‘Philosopher’ whose speech consists entirely of verbatim quotations from Derrida and the distressing incoherence of verbatim quotes from Schad’s actual ‘Father’, whose mind, benighted by dementia, lays bare the awful twilight before ‘that good night’ – namely the rage, and the dying of the light. There’s something haunting in these characters' slow, repetitive actions (piling sugar cubes in a dish of blue dye, immersing pages of writing into a watery grave, folding Origami boats and blowing them away) which are projected in close-ups behind the main staging, at once profound and meaningless.
Finding meaning in the otherwise meaningless is what drives the unfolding mystery. Distinct events and lives – at first seeming coincidences – become inextricably tangled and soon unignorable, like not only being able to see the face of the Man in the Moon but also being able to feel his hands around your throat. And this play is not thematically limited to the philosophical pursuit of meaning: murder, fascism, and horror are all also in play here, delving deep in to the shied-from shadows of the 20th Century.
Dalmasso’s direction dissolves the stage’s boundaries, allowing the action to spill over into the Sheldonian stalls where Derrida himself had spoken some 23 years prior, bolstered by Ben Hughes’ ethereal scenography that eerily commands the cavernous space. With strong performances from all the Collect-ifs company, the unnerving revelations of the play were brought to life wonderfully in the place (perhaps) most intimately suited with the text itself.
It must be said that this “play of voices” is absolutely not for everyone (as Schad openly attested after the performance, ‘This is not a commercial show’), and I imagine quite a few will be deterred by the hefty phenomenological and post-structural allusions. That being said, anyone with a genuine interest in seeing a performance operating at the very frontier of theatre is in for a categorically exceptional experience – there is nothing else quite like this. Intensely personal, innovative, and indefatigably intriguing, you must – if you can – catch (the) Last Train to Oxford.
[1] At one point, the ‘Philosopher’ is forcibly restrained from fleeing the stage and is made to stand further questioning and provide answers. Anyone who has ever read Derrida’s books will find this incredibly satisfying.