The Oxford Lieder Festival provides an incredible annual opportunity for song enthusiasts to enjoy performances of a professional standard. This year, the Festival chose to focus solely on the song output of Franz Schubert (1797-1828), a sizeable undertaking given that the prolific composer wrote around 600 lieder in his 31 years. This lunchtime concert in the Holywell Music Room, England’s oldest purpose-built concert hall, featured settings of Schober and Mayrhofer, poets and close friends of Schubert, sung by mezzo-soprano Ciara Hendrick, bass-baritone Maciek O’Shea and pianist and founder of the Lieder Festival Sholto Kynoch.

The programme opened with great bravado, as O’Shea delivered a rousing performance of ‘Der Alpenjager’ (The Alpine Huntsman), in which he captured the proud nature of the Huntsman in both his vocal delivery and stature on the stage. O’Shea commanded the expressive contrasts of Schubert’s narratives very well, reflecting the subtlety of the harmonic shifts in the second verse in his timbre. The song clearly set out two of the main tropes of this program, lost love and the pastoral, which were explored further in ‘Trost’ (Consolation) and ‘Genugsamkeit’ (Simple Needs), among others.

Trost, the second lied in the program, introduced Hendrick with a much more introspective atmosphere, reflecting the relative lightness and sweetness of her tone. Combined with the lilting ‘Ruckweg’ (The Way Back), Hendrick was able to showcase her clarity of timbre, as well as the immense control and power of her higher register. It was this ‘simplicity’ that she brought to perhaps the most arresting moment of the whole concert, the unusually named ‘Pax Vobiscum’ (Peace Be With You).

While Schubert did write 7 masses and several other sacred works, religious allusions as overt as in this lied are quite rare. The hymn-like accompaniment stood in stark contrast to the more typical, flowing figurations of Schubert’s lieder, both played very sensitively by Kynoch. The climax of the song came at its highest point, on the words “Ich liebe dich, du guter Gott!” (I love you, merciful God).

After this highly emotive moment, O’shea’s next two songs, ‘Pilgerweise’ (Pilgrim’s Song) and ‘Jagers Liebeslied’ (Huntaman’s Love Song) were rather lost in the middle of the program. While O’Shea tackled them both with great technical proficiency and energy, some of the exciting characterisation of the earlier songs was lost in the heaviness of the text and sometimes overpowering piano line.

Unlike Hendrick, O’Shea seemed to lack a necessary lightness at some points in his delivery, which was especially noticeable in more whimsical songs like ‘Alte Liebe Rostet Nie’ (Old Love Never Dies). More acting on stage and engagement with the audience would have aided the expressivity of O’Shea’s performance, something that I felt Hendrick brought to her more sombre repertoire in abundance, most notably in the recitative-like section in ‘Abendlied Der Furstin’ (The Princess’s Evening Song). 

The final two songs in the program provided the most memorable and exciting moments of the concert. Both farewells — ‘Abschied’ (Farewell) and ‘Schiffers Scheidelied’ (The Sailor’s Song of Farewell) seemed the perfect way for each singer to acknowledge what they had brought to the concert expressively.

Hendrick’s slow-moving and melodically simple ‘Farewell’ summed up the beautiful elegance of her voice, making technically challenging songs sound easy, while O’Shea managed to recapture the dynamism of his earlier songs for the fast-moving, 7-verse finale, leaving the audience energised at the end of a very contrasting program.

You might remember the play Ashurbanipal: The Last Great King of Assyria, put on at the Simpkins Lee theatre last year. The play was the first of a trilogy, written by Selena Wisnom, an Assyriologist (who has just handed in a PHD in Assyriology) and this week sees the production of the second, Esarhaddon; The Substitute King, which follows the king Esarhaddon in his attempts to keep control when everything around him is spiralling out of it.

The two plays will become a trilogy, and Selena is currently working on Sennacherib; interestingly, the trilogy is working backwards through the last three kings of Assyria. I email Selena to ask why. “Rather than showing these important events in the order they happen, going back through time is like digging into the psyche. It reflects the process of investigation and the revelations come in a more interesting way, and are more unexpected. It’s a more interesting narrative technique.”

When I met the director, Lucy Wood, the first thing I wanted to know was just what happens when an expert in an obscure line of study sets a play in the world she knows so well. Is this historical fiction, or something more like historical reconstruction?

“It’s historical fiction in that she’s turned it into a play, but a lot of it is taken from directly from old tablets, a lot of the lines are taken from the records which she still has available to her, so it’s really interesting in the way it’s written. That was the first thing that made be really interested in it.”

