This production of a piece of contemporary playwriting has the makings of a truly unique and unforgettable Oxford theatre experience. Based conceptually on multiverse string theory, we see the development of a relationship between two characters in terms of alternate possibilities – in any given scene, we see different eventualities acted out. For example, we see the initial meeting of the two at a barbeque with different results – him having a wife, them getting on well, and her coming off oddly as well. Without giving too much away, this novel concept is then used to create heart-rending scenes where we see both the very best and very worst of situations juxtaposed within minutes of one another. This emotional complexity of showing subtle variations of scenes requires an intense and sustained pair of performances from the two lead actors, Calam Lynch and Shanon Hayes. They both live up to this rather difficult task, giving transfixing performances as Roland and Marianne respectively. I would say this was some of the best acting I had ever seen, with subtle nuances of emotion cleverly shown in every facial expression to give an authenticity to a concept that threatens to sink under the weight of its own pretensions.

Watching the ‘creative process’ of this play was particularly enlightening in terms of how this natural seeming relationship was constructed. Instead of going straight from the script, they improvised and riffed over the themes of the play, then returned to the script and moulded it in their own image under the charismatic direction of Sammy Glover – creating a highly naturalistic, genuine development of emotional connection between the two leads. This effectively heightens the emotional stakes of the play beyond what is intrinsically written into it, making it all the more harrowing, comic and bittersweet by turns.

Not only is this the first time this play is being performed off Broadway, but it is also being performed in the round, adding yet another level of novelty to this already envelope-pushing play. It is also worth noting that the presence of only two people on stage, speaking dialogue, does theoretically run the risk of creating an excessively still theatrical space. However, this is no hinderance to the effortless characterisation and does nothing to damage audience interest in the progression of the play. This is  done to heighten the intimacy of the audience to the characters which, as with many of the ‘tricks’ of the play, effectively attempts to bring the audience to become completely involved in the fates of the protagonists.  When sat in such close proximity to the acting, the quality of the acting became even more apparent – every word was delivered with such sensitivity that it rendered even the preview completely unforgettable. Who knows how powerful an impact the show proper will leave!

Some may feasibly complain about the piece being too jarring. Each alternate possibility of each scene comes straight after one another, with special effects being used to signify when a change of possibility is occurring. This is a daunting task, to make it flow effortlessly, yet I think the completely natural dialogue helps to ensure that no audience member will be left confused or otherwise dissatisfied with the effectiveness of the play at showing its deep emotional core.  The challenges of the play are not only made so they are not challenges, but become fundamental facets of its unique and undeniable appeal. The possible pretentiousness, the stillness, the lack of extra people on stage – all are inverted to become fascinating revelations of the play’s emotional progress.

Ultimately, this play is bold in its writing by Nick Payne, but is even bolder in its execution. Here I think the old adage that ‘Fortune favors the bold’ applies; and I am very optimistic that this will pay off in one of the most exciting pieces of theatre to come to Oxford.

Librarian, Treasurer, President I hear you say? Well perhaps, but maybe that’s more like the threefold ministry… Who the bishop, priest and deacon are, I leave to you…

In any case, next week Oxford Union members will be graced by three speakers whose celebrity is quite possibly of divine stature. In spite of its heretical detractors, I’m afraid to say, looking through the order of service you have to hand it to the Union officers. No, I’m not reading from the Union propaganda hymn sheet. But let us reverentially put our hands together (to clutch our termcards) and give praise where praise is due – let’s look at the highlights from next week’s particularly special line up.

 The Father: Harry Redknapp

Tuesday 26th January 

In the Gospel of John, the prologue that precedes the narrative recounts:

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

And who can forget QPR’s stunning 2-1 victory over Wigan in the 2014 season. Indeed the Rangers’ souls were looking particularly dark that fateful Tuesday night following relegation at the hands of the none other than the red devils. But under the luminous paternal guidance of Redknapp, Charlie Austin scored QPR’s two goals and darkness was overcome. Indeed, Redknapp’s seemingly eternal presence in English football promises a wealth of insight and stories, though as regards English football’s future, perhaps not much hope for a second coming. 

