★★★★☆

Four Stars

“When you’ve a gun, everybody pays attention.” Who you choose to point the gun at can get you even more attention. If you choose to point it, and not just point it, fire it, at the President of the United States of America then not only will you get attention, you’ll get your own little place in American history. Stephen Sondheim’s musical, Assassins, on at the Keble O’Reilly until November 29th and directed by Silas Elliott, tells the story of the four murderers and five attempted murderers of Presidents throughout history, taking on a revue-show-like format as we learn their stories and their motivations.

It might be expected that portraying characters who resort to such an extreme course of action would be impossibly difficult, but this cast manage to make it look easy. As might be expected, mental illness is pretty much par for the course for the majority of people who would think to attempt something so drastic, but the intelligence of the acting and direction means that even those characters who are somewhat unhinged are all unhinged in their own way. A great example of this is the juxtaposition of Blathnaid McCullagh’s Sara Jane Moore and Heloise Lowenthal’s Lynette Fromme. They’re the only two women, and they both attempted to assassinate Gerald Ford, but McCullagh’s ditzy, prim, accident-prone housewife couldn’t be more different from Lowenthal’s hip but brainwashed Charles Manson devotee.

The appropriately dysfunctional patriarch of the assassins — assembled across time and space to interact with each other in a grimly carnivalesque otherworld — is Sam Breen’s John Wilkes Booth. Breen imbues Booth with the levels of charisma you’d expect from a former stage actor, and from the beginning of the show is representative of the conflict between murdering the President for politics, and murdering the President for attention. Booth gets a ballad in his name, as do two of the other successful assassins, Polish anarchist Leon Czolgosz and hopelessly mad Charles Guiteau, who just wants to promote his book (available for £14.50 on Amazon if you’re interested). We are treated to appropriately strong and affecting performances from Chesney Ovsiowitz (Czolgosz) and Luke Rollason (Guiteau), who hold the audience’s attention and even — perhaps — earn their sympathy.

The collapsing of time in Sondheim’s musical allows for the piece to be bookended by Booth’s murder of Lincoln and Lee Harvey Oswald assassinating JFK, despite the fact that chronologically most of the action shown in the play takes place post-1963. In this production, the roles of the Balladeer and Oswald are combined, but Niall Docherty makes it work, and never having seen the show before, I didn’t realise until afterwards that these were originally separate characters. Docherty has a fantastically sceptical and ironic attitude towards the men he, as Balladeer, tells the stories of, never quite allowing the characters to attain the heroic status they crave.

All the cast are fantastic, both in their singing and acting, and the songs are just as dark and catchy as you’d expect from Sondheim. However, there was a slight problem where at points the words sung couldn’t be heard, either because the music was overpowering the actors’ voices, or because there wasn’t enough enunciation of the words to make them intelligible. This wasn’t a massive problem, but it did let down what is otherwise an excellent performance.

Assassins is a fascinating exploration of the most extreme way to get attention, whether for a political cause, to get the attention of someone you’re obsessed with, or just because your stomach really, really hurts. Whilst the musical doesn’t try to excuse the actions of its subjects, it does prompt you to ask how a just society can allow the poorest and most vulnerable of its population to achieve immortality only by taking a pot-shot at the most powerful man in the world.

Mitchell and Webb, Armstrong and Miller, Fry And Laurie, Jackson and Grumitt — which is the odd one out? It could be Fry. After all, he is a self-absorbed, tousle-haired, national dickhead treasure who seems to have wormed his way into the limelight primarily through his ability to wear colourful blazers, whereas the rest of them all seem like darn good self-effacing chaps. It could be, but it’s not.

The right answer is in fact Jackson and Grumitt. Why? Because, unless I am very, very much mistaken, they are the only duo performing a sketch show at the BT Studio in 8th Week (they’re also the only duo never to have had a BBC sketch show series, never to have received widespread critical acclaim for their comedy, et cetera, et cetera, but give them time).

Olly Jackson and Richard Grumitt are almost certainly the latest in a long line of successful double acts to meet at Oxbridge, make a splash with their wacky, off-the-wall comedy, and enjoy a long career of sitting next to the insufferable Alan Davies on BBC panel games. They just haven’t done that last bit yet.

I caught up with them in the very JCR bar of St Hilda’s, before they performed a few sketches from their upcoming show, to ask them why the fuck not? They didn’t seem to have a good answer to this, so I revised my conversational approach slightly. How had they met? Who wrote the material? How did they come up with such a startlingly original idea?

“Rich and I met during a college play,” Jackson tells me. “There was a 15 minute long scene in which we were in the background with nothing to do, so to avoid boredom we tried to make each other laugh by whispering comments.”

“I’d always wanted to do some comedy at Oxford, so after the show finished, I asked Richard whether he would like to do some writing and luckily he said yes. We started doing Audreys [the Revue’s fortnightly comedy evenings] and bar gigs, then we performed at Worcester Ball, which was great.”

Fascinating.

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“Usually, one of us comes up with an idea for a sketch, the other person writes it, and then we edit it together”, Jackson continues. “It’s quite a productive system because the bones of the sketch come from one person and the humorous substance is added by the other.”

