★★★★☆

Four Stars

In recent years, there has been a definite societal shift in the way we discuss mental health. In fact, the main change has perhaps been the frequency with which we discuss it at all. Charities such as Mind and Calm (the Campaign against Living Miserably) have hugely increased profiles nationally, whilst here in Oxford, OUSU’s ‘Mind Your Head’ campaign has worked to challenge the stigma of mental health amongst students. With the general election approaching, political parties have been tripping over themselves to describe mental health as a priority. Yet funding has been cut by 8% since 2010 whilst referrals have increased by almost a fifth, and the Minister of State for Care has himself described children’s mental health services as “not fit for purpose”.

It’s in this context that BBC2’s Nurse has been broadcast, adapted from the successful Radio 4 show of the same name with the original team of writers. The show stars Esther Coles as Liz, a community mental health nurse visiting her wide array of ‘service users’, the majority of whom are played by Paul Whitehouse in astonishingly good make-up and prosthetics. Among the most memorable characters he plays are the softly-spoken, utterly charming Herbert, mourning his erectile dysfunction while gently acquiescing to the onset of dementia, and Billy, a tattooed, muscular ex-prisoner with crippling agoraphobia, who is simultaneously helped out and held back by his moustachioed friend Tony (Simon Day), who consistently interrupts his appointments with Liz.

It is in these harmful relationships between patients and those around them that Nurse makes its clearest points. Both Billy’s friend Tony and Graham’s overbearing, morbidly obese mother actively maintain cycles of dependency, while Lorrie’s next-door neighbour and would-be sweetheart Maurice quite simply cannot take a hint. Coles is utterly believable in these scenes, and indeed throughout the series, balancing warmth, humour and understanding with her patients and a bluntness and even outright anger at those who threaten her patients’ recovery. She has her own issues in her personal life, and the snatched moments between appointments in which she makes a phone call, sings along to the car radio, or grabs a bite to eat, add to her total credibility in the role.

Somewhat counter-intuitively, the sketches which work best are the often the ones which make the least attempt to be funny. In the first episode, Rosie Cavaliero’s ‘crazy cat lady’ is actively anti-comedic, deconstructing the familiar trope by stripping it back to its achingly sad reality. Whitehouse’s finest performance, and the program’s biggest emotional punch, comes as the son of an Alzheimer’s suffering mother who is convinced that her son never visits her – he lives with her as her full-time carer. Forget The Fast Show, forget Harry and Paul, try to forget those godawful insurance adverts, and watch Whitehouse as a straight dramatic actor in these scenes – he is extraordinary.

Blending Getting On’s brusque gallows humour (unsurprisingly, both Coles and Whitehouse have family who are mental health workers) with Rev’s deft emotional poignancy, Nurse is a beautifully written, exquisitely acted piece of television comedy. It’s in its willingness to restrain itself from seeking out laughs at every opportunity, that it finds a far more emotionally satisfying humanity.

★☆☆☆☆
One Star

There were clearly high hopes for the big screen adaptation of the first of Joseph Delaney’s fantasy novels about a young Spook’s apprentice, but a seemingly never-ending gestation period in post-production limbo seemed to set its fate in stone. With such a tumultuous history behind it, it’s no wonder that the final result is a shambolic mess of medieval sword-and-sorcery drudgery. Somewhere along the line, Russian director Sergei Bodrov’s pseudo-epic venture into English language filmmaking seems to have somehow got more than a little bit lost in translation.

The film follows “Spook” Master Gregory, a chivalric protector of humanity against supernatural forces, played by a dazed and confused Jeff Bridges. After his apprentice is killed in action, Gregory hurriedly seeks a replacement to take on the evil Mother Malkin – who takes the form of Julianne Moore in complete Goth attire when she isn’t a gargantuan dragon. After a remarkably brief search, Gregory chooses scrawny but good-hearted Thomas Ward (Ben Barnes) to take up the mantle of his next apprentice, all because he is the seventh son of a seventh son (AKA: an ancestry.com nightmare), and because Thomas is plagued by recurring visions of their quests together.

