Here at Cherwell we tend to prefer hochkultur – transcendent themes, the dramatic that reaches for the divine – the sort of art that transports you from a grotty rehearsal room towards heavenly truth. Thus, It was with a degree of trepidation that I opened my email to find an invitation to a preview of the Oxford Revue’s new sketch comedy show. The world of student comedy doesn’t tend to reach those hallowed themes which are constantly on the minds of the Cherwell stage team, but my co-editor is too lazy to check our the shared email account with any frequency, so I pinched my nose, and took the plunge into sketch comedy.

Heavy Petting is a four-man sketch show coming to the BT in third week – it’s the revue’s flagship this term, so I was a little surprised when I arrived at the preview to find only Jack Chisnall (Revue president), Chesca Forristal, and Dom O’Keefe present. It quickly transpired that their fourth man, Alexander Fox, had abandoned his artistic scruples before the show even started, and was currently pursuing a lucrative internship at an advertising agency. The loss of Mr Fox, did, unfortunately, somewhat narrow the repertoire of what the principled remaining trio were able to perform with me – he’s very central to a lot of the sketches, they said with no small degree of hand wringing.

Regardless, I was treated to a sample of very inventive, and occasionally bizarre sketch comedy – presuming they can maintain the agility, the wit and the joyful passion for the full 60 minutes of Heavy Petting, you’re in for a particularly funny evening from a very strong Revue line up (presuming that Fox isn’t very much the weak link in the chain – hidden from my sight on the pretence of a phony internship, to improve the chances of a positive preview). 

Once the comedy was finished, we sat down to talk about the drive for this sketch show, their inspiration and their influences. The consensus amongst the comedians was that the star of sketch comedy has very much been on the wane in the last few years. An overreliance on hackneyed themes, and the overuse of choppy blackouts – in part to desperately engender applause from the audience, and in part the progeny of television sketch shows, has forced the form to concede to the jagged self awareness of student stand up, or lean on gimmicks to prop itself up. This trend in sketch comedy has built up a barrier between the comedians and the audience, which the Revue intend to smash down with a flowing, organic and engaging show – drawing you into the often ridiculous world of these sketches with a very earnest smile on its face. If you want a laugh next week, then you will be guaranteed one by heading down to the BT to be Heavily Petted. 

The New College Ante Chapel will be hosting a concert by the International Rameau Ensemble (IRE) at 8.30 PM next Saturday evening, performing excerpts of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s famous Les Indes Galantes and a selection of other Baroque pieces based on the theme of love, such as Lambert’s “Ombre de mon amant, Vos mepris chaque jour” and Charpentier’s “Celle qui fait mon tourment”.

The IRE will be accompanied by acclaimed soloists Katherine Blumenthal and Lawrence Olsworth-Peter, respectibely soprano and haute-contre, who sung the title roles in the 2012 premiere of a revisited production of Rameau’s Acante et Cephise at the Bloomsbury Theatre, in London. The flautist and Birmingham Conservatoire PhD student Lisete da Silva will equally be present among other specialised musicians, to let the audience discover the intricacies of 18^th century French court music.

Founded two years ago, the ensemble aims to bring Rameau and his contemporaries’ works back and out into the open, demonstrating how much potential the complex music writing techniques and conventions followed by these composers still have, and making it accessible to curious musicians of all ages by organising their annual International Rameau Summer Schools with the talented harpsichordist Christophe Rousset. Previous performances of this formation include a successful concert at St George’s Hanover Square, where the IRE played Rameau’s Grands Motets. The ensemble has also been featured in BBC Radio 3’s In Tune programme with Sean Rafferty.

About a week before Valentine’s day, this concert should make for an interesting evening for the un-initiated to delve into a world which is rarely presented to the public, and allow anyone already acquainted with Baroque to enjoy the IRE’s programme.

“The whole secret of farce is that it’s about ordinary people in extraordinary situations: if it happens to a bunch of clowns it isn’t funny at all”. So said Ben Travers in 1979 during an interview with Alan Ayckbourn, and any director would do well to heed his advice.

Long before Brian Rix thought of dropping his trousers, Ben Travers was packing out the Aldwych Theatre with a series of hugely popular farces. Written between 1925 and 1933, some of the best of them were turned into films. Madcap comedies like Rookery Nook, Thark and Plunder immersed audiences in a Wodehousian world of well-meaning chumps, formidable wives and buck-toothed vicars. But best of all was his dotty dialogue that led characters to utter lines like : “Don’t bend like that, you look like a prawn.”

To enter Travers’s world is to go back to a time when any mention of sex was considered saucy. This isn’t surprising when we remember that Travers was born in 1886, and as a child recalls seeing Charlie Chaplin strut his stuff, and William Gillette take Sherlock Holmes to the stage. Travers served as a pilot in the First World War and worked in RAF Intelligence in the Second. A genial-sounding fellow, he loved cricket, chorus girls and pipe-smoking, and even into his nineties liked to stand on his head to lift his spirits. When asked by Roy Plomley on Desert Island Discs in 1975 what he’d most like to get away from he answered: ”I’m 88. My feet.”

