The production of Sarah Kane’s Cleansed at the National Theatre this month provoked some delightfully cliched repsonses from the national press. The Mail gave it one star, decrying the inappropriate use of an arts grant on torture porn; The Guardian gave it four stars and praised the “dark female voice” at the heart of the production. VICE reacted with a sarcastic commentary on the cliches of the national press, took a drag on their roll-up and said that they aren’t scared of a bit of blood, thanks to online desensitisation, turning into a preachy reflection on how the papers just don’t get the “youth” like VICE does – presumably stemming from their desperation to let us know how many drugs they do and how relevant they are.

As his audience enter the Burton Taylor Studio, Johnny Lucas sits barefoot, head down, on a chair on the small stage. His presence is demanding, though he sits still and quiet until the room has settled, and until he can begin his dramatic narrative.

Alfred Lord Tennyson’s 1855 poem Maud is a complex one to say out loud. Its cross rhythms make for a troubled oration; in other sections its song-like structure means that words elide into one another in an almost incomprehensible manner. It is with this in mind that Lucas’ fortitude must be respected: this one-actor show is hugely challenging, yet there is no stumbling over words or mishaps with his tightly-crafted emotive monologue.

The intelligence in this production comes from the dramatic awareness of the differences in ambience between each section of Tennyson’s verse. As the protagonist mourns his lost lover, Maud, he exploits the idea of grief in expressing all the stages of torment that come along with it – hallucinatory madness, hollowness, and utter sadness. The nuance with which Lucas brings out each of these variations of what could be a simply “depressing” tale reflects his acute awareness of Tennyson’s language of mourning.

The promotion for this production which has been adapted by student Tabitha Hayward, tells of a performance which “blends poetry with photography and film to guide you through a mind tormented by love and guilt.”  But I’m not so sure of any “blend”, and not by means of criticism. Rather than a softened array of media, the film footage which plays intermittently on a screen at the back of the stage works only to make stark Lucas’ lines.

It is the juxtaposition of haunting shots of Maud – first as a hazy silhouette and then suddenly close-up, standing “in the high Hall-garden” – set behind the protagonist’s body and bare stage, that is so powerful. The exquisite timings of the playback of video, to coalesce with, or often prove startling against, Lucas’ monologue serve only to strengthen the precise timings of this performance.

This torment of having Maud linger behind, somewhere in the distance but far from us, is excruciating. Our nameless protagonist is so haunted by Maud – Maud, who is ever so “perfectly beautiful … where is the fault? … faultily faultless.” Lucas says these lines as he moves to the projection of Maud on the back wall, reaching out to stroke her yet only touching a blank space, where no human resides. The use of multi-media here, for of course Maud will only ever be a hologram, a fixation of pixels projected into a void, accentuates the boundary between life and death that the protagonist attempts to envelop.

Of course, as soon as he reaches out to touch his love, her image disappears, and the protagonist must face the intangibility of his love, an intangibility that film and the live spoken word perfectly express.

As it draws to the end of term I am becoming more and more tired of the same old Oxford. Same libraries, same tutors, same nights out. I was therefore delighted to be invited to the preview of ‘Attempts on her life’ which is not similar to anything I have experienced before. Marcus Crimp’s postmodern work is renown for being challenging, confusing and thought provoking. The play is made up of seventeen unconnected scenes that refer in some way to Anne – the main character. We never meet Anne but instead hear about her through the various perspectives offered in each scene. That is not to say we ever understand or know who Anne is; she is a different person to every actor in every scene if not a different person to every actor in every line.   

The play begins with multiple characters leaving unconnected messages to Anne on her answer machine. One character portrays an emotional mother financially cutting off her daughter, while another wishes to sexually assault Anne. All messages are unconnected whilst also playing on stereotypical human relationships, each is relatable in isolation but ambiguous in the sporadic context of Crimp’s work. Indeed, the opening scene can be seen as a paradigm for the play in general in how it explores a plethora of intense human emotions in a nonsensical way. 

