When once asked if he thought Ben Travers’ farce, Thark, was relevant, Michael Billington replied that it remains as gloriously and sublimely irrelevant as it ever was. Having watched one of Jack Bradfield’s high octane, packed rehearsals, I have to agree with Michael. Thark’s script is funny, playful and (yes) irrelevant- but this production seems to ramp it up until it resembles P.G.Wodehouse on speed, lines flying, misconceptions throwing the cast into hilarious consequences, and pulling the audience into their wild world of ghosts and intrigue. Try to imagine the roaring ‘20s, haunted houses, jokes ranging from wordplay to horrendous innuendo and characters with names like Lionel and Sir Hector Benbow – and then mix them together and double the tempo.

Thark, a little known 1920s farce by Ben Travers, is wonderfully brought to life in this production- instead of being treated reverentially and as untouchable, director Jack Bradfield and producer Claudia Graham have embraced the play’s absurdity and friskiness, taking risks with the script and tightening up the wording – and it really works. Setting the play in the round, which will work especially well in the intimacy of the Pilch Studio, means the characters are exposed from every angle and forced to move around to engage each audience member and gives the play life and vitality. It also allows characters to appear on and off the stage from every angle, bouncing about like balloons in high winds or a particularly energetic snooker game. Props are hidden amongst the audience, teddy bears are given front row seats. “It’ll draw people in and exemplify the farce,” Jack tells me before he cracks a wide grin: “and it’ll also just be really fun.” This experimentation only enhances the farcical situations and hilarious witticisms, which Jack and Claudia aren’t afraid to change. Not even the ending is spared, being adapted to ‘suit the cast better’ – with the actors’ reactions and mannerisms becoming just important as the script.

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One thing that really seems to bring the rehearsal to life is how much the cast are enjoying themselves – scenes break down in fits of giggles as lines are twisted and played with, and when the play draws to a close people just don’t want to stop. Everyone is drawn in to the play’s infectious, fun atmosphere: and Jack Bradfield is the most manic and energetic person in the room, running from person to person, pointing out a certain emphasis “that would just make it funnier”, and even at one point lending out his glasses (leaving me slightly worried as to whether he’d fall over a chair). With his help the cast are immersed in the script, and the play seems to come to life before my eyes: especially after he’s given the cast his ‘points of concentration’: “just imagine you’re holding in a fart. It’ll give you urgency.” Suddenly all the lines become heightened, more funny and engaging, and I can’t help but be pulled in as the play rushes forward headfirst. And I mean ‘pulled in’ in every sense- for the last scene I was required to stand in as ‘Ronnie’ and get accused and shouted at by just about every other character. If this production is anything, it is certainly full of surprises. This will be one farcical haunted house experience you dare not miss.

‘Thark’ is on at the Pilch Studio in 3rd week, 3rd – 6th February.

The Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, one of the most exciting spaces in the international art scene, is currently home to an exhibition by Mexican artist Abraham Cruzvillegas. The exhibition, called Empty Lot, consists of a “grid of triangular wooden planters” each filled with “a mixture of compost and soil collected from parks, heaths, commons, green spaces and gardens across London”. It is a striking visual experience; hundreds and hundreds of identical wooden frames contain various amounts and types of greenery and fungi. Nothing has been intentionally planted in the boxes and the main purpose of the work is to find out, given sufficient time, water and sunlight, what “flowers, mushrooms or weeds may or may not grow depending on what is already in the soil…or on what people drop into the structure”.

A scotch egg, split in two by the impact of its fall, lay in the wooden planter closest to the crowd. The sausage layer had blackened and moistened and the yellow marble of egg had congealed. Contemplating the egg as it lay sprawled upon the soil, I understood it to be an emblem of defiance, of protest. Here was the quintessential snack food of the average Londoner – said to have been invented in the very heart of London at Fortnum & Mason in 1738. Here the scotch egg, an emblem of normality, was a form of protest, a desperate attempt to make heard the voice of the crowd member, the city-dweller, the mother of two, the toddler, the student. It was a statement of presence; I was here.

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Neighbouring boxes boasted fresh clumps of green grass, young nettles and even the odd pale toadstool. One box was even home to a family of ladybirds, managing to live a normal life under the constant gaze of the artistically curious. In contrast to these boxes buzzing with vitality, the box of the scotch egg was strikingly “Here the scotch egg was a form of protest, a desperate attempt” barren. Indeed, the broken snack lay alone in the box of soil and rocks. As I stood contemplating this lonesome sausage-based food product, I gradually became aware of its deeper meaning in today’s urbanised lifestyle. This was an example of our struggle, as city-dwellers, to live harmoniously alongside nature. The presence of the scotch egg, symbol of the people, prevented nature from thriving in that particular wooden planter.