Jackson talks like the hundred-mile-an-hour dog runs, in a breathless, hurried manner. In a valiant attempt to involve Grumitt in the interview, I ask him about their comedic style.

“When we started, it tended to be that Olly would play the sillier characters and I would play the straighter ones. That bias is probably still there a bit, but it’s evened out slightly. We try and do universal comedy now, so there’s some surreal stuff, there’s some silly stuff, and there’s some satire in there too.”

Jackson eagerly takes up the conversational reigns again after I enquire as to the duo’s influences.

“I grew up with Mitchell and Webb, so I’m hugely influenced by them and their ilk,” he thunders. “Atkinson [Rowan that is, not Big Ron] is probably my favourite, though. He is just the master of physical comedy but he can do vocal stuff too.”

“I love Monty Python”, counters Grummitt, “but I’m also a big fan of some American comedians like George Carlin [yeah, me neither] and Louis CK.”

Stage-fright, as Renee Fleming (of BrainyQuotes.com fame) once said, ‘can undermine your well-being and peace of mind, and it can also threaten your livelihood.’ So I am interested as to whether or not Jackson and Grummitt shat their proverbial pants when they first performed their own material.

“I think the beauty of performing sketch comedy is that you always have someone else with you. Someone can pick you up, someone can validate that yours isn’t the world’s shittiest comedy.”

I take it that their underwear remained unsoiled, then. Indeed, when I see them take to the cleared corner of their JCR bar, they certainly do seem to exude a confidence in themselves and their writing.

Taller than Grumitt by a good few inches, Jackson is a man seemingly made up of elbows (I imagine he could play a seminal talking cricket in Pinocchio). Despite, or perhaps because of this, he is as versatile as a bipolar Derek Jacobi, transforming from a confused Egyptian builder to a simpering English maiden before my very eyes.

Allowed space to express himself, Grumitt reveals that he is much more than his innocent chorister appearance suggests; his emphatic hand-gestures and resonant voice are genuinely entertaining. He relies on the humour of the writing more than Jackson, but he seems equally comfortable embracing physicality for laughs.

A sketch about the construction of the pyramids goes down particularly well with the gathered crowd of St Hilda’s students who have nothing better to do on a Sunday evening than head down to their college bar, and a satirical pharmaceutical advert for a medicine “distilled from pure bleach and filtered through the ball-sack of a mountain goat” is similarly well-received.

Don’t miss the chance to catch this aspiring comedy duo during their cutting-edge student phase because if you don’t, in a few years time you’ll (probably…) see them on BBC3, forcibly laughing at the soul-destroying banalities of Rob Brydon, and boy, what a fool you’ll feel. It’s also in 8th Week, and you’ll have nack all else to do.

I arrive early at the Phoenix Picture House to find a lot of people already there. The best of the Oxford Broadcasting Association’s productions from the past year are being shown, a number of them for the first time, and there has been increasing buzz for this event over the past few weeks. No-one has been put off by the £10 ticket price, and the cinema is packed. I recognise a few faces who I know are either in the films or have been involved in making them. People chat excitedly; Oxford film is a community indeed. The lights go down and the first film begins.

It’s called Baktrack. OBA offers a short summary in their programme: “Matt used to be a raver, just like his best mate Eezy. Now Matt’s grown up, got a job, and got bored. Eezy hasn’t aged a bit though. He’s still living the 90s and he wants Matt to live there with him. If you could go back to the best days of your life, why wouldn’t you? But Matt has some demons to conquer and Eezy might just be one of them.”

Baktrack opens like a 90s music video, which, obviously, feels appropriate. 1998 home cinema footage captures the rowdiness of a house party, and for a moment I am worried that the whole film is going to be shot like this, and incomprehensible as a result. I needn’t be, though, because after a minute or two we cut forward ten years to a world where editing is far more nuanced and the shots are composed nicely. Matt, the main character, runs into an old friend and gradually slips back into his old lifestyle before realising he might not have remembered everything that happened a decade before.

The film blends a nice balance of humour with real emotional depth. James Corrigan is convincing as Matt, and David Shields even more so as the childish but menacing Eezy, bringing to mind shades of Jack O’Connell in Skins. Bucket hats, shell jackets and party drugs dominate his dingy flat, and Eezy even still uses VHS tapes, proving to us that the 90s have well and truly not left. The most convincing part of the whole production, though, is Nathan Klein’s brilliant soundtrack. It’s so well-observed and imitative of the era that it would be hard to believe it was composed especially for the film and not lifted straight from a late-90s Ministry of Sound compilation were his name not mentioned in the credits.

As the first film shown, Baktrack’s most immediately striking aspect is its assured level of technical production, and I find that this standard is maintained throughout all the other films. Well written, shot and edited, the actors give accomplished performances and the film succeeds in engaging, then unnerving the audience.

Next up is Waterbird, the first of three films directed by Alex Darby, OBA’s co-president. For this, the programme says: “Tom is a champion swimmer whose future prospects are marred by a tragic accident. As a journalist pesters him for a vox pop on the anniversary of the event, the truth comes out and an innocent interview turns to a moving story of friendship, ambition and grief.”

Not a barrel of laughs, then. Waterbird changes the tone from the previous film, with a more contemplative mood