The Son: David Hasselhoff:

Monday 25th January

One issue of debate has been the impenetrable mystery of who the Son is. Who is the Hoff? Actor, singer, producer, businessman, or record reverse bungee jumper?

Indeed this walking enigma has often granted us revelation – Baywatch left little unexposed – but do we really have faith that we have seen all there is to see? Who/what is behind the masks of plastic reconstruction? Will the breadcrumbs of talent and tales of fishy experiences feed the expectations of the thousands of fans that will amass under the Union’s new queuing system?

The Spirit: Katie Hopkins

Thursday 28^th January

Which spirits and in what quantities of consumption is still unknown; what we do know is that she will be speaking in opposition to the motion, ‘This House Believes Positive Discrimination is the Best Solution to an Unequal Society’. Like the omnipresent spirit, Katie’s opinions certainly have a tendency of (hop)ping around nearly everywhere – quite often with substance as immaterial as that of God’s ethereal communicator. 

Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see how discriminating the crowds will be in their questions, not least because they will be speaking in a debating society where the crowds’ positivity to unpopular figures is not often equally distributed. 

Looking at my antisocially empty diary I’m glad to say the quality of speakers means this does not promise to be a totally hole(y) week. Uncertain divinity aside, this certainly presents a promising resurrection for the Union after a comparatively dormant First Week.

I was surprised when I received my first ever reading list from Oxford; as well as listing all the wrong books for the first year course, which I’ve since learnt is typical of Oxford organisation, it also contained the sentence ‘There is no need to begin reading widely in German literature but it would be a good thing to read the Old and New Testaments.’

Why was the Bible more important reading than books directly relevant to my course? I was not so familiar with German literature, having taken my tutor’s comment about not reading widely very much to heart, but when I started to think about it, I realised how much the Bible was behind some of my favourite childhood stories. Harry Potter’s mother sacrificing herself to enable her son, who should have died, to live was more than just a Disney-style leap in logic; it was a sacrifice directly based on Jesus’s death to give humanity life. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, too, Aslan doesn’t come back from the dead as a cop-out happy ending for children; his resurrection, in parallel to Jesus’s, frees humans from a miserable slavery to evil.

As soon as I started thinking about it, I encountered the Bible everywhere. I’ve recently become addicted to ‘Endeavour’, not least because I can shout ‘I know where that is’ each of the 46 times per episode they run past the Rad Cam, and I’ve noticed how much they quote or allude to the Bible. In the first episode of this series, a spin-off of The Great Gatsby, the verse Numbers 32:23, ‘your sins will find you out’, is scratched on Bixby (aka Gatsby’s) car, whilst in the second episode, a hippy quotes the verse ‘consider the lilies of the field’ (Matthew 6:25) to Inspector Thursday, who is less than impressed. We’re often quite like Thursday, I think, dismissing the Bible as old, boring and irrelevant. But if there are no original stories, as some claim and as the appearance of tenuously linked Endeavour/Gatsby episodes would seem to testify, is it not relevant that the story we keep returning to, in Harry Potter, Shakespeare, Narnia, the musical Joseph, Paradise Lost,Lord of the Rings, is the story of the Bible?

The familiar observation that the Bible is the best-selling book of all time obscures a more startling fact: the Bible is the best-selling book of the year, every year. A conservative estimate is that in 2005 English-speakers purchased some twenty-five million Bibles—twice as many as the most recent Harry Potter book. ‘In the beginning was the Word’ and it seems we just can’t get away from it. Both the original Bible, available in over 350 languages, and modern bestsellers with biblical foundations prove that over 2000 years on, we’re still fascinated with this story. And rightly so; far more than ‘lily of the field’ books which bloom for a while and fade away, this is a book that has been changing lives and whole systems of thought for centuries. So that’s why it’s more important than reading widely in German literature, which, admittedly, most things in life are, but this is also what makes it more important than any other book ever written.