The irregularities of narrative and characterisation make this a daunting play to put on as a director. The script gives no indication as to how many actors there should be in each scene or who should say which lines. These decisions are down the discretion of the director, Archie Thompson. In response to these challenges he replied that the process had been wholly collaborative with all of the actors working closely together to determine who should say what and which characters should be created to best represent each scene. The overriding sense that I found was how compatible and comfortable the various actors were with one another both on and off stage and the characters that emerge are decidedly original.

In order to counter the potential confusion of having seventeen completely separate scenes, the actors always remain on the stage. The play is like an audition with each scene beginning with an automated voice that states the title of the scene and the number of actors involved. There is an eerie competitive edge throughout all of this and you are often left guessing whether each actor is expressing his own feelings or those of the character he is acting. The sudden changes between humour and horror create a sense of uncertainty in the viewer and it is hard to know whether you should laugh or cry.

Attempts on her life explores various themes from consumerism to religion to human relationships in a way that makes it difficult to take any coherent meaning from the play. Perhaps the overall theme of the play is to challenge the individual’s identity, something that is increasingly relevant with the modern obsession of social media, where actual identity is lost in the desire to be represented in a certain way. I left the preview more confused than when I walked in but perhaps that’s the point? Either way it was an exciting taste of what looks to be a fascinating production that will affect every viewer in a different way.  

FIELD,Anne Hardy’s recent exhibition at Modern Art Oxford was an expansive experience. Based largely on the artist’s two preferred media, photography and found objects, the work sprawled across three rooms, delineating a journey through creative space. At the entrance, the visitor was greeted with a large-scale photographic display, followed by two major installations: one room lined entirely in blue with a wooden hut in the centre, the second, in canary yellow and adorned with hanging screens and everyday objects. The effect was oddly intimate, a world in miniature.

Hardy hasn’t always worked on installation art. She started out constructing her diverse sculptural spaces and photographing them, before destroying them. Photography still plays an essential part in her work but she has also started to document the process, revealing the unfinished work, as it were. Hence, perhaps, the intimacy of her art. “I used to want to show only the image,” Hardy explains, “rather than the structure, so that the physical reality of these worlds would remain uncertain and unresolvable, and so the structures I built to make the images were provisional and fragile. I have carried this approach through into the three-dimensional works: the sense of temporality, and impermanence is important to me – that everything could change or collapse.”

FIELD is the third exhibition in a sequence of shows; the other two were exhibited at Kunstverein Freiburg and the Common Guild in 2014 and 2015 respectively. Hardy reflects that, “The ‘field’ of these titles is, for me, a way of thinking about an expansive work space that encompasses the visitor to the work inside it: a ‘living’ work that defines a zone of interest, a terrain or an open-ended psychological space:

The works themselves evolve through process and in all 3 exhibitions have involved long install periods where much of the work is formed in situ, in response to the spatial characteristics of the gallery.”

The exhibition is quiet when I visit it on a grey weekday afternoon in January. In the dim and hushed interior of the wooden hut, there is a narrow wooden bench, and a soundtrack plays on loop. I sit on the bench and listen to the distorted, ambiguous sounds of scraping and carving and Anne Hardy’s voice, creating a kind of associative poem. “Ambiguity within the texts and sounds is a way to open up an imaginative space that sits alongside and circles around the physical structures of the exhibition: a parallel and suggestive space,” Hardy explains. “It’s easy to assume that language is definite in its meaning, but the way in which I wanted to use the text was to make it quite distinct that that’s not the case, that language, as with our other perceptive skills, has slippage. The sounds operate in the same way for me, they are all recorded in the studio from processes and activities used in making the work, so they have this definite analogue origin, which becomes abstracted and suggestive once disconnected from their original source. The sound, text, physical structures are all intricately connected from the beginning of the process.”