The scotch egg, symbolic of both the Londoner and the Londoner’s struggle to co-habit with nature, very much steals the show in this exhibition. I would even go as far as to say that the thrower of the said snack deserves recognition, deserves congratulations on a level that far exceeds that of Cruzvillegas. Yes, Cruzvillegas provided the environment, provided the initial concept, but it was the thrower of the scotch egg that provided the art.

Rembrandt painted this image of the Prodigal Son in the final two years of his life. This life had followed a story of riches to rags. His early adulthood brought fame, popularity and wealth. Yet this early success was followed by misfortune. Two of his daughters and his wife died; his popularity plummeted and in 1656, he was declared insolvent – his works were sold off at auction.

With this in mind, the figure kneeling in rags in this painting takes on a new significance. Painted towards the end of Rembrandt’s life, this is not an abstract Bible study in picture. It is Rembrandt painting himself, on his knees, at his weakest.

You might have a variety of views of the Christian faith – perhaps for you it’s the mindless drone of a mandatory secondary school service; perhaps it’s the initiator of wars of religion from the Crusades to the troubles in Northern Ireland; or maybe it’s a conservative, judgemental, reactionary force that has left you feeling nothing but guilt. This image captures Rembrandt’s understanding of the faith: a story of homecoming, a wandering child returning to a devoted heavenly father. Its power lies in the fact that it is painted at the end of life, the result of lived experience of faith. Brokenness is juxtaposed with intimacy and grace; the extent of the father’s love is emphasised through the embrace of his dirt-ridden, stinking son.

Yet this is not the only message within the piece. Though the viewer’s attention is drawn man who stands prominently to the right: the older brother. In positioning the father, God, as embracing the dirty son, rather than the slightly detached sombre man, his older brother, to his right; Rembrandt inverts traditional understandings of ‘religion’. Space is used to signify distance, emphasising paradoxically that the religious, well-dressed man is further from God than the broken one. Why is this? Rembrandt is perhaps stressing that, in his experience, intimacy with God is found through humility and not pride. He is also providing social critique: the contrast between God stooping to meet the broken man and the stern brother standing detached suggests that those who stand in judgement in order to have an aura of religiosity have missed the point. We are left with an image of a God of grace and a challenge as to whether we treat others in the way that the father in the painting does.

Sacred art provides a window into the lived experience of faith. Rembrandt’s image leaves us with a powerful, punchy message – it says that Christianity is a story of homecoming, a faith which calls broken people to love other broken people and not stand in judgement over them. I know that as a Christian, I have found this deeply resonant. Rembrandt’s portrayal of utter dependency and grace is what I need and what the Bible describes in Luke 15.

The real mystery about Agatha Christie’s 66 novels, 14 short story collections, films, radio plays, and seemingly endless ITV adaptations is not who stabbed the rich businessman, clobbered the young school teacher or poisoned the blind pensioner but instead why her tales of cold-blooded and often gruesome or violent murder have achieved and maintained such incredible popularity. Where does this tremendous success – at times somewhat surprising given the criticism she’s come up against and the sometimes problematic nature of her writing – come from, and what does it say about us?

Anyone who, like me, has read more than their fair share of Christie classics, will be familiar with the modus operandi her detectives use when facing a mystery like this one. First they inspect the crime scene as a whole (it’s always neatly contained and readily surveyable,) then they gather and examine all the evidence before – after a period of intense uncertainty – revealing all in an overly dramatic finale.

And so, following her tried and tested structure, we need to look at the nature of Christie’s success before we can evaluate its causes. It’s difficult to be exact, of course, about sales, but most sources agree she has sold between two and four billion copies in over 100 languages – a staggering number, and one that, almost unbelievably in my view, makes her the joint best-selling author of all time (sharing the title with Shakespeare). And Then There Were None is one of only eight confirmed works of fiction which has sold over 100 million copies. Her most successful play, The Mousetrap, has been the world’s longest continuously running theatre piece for decades now and her works have inspired countless new detective writers and set industry standards.