It must surely take some effort to reduce actors of Jeff Bridges’ and Julianne Moore’s calibre to such painfully empty performances. Bridges appears to have sourced Gregory’s voice from somewhere between Gandalf the Grey and Bane from The Dark Knight Rises. He pushes out each word with the intonation of an asthmatic chimpanzee, fashioning a character even more inaudible and incoherent than his Rooster Cogburn in 2010’s True Grit. Julianne Moore should have been blessed with a deliciously juicy ice-queen – as fun and playful as Susan Sarandon in Enchanted – but instead she can’t make head or tail of dialogue unfit for a pantomime villain. You’d have thought the onscreen reunion of these Big Lebowski stars would have been something magical, but there isn’t a single spark between them.

Bodrov evidently didn’t have much of a plan for his performers. The English actors are sporting American accents, the American actors are sporting English accents, and Swedish actress Alicia Vikander is caught somewhere in between as the pointy-shoed two-dimensional squeeze. Even Olivia Williams as Thomas’ mother, harbouring a major plot secret of her own, doesn’t appear to have a clue what is going on, and a sorely underused Djimon Hounsou spends more time in beast-form than he does in person. We can’t blame him.

It seems that even the filmmakers get tripped up over the muddled ridiculousness of the plot at times. At one point, Thomas literally steps into the shoes of the audience and screams at his master what’s on everyone’s lips, “you have to explain things!”, to which Gregory nonchalantly retorts, “no time!”. It’s funny how one minute Gregory is barking that there is absolutely no time to lose when Thomas pesters him with questions the screenwriters clearly couldn’t be bothered to answer, but then all of a sudden there is ample time for a lengthy training session montage, simply because Thomas asks for it (and says “please”).

Undoubtedly intended to launch a fully fleshed fantasy franchise, audiences will be profoundly disheartened by this vacuous first (and thus probably only) installment. There is simply no escaping or excusing the vapid dialogue, the chaotic artistic direction (Thomas Ward is consistently clad in something of a “medieval” hoodie), and the overbearing feeling that the film wants to be over and done with faster than we want it to be. What a tragic waste of time and talent.

Writing in the New Yorker, Kenneth Goldsmith is one of many voices currently championing the Internet and Postinternet movements in art and literature. Goldsmith’s increasingly regular articles discuss the development of this latest art form and argue passionately for its significance and centrality in our digital culture. And he is right. Online arts have today visibly progressed from a niche to a mainstream interest, gaining media attention, exhibition spaces and serious academic scrutiny. The most recent New Left Review, for example, includes a review of Astra Taylor’s The People’s Platform, a critical study of culture in the digital age. Just this week, even, the poet Rupi Kaur’s banned Instagram post  brought online art into the limelight as the story, and the artist’s powerful response, circulated on social media via the Huffington Post. Postinternet art now seems to be an established presence, but what exactly do we mean by ‘Internet’ and ‘Postinternet’ art, and where is this movement taking art and literature?

Internet art, as a useful starting point, is art that is (usually) digitally made and shared using the internet, making particular use of the interactive and communicative possibilities of the web to create an Internet-reliant aesthetic experience. Internet artist Jess Mac, as a perfect example, makes art from emojis and Google Images, and and shares them on her tumblr, which has the tagline, “What happens on the internet, stays on the internet.” The postinternet movement, then, clearly follows on from this, but evidently doesn’t refer to a break from the Internet – culture is ‘post-Internet’ in the same sense as it is post-Freud or post-Marx. Art and literature considered postinternet engages with the web and with society after the invention of the web: it breaks the online confines of internet art, entering into physical gallery spaces and printed books. As a movement too has its own distinct aesthetic characteristics, which are largely brought forward from internet art: garish graphics, the love of objet trouvé and an unrelenting use of pastiche and parody. 

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“What happens on the internet, stays on the internet.”

American poet Steve Roggenbuck’s YouTube videos are seminal works of Internet poetry, collages of pop-culture references, offbeat snippets of invented dialogue and Whitman-esque carpe diem sentiments, set over slowed-down trance songs and frenetic, stirring post-rock tracks. Roggenbuck’s most recent video there is no morning sky anywhere (2015) is a mosaic of recordings of conversations and poetry readings (by himself and other poets), only beginning the poem-proper in the last minute and a half, which is accompanied by overlapping video clips and crummy graphics. The video treads the line between online and real life, between internet and postinternet, knowingly translating a physical, pre-internet art form (poetry readings) into digital media, only to parody itself with an ostentatious display of its internet-ness in the lo-fi filter and early-internet-style graphics at the end of the video. 