Art enthusiasts, there is a bold new installation in town – and to my shame, I am currently kneeling on it. Surely if Jackson Pollack’s paint splattered floor can be considered art, my carpet in an equally distressed state has just as much right to the title. As with Pollack’s famous final work, my carpet tells a story. Each slight stain, for which I am now searching desperately to understand the cause, depicts a fragmentary moment in time. This is then profoundly juxtaposed with its power to erase past mistakes, as many years of wear make it increasingly difficult to ascertain the origins of the species now growing within. If you have ever read Terry Pratchett’s ‘The Carpet People’ you can imagine how emotionally involved I was in the creation of this piece. Indeed everytime the scout comes in, I feel a sense of solidarity with Sara Goldschmied and Eleonora Chiari, two Italian artists whose installation ‘Where Shall We Go Dancing Tonight?’ was swept away by cleaners at the Museion in Bolzano. Honestly, sometimes it feels like no-one respects modern Art.

But this may be about to change. Brilliantly reviewed by many (not to fan my own already petrol-fed flames), the eminent art critic Dr P. Einlich spoke to Cherwell earlier this week. He made the following profound observations; ‘The underwear strewn in an adhoc fashion across the piece add a certain human element to this masterwork. There is a very real sense that one is walking over the tatters of a human life. Comically the artist herself doesn’t hesitate to include a mass of slated translations and failed essays to demonstrate the cataclysm her life has become. I personally admired this honesty, evident throughout her work.’ I must admit however that not all critics were so positive. Ms Susie Gee was heard to whisper as she walked into the exhibition; ‘isn’t it like…just your carpet.’ Dear reader, we cannot expect all to understand the intricacies of artistic thought.

Thus to avoid similar reviews, I have decided to write this exposition. The thick layer of dust in the corner and the pile of recently ripped off backs of double sided sticky tape, are not just evidence of my own lack of self motivation, but beautifully present the transition of time and is proof of my own considerable commitment. The splatters of mud covering the floor, spread Oxford geographically throughout the square entity, providing a new spacial dimension. Indeed this is not a static installation, but one fixed in temporality. This is not just my finest work; this is my life’s work.

I invite you dear reader to come visit this cultural revolution. Tickets £3 on the door. All proceeds will go towards my latest installment, cryptically named ‘the wall’.

From the very first few minutes of chatting with travel author and adventurer Rory MacLean, it was clear this was one of the most genuine, friendly people I’d met. Rory’s wanderlust has taken him all around the world in the hunt for interesting stories and absorbing journeys- and as we talked I began to realise how he’d got so far and built friendships with so many different travellers. This empathy and understanding comes across clearly in his writing. Rory’s work slips along the border of fact and fiction, mythologizing the journey taken and weaving history and fact in with his own fiction. This creates an absorbing tangle of narrative that becomes a world of its own. His style, as far as I can tell, is utterly unique- and completely captivating. “I aim to reach a greater truth through the use of facts”, he explains. “I want to make a place, a history and a people more accessible. One of the reasons I concentrate on the individual, bringing fictional devices into non-fiction, is to make the reader empathise- to help them understand the whole human dimension of a historical event.”

We were discussing Rory’s latest work: ‘Berlin: Imagine a City’, – chosen as the book of the year by the Washington Post – which explores the tumultuous city throughout its varied history, viewing famous events through different angles and bringing the past to life. This way of experiencing other places through different eyes and through different times is at the heart of MacLean’s writing: “only then can you understand another person or society. The simple parochial representation of a place is no longer an achievement – other perspectives are essential.” This is what makes MacLean’s writing so interesting- it stretches and plays with the concept of ‘travel writing’ to encompass both factual reporting and imagined journeys, bridging the gap between the reader and the place- and showing them what it may have been like to live in a certain place, at a certain time.