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Over the years there have been some revivals of Travers’ work – most notably Plunder at the National Theatre in 1978 – but generally his farces were regarded as charming but antiquated. Yet on my first reading of Thark I couldn’t stop laughing. As the critic Michael Billington so neatly put it: “Travers’ farce remains as gloriously and sublimely irrelevant as it ever was.” I could see my job as director would be to lift Thark from the category of quaint revival, and help reveal it as the comic masterpiece it really is. 

The play’s setting is the eponymous Thark, an isolated country house in deepest Norfolk. Reputed to be haunted Thark’s owner, Sir Hector Benbow – a lecherous old toff – arrives from London to investigate. He’s accompanied by various family members, all of whom are enmeshed in a series of romantic misunderstandings of their own making. The plot-line is as creaky as the house itself, and the ensuing bad behaviour threatens to bring the set crashing down around the actors’ heads.        

Travers’ farces were originally written for a company of well-known comic actors, so much like Shakespeare he wrote with certain performers in mind. The fact that Tom Walls, his leading man, always insisted on his girlfriend being given a part kept Travers on his toes, particularly as the girlfriend in question kept changing. So when it came to casting our production, I wanted to make sure the roles fitted our performers as seamlessly as a Saville Row suit.

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Auditions kicked off last Christmas, and producer, Claudia Graham, and production manager, Charles Pidgeon, were as excited as I was at the calibre of actors who made their way to LMH. By the end of the day we had bagged ourselves a splendid cast of matrons, shop-girls and chinless wonders. The only part we’d failed to cast was Death, Thark’s aptly named butler, whose lugubrious presence lends the play its only existential chill. With minutes to spare, in walked George Fforde, and we knew by his spooky steps and sinister hisses that our day’s work was done.

Like all the best farces there is a frenetic momentum to Thark, which modern interpretations like to emphasise. So with the help of our dramaturg, James Watson, we kicked off our early rehearsals with improvisation and spontaneity exercises. It wasn’t long before Lord Benbow (played by Adam Diaper) and his nephew Ronny (played by Barney Shekleton) were cuddling up on an imaginary double bed. The best farces may appear Brylcreem slick on the surface, but there’s a lot of energetic paddling going on down below. 

The newly opened Michael Pilch Studio in Balliol’s Postgraduate Annexe has proved the ideal space for our production, enabling us to establish two domains on stage. Production designer, Chris Page, sees the audience seating plan as key to “raising the energy and comic pace of the whole piece”, while Georgia Crump, the production’s talented costume designer, is working to evoke the aesthetic of “rich people fooling around”.  Spooky weather is central to the play’s atmospherics, and technical managers, Catrin Haberfield and Noah Rivkin, are “pumped” to experiment with the Studio’s state-of-the-art effects.

Freud believed that laughter was the release of anxiety. While farce isn’t to everyone’s taste, we hope even its fiercest critics will find our production of Thark a therapeutic experience. Some of England’s finest playwrights – Michael Frayn, Tom Stoppard, Joe Orton – were farceurs, but Ben Travers got there first. His only weakness as a writer was that he wasn’t great at endings. So channelling his spirit, we’ve come up with a new Tharkian twist. We hope that he wouldn’t have told us to Thark Off, and would’ve been tickled to see his work revivified for a new generation of Oxford audiences.  In farces, everything must go wrong, but in exactly the right way. It is towards this truism that we have been working. In the words of Hook, Sir Hector’s put-upon manservant: “I’m afraid we’ve made a bit of a mess.”

If there’s one thing that really pisses me off, it’s when directors try to trick the audience, but don’t really put any effort into it. Henry IV part II opens with a speech from an anthropomorphised representation of rumour dressed in a robe painted ‘full of tongues’ (a device which sparknotes reliably informs me is singularly Virgilian in origin). In Greg Doran’s production at the Barbican, Rumour wore a Rolling Stone’s t-shirt emblazoned with tongue and lips and chastised us for not turning off our phones, only to be distracted by his twitter feed. His speech “Stuffing the ears of men with false reports” was accompanied by a variety of hashtags projected onto the wall behind him, it was all very ‘modern’ and ‘fresh’ and ‘exciting’ and ‘made me realise just how relevant the bard was in a social media age’ and ‘please don’t cut any more RSC funding’. 

Despite my scathing tone there, I don’t in principle have any problem with modernising, as long as its innovative rather than dogmatic – the frankly tiresome repetition of ‘let’s put CCTV in Hamlet’ has got more than a little dog-eared. No, I didn’t have any problem with the rampant hashtaggery of Doran’s introduction, my problem is that it wasn’t build into a coherent narrative within the play. After Rumour’s speech, not a single concession was made to the ideas that this decision painted so ham-fistedly. I’m sure that Doran’s defenders will point to the speech as a useful transition from the world of phones which the audience inhabits, to the meticulous period setting of this play. That is utter bollocks, this was a lazy concession, a limp wristed attempt to make a very traditional staging look innovative and exciting, and I simply refuse to let him get away with it.