The website Rhizome is currently host to an online exhibition of poetry, called ‘Poetry as Practice’, which publishes a new poetry work every Monday for 6 weeks. Penny Goring’s contribution DELETIA is a sprawling epic of sound clips, gifs, images and YouTube clips, with Goring’s face crudely edited into images throughout. It looks much as though she dragged a net through a Tumblr dashboard and emptied the contents into a Powerpoint – the result is disarmingly poignant, if at times esoteric. The piece relies on the audience’s interaction to scroll through the pages and play videos, exploiting its particular medium for its aesthetic ends: Internet poetry is notably indebted to McLuhan’s “medium is the message”.

What is central both to Goring’s and Roggenbuck’s poetry is its multi-modality, the use of images, video and audio alongside and even as the ‘text’ of the poem; it is even multimodal in the sense that they both distribute their work online and in print version. It is this multimodality which makes postinternet art and poetry so easy to talk about in conjunction – textual and visual elements merge in the familiarly readable manner of the meme. Postinternet culture offers little distinction between art forms, favouring the play between different media: in music, for example, its aesthetic clearly informed the artwork for Vektroid’s album Floral Shoppe as well as the early music videos and lyrics of rappers Yung Lean and Allan Kingdom.

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Artwork for Floral Shoppe by Vektroid

 Another notable feature of Internet art is its chaotic blending of styles and periods, its garish juxtaposition of emojis and Renaissance painting, Walt Whitman and Yolo, combined with its ironic sense of nostalgia, where it celebrates the aesthetics of early computer graphics – it harks back parodically to a paragon of the virtual, lampooning a conventional artistic nostalgia for some notion of realism and art that can be founded on the natural or material world. The Tate Britain’s ‘1840s GIF Party’ picked up on this by inviting contemporary artists to make GIFs out of paintings from the gallery’s 1840s room. British artist Joe Webb responded playfully by giving Roussel’s The Reading Girl an iPad to play with and had Watts’s The Minotaur talking a selfie with an unfortunate amount of redeye. Webb is most famous for his prolific collage work, the method of which is key to the Internet art and literature movements, which recycles cultural materials – images and phrases, for example – into new artworks, enacting quite literally the postmodern parody of form in a way only possible in the information-saturated digital age.

What is most interesting about the move from internet to postinternet culture is how it parallels the liquidation of the boundaries between cyberspace and the real world; the synthesis of the material art predating the internet and the virtual reality of early internet art. The internet is dragged into art galleries and poetry books, while Walt Whitman and the 1840s are rehashed and remoulded in cyberspace. As Bickerton notes in her piece for the New Left Review mentioned earlier, this merger of online and real life is more than a cultural creation, but the product of a pressing reality today with which we are all familiar: Google’s 3D profiling merges information from our search queries, social media and physical whereabouts – our ‘knowledge,’ ‘social’ and ‘embodied’ persons – for its targeted advertising.

The individual of late capitalism lives in this dual reality: online and offline are not separate worlds. Postinternet art and literature reflects how the spaces we inhabit and communicate through have changed and are changing, and as such has an importance in broader interpretive and perceptive contexts, but also brings with it a new set of questions of production and reception for the creative industries – will internet poetry be to publishing houses and poets what Spotify is to record labels and artists? Meanwhile, art and literature plumbing the depths of postinternet culture is some of the freshest, interesting work being put out today, that is also perhaps the most accessible and relevant. There is, undoubtedly, a certain tongue-in-cheeked poignance in Roggenbuck’s mock-aphorism, that real life “is just the manure of our online life”. 

This year’s highly anticipated Game of Thrones Season Five launches in the US on 12^th April 2015 and the next day for eager UK viewers on Sky Atlantic. The blockbuster television series has been widely followed in the media over the last six months, and now, with less than two weeks to wait before the broadcasting of the first episode, every Game of Thrones fan worldwide is anxious with excitement. Shot in a mere 240 days, Season Five has utilized 151 sets in five countries and – besides their 166 cast members – over 1000 crew members and 5000 extras.