But this book is more than that- it’s also Rory’s attempt to understand his own experiences in that city. “I first saw the Wall as a young Canadian at 17 ‘doing Europe’”, he tells me. “The sight of it shook me to the core. I knew the history, of course. I understood what had happened. But I couldn’t conceive how it had happened. The individuals whose actions had divided Germany and Europe – the wartime planners, the Soviet commissars, the Stasi agents – weren’t monsters. They were ordinary men and women. How had they have grown blind to their human experience, clouding it with dogma? I longed to understand their motivation, yet at the same time I was repulsed by their crimes and needed to feel their victims’ suffering. In a way it was these questions that led me to want to be a writer- to know how those people had come to act as they did.” So Rory traced the descendants of the Wall-builders and warmongers through Berlin’s history- “in that city, I could hardly avoid it. Everywhere you turn there simply oozed history and stories. You could feel the weight of it all around you.” But when asked if he believes events can stay in a place’s ‘residual memory’, he replies that he wished it were so- but he can’t quite bring himself to. “Perhaps it’s because my life became entwined in larger historical events: I’ve knew Berlin during the Cold War, and after it. Is there a collective memory of it? Or is it just a kind of nostalgia? I don’t know.” This curiosity, and a sense of questioning the very fabric of the city, is partly what makes the book so enthusing and gripping.

‘Berlin: Imagine a City’ mirrors Rory’s other adventures: from following the ‘Hippy Trail’ across Asia in ‘Magic Bus’ to exploring the culture of repression in Burma in ‘Under the Dragon’, Rory has always been on the hunt for stories. “It’s easy to think that the world is homogeneous: but look just below the surface and you find it’s so rich, so full of variety. I try to live and work in the places that I find individual and exciting- there are still so many to visit and I’m running out of years!” But Rory says he’s never actively gone out to find anecdotes to write about. “I just enjoy the deep richness of experience. I love learning how individuals live, and experiences come attached with that.” And it’s certainly paid off: Rory is full of stories and quips. At one point he tells me how, amongst other things, he worked with David Bowie. “I was a director’s assistant, and was sent to work in Berlin on Bowie and Dietrich’s film. In that city at the height of the Cold War, overlooking the Wall, working with Bowie… I realised then I’d been gifted something really special in life.”

But these adventures stretch far beyond the geographical. Rory is also the writer in residence at the Archive of Modern Conflict, writing a collection of fictional short stories based on some of the 4 million photos of war held there. When asked why he writes so frequently about conflict, he replies it’s as much about disbelief as fascination. “I find it almost beyond understanding what the individual is capable of- it’s like I’m back in Berlin looking over the Wall, and trying to understand why we – mankind – has to be this way.” Having written also about the missing civilians of the Yugoslav Wars for the ICRC, Rory is now working on a similar project with the UN, writing about the missing of Cyprus between 1963-74. “Over 2,000 men, women and children simply vanished.” He tells me. “There are so many heartbreaking stories- people can’t accept loved ones have gone, they’ve been waiting for 50 years for news of their fate. These are stories that need to be told.”

And this is what is so wonderful about Rory’s writing- it illuminates all sides of human experience, whatever historic period, whatever situation. “I look at the individual life to illuminate a broader historical trend. This lets me focus on the ‘wonder-voyage’ of everyday lives. I find art is a catalyst for this, it lets us celebrate other people’s richness and potential, but it also reminds us of the wonder-voyages taking place in yours and my and everyone’s everyday lives, showing us all to be – in one way or another – extraordinary.”

Has Rory always had this open- minded view of people and their experiences? “I did a lot of reading when I arrived in the UK- I felt illiterate, so I began to devour all the books I could find. I’ve been keeping a quote book for years!” He tells me. And Rory certainly shows his knowledge: our conversation is peppered with references and names, and I find myself jotting down notes to be researched later. “Reading is so key for me- it lets me easily slip into different personas. The past is not a place from which we must escape: it is a dynamic living community to be given to our children.” This lets him explore turning points in history- those moments we are constantly drawn back to. “But there is magic in the small events, too- the everyday as well as the unexpected,” he hastens to add. And, as our discussion winds its way through his various adventures, I find I’m agreeing with Rory: sometimes the everyday, such as a routine interview or conversation, can turn into an unexpected joy that you find yourself coming back to, again and again. ‘Berlin: Imagine a City’ is a wonderful book. But the figure behind the words is even more interesting.