★★★☆☆
Three Stars

Steven Berkoff’s Dahling You Were Marvellous is a masterfully conceived play. Ceaselessly satirical, unnervingly pertinent, and entertainingly colourful, it presents a series of well-drawn caricatures, every one somehow connected with showbiz and every one glorious in their annoying, borderline aggravating, self-absorption. Cameron Cook’s production at the BT Studio is as bold as brass, as tight as a drum, and as energetic as a hyperactive toddler, but there is one major problem: comedically, it’s as hit and miss as a drunken divorcee desperately trying to reach the high notes of Harry Nilsson’s Without You from a Wetherspoons’ tabletop.

There are funny parts and there are not so funny parts; there are funny characters and not so funny characters. Nick Davies and Helena Wilson are entertaining, if a little tedious (though, one feels, that is kind of the point), as Steve and Linda, a pair of cross-legged, narcissistic sycophants, who are all-talk-and-no-action over their desire to take on the roles of Macbeth and his lady wife.

Actor/Director Cook is impressively, if not enjoyably, visceral (Ray Winston-esque) in his various loud-mouthed parts, though if he could develop just one alternative facial expression his performance would be immeasurably more watchable. Maintaining that grossly upturned lip and scrunched-up nose for the entire duration of the performance must be exhausting on the face.

Exaggerated physicality, grossly distorted facial expressions, and appropriate over-acting are all. Or rather, they are almost all. With his recognisable monosyllabic delivery, David Meredith manages to capture as much as the other performers and more, barely straining a muscle in the process.

There is something totally unique about Meredith’s brand of humour, a combination of quintessentially human pathos and crushing cynicism. He always seems so aware that he is on stage, yet this paradoxically lends an extra dimension to his comedy. Whether as the enunciating Sir Mike, the painfully alternative Sid, or the timid would-be-producer tentatively proffering his screenplays, he never fails to amuse. Come to that, he never fails to amuse in anything he turns his hand to.

“A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth,” said Joseph Conrad, and while this might seem an obvious observation, it is one Cook et al would do well to contemplate. Caricatures are only funny when the kernel of truth at their heart is defiantly present. With some of the characters presented in Dahling You Were Marvellous, it seems to be disappointingly absent.

Hence the audience laughs at Meredith’s Sid, because no matter how exaggerated his irritatingly shallow pretentious to social commentary are, they are the recognisable traits of the guardian-reading, herbal-tea-drinking quasi-anarchist. But conversely, the audience does not laugh (as much) at Nick Davies’ moronic Brick Bergman, because his bravado and naivety seem little more than a polished veneer.

Reception to these caricatures is undoubtedly subjective; we find those exaggerated stereotypes funny which we are most familiar with. So it is inappropriate to criticise any of the cast, for their satirical endeavours may resonate better with another audience member. If you’re a cardigan-wearing, skinny-jeaned Oxford arts student like me though, they quite probably will not.

That said, Dahling You Were Marvellous is far from unentertaining. Cook’s production is slick to the point of seamlessness and many of the characters presented really do find comedic purchase. It is an enjoyable, exhilarating hour of fun-poking, married only by its understandable inconsistency.

★☆☆☆☆
One Star

Superfood’s album is as musically unsatisfying as the nutritional benefits of their name sake foodstuffs. Not wasting any words, Don’t Say That really has little holistic benefit to the listener.

The band’s sound appears to be a disappointing mimicry of Peace, an attempt to occupy the same musical niche. But the stronger competitor always succeeds and outcompetes the weaker. Don’t get me wrong, Peace are a pretty good band in their own right. But mimicking the sound of a band who released their last album within the last year is never a good approach. Instead of developing their own sound, Superfood remain musically anaemic, starving themselves of any bands who could improve their sound. Not only this, but the albums cover is quite uncomfortable. The focalisation upon female body, headless and breasts which bear the band’s name is tasteless and reinforces the identity-less band image.

Lets talk about the album’s sound. None of the songs are worth mentioning individually, as the entire album blurs into one. It’s just an inane mass. The album is so innocuous that you can play it in the background and not be hugely offended. Until you listen to the lyrics. “I speak to leaves as I haven’t got any friends.” What does that even mean? Surely the band’s song writer could have thought of something better to speak to? As Ganderton himself sings, “you’re always hungry,” hoping for a good song to come along. But it never comes along. The band would have been better stealing the early demons of Peace and Swim Deep that they produced than attempting to produce their lower quality parodies. I’m sure someone will like their new album, but if they do, their musicial tastes are in need of great refinement.

★★★★☆
Four Stars

Jazz music slips warmly from the speakers as we take our seats in front of a rather classically furnished living room: a couple of couches, a dark window to the left, to the right a desk laden with drinks tray and record player, and in the centre, a self-consciously decked coffee table. Exir Kamalabadi’s yellowish lighting is realist and will prove perfectly synced. In a sense, the darkly uterine space of the Burton Taylor Studio could not have been more suited to host Pinter’s claustrophobic chamber piece. The BT’s tiny stage is necessarily either level with or lower than the audience, and this is in keeping with the riddles of voyeurism and exposure they are about to watch unfold between Old Times’ three protagonists.