Adapted from George R. R Martin’s fourth and fifth novels in his spectacular ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ Series (Book Four: A Feast for Crows and Book Five: A Dance with Dragons), Season Five is rumoured to be “shocking” and “pushing the boundaries of the way we view television”. With producers David Benioff and Dan Weiss’ decision to stray from some of the novels’ particulars to keep audiences on their toes, fans have been warned that some characters will die who do not die in the books, amongst many other significant changes from the novels.

Season Four ended in a flood of dramatically extravagant events including the epic full-length episodes of the battle at the Wall between the Wildlings and the Night’s Watch, and the first encounters of the mythical Children of the Forest. More controversially, the distressing fight between Oberyn Martell and The Mountain concluded in one of the most graphic and traumatic deaths seen so far in the 18+ rated television series, causing shock and outrage worldwide. The Seven Kingdoms have been left in ruin. The manipulative and scheming Littlefinger has fled the capital and enveloped the elegant Sansa Stark in his dark plots, exposing his warped romantic attraction to her, and his previous murderous involvements.

The death of the much-hated young King Joffrey at his own infamous Purple Wedding and the almost-total destruction of the Stark family, as well as Tyrion’s harrowing trial and murder of Tywin Lannister, have all left Westeros  significantly weakened. Westeros now lies in the clutches of the hate-filled Cersei Lannister, whose feud with Margaery Tyrell will only intensify in Season Five. The beautiful Daenerys Targaryen – though stronger than ever, and with dragons who seem to grow ever powerful – is encountering trouble whilst managing her newly conquered cities, and it is believed that her narrative will now, much to the delight of her fans, take a central role throughout the following season. Neither Bran Stark nor Hodor however will be making appearances, as their part in the story had already reached the end of Book Five in Season Four.

Season Five will be encountering new faces such as the High Sparrow, the Sand Snakes and Slave Trader Yezzan. There will also be the re-visitation of some older familiar faces such as the vulnerable Myrcella Lannister, living as a ward in Dorne amongst the outraged people of the murdered Oberyn (whose death was caused entirely by the Lannister household). Rumour has it that the mysterious face-adapting Jaqen H’ghar will also be making a reappearance of sort. Characters are said to be venturing into strange new lands including Dorne and Braavos. An exciting new set location includes the world-famous Alcazar Palace in Sevilla, Spain, and also the stunning historic town of Dubrovnik, Croatia. Sophie Turner, who plays Sansa Stark, states, “There are some massive moments, perhaps even more shocking than the Red Wedding… There’s a lot of blood, a lot of death.”

It has been widely reported that the usual controversy surrounding Game of Thrones will continue, with Season Five containing its expected dosage of strong sex, nudity and violence. Sexual violence, it has been unofficially informed, will also be a theme that the upcoming season shall be exploring. Kit Harington, however, who plays Jon Snow, says that he likes the controversy attached to the show, declaring, “I think it’s what makes our show our show… I don’t think it’s controversial for the sake of it.”

Jon Snow, one of the principal characters to the plot of Game of Thrones, is said to hold a very important role in the following season. No one could forget the significant ‘look’ given to him by the Red Woman at the end of Season Four, suggesting a dark interest in him that will not be dropped. In November 2014, David Benioff and Dan Weiss’ visit to the Oxford Union, accompanied by Kit Harrington (Jon Snow) and John Bradley (Samwell Tarly), implied a strong importance on the currently unknown identity of Jon Snow’s mother – not necessarily for Season Four but for the series as a whole. Only time will tell.

Game of Thrones is certainly at an exhilarating stage of its development, and its millions of fans worldwide hold their breath in anticipation for its release on the 12^th April 2015. Soon social networking sites and the media will explode with suitably related Game of Thrones material and with the forewarned dramatic developments. No doubt Game of Thrones Season Five is going to cause every bit of fuss it deserves.

For us, Summer approaches with every day that passes. But in Westeros, for our many beloved characters and equally for those we love to loath, Winter is coming. 

