★★★★☆

Four Stars

December 1987. The Stephen Joseph The­atre in Scarborough. Artistic director Robin Hertford, working with a crip­plingly low budget, commissions playwright Stephen Mallatratt to fill a gap in the theatre’s schedule. The result is The Woman In Black, a tense, elegant two-hander based on the Susan Hill novel of the same name.

June 1989. The Woman In Black, still directed by Robin Hertford, is transferred from West­minster’s Playhouse Theatre to the Fortune on Russell Street, where it is to remain for the next 27 years, becoming the second longest-running non-musical in the history of London theatres.

January 2015. Mallatratt’s play arrives at the Oxford Playhouse as part of a national tour, still directed by Robin Hertford, and still essen­tially the same production that was performed in Scarborough almost three decades ago.

The plot revolves around the young Arthur Kipps’ ill-fated visit to Eel Marsh House, an isolated mansion in rural England with a dark history. Classic horror motifs abound: scared locals reticent to divulge any information, eerie noises echoing from supposedly empty rooms, and the occasional hair-raising sight of the epony­mous ghost.

Malcolm James and Matt Connor star respectively as the elderly Arthur Kipps, a timid gentleman frightened by the spotlight, and The Actor, the man entrusted with helping Kipps’ de­liver his chilling story to the world on stage. Connor, as The Actor, portrays the young Kipps, whilst James, as Kipps, provides a host of support­ing charac­ters.

It is packed full of meta-theatricality; we see Kipps and The Actor slip in and out of charac­ter before the audience, delving in and out of Kipps’ story. It is a tremendously effective device, as the audi­ence is periodically thrown into the terrifying world of Eel Marsh House, then dragged back to ‘reality’ for a comforting few minutes before the next breathless plunge.

The Woman In Black’s power to scare derives from this device. The audience is under no illu­sions as to the pretence, but far from denying the performance any realism, it establishes a firm complicity between performer and viewer, which paradoxically augments the ten­sion, rather than diminishing it.

The play relies substantially on the audi­ence’s imagination, stimulating it with the most subtle of technical direction. A slight change in light shifts a scene from present to past, a bubbling of recorded sound signals a change of location, and the mind of the viewer extrapolates from this a bustling London street, or a deserted marsh, or a wind­swept graveyard.

Both James and Connor are well cast. The former’s versatility is cap­tivating; he inhabits each idiosyn­cratic supporting character with a realism that truly delights. The latter, with his wide smile and commanding voice, is perhaps slightly too enthusias­tic, but both display an impressive physicality that is as engaging as it is appropriate.

Make no mistake, The Woman In Black is a scary play. Something of the atmospheric intimacy that characterises the productions’ per­formances at The Fortune is lost in the relatively wide expanse of the OP, but in truth, this matters little when the writing, the direction, and the acting is commendable to the point of eulogy.

The Woman In Black is on until Saturday at The Oxford Playhouse.

On the cover art for her new album, Björk lays open the painful whirlpool of emotion that engulfs Vulnicura, by literally wearing her wounded and festering heart on the (album) sleeve. Forced to release the album two months ahead of schedule after an online leak, it has come about unexpectedly, like, I imagine, the breakup from artist Matthew Barney she details.

Drawing on the experimental electronic soundscapes of co-producers The Haxan Cloak and Arca, the 49 year old Icelandic songwriter and performer hasn’t compromised the typically Björkian vein of avant-garde musical experimentation to release a dreary series of emotion-laden breakup songs. The Haxan Cloak’s influence can be felt in the underlying bass thuds, whilst Arca stamps his identity on the album with his industrially tinged, glitchy shrapnel-like beats, felt on tracks like ‘Family’, on which Björk’s vocals are drawn out over deconstructed dance beats like a heart being wrenched.

In the album’s opening track, ‘Stonemilker’, which might also be the most melodically straightforward and accessible song of the album, her vocals soar over avant-garde string arrangements and the boom and crack of fragmented, electronic beats.

The coalescence of the personal with the universal is expressed in the raw ‘History of Touches’, with the lyrics, “Every single fuck/We had together/Is in a wondrous time lapse”, reflecting Björk fine tuning her soul to the universal wavelength, as she does over the shifting strings of ‘Atom Dance’. But like the fleshy slit on her chest as depicted on the album cover, there are moments where the music takes on a grotesque physicality, notably in ‘Mouth Mantra’ which unleashes the sudden gushing of the “thousands of sounds”. It feels like a reflection of Björk’s pent-up emotion and the experience of finding your voice again after a messy breakup as alluded to by, “My throat was stuffed/My mouth was sewn up/Banned from making noise”.

