Writers in Oxford

Review: OUR MAN IN HAVANA at Oxford Playhouse Theatre

Bruce Hugman — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 15:17:36 +0000

Review by Philip Gooden

On stage|: 28 July – 1 August

There’s quite an overlap between 20th century English novelists and the secret world of Intelligence. Writers like Ian Fleming and John le Carré had actual experience of what they were writing about and took the subject seriously but Graham Greene, who worked for MI6 in Sierra Leone during the Second World War, looked at things with an altogether more sardonic eye.

Greene was famous for his exploration of out-of-the-way places and during the early 1950s he made several visits to Havana ‘in search of pleasure’, as the narrator puts it in actor Clive Francis’s adaptation of Our Man in Havana, first staged in 2007 and now revived at the Oxford Playhouse in a touring production. The setting is Cuba in the pre-Castro period when Havana was a haven of brothels, roulette, corruption and police brutality, a place ‘where every vice was permissible’.

On an evening when the outside temperature perhaps rivalled that in Havana, a full house in the air-conditioned theatre was treated to a finely realised set by Julie Godfrey (also costumes), evoking the heat, frenzy and colour of that capital city.

Greene’s wry take on the espionage business was to turn his protagonist James Wormold into an expat vacuum-cleaner salesman. (In passing, is there a more unBond-like name than Wormold?) Recruited by Hawthorne from the British Secret Service – a scene which takes place in the seedy Gents at a bar – Wormold (Jack Ashton) discovers that he’s become ‘our man in Havana’ almost inadvertently. His motive isn’t so much patriotism as the need to make money to placate his teenage daughter Milly (Jodie Steele), who is quite prepared to throw a tantrum if she can’t have a horse.

The ineffectual salesman is totally unfitted to be a spy but he does have at least one asset, a quick imagination. When London pressures him to come up with the goods, he creates a roster of imagined sub-agents, on whose behalf he can of course claim more expenses. He also draws diagrams of vacuum cleaner parts with the pretence that they’re images of new secret weapons, an uncanny foreshadowing of what happened some years later during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Inevitably everything starts to go wrong when one of the invented agents comes to life, or rather death in road accident. It seems that Wormold’s creations, like a novelist’s characters, are taking on a life of their own and running out of his control.

Our Man in Havana has a cast of four who, with the exception of Jack Ashton in the pivotal role, change outfits and accents with lightning speed as they juggle with more than thirty roles. I particularly enjoyed Leon Ockenden’s turn as the sinister, pomaded Captain Segura and Bob Barrett’s portrait of the melancholic German Dr Hasselbacher, the one resident of Havana for whom Wormold feels anything like affection.

This is intentionally a broad-brush, sometimes cartoonish production under the direction of Philip Wilson, which relies on stereotypes like the excitable Latino and the phlegmatic Englishman. It moves at a hectic pace with some dextrous changes of scene and contains set pieces that are both farcical and ominous, a faithful reflection of Greene’s original book and indeed his world-view.

★★★★☆. Philip Gooden. 29 July 2026

Photography credit: Jack Merriman

With thanks to Stage Talk Magazine

Mon 9 Nov 26 – WIO’s Not the Booker Prize

Bruce Hugman — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 14:49:34 +0000

Monday 9 November, 7pm for 7.30 start

Wadham Room, King’s Arms, Broad Street, OX1 3SP

WiO’s popular annual event!

On the night of the official awards, our panel of fiction readers will speak to each of the titles on the shortlist. Our audience then cast their votes before the official results are announced. Our regular fun evening for fiction fans!

To join the panel or the audience, register with: events@writersinoxford.org.

Sat 24 Oct 26 – WiO’s Self-publishing training session

Bruce Hugman — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 14:44:04 +0000

Saturday 24 October, 2-5pm

Sadler Room, Rewley House, 1 Wellington Square, OX1 2JA

We are re-visiting this vital topic, with two major sessions: Andy Severn of Oxford Brookes on Production and Colin Wade of Oxford Independent Authors on Marketing. There will also be plenty of time for you to bring your own specific questions for the speakers and other members to answer from their experience.

Please register with events@writersinoxford.org.

Base image: Technica

Sat 3 Oct 26 – Wallingford Literary Festival; visit or participate

Bruce Hugman — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 14:42:48 +0000

Saturday 3 October 2026

Oxford Independent Authors (OxIA)

St Mary’s Church and the Methodist Church in Wallingford.

The festival is supported by Wallingford Bookshop and Wallingford Town Councillors.

The festival will have stallholder space across both venues with children’s workshops planned at St. Mary’s and adult-focused talks at the Methodist Church. To register an interest in having a stand in the book fair (£20 for the day) you are invited to email LitFests@oxia.org.uk.

The organisers are also seeking nominations for talk slots. If you are interested in giving a talk, please contact OxIA no later than the 24th June 2026.

https://www.oxia.org.uk/events.php

Sat-Sun 12-13 Sept – Oxford Open Doors

Bruce Hugman — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 14:40:17 +0000

Saturday 12 – Sunday 13 September

Follow the full programme at https://www.oxfordpreservation.org.uk/open-doors

The unique annual opportunity to see behind the scenes in multiple locations across the City.

Just one example is Harris Manchester College:” Our Chapel, with its pre-Raphaelite stained glass windows by Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris has been fully renovated – do come along and see the windows in all their glory! The D-Day Landings were planned in College, and the Arlosh Dining Hall was the centre of operations for the planning of Operation Overlord as well as other WWII operations. There will be a display of photographs and other materials. Also open will be the Tate Library (with its glorious stained glass) and our small but perfectly formed gardens. All are welcome!”