★★★☆☆

Three Stars

In 1985 Mark Knopfler must have been a smug man. His band Dire Straits had just produced the nine times platinum selling album Brothers in Arms; an album produced on a Caribbean island with their good friend Gordon Sumner, aka Sting. As if life wasn’t hard enough, their concerts were almost as profitable as the businesses of the stockbroking fraternity that attended them. The ‘Geordie lad’ had very much left the dingy pubs of the East End and never looked back.

This is ironic because in 2015, Knopfler is back in the dingy pub. He’s still making a lot of money no doubt, but his attention has turned from the yuppies and returned to the down to earth grit of his formative years. This has been his line following the disbanding of Dire Straits. The resulting albums have provided a satisfying mix of folky Celtic sounds with laid-back blues-rock. This new style reached its zenith with 2010’s Get Lucky where he dropped the last vestiges of rock stardom to create a poignant and beautiful swan song to the influences of his youth. In short, he’s done the commercial stuff, he’s done the ‘return to your roots stuff’: so what’s next?

On one level his latest offering, Tracker, is a great-follow up. On another, it’s seriously lacking. Tracker is a competent and well-crafted album, and its merits as a stand-alone work cannot be denied. At the same time it’s clear that Tracker has just recycled the ‘return to your roots’ trick, yet again. To appraise Tracker is the same as appraising Knopfler’s solo work, for it is virtually indistinguishable. While this is a credit to the album, it’s a discredit to the development of Knopfler’s career.

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If you’ve never heard Knopfler’s solo work, this is the perfect place to start. All the hallmarks of his oeuvre are here. One of the standout features is the consistently pitch perfect production. From the opening notes, you can almost feel the lumbering acoustic bass of his Gibson resonating as if you were sitting right next to him. The sound is masterfully clear and well balanced yet also infused with a sense of age and grit which for a second makes you believe you really are in that dingy pub surrounded by disillusionment and despair. Then you remember it’s probably been forty years since Knopfler was in that pub or indeed felt any sense of poverty stricken hopelessness. His solo work has often assumed this tone of wistful melancholy as he recounts working class stories told through the imagined stories of hard done individuals. Tracker no less than other albums has its fair share of social realism: “We were young, so young, And always broke” or indeed “If you got no place to go, I got my home from river rats, The only home I know”. But he gets away with it; he sings with such conviction and feeling that the lyrics never feel too disingenuous or conceited. Nevertheless, the songs are so beautifully played that any cynicism is seduced into mellow complicity by Knopfler’s languorous groans, his band and his spectacular array of guitars.

All this is great, but it didn’t warrant Tracker. The above is applicable to any one of his albums. Most of them share the formula of Dickensian storytelling, impeccable production and beautiful musicianship. True, only after Get Lucky did it come together in a style properly distinct from Dire Straits, but arguably most of the elements were there since day one of his solo career. So, in answer to the question ‘what next’, disappointingly the answer is same old, same old.

I say ‘disappointingly’, perhaps this is unfair. There is undeniably a charm about the post-Dire Straits style Knopfler has eased into. I’ve seen him play in a massive arena, and despite the anonymity of the venue he still walks on stage with amicable glee as if he were one of his characters meeting a friend in the dingy pub. It’s as if the gargantuan crowd is sitting with him round a pint as he cracks some jokes with the (excellent) band. He’s in a good place and he knows it: a happy summation to his career combining his earthy roots with the flashy production and guitar work of his youth. Tracker is a happy repetition of this formula. It probably helps that the city boys on early retirement still buy the records and one might suspect that this has allowed Knopfler to slip into aging self-indulgence. However, neither can it be said that this is a lazy album; it is an eminently solid effort. Nonetheless, I still live in hope Knopfler will one day deliver a fresh third period to his career. 

★★★★☆

Four Stars

Mommy marks the fifth film in five years to be written and directed by the prolific 25-year old Xavier Dolan. Despite the critical feting his films have received, there’s nevertheless been a pervading sense that his early promise was never quite delivered upon; An expectation that he had bigger and better things coming just around the corner. Winning the Jury Prize last year in Cannes, Dolan’s Mommy has taken some time to arrive on these shores. But now, as the film sweeps into UK cinemas amidst a wave of anticipation, we find the weight of critical expectations validated, and Dolan confirmed as one of the industry’s most promising talents.