Although she sings, “Maybe he will come out of this loving me/Maybe he won’t/Somehow, I’m not too bothered” on ‘Lion Song’, the stretched-out agony of ten minute track ‘Black Lake’ suggests otherwise. Closing on the twitchy and clanging landscape of ‘Quicksand’, she seems to finally reject total recovery, singing, “When we’re whole, we’re broken”. It’s an intensely cathartic and emotionally draining album – a reverie of groaning strings, mutated beats and jarringly pitched echoes. But through the open wound, Björk’s unique sonic palette shines through, undefeated.

If albums are like nuts, then the self-titled debut LP from the Canadian group Viet Cong is without doubt a Brazil nut – tough to crack, but intensely rewarding with a bit of effort.

For one thing, it is very difficult to categorise or place an album that has so many sonic influences: from the intriguing, listenable noise of ‘Newspaper Spoons’, to the percussive energy of ‘Bunker buster’, and the throbbing, almost mechanical build and euphoric volta of ‘March of Progress’, the album is a mix of moods, sounding at times industrial and post-punk, at others almost like a product of the Australian psychedelic pop revival.

While the song titles seem somewhat bland and deadpan – think ‘Death’ and ‘Pointless Experience’ – the tracks are far from it. The roles of instruments are subverted, with the bass piercing through a six string growl, on top of drums so heavily filtered they sound sampled from a Perc album.

The value of this album, therefore, is very much rooted in its crafting. Without a political axe to grind, or romantic sentiments crying to be released, it is not an album with baggage – despite the death of an ex-band member from a former project.

What is quite clear, however, is an inner conviction and pleasure in the beauty of four people playing in a room. Give it the time, and the effort, and it is an album that will give great pleasure.

How would P Money describe grime to someone new to the genre? “Vibes. Great vibes.” The Oxford stop of the Originators tour was profuse with “vibes”, causing bygone dons to turn in their graves, reeling at the guttural basslines pounding through their historic city walls. I caught up with some of the scene’s makers and shapers to get their thoughts on grime’s growing mainstream appeal.

The presence of these grime heavyweights in a city more renowned for its dreaming spires than Sir Spyro(s) is a testament to grime’s changing audience since the days of its early beginnings on Fruity Loops Studio on old PCs. When grime first burst onto the scene in the form of clashes crackling on pirate radio and eski raves, the deadpan bars of Wiley and Dizzee, and Ruff Sqwad’s bone-chilling instrumentals were deemed fodder for violence and disorder. Now, it’s being steered into the mainstream by ‘German Whip’ and Skepta’s ‘That’s Not Me’, accruing a new following in the process. “This guy’s come to see me from Japan!” P Money exclaims to me, bemused by the dedication of a young fan who’d flown over just to see him perform in Oxford’s answer to Jammer’s basement.

“When I used to go raving as a kid, I had to go through metal detectors and stuff ,” Logan Sama tells me. “There’s none of that now, it’s all trendy kids and students.” I ask the DJ, who pioneered the scene in its early years when MCs like P Money were starting out, why he thinks this is. “They’re generally more open to things.” Although, as he points out, the original audience are also now in their thirties and probably have families. “I’m sure they still like grime, but they’re just not active.”

I ask P Money whether he thinks grime’s voyage into the mainstream is benefiting the genre. “It’s good for any genre. People confuse mainstream with selling out; mainstream just means popular. Like, how many people are singing along now?” he asks, turning to Oxford’s Out of the Blue-cum-More Fire crew. “People said grime was dead, but it’s never been dead. People just lost faith.”

Logan Sama sees the resurgence as part of the cyclical nature of UK’s electronic music. “Everything comes back around. Disclosure brought garage back and now all of a sudden, DJ EZ’s really cool and trendy. Unfortunately people in this country are very quick to be over something, after that initial honeymoon period,” and he suspects grime will have a cool-off period too. 

Not only have some of grime’s originators been re-energised after a period of lying low, but a new wave of fresh talent such as Stormzy and Novelist, grime’s new poster child, has emerged. “That generation’s really interesting to me because we’ve been doing this for twelve years, and they’re seventeen” Logan Sama tells me. “All of their conscious music-listening life, grime’s been in and around their ears.”

But the recent spotlight on producers like Darq E Freaker, whose Cherryade EP was one of label Oil Gang’s biggest hits, has reminded us that grime’s birthday suit is its instrumentals. I ask Freaker how he would define his sound, labelling everything from ‘technicolour’ to ‘chronic’ grime. “Define me as you perceive me,” he says coolly. Freaker tells me he grew up listening to Timbaland, Missy Elliot and Prodigy, and these eclectic influences are pronounced in his genre-blending, transatlantic music, having brought grime to a US audience via Danny Brown.