I can’t imagine what that would even sound like, so I ask how ancient Assyrian tablet-speech (very impressively, translated by the writer) sounds on stage.

“She’s been very careful about keeping it in the metre that it would have originally been spoken in. The tablets, which are usually reports, are a very formal way of speaking. It looks like blank verse. It’s very Jacobean in ways, because of that structure to  the line.”

More impressively still, the translated passages do not appear at odds with the rest of the play, in fact, Lucy tells me that you can’t tell the difference between original text and new composition. “I’ve read it over and over again and I still can’t tell where the joins are. She’s been very careful about reconstructing what they’re missing in terms of the remaining artefacts and records.”

It’s clear that this a fairly unique venture. It’s the ultimate new writing, with absolutely no precedent, and Lucy clearly enjoys this freedom. “It’s wonderful and exciting to work on something no one’s ever done before. All the other plays I’ve directed have been fairly established, so, to be able to do something and really play around with it and bring your own ideas to it has been very very exciting.”

The play is also free from the pitfalls which usually haunt new writing. “You see that a lot of the new writing in Oxford feels a bit samey and self indulgent. You know, about people with troubled parents or wives or girlfriends who say fuck seven times a scene just to be edgy.” Esarhaddon is obviously different, a more mature new play, maybe somewhat helped by the fact it’s not written by an undergraduate.

There’s still one thing I want to clear up; how obviously is this ancient Assyria when we watch it? Apparently the cast have lost count of the number of sheep they’ve sacrificed. Lucy, reading Classics and Oriental Studies, brings her own experience to this; she sees her degree as focused on things that are either far away and new, or here but in the past, and throughout, everyone faces the same problems. “The culture that springs up around them can be different, along with the ways of coping and theories for explaining what’s going on, but the problems, the essential problems, don’t really change across time and place.”

“We don’t very often hear about these times and places and people, it’s a very unique story, but at the end of the day everyone’s human, and whether we’re in ancient Assyria or modern oxford, there are still human relationships. There are still people who fall in love and have their hearts broken, still people who fall out, who go mad, who are driven mad by the stresses of ruling, and people who are fighting to take power from one another.”

Esarhaddon, only the second play ever (after the first in the series), to be set in ancient Assyria, and written in a brilliantly new style, weaving together old and new, promises to bring out, just as in any good drama, the same themes that are relevant to human existence today. This is radical new writing, and I for one am certainly going to be in the audience.

★★★★☆
Four Stars

There was perhaps an unfair weight of expectation on my part towards this production of Our Fathers at Summertown’s North Wall Arts Centre – anything that requires me to venture further than a ten-minute walk away from the concrete towers of St. Catherine’s has to work extremely hard in order to make me feel my journey was worthwhile.

Within moments of the play’s unobtrusive opening sequence, however, any grumbles regarding our distance from Arne Jacobsen’s architectural masterpiece were swiftly and permanently forgotten; what was to follow was an hour of the most original, unpredictable and genuinely moving theatre I’d seen in a long time.

Our Fathers isn’t exactly subtle in how it grabs its audience’s attention — having a dancer brandish a sign bearing the legend “THIS CONCERNS ALL OF YOU” within its first five minutes is certainly an effective way of bludgeoning down the fourth wall. Yet this arresting message comes as just one in a sequence of slogans patchworked together from famous speeches and popular culture, meaning the relationship with the audience is subsumed into just another choreographed routine for ballet dancer Bert.

Throughout the play, the themes and poignancies that CONCERN ALL OF US are similarly approached through each character’s idiosyncratic personal experiences. The ‘action’ centres on the choice faced by the semi-fictionalized version of actor Mike Tweddle: that of whether to father the child of his dead dad’s friend’s daughter (keeping up?) despite the fact that he’s never met her. This is understandably causing tension with his boyfriend Bert; in the meantime, their vivacious flatmate Sofia is trying to escape the shadow of her father in an attempt to find a partner of her own.

The production never lets you get too comfortable as passive spectators — Sofia literally ‘dates’ several members of the audience over the course of the play, snuggling up to various men with an increasingly intimate accompaniment of popcorn, red wine, and post-coital bedsheet. Yet the play’s strength lies in its ability to use such comic audience participation — alongside the various different media of dance, video and music — without ever seeming gimmicky.