The film is a quasi-oedipal family drama which follows a trio of complicated characters unable to escape the confines of life in a Quebecois suburb. Dianne and Steve, a mother and son in a destructive, codependent relationship, pull stuttering teacher, Kyla, into their dangerous orbit when she moves in across the street. After being released from public care for disfiguring another boy in a fire, Steven moves back in with his mother, who vows to pull the pair out of the downward spiral they’ve been in since the death of Steven’s father a few years previously.

These characters help each other in a mutual struggle for survival and self-actualisation, striving for a vague notion of freedom through self betterment. Yet they form a chain of three weak links. All three are constricted in their own ways – by their minds, by their prospects, by the strength of their hope which can only stand so much. The inescapability of life, of emotion, and of circumstance form the film’s dramatic thrust. It rings achingly true.

Like previous efforts Heartbeats and Laurence Anyways, Mommy’s sprawling, unruly pacing occasionally asks a little too much of the audience’s patience, even whilst our frustration is the desired effect. Structurally, Mommy is crude and uneven, but this only draws us closer to our hyperactive, vulgar protagonists. Like its characters, the film is rough around the edges and completely exhausting, but both are also ultimately inspiring and hugely entertaining. Dolan’s masterstroke with Mommy is finding a vehicle which turns his messier dramatic instincts into virtues.

Dolan has always been an intensely emotional filmmaker, but with Mommy he surpasses himself, whisking the audience along a passionate, wild, jubilant, heart breaking roller coaster. Returning to themes which served him so well in his debut, Dolan again demonstrates his piercing understanding of the minutia of familial interactions which allow seemingly innocuous conversations between inescapably close relatives to veer wildly between love and hatred.

Even amongst the story’s squalor and pain, Dolan remains as one of contemporary cinema’s most romantic stylists. From his signature slow motion, to the not-quite-in bloom colours, his camera captures longing and frustration like no one else. We watch these characters, but we experience their inner lives through Dolan’s feel for texture and vibrancy. His intense visual flare remains in full force, though he’s reigned in his more exuberant impulses to consistently serve the story, a world apart from the draining excess which plagued 2012’s Laurence.

The film’s greatest stylistic indulgence is it’s almost square aspect ratio. It’s stifling and intense, but bluntly effective in limiting the horizons of these characters. We too find ourselves confined – aware of the inaccessible worlds and opportunities sitting on either side of the square frame. One brilliant scene sees our rebellious young protagonist spin a shopping cart wildly, lost in a brief moment of anarchic mindlessness, spinning in and out of shot, freedom fleetingly found just beyond the border of Dolan’s lens. And then finally, in perhaps the most joyous cinematic moment you’ll see this year, Dolan liberates both us and his characters. We breath together. Our joy is their joy.

The performances are uniformly flawless. Antoine-Olivier Pilon’s Steve careens across the screen in a wild, debauched, and complex performance. He’s a performer blessed with the gravitational charisma and unpredictability of Dean or early Brando. Pilon’s broad features display all the pain and confusion behind his rage, rooting the character in an understandable, even loveable realm. You can feel his conflicting instincts banging up against each other until they spill over in a blaze of violence. It’s a visceral, star-making performance.

Anne Dorval, shines once again, imbuing her long-suffering mother with a heartbreaking combination of wit and vulnerability. Dorval is an incredibly primal, physical performer, her entire being an outlet for expression. She’s the perfect canvas for Dolan to work out his troubled relationship with mother figures on, finding her. Once striking looks played against the gauche, trashy outfits Dolan has time and again clothed her in. Yet her innate ferocity allows her character’s dignity and resilience to remain beyond doubt. Susanne Clement impresses with her somewhat enigmatic portrayal of Steve’s teacher, convincingly finding the layers of steel beneath her meek surface. The central trio’s chemistry crackles with energy, carrying the story through it’s occasional rockier moments. Pilon’s and Dorval’s relationship in particular is a delight to watch.

Mommy is a film of vast human insight, but perhaps with less on its mind than it has in its heart. But for Dolan, it lays to rest the labels such as wunkerkind, or enfant terrible, which have plagued the twenty-five year old French Canadian since his teenage debut. Mommy is the work of an artist in full command of their craft. It’s the birth of a major filmmaker.

