Coming to the Michael Pilch Studio in 1^st week Trinity, Orphans looks to be a harrowing exploration of the division between familial and societal duty.

Helen and Danny are ordinary, functioning dutiful citizens – all until Helen’s brother, Liam, comes in bloodied and makes them change their attitudes and outlooks. What becomes clear from the outset is his inability to clarify his own story of how he comes to be bloodied – whether it is an accident or not becomes a key piece of the opening, providing the vaguely unsettling mixture of comedy and deep, macabre severity which comes to be the play’s calling card. The question of his guilt or innocence provides much of the tension of the play’s opening; yet altogether more unsettling questions come to the fore later on. 

The style of the play is as one would expect from The Experimental Theatre Club. In the original script as written by Dennis Kelly, often the lines do not end with punctuation – but instead with the interjection of another character. The resultant realism drives the conversations, which in turn drives the plot. The play also has no real exposition, relying on it being revealed in off-hand allusions in the conversations. Thus when Liam comes in bloodied, it comes as a jarring image, disturbing the apparent peace of the family dinner setting. However, the portraits of these characters get filled in as the play progresses, making us question the intrinsic moral worth of each of them; with the possibility of being pushed from middle class civility into madness and violence never that far away. 

The tension is something Kelly has spoken about explicitly in relation to this play. Ever since its debut on the Edinburgh Fringe in 2009, it has shocked and provoked audiences for it and what happens at its resolution. The questions asked of ‘Broken Britain’ by the play attack the notion of a united, integrated country that David Cameron was contemporaneously trying to build with the ‘Big Society’. Kelly says this tension is necessary for him – ‘I always want my plays to have tension; whether the audience hates it or loves it is up to them, but I never want them to be bored.’ He has achieved his aims – if you go and see it; you won’t be.

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Accidental Morning

Late turned to early when the mail slipped under the door,

a tiny crease of lemony light covered, then revealed. 

Those pebble steps.

Somehow the tea cooled. You called it the colonizer’s drink,

and I put my hands over my ears, I said,

to warm them.

When the heat turned off, we knew it was spring again.

The marigold splashed itself into the hallway,

despite our protests.

I placed a petal in the oval of your chest (but your body had grown

out of my stretch). A mailman’s thumb.

Smudged return address.

All of it, morphing without our consent. No wonder

I fumble like any accidental supplicant, whose prayer

is for a single lull to stay and be.

Note:

Cathy Go is the recipient of the River of Words Grand Prize in Poetry and a Columbia University fellowship funding her first chapbook project, which aims to present both oral history and poetry in a dialogue on memory, landscape and diaspora. She has been published in Cuckoo Quarterly, Just Poetry and the Columbia Review.

I feel like, at this point, provisos about the hit and miss nature of student comedy are cliché enough to be taken as read. If the attendance of the opening night of this show was anything to go by, Oxford at large is far from convinced that just because a show has the Revue’s stamp on it, it will necessarily be a guaranteed night of laughs. Watching bad comedy is genuinely painful, in a way that bad acting can never quite manage to be – the public in general knows what good comedy looks and feels like, in a way that is much more difficult to discern than good vs good dramatic performances. Added in to this mix is the fact that plays are very rarely written by the people performing them, whereas in sketch comedy we are not only judging the people on stage for their performances, but we’re judging the very premises that they are presenting to us. In this way, comedians are actually considerably braver than actors – with all this in mind, let’s get down to the business at hand – the new show, ‘Horseplay’, from the handpicked new generation of the Oxford Revue.

The sketches themselves had, for me, a hit rate of roughly 60%, however the overall tone of the show was surprisingly coherent – the sketches had a unifying voice which was surprising and impressive given the relative inexperience of the cast. If I were characterise the prevailing tone of these sketches, it would be massive, constructed, dense set ups, incredibly intricate worlds created and then paid off with incredibly simple punch lines– sometimes just puns. To describe some of the set ups, the audience was treated to a (shoddily accented) Australian spelling bee, where two of the judges were feuding divorces, all for the pay off of ‘you didgeri-did my wife’. I think these ludicrous experiments in world creation, which take an enormous amount of effort and time for these laughs founded in very simple and mechanical humour owes something to the meteoric popularity of improvisation – which has gone from strength to strength in recent years. This show really relies on an audience which will say “yes, and” to increasingly convoluted and dense sketches – Dr Seuss at the Pharmacy, someone dissecting a rat in the Missing Bean, and a completely surreal office environment with some astonishing character acting from Derek Mitchell, who quite literally had me gasping for breath. 

