★★★★☆

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.