Despite this, Logan Sama is adamant that the MCs will remain at the forefront of grime’s changing landscape. “I don’t like to say one’s more important than the other. But the MCs are always going to be the focal point because of their personalities and character. They’re driving the culture too.” Big Narstie, who donned a first year’s mortar board at a Wadham after party and posted it on Instagram, is perhaps the best case in point.

There’s an element of nostalgia to Logan Sama’s recollections of early grime. “Grime was really exciting because it had that punk ethos of getting the most out of a limited set of tools, making tunes using whatever sounds were in the keyboard” he tells me. “For me, whenever a new grime producer came out, be it Musical Mob or Terror Danjah, they all had their own sounds. I think that’s been lost a little bit.”

I ask Logan Sama what he thinks about some of instrumental grime’s more ambient sounds from producers like Murlo and Mr Mitch. “A lot of it doesn’t appeal to my aesthetic, but other people like it and I love that width of appeal. That’s why grime has kept going for twelve years.” With hits from fresh new talent like Novelist and Mumdance, and more exciting collaborations in the pipeline, grime continues to grow, ‘1 sec’ at a time.

★★★★★

Five Stars

It was a celebrated play at the 2011 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. One year later the Hollywood Fringe Festival awarded it with The Best International Show award. These haven’t been a bad few years for Richard Parker – a dark, ponderous and hilarious drama about fate and coincidence by Welsh playwright Owen Thomas, who is coming this week to watch his play being performed at the BT.

So the pressure is on. Or it would be, if the opening night hadn’t promised a show that is only going to improve across the week. Poor Player Productions have put together a brilliant piece, which works excellently in the intimacy of the BT, where minimal set and props enable the talent of the leads to come to the fore.

Richard Parker is about the meeting aboard a ship of two identically named men—played by Jake Boswall and Ieuan Perkins—who, despite all they have in common, are in the deepest and most important ways starkly different. One Richard Parker is temperate and modest, the other lives his life according to the dictates of coincidence. The reason for their meeting is known only to one of them but it is soon made clear that the two are irrevocably linked, and that one may have to crush the other in order to survive.

Covering shipwrecks, cannibalism, wasted lives, individualism, selfishness, and destiny, the play is as disconcerting as it is amusing. Do the men come together through choice or coincidence? Is the disturbing denouement following the tantalising twist of the ending down to decision or was it fated? Thomas gives no easy answers; and the idea that “someone, somewhere, is pulling the strings,” is rather less comforting than it might sound.

Do we have an ultimate purpose, determined by the precedent of history?  Is there any escape from that which seems to be ordained for each of us? Just how important are our names and our circumstances? And, perhaps most disquieting of all, if all this can be dismissed as superstition and we do have no purpose—what then?

It is a superb play, superbly performed. Boswall and Perkins are each in utter command of their roles, demanding the attention of the audience in equal measure—no easy feat for a two-person play so dependent on dialogue. The worldviews of the protagonists are comically and cleverly contrasted through a quick, quirky and rapacious script that relies for its effect on exquisitely-timed delivery. Boswall and Perkins are more than up to the challenge.

Director James Watt has pulled it off. Let us hope that next he turns his hand to Thomas’s sequel, Robert Golding. Meanwhile, one might wonder whether it is a coincidence that Richard Parker was also the name of the tiger in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi—another tale about shipwrecks and cannibalism. Did Martel know the eerie history of that name? Something to ask Owen Thomas himself at the Q&A on Friday evening.

So be a nosy Parker and discover Richard and Richard. Richard Parker is on at The BT Studio until this Saturday.

★★★☆☆

Three Stars

Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin have recycled their winning formula for BBC smash-hit comedy, Outnumbered, by partnering two normal-ish parents with three outrageously sharp children, but this time it’s for the big screen. What emerges is a buoyant, credible venture with a good heart and far more laughs than you might expect. Somehow, with little struggle, What We Did On Our Holiday stops itself from trickling over the wrong side of sentimental drool and develops with surprising maturity.

As with Outnumbered, the adult actors learn a script and the child actors are given last-minute sketches about how the scene is going to play out. If there’s ever been a film to demonstrate the erratic and uncharted unpredictability of a child’s mind, it’s this one. Rosamund Pike and David Tennant are Abi and Doug McLeod, a couple whose marriage has reached the end of its tether. They’re always arguing, one of them has had an affair, and now they live in separate houses. Their three children, Lottie, Mickey, and Jess (played with comic bravado by Emilia Jones, Bobby Smalldridge, and Harriet Turnbull, respectively), are aware of the impending divorce, and each seem to be affected by it in bizarre and troubling ways. Jess’ two best friends are a rock and a brick, and she frequently resorts to holding her breath if things don’t go her way; Mickey is obsessed with Viking culture and Norse mythology; and Lottie keeps a private notebook of her thoughts and feelings, including all the lies she’s supposed to be maintaining for her family.