Tues 1 Sept 26 – Cazalet Chronicles Continued

Bruce Hugman — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 14:36:13 +0000

Tuesday 1 Sept 2026, 7pm

Daunt Books Summertown, 247-249 Banbury Road, OX2 7HN

Best-selling author Louisa Young, niece of Elizabeth Jane Howard, is bravely continuing the Cazalet Chronicles under the titleThe Golden Hours. Unmissable, if you’re a fan of that family epic.

Tickets £7 including glass of wine from https://dauntbooks.co.uk/shop/events/louisa-young/

Sat 15 Aug 26 – Poetry in the Galleries

Bruce Hugman — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 14:31:34 +0000

Saturday 15 August, 2-3pm

Gallery 48, 2nd floor, Ashmolean Museum, Beaumont St, OX1 2PH

Poets from Oxford and surrounding areas will explore and celebrate the Museum’s pieces, renowned or recherché, intriguing or glorious and newly-acquired artworks amongst the Dutch still-life collection. Free to all.

Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day – film review by Brenda Stones

Bruce Hugman — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 09:20:36 +0000

Why do film producers feel they need to distort the facts of a period in order to make their point? Do they think viewers are so simple-minded that accuracy is unnecessary?

Virginia Woolf’s novel, Night and Day, was a study of a young Edwardian girl who was more interested in maths and astronomy than finding a husband. Tina Gharavi’s film takes this obsession further, making the ambitious Katharine apply to Cambridge to further her career.

But here the film seems to find it necessary to exaggerate the prejudice against women studying, by staging a mock interview with three male physicists, who would never be interviewing her anyway! The facts are that Katharine would have been applying to a college, not a faculty. And in 1910 Newnham College actually had more than 10 women studying physics, using the Cavendish Laboratory. Admittedly, these women could not be awarded degrees until 1948, but to exaggerate the difficulty of entry through this fake interview scene (apparently located in the cloisters, for some reason) actually reduces the credibility of the situation.

The extent of astronomical knowledge is more accurately portrayed: surprisingly in 1910, when Halley’s comet appeared across the sky, physicists still thought the universe was finite, and confined to the Milky Way. It was only when Hubble’s telescope extended their visual range in the 1920s that scientists realised the unlimited extent of the galaxies. Though we are led to believe that Katharine was already aware of this possibility in 1910 with her tiny home-made telescope!

Other distortions of the novel to make the film producer’s point include the introduction of a gay relationship: the character of Cyril in the novel has two children with the woman he is living with, but not married to, which would be radical enough in those times. But Gharavi takes his status further, making him the gay cousin of Katharine, with a black lover who pours out his heart to her after Cyril dies dramatically and unexpectedly, just beyond the ha-ha of the country house they are visiting.

So we already have three strong themes from Edwardian times, of women’s suffrage, higher education and unorthodox living situations; but do audiences really need those realities to be pulled out of shape to make a modern point? Go back to the truth of the novel and be amazed, with a rather softer soundtrack too…

Brenda Stones/3 July 26

Celebrating Maeve’s 80th with new music videos

Bruce Hugman — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 09:44:33 +0000

Maeve Bayton has just turned 80, and to mark the occasion she and her guitarist friend Pete have released 3 new music videos into the world: Accident of Birth, The Conversation and Picasso Postcards. You can watch them here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IK1ZYuK-Yd8&list=PLxCcZw1m4oIUQwUMlmLkmyTJ73ceagYLt

Maeve says: “Accident of Birth came from my reflecting on the role of chance in one’s birth and life chances. And it concludes with the reflection that, notwithstanding these many differences, more unites us than divides us.”

To read more about Maeve, see her article in the August 2025 issue of The Oxford Writer, entitled ‘Rocking in my 70s’.

You can find this in the Newsletter pages of this website.

Fot the individual videos:

Picasso Postcards

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ihxdUP6DoQ&pp=ygUMbWFldmVhbmRwZXRl0gcJCdoKAYcqIYzv

The Conversation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IK1ZYuK-Yd8&pp=ygUMbWFldmVhbmRwZXRl

Accident Of Birth

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vr_c4UchEg&pp=ygUMbWFldmVhbmRwZXRl

New book by WiO member Janet Phillips

Bruce Hugman — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 11:33:40 +0000

An exploration and insightful analysis of sisters in literature and their
depiction in three centuries of the novel.
Twenty succinct entries
Includes Jane Austen, George Eliot, J.D. Salinger, Toni Morrison
and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Sisterly relationships feature prominently in some of our best-loved
classic literature. From Jane and Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice
to Hasina and Nazneen in Brick Lane, they have provided inspiration for
novelists over the centuries.

Sisters can be best friends, mother figures, rivals, heroes, sounding
boards or partners in crime, depending on literary genre, era, or the
demands of plot. They can bring into focus the changing roles of
women in society, especially in literature that predates the twentieth
century, such as Middlemarch, The Woman in White and The Old Wives’
Tale. Their bonds with younger or older siblings, like those of Meg, Jo,
Beth and Amy in Little Women, are often complex and nuanced, and
occasionally devastating.

Covering childhood, adventure, affairs of the heart and mental health,
this book explores the role of sisters in twenty individual entries, each
one providing a synopsis and analysis of the work in question. Including
writers as diverse as Charles Dickens, E.M. Forster, J.D. Salinger, Toni
Morrison and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, it makes the perfect read for
book-loving sisters whatever their connection.

Available on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=Janet+Phillips+Literary+sisters&i=stripbooks&crid=120Q0745RU4Y2&sprefix=janet+phillips+literary+sisters%2Cstripbooks%2C100&ref=nb_sb_noss

JANET PHILLIPS is the author of Great Literary Friendships (Bodleian
Library Publishing, 2022).