Sofia’s overbearing father is rendered brilliantly through shadow-play, taking such an exaggerated form that he is more cartoon character than actual person. The classic trope of your father ‘living in you’ is invoked in the Skype conversation in which Bert plays both father and son, one of the standout sequences of the play. Without ever moving from his chair, Bert repeatedly transforms himself so skilfully that it feels like you’re watching two different actors on stage. And, using only the simple combination of a projector and a home video, we see Mike get to dance with his father in the most gorgeously moving sequence of the whole production.

Though the use of real-life material (home videos and diaries) lends the play undeniable emotional power, the production itself is carried by the outstanding performances of Mike Tweddle, Bert Roman and Sofia Paschou; the combined force of their individual stellar performances makes Our Fathers a piece of genuine must-see theatre.

★★★★☆
Four Stars

2014 marks the 30th anniversary of one of the fiercest industrial battles in modern British history. Between 1984 and 1985, around 140,000 members of the National Union of Mineworkers came up against the Thatcher government, protesting the privatization of British mines, widespread pit closures, and the loss of tens of thousands of jobs.

The miners were ultimately defeated and the state claimed the incident as a victory. Yet while the strike, and its sad ending, was a dark moment for the British working class, it miraculously gave birth to strong new alliances. During the strike, the miners attracted the support of an unlikely group: the newly formed queer collective, Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, who saw echoes of their own experiences of subjugation in the miners’ plight.

During the course of the strike, LGSM raised around £20,000 for the miners and their families and visited rural mining communities. Mining groups, in turn, began openly to support LGBT equality rights, and in 1985 it was unanimous support from the National Union of Mineworkers that enshrined support for LGBT rights in the Labour Party’s constitution. Indeed, the real victory of 1985 belonged not to Thatcher’s government, but to the ideal of solidarity.

Pride, the new film by Matthew Warchus, tells the true story of the London Branch of Lesbian and Gays Support the Miners, who threw their support behind a Welsh mining community during the 1984 strike. With equal parts humour and tenderness, the film traces the unlikely friendship between two vastly different groups.

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Pride doesn’t pretend that relations between the notoriously conservative, often homophobic miners and the urban LGBT community were always rosy. What it shows instead is real progress being made between communities that found common ground in dire circumstances.

In one scene, a member of LGSM, Jonathan, played by the wonderful Dominic West (a radical change from his hyper-masculine role as Jimmy McNulty in The Wire) busts out some impressive disco moves at a mining function: the song, fittingly, is entitled ‘Shame’. The heterosexual male citizens of the mining village realize that dancing will be an effective way to pick up women, and shame is transmuted into a bonding experience. 

Pride boasts many brilliant performances. Young actors Ben Schnetzer, George Mackay, and Faye Marsay play the enormously likeable LGSM, while Bill Nighy is perfectly understated as an elderly miner. The mining community’s elderly female characters do much to keep the comedy going. Imelda Staunton, who plays smart-as-a-whip, open-minded Hefina, claims many of the film’s best one-liners, and it is a joy to see her laughing hysterically while brandishing an immense pink dildo.

The Welsh countryside makes for beautiful cinema. Long shots of the snow-covered Dulais Valley are a highpoint, as is a scene in which the LGSM group visit an ancient Welsh castle, reminding us that Wales has long and proud traditions that predate and will outlast any Thatcherite oppression.

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There is no shortage of genuine laughs in Pride. At the same time, the film doesn’t gloss over the unsavoury realities of the era. In 2014 we might be horrified that homophobia was once so common in Britain (remember that in 1987 more than half of the English population believed that homosexuality was “always wrong”). Pride also reminds us of the horrors of AIDS, which claimed the lives of far too many brilliant young people.

At the same time, Warchus’s film is about another battle that has been waging for centuries: the fight between capital and labour. It reminds us too that the identity of entire communities can be closely tied to work, and that there is more than just jobs at stake when the state attacks local communities. “The pit and the people,” Bill Nighy’s character tells us, “are one and the same.”

Remember that Margaret Thatcher once proclaimed, “There is no such thing as society.” Pride teaches us that there is something even more important: solidarity. It shows us the true meaning of solidarity, which proves far more valuable than Thatcher’s political victory. The film reminds us that solidarity is not simply synonymous with similarity: it combats difference, and it is built across class and gender boundaries.

It would be easy for a film like Pride to overplay its emotional material or to pluck too insistently at the heartstrings. By retaining enough edge—enough waving dildos and political intensity—Warchus avoids clichés and the pitfalls of sentimentality. Pride is that miraculous thing: a movie that is as hilarious as it is serious, as funny as it is moving, and it will leave you either in well-earned tears, or on your feet in solidarity with the film’s heroes, with fists clenched and raised.