When we meet the McLeods, they are bracing themselves for a trip to Scotland to celebrate the 75^th birthday of Doug’s father, Gordie (a reflective Billy Connolly). Gordie has terminal cancer and isn’t expected to last much longer. He’s currently staying with his son – Doug’s brother – Gavin (Ben Miller) and his wife, Margaret (Amelia Bullmore) in Gavin’s lavish mansion in the Scottish Highlands. Gavin has spared no expense organising a huge party for Gordie, and it’s clear that there’s a tense rivalry between Gavin and Doug, perhaps because of money, but more likely because Gavin gives the impression that his life is simply in much better shape than his brother’s. But there’s a catch. As if getting their three wayward children into the car for the painfully long journey wasn’t enough, Doug and Abi have enlisted their youngsters to cooperate in a little white lie with them. In order to steer clear from any possible upset on Gordie’s last birthday, they don’t want to tell him about their separation. The idea is to appear as a solid couple and family unit for the duration of the stay, and so the children – for once – must try to keep their mouths zipped tightly shut. 

As is always the way, nobody in the family ever listens to the children. They look with innocent eyes as their feuding parents go to war against one another and their dysfunctional family collapses around them. Though separated by some seventy years, only Gordie, carefree and wild in spirit, listens to the children. Only he speaks their pure and simple language. He feels able to confide his own existential fears in their sweet and humble nature. The children don’t need to be patronised or ignored, they just need to be listened to (or allowed to drive the car…). It’s a cheesy message, but Connolly handles a very long and hammy scene with the children on a beach with impressive stamina, bestowing touching (and often vulgar) words of wisdom to his grandchildren, such as “you need to live more and think less”. The kids just want to have fun. They just want to see their family enjoy each other’s company. It soon becomes apparent that the wisecracking and impulsive children may be a huge liability to the whole scheme of hiding their parents’ secrets, but they’re also the best chance of salvaging their crumbling family unit.

Hamilton and Jenkin know that they’re not dealing with the most original of concepts, but that’s okay. The film is in the safe hands of Pike (who has just done the best work of her career in Gone Girl) and Tennant (who is surprisingly strong as a delicate father), but it is Billy Connolly who emerges as the scene-stealer playing the devil-may-care grandfather. Gordie has seen and done it all, and he’s the only character with enough perspective to be able to tell everybody else that none of their petty fights, none of their immature squabbles, in fact, nothing really at all in this life, matters. Pain is transient; life is fleeting. Get out there and enjoy it. It’s nothing we haven’t heard before, but Connolly’s brazen and brash delivery somehow makes it all rather uplifting.

Despite dealing with three pretty heavy D’s – depression, divorce, and death – What We Did On Our Holiday bounces back with the dignified resilience you wouldn’t expect from a typical family film. It often plods into contrived soppiness, but a tight script and unabashed improvisation are on hand to heave it out of the occasional frump. Hamilton and Jenkin were extremely judicious in their choice of child actors, and the film owes its second act to their quick-witted elasticity, even when the plot falls a little thin. It’s refreshing how bluntly some very grave issues are handled, especially the children’s thick skin in relation to their parents’ divorce. The adult talent is underused, but this is the kids’ show, and they make the most of it.

In 2002 The Tolkien Audio Collection was released, containing snippets of the author reading from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy. This 1952 recording of Tolkien feature the author reading the famous ‘One Ring’ poem which forms the epigraph to each of the trilogy’s novels. It is fascinating to hear him pronounce the words of his invented languages – listen to the guttural way in which he rolls the ‘rs’ in ‘Mordor,’ giving the dark land a harsh and foreboding feel. Before speaking these lines in his role as Gandalf in the Peter Jackson movie adaptation, Sir Ian McKellen listened to this recording and strove to imitate Tolkien’s accent. 

As well as an author of fantasy literature, Tolkien was a prolific scholar of medieval English, and was closely associated with Oxford. He was twice pointed Professor of Anglo-Saxon, as well as the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature. The influence of his studies on The Lord of the Rings is huge: Mordor, for example, derives from the Old English word ‘morthor,’ which means murder, and Middle Earth, the setting for Tolkien’s stories, is taken from the Anglo-Saxon ‘middengeard’ – a term they used to describe the inhabitable world. Tolkien single-handedly invented several languages, and it is an immense pleasure to hear these beautiful and alien tongues spoken from the creator’s mouth.