Criticism? “Darling, you must be joking, you’re not here to ‘criticise’…”

In theatre, the relationship between the reviewer and the reviewed has always been an interesting one. Writing for other culture sections, you know you’re safe. After all, when was the last time anybody made a snide comment about the latest Hollywood blockbuster, only to have to explain themselves to Tom Cruise at the Bridge smoking area? If that ever happened, you’d probably count yourself lucky…

But you probably wouldn’t count yourself so lucky if, having slated an aspiring masterpiece at the BT, you were to run into that same cast to whom you smiled so sweetly as you were handed the complementary ticket last Friday. It is this that distinguishes the relationship between the press and the stage at Oxford: sooner or later everybody knows everybody else. So how do the bitchy critics and the self-indulgent thesps coexist?

I’ve worked on the two sides of the divide and it seems to me this coexistence can lead to one of two extremes. In the first extreme there is no tension because the reviewer is complicit with the cast regardless of his/her real opinion. So, it’s all wonderful and inspired darling. In the other extreme this tension is a state of war: thesps are seen as the sort of people who look in the mirror and imagine Tom Hiddleston or Emma Watson looking back, whilst reviewers are seen as sad, lonely, English students, too talentless and too spineless to get on the stage. You need only see the fury vented in the private Facebook group of a production after a bitchy review to see what I mean. 

So why the two relationship extremes? To put it bluntly, the images the thesp and the critic have of each other are themselves extreme: from the view of the exhaustingly self-obsessed thesp to the either totally ignorant or totally self-important critic. In reality of course, not all thesps wear shirts that look like adverts for a garden center and not all reviewers spend their time decoding Ulysses in search of a friend. But the potential clash of these caricatures creates the tension that polarizes their relationship into one of either perfect harmony or mutual resentment. It’s as if both groups share the motto ‘either you love me or you don’t and given we see each other all the time, it had better be the former’. But perhaps both groups have some grounds for their view of the other. 

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Consider the scene that greets the reviewer moments after arriving at a preview. The marketing manager is having severe palpitations whilst the director is trying to give a philosophical justification for why the third dancer from the right was half a quaver out of time. The leading man/lady despairs over not bringing along Camus in this time of existential doubt; “am I good enough…”. All the while, the reviewer probably misses most of this and looks on impassively waiting for something intentionally theatrical to happen. A gesture suggesting anything less than total understanding by the reviewer is then felt to be a malicious affront. The truth is, the reviewer doesn’t have a clue one way or another about the cast’s hypersensitive deliberations. Maybe, there is some truth in the thesp stereotype…

Then again, maybe there is also some truth in that of the critic. Next time you settle into your seat at the theatre, look out for the one in the blazer seated in the front row. Observe the profound self-satisfaction as he/she eases themselves into their chair and languorously produces the Moleskine notebook. Fountain pen at the ready, the slightest stab of a smile betrays the poker face as the dagger hovers over the matted paper. The arguments of insidious intent course through their veins and a writhe of pleasure unsettles the cool before the knife plunges. That putdown, transcribed from the depths of his/her self-satisfaction and into the hands of the Oxford readership will have bled the hearts of many an aspiring star.

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In reality perhaps the drama world isn’t a Mexican standoff between the egos either side of the curtain. And what few shots are fired, resound only within the stage world. Understandably most people just don’t care. Which is why the stage section exists mostly as a sort of agony aunt column for actors “yes darling you really were a dream in Macbeth” (and with the miracle that is CTRL f, the actors don’t even have to read the whole review anymore). Yet a tension does exist and its existence and how we deal with it says a lot about Oxford’s aspiring (and potentially wild) West End.

The result, is a sort of implicit pact: the critics get to use all the big words from their critical theory textbook to write essays that have nothing to do with the plays they watch. In return the thesps get to stage whatever they like, however they like, while taking lots of black and white pictures of themselves doing it. It’s a pact that keeps both sets of egos happy but never brings them into conflict. Thesps can be ridiculous and critics snide, but by contriving mutually assured admiration they avoid mutually assured destruction. Is this peace worth the price? Perhaps a better solution is that we all stop taking ourselves so seriously. However, having suggested this to Tom Cruise at Bridge, his reaction suggests this might be mission impossible.