But what is it about her stories that has caused people to buy them time and time again? My first sense is that she taps into some macabre fascination with death we hold as a society. Christie exploits the same instinct that causes motorway drivers to slow down to get a good look at the debris from a high-speed collision or tourists visiting Italy to seek out the petrol station in Milan where Mussolini’s corpse was hung. Her books are to civilised, modern society what public hangings were to medieval Britain or what gladiatorial fights were to the Romans. But even if this is true, it doesn’t completely explain her personal success. Christie didn’t invent the genre – The New Yorker credits Edgar Allen Poe with this – and given Arthur Conan Doyle’s success 30 years earlier it wasn’t the case that she had simply stumbled across fertile but previously unsown lands. When Christie started writing shortly after the First World War there was no shortage of detective fiction. Anyone and everybody seemed to be writing crime fiction; the genre was so popular that anyone who wrote stood a good chance of getting published. There needed to be something else to make her stand out.

Maybe, however, she offered a desensitised, cleaner and more tolerable approach to death. Her books are notable for their distinct lack of violence or gore. The majority of her victims are poisoned, and those deaths caused by being shot, stabbed or bashed on the head are disconcerting only in their clinical techniques. Christie found a way to successfully feed our primitive fascinations without any of the irritating moral thoughts civilised society requires of us. She made death easy to read.

The Queen of Crime also made the experience of a murder mystery as a whole less difficult for her readers. Her direct style of writing means reading her works is no chore. She gets criticised for creating one-dimensional characters, figures who lack a background or believability, but I think some of this can be put down to society’s tendency, especially in the world of literature, to view popular fiction as less worthy or as the product of an artist who sells out.

I subscribe to the Orwellian principle that simple writing makes good writing and I find from personal experience that achieving this without sacrifice is often incredibly difficult. Accomplished, celebrated writers also seem to share some respect for her stories. T.S. Eliot’s The Family Reunion, for example, contains a mystery solved by a character named Agatha, who is likely to be in tribute to Christie.

Often another source of criticism, the formulaic approach Christie takes in nearly every work may in fact be a significant strength. She overloads us with so much information – often seemingly contradictory in nature – and with such pace that confusion and chaos dominate much of the plot. Despite this, the detective seems to know better than both the other characters and the reader. This sense of someone being in control is reassuring (and I would speculate this is the same phenomenon that leads us to sometimes see our presidents, doctors, and others as superior). But it is the promise of an elegant, simple solution at the end regardless of how unlikely it may look that is Christie’s most powerful tool. W.H. Auden once explained that, once he had picked it up, he couldn’t put down a detective novel until he had finished it. In reality, solutions – whether in murder cases or anything else – are rarely so beyond doubt. Like so many other successful writers, Christie crafts a tremendously exciting and satisfying world that could never exist outside the novel.

Sadly, the causes of Christie’s success as a writer are not as clearly identifiable. But, in a distinct parallel to one of her most famous stories, I think it is legitimate to attribute all of the suspects with some responsibility. She wrote in a genre that lent itself to commercial success and popularity, but it took the creation of a certain type of desensitised crime, the development of a very readable style, and knowledge (whether conscious or not) of inherent human nature and our difficult relationship with death to set her apart. I feel Agatha Christie’s contribution to literature is often played down. I am no Christie; I cannot solve the mystery of her success in a neatly-tied bow. But I hope I have at least made the case for more considered thought about our relationship with her.

In 1954 everyone’s favourite, loveable, Welsh drunkard, Dylan Thomas, penned Under Milk Wood, a ‘play for voices’ that quickly became one of the best-loved pieces of British literature. Set in the course of a single night and day, his sleepy Welsh town of Llareggub gives us a window into the everyday lives of ordinary Welsh villagers. But, for me, it is the beautiful, pervading sense of darkness in the book’s description of night that is captivating – I can vividly remember being transfixed by the first few lines. “Down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishboat – bobbing sea.” How could anybody not fall in love with this music?

It is this sense of cosy, coastal darkness that the artist Peter Blake captures and contorts wildly in his set of collages to accompany the work. Famous for his mad, eclectic album cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, here Blake injects a wonderfully psychedelic, disturbing element into Thomas’ writing. His collages are full of twisted dream sequences, of colourful figures vying for space against lurid backgrounds filled with random flying objects. Looking at them, I feel sucked into Blake’s mismatched world where nothing is ever as it seems – even the “starless and bible-black” darkness of a small Welsh village. Whilst Dylan Thomas lyricises beautifully about the night (“the houses are blind as moles,”) Blake picks this world up and shakes it, rolling it over to reveal the crazed underside of our regular lives.

Blake works with hundreds of scrapbooks, cutting out shapes that fascinate him – a gramophone, a tap dancing fox or a dining table. It perfectly captures Thomas’ writing, particularly the dark undercurrent. It should come as no surprise, after all, that Llareggub is ‘bugger all’ backwards.