Other standouts included Kathy Maniura’s pretentious Marina Abramovich devotee (who reminded me of several people I know) and Alistair Inglis’ Oscar nominated bishop. The problem with such vast and intricate sketch comedy is that when it falls flat, it really does fall flat – I would like to think of myself at relatively intelligent, but there were some sketches I simply didn’t ‘get’. Maybe the problem was that I did ‘get’ them, but the pay offs were so mind bogglingly simple, that I refused to belief that we’d spent quite as long as we did getting there. The one sketch that really frustrated me was set in an audition for the show, under the premise that fart jokes are unfunny, but if we present them in a knowing way, as bad comedy, then they will become funny – it’s a copout, and I am so tired of self awareness. Moreover, the changes between sketches were often choppy, and the shifts in subject matter so erratic as to make the whole thing quite disorientating at points. Overall, this was an impressive opening for this new generation of the Revue – there were plenty of faults to be ironed out, but I mostly think it’s a shame that there weren’t more people there at the opening night. 

Okay so first I have to make some concessions – I do not have the work ethic, the raw talent or the drive to put together a comedy show like this, I’m not really qualified to be passing judgement on this, and my position as a critic stems from a totally unfounded sense of self importance. With all of those caveats in place, I have to be honest and say that I didn’t particularly enjoy this show, which is a shame. I really wanted to enjoy Sketchy History, the premise seemed to fit me to a tee – I’m a tireless history nerd with a deep love of self-deprecating student comedy, and yet this show really failed to connect – I laughed, but more out of a sense of obligation than genuine joy.

Alarm bells started ringing for me when I saw a teaser for this show at the Keble Arts Festival comedy night – the sketches felt for the most part a little bit too obvious – its never particularly reassuring when you can see punchlines coming from several miles away, and even worse when you’re pretty sure you’ve heard some of the individual jokes before, in other pieces of comedy. That’s not to say that this was a complete disaster – not by any stretch of the imagination. There were some genuinely original and hilarious moments in this evening of entertainment – kernels that promised great things from this act. Particular highlights included Martin Luther King’s Freudian psychoanalyst or little asides such as “mashed up Samaritans… not the good ones”. There was a certain joyful allure in the silliness of the language – “we’re going to fumble with history’s bra in the dark until she gives up on us and goes back to her ex David Starkey.”

And yet for all the promise that was stored up in occasional flashes of earnest comedy, the whole show failed to cohere for me. The belly laughs came too few and far between to truly lose yourself in the narratives – there was an oddly disjointed element to the show as a whole, compounded by sloppy changes and an eclecticism of tone which I found distracting. It would be unfair to describe the less fleshed out sketch ideas as half baked; it more felt like they’d been cooked to perfection, but were lacking that little bit of kick – vanilla extract, Tabasco – whatever the culinary metaphor requires. This was further compounded by the performances, which were far too reliant on bemusingly broad-brush characterisation and hesitantly fell back on excessive swearing if the laughs started to dry. 

This review is not particularly kind to Sketchy History – and I think the show could have been considerably worse, and I might have ended up being less critical as a result. It is because I could see occasional glimpses of something great that I became more and more frustrated with the show for failing to live up to its potential. I earnestly hope that these comics continue to ply their trade, and find a way to fully realise their latent talents. I also have to concede that a lot of people went to these shows, and seemed to laugh quite extensively – so what do I know?

Making the trek from LMH to St Peter’s on an otherwise uninspiring Thursday evening, I really had no idea what to expect from The Rape of Lucretia. I was familiar with only the barest details of the plot, and, I have to admit, somewhat of an opera newbie. Despite my rather stunning ignorance, this was a production that succeeded in creating an admirably disquieting atmosphere. From the very first note, an overwhelming sense of eeriness filled the suitably darkened chapel, and I never felt quite comfortable in my seat, was never truly able to shake of a mounting feeling of disconcerted apprehension. This was largely thanks to some very clever staging. Atmospheric though it is, St Peter’s chapel is not what you would describe as cavernous. Restricted stage space was, however, all to the good, and added to a sense of uncomfortable, claustrophobic oppression. There was also little to adorn the stage, and this added an appropriately stark feel, as well as keeping attention focused on the cast’s magnificently mesmerising performance.

It was, in fact, in the moments of quiet anguish, of simmering, bubbling tension, that the cast’s skill was most evident. Sure, everybody likes a bit of bombast and there was certainly no shortage of stunning, shocking drama to be had. Yet, I was never more captivated than when we were afforded a slight pause, when the action was allowed to breath. The scene in which Lucretia first appears was particularly impressive, and it was hard not to be utterly drawn in by her desperate wait for her husband’s return home from war.  Indeed, the all-important moment when Lucretia’s virtue is violently robbed was a largely well-handled affair, and managed to steer clear of the sensational. (Although if weren’t for the otherwise supremely classy nature of this production, I would be tempted to call the red lighting during this scene a little heavy handed).  Indeed, with a story concerning such overwhelmingly dark themes, it can be hard to find the correct balance between tiresome moralising and ghoulish overemphasis. Yet the all-pervasive sense of doom never overstepped its mark, and the cast judged their roles perfectly. Lucretia was vulnerable without being melodramatic or pathetic, Tarqinius dark and menacing without slipping into any kind of pantomime villain mode. So good was this production, that I had real trouble leaving behind my troubled disconcertion, even after leaving the eerie confines of St Peter’s chapel.