Let me call everyone’s attention to David Todd’s The Oxford Arts Stream. Here is a new, weekly arts festival which brings with it fresh air. It is fusion cuisine, stirring variously spiced drama, poetry, music and dance all together in one delectable show. And the latest instalment – its second – made for an appetising evening. Most performers proved very capable. Their strongest merit was intimacy. One felt bathed in warming lamplight, rather than bonfire blaze.
This worked especially well with the two feelingly sung settings of ‘Drop, drop, slow tears’. I hesitate, then, in urging the organisers of The Stream to add weight and muscle to their project: intimacy is a difficult virtue to transfer onto a grander scale. But I would like to, trusting they will manage. Like most fusion food, The Stream pleases, but falls short of being haute cuisine. The only solution is to establish a standard and tradition of its own. Give it an imposing name too, if needs be, like Gesamtkunstwerk. For this one requires a more lucid display of the show’s structure and dramatic purpose, to whet the blunt knife sharp.
There is also want of lengthier, more substantial pieces, to boast impressive feats outwards as well as cursive retreats inwards. Then The Stream may truly leave its mark on the Oxford arts scene. One last proposal, since I always try to be constructive: the venue ought perhaps to move away from College chapels, not least because the readings of Gillian Clarke and Wordsworth were perilously close to sounding more like lessons from the Gospel of St Matthew.