The premise seems simple: Kate (Emily Warren) and Deeley (Cassian Bilton) have been married twenty years and are about to receive a visit from one of Kate’s oldest — and only, as it happens — friends, Anna, who lives in Sicily but has travelled to England. But, in true Pinteresque fashion, the plot thickens before Anna (Sophie Ablett) even arrives, and the audience witnesses the interaction between husband and wife, wife and friend, friend and husband, steadily become more and more tortuous, more and more taut.

Admittedly, as the play started, the Warren-Bilton pair lagged just a little behind it at first — but after a slightly chilled beginning, they swiftly settled into the warped rhythm of half-truths and full lies, manipulation and evasion, menace and mockery that pervades the play. By the time Ablett-as-Anna has finished her first burst of speech, all three actors’ work on a form of overstrung naturalism has paid off, and the whole thing is ticking like tightly twisted clockwork.

Well thought-out blocking and attention to body language by director Sabrina Sayeed gives an otherwise difficult piece — no plot to speak of really, nor movement from the living room except Kate’s long bath and return — a certain tempo, a dramatic legibility. When Anna and Deeley perch on one side of the central couch, to sing at Kate sitting folded into herself at the room’s opposite corner, you know where the alliance directs its hostility. And when Anna and Kate let surface their long-dormant but suddenly-awakened intimacy, and begin to circle closer to each other while Deeley drinks angrily by himself, you also know that you are witnessing a new kind of ganging up, which insidiously excludes the husband.

Ultimately, the actors do justice to Pinter’s heavily portentous dialogues. The few stutters do not detract from otherwise finely-absorbed lines, and they get the chemistry between this tense ménage à trois pretty much down. Dealing with a symbolism that can transform humming into bullying, reminiscing into sexual humiliation, and apparent social flattery into stifling eulogy is no easy task, a bit like walking on theatrical eggshells — too much and it seems histrionic, too little and the audience’ll miss it or you’ll sound flat.

Still, the entire team, well cast and quite well directed, rose to the occasion and produced a sincere, relatively tight production, with at times its own perverse pulses of brilliance.

★★☆☆☆
Two Stars

The great mystery surrounding Serena has nothing to do with its plot, which sees Bradley Cooper’s timber merchant, George Pemberton, whisk his new bride, Jennifer Lawrence’s titular Serena, away to his logging operation up in the North Carolina mountains.  Out there in that remote wilderness, the newlyweds’ marriage, mental states and lives are tested by the barbarity of human emotion and the savagery of nature. And yet the greatest interest in Serena prior to its release was why this film, directed by Academy Award winner Susanne Bier and starring two of the world’s biggest stars, had stayed unreleased for over two years.

The answer, it seems, lies in the film’s script. A dark and poorly constructed mess of coincidence, disjointed plot threads and overstretched metaphors, it leaves the film floundering without direction or purpose. Like with the story’s remote patch of overvalued forests, you have to wonder why the film’s leads were so drawn to it in the first placed.

The problems, which plague Serena for its torturously long two hour run time, are evident in its opening minutes. Rattling through the logging company’s financial problems, the beginnings of a hunting subplot, the meet-cute between our lovers, a wedding, and an unexpected pregnancy all with the speed and subtlety of a falling tree, the film leaves us disorientated and detached from both the characters and the story. An engaging emotional arc takes a back seat to the film’s many plot contrivances, with Bier dragging the audience into the darkest corners of human nature without bothering to illuminate the way.

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Lacking in dramatic consequence, the storytelling is listless, misdirected, and almost impossible to care about. Crucial, devastating events occur entirely by chance, and most plot points have little causative connection to one another. You get the sense that the film’s events could be rearranged in any number of ways and it could still arrive at the same conclusion. Furthermore, Serena’s two main narrative elements — that of the logging camps declining fortunes and Pemberton’s illegitimate son — never meaningfully connect, and so both limp along without purpose or direction. You’ll wish Bier would do us all a favour and put them both out of their misery.

This disconnect between character and narrative unsurprisingly leads to a disjointed lead performance. Lawrence attempts to ground Serena in the common ground between the character’s conflicting romantic and the pragmatic traits, but the material continually works against her. You feel a stronger interpretation of the character was lost in the editing room, as Bier seems determined to contrive grand standing scenes for her lead actress, demanding go-for-broke acting but without bothering to play the emotional beats which would tie these moments together. The result is a performance which plays more like a show reel than a character study. Bradley Cooper fares better thanks to his more manageable arc, which grounds the film in something resembling an emotional reality, but he remains an uninteresting and ineffectual hero.

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However, the most depressing thing about Serena is its attempt to cloak itself in metaphors in order to ascribe meaning to its pithy story. The film opens with Pemberton’s hunting party tracking the last panther in the North Carolina forests; we’re warned that the panther kills by clawing out the heart of its victim. Might Pemberton meet a similar fate at the hands of a human predator? It’s a metaphor as thin as it is obvious. The film is too in love with its wilderness setting to see that the forests, as beautiful and untouched as they are, hold nothing more compelling or insightful than the human drama unfolding there. The clumsy metaphor only serves to draw attention to the shallowness of the film’s insights.

Ultimately, Serena’s greatest sin is not knowing what it is. The film thinks it is telling a timeless human story about loneliness and ambition, when really it’s a poorly constructed B-grade thriller with delusions of grandeur. Perhaps this was one best left on the shelf.