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Musicals of Oxford and The Player's Fools have bitten into a tough cookie from the godfather of modern musical theatre, Stephen Sondheim. Assassins is essentially a one-act concept musical with no likeable characters, no obvious structure and no happy ending. That's not to say it is an inaccessible bore, far from it; it's completely unmissable.

It centres on a group of trigger-happy, and perhaps attention-starved, individuals who have all dreamt about, and followed through, with an assassination attempt on a US President. It's a haphazard bunch of the famous (Lee Harvey Oswald) and the obscure (Sam Byck, a man who tried to crash a plane into the White House. Anyone . . . ?), who all share this mutual, if somewhat differently motivated, aim; and none of them is exactly sympathetic. But that doesn't stop the singing and the dancing. As it's Sondheim, the man who wrote Sweeney Todd and helped out with West Side Story, the music and lyrics are top-notch. Whether his morally ambiguous characters are waxing lyrical about firearms or whether he's plucking at our heartstrings with a duet between a Charles Manson devotee and a Jodie Foster obsessive, the result is unquestionably divine.

You can ignore some of the obvious problems facing the musical and the cast when you see something this provocative and intelligent. Sure, the climactic scene with Lee Harvey Oswald is unnecessarily long and tries to pull in loose ends that should be left hanging. Sure, the drawing of some of the characters is sacrificed for laughs and thematic developments. On the production side, some of the cast's voices are not as strong as they should be, there are sound problems and the direction is perhaps a little stiff in places.

The most important lesson, which transcends all this, is that violence is an inevitable waste product of a society intent on freedom of expression and having one's voice heard. Its profound implications echo beyond the last beat of the last song. Assassins isat the OFS Studio until tomorrow night.

2:15pm Wednesday 14th May 2008

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