Outside the yellow room, visitors are requested to take off their shoes. Barefoot on the soft carpet, we wonder soundlessly around this kind of playroom of photographs and found objects, bathed in warm light. It reminds me strongly of an artist’s studio and Hardy confirms that this is intentional. “I wanted to take my process to the gallery, so that it’s really apparent that this is a point in time at which you can be with the work, but it doesn’t mean that it is a static ‘finished’ thing. To me making work is a way to think about things around me, and I want the shows to be ‘living’ things that are alive and make space for other people to be in them.”

Confession
-Alex Shaw

That he’d dragged his heels with the DIY.
That choler had lit in him, that afternoon
when the clutch burnt up along unnumbered
French roads. That his humours had swung
out of balance and he’d seized her wrist,
when his anger was an autopilot, doing
the steering. That he’d feigned a love
for mountain scenery, seizing her wrist
only to point out vineyards on the slopes.
That before the accident he already knew
the house was rigged out without an earth.

Note:

This week, Alex Shaw submitted this cryptic piece, reminiscent of the increasing incomprehensibility of 8th week. There is a sense that there is a story here, incomplete amongst the fl owing lines, much like an Oxford term. Alex Shaw is a second year, reading English and German at Jesus, and Vice-President of Oxford University Poetry Society. He won last year’s Martin Starkie Prize, and has been commended in the Christopher Tower Poetry Competition.

Rob Cowen is an award-winning journalist, author, broadcaster and naturalist whose self-confessed mission is to reconnect people to the world around them, and to the nature at their feet. In nowhere is this clearer than in his new publication, Common Ground, which looks at a small, seemingly nondescript patch of ground near Cowen’s home over the course of a year. In a fascinating mixture of analytical prose and personal, lyrical writing, Cowen spends cold dawn mornings, sultry summer days and long dusky evenings with a myriad of creatures in his small patch of the countryside, proving that the wilderness is sometimes much closer than we all think. I begin by asking him if he’d planned his latest book, or whether it simply evolved from his experiences. “A writer writes!” Cowen replies. “This book just happened.” Having lost his job in the recession and moved away from London to Yorkshire, Cowen went freelance, giving him more time to wander around a small tangle of meadow and woodland behind his house making field notes. “I eventually realised both work and the landscape was important, and realised there were stories there,” he says.

Common Ground looks at a new way of writing and reading about nature and how we interact with it by focusing on one small spot of land, forcing the reader to examine and experience it in detail. “As everything that our world is predicated on slowly dissolves, people are looking for something greater. They can find that in nature.

“We need to draw maps, to lose maps, to redraw old ones – we need to be outside!” Cowen tells me fervently. “When I worked in London, I felt I’d lost my connection to the outside world – I needed to get back to it. I used to go up to the moors with [co-author] Leo, just to escape the city and to meet with nature.” The pressures of modern living can all too easily squash those connections, especially with internship and graduate schemes pulling students into the city. “But remembering the outside is important”, Cowen says. “It shapes who we are.”

And Rob Cowen doesn’t just write about this reconnection to nature through stories; he lives it, too. Cowen is director of Untold, a travel and content consultancy that focuses on the importance of storytelling in a digital landscape. As well as this, he writes weekly outdoors columns for both The Telegraph and The Independent. Cowen tells me that he sees this weaving of business and authorship as important in the modern age; “I’m not separating them but bringing them together. You always need to be doing other things!” Travel is important to Cowen in journalism, and narrative and storytelling are ‘emotional currencies’ for travel, he tells me. “Even Google now priorities stories. They’re looking for new storytellers, new travel brands. They’re acknowledging that stories are important.”

Using his small patch of common ground as a microcosm for the world at large, Cowen shows us where we fit. “It is a celebration of edgelands, of truly wild places. You don’t have to go to national parks to find these places. Local wildernesses have human fingerprints on them in a much more natural way – they are places that have been recolonised after we’ve left them.” Cowen teaches us that these brownfield, edgeland sites are magical, absorbing places to explore. “It shows the otherworldliness of nature, that it’s indifferent to us. We’re just part of a biosphere. As the world becomes a busier place and people look for more ways to ground themselves, these places will become even more important.”

These may seem like big ideas to swallow, but Cowen’s distinctly lyrical writing mixed in with sharp analysis of the natural world makes the book effortless reading. Cowen tells me that taking a personal approach to the writing, integrating his own stories such as the birth of his son into his field notes, helped him to better interpret the landscape. “The difference between a report on the landscape and writing about it is the personal connection,” Cowen says. “It can very intense, very close – a billion interactions, and I have to reduce this into something to get it across to the reader. Using poetic language stops it from becoming a list. It also makes this style very individual. It works for this book, but maybe not the next.”

It’s clear from our conversation that Rob Cowen is someone intimately connected with the landscape. Buzzing with stories about his travels out in the edgelands of Yorkshire, he tells me that as little as 20 minutes in a natural environment reduces stress – something I might try in my next essay crisis. Our discussion mirrors his book: full of small joys, unexpected discoveries, and absorbing tangents. Common Ground is indeed a wonderful book, and well worth a read. If you want a tip, read it outside, out amongst the trees or in some hidden thicket by river. You’ll thank me later.

Ali Shaw is reluctant to call himself a writer of magical realism. Award-winning Oxford-based author of The Girl with Glass Feet and The Man who Rained, which are about as magical as their intriguing titles, his latest novel is simply entitled The Trees (March 2016). Lest readers be misled by this simplicity, the stunning cover art, which represents a stylized animal head made of autumnal leaves, offers a worthy visual counterpart to Shaw’s poetic language.

The Trees is about an apocalypse, Shaw explains, “about a forest that appears everywhere in the world fully grown in the blink of an eye. It comes up through the ground and smashes everything that was there before. And in a sense the whole world has just been reforested and utterly devastated. But also the forest isn’t just some sort of radioactive accident. It’s kind of a magical forest, it’s full of wolves and bears and all that stuff, but it’s also full of things that are a bit creepier and more enchanted and trees that have their own agenda and are alive – not so much getting up and moving around, that doesn’t happen, but certainly playing a very active role in human affairs.” Nature usually plays an active role in Shaw’s writing, often as a primeval and personified force. His books are set in wild places, on the fringes of civilization, as Shaw puts it. “I think in a sense, setting them there and then putting in all of this fantastical stuff in a sense sense is also grounded in reality. I suppose it’s made-up places that allow a lot of fantastical things to happen. Hopefully, it also allows it to be grounded in a far truer sense as well, in the rocks and stones and forests than cities would have done.”

Fairy stories are obviously one of his main influences. Shaw recalls being inspired at an early age by The Storyteller, a 1980’s animated show, narrated by John Hurt. Later, he read Kafka’sMetamorphosis and became interested in a darker side of adventure stories and magic, or perhaps in a more human side. “I think they’re really explicitly designed to instruct people how to deal with fear,” he muses. “And that’s not necessarily how to conquer fear. Fear is a precondition and you have to live with it. They’re so hopeless, they end so bleakly and so unsatisfactorily as well.”

This synthesis of reality and fantasy is often described as magical realism, a genre first pioneered by South American authors such as Gabriel García Marquez, but Shaw hesitates to put labels on his work. Genre, in his opinion, is generally more of a hindrance than a help when it comes to fiction. “I think the thing that’s unhelpful about it is the sheer amount of effort that goes into deciding what genre is what. I don’t think it’s such a problem now but when The Girl with Glass Feet came out, I received a whole lot of warnings from people who said, oh books like this are really difficult to categorize, readers don’t know what to do with it. Is it fantasy, is it magical realism, is it general fiction? There was almost a sense of panic over it, sort of a ‘what have you done? Did you have to make it about glass?’ Could you take that out? But it was fine!”

The label magical realism may help to succinctly place Shaw’s work. But in many ways, his writing is firmly rooted in a quest for vanished countryside, a quest that is made explicit in The Trees. Indeed, he tells me, only half-jokingly, I think: “My ambition in life is basically to own a pair of cows. I want a really big cow called Thoreau and then a little cow called Emerson and if I could have that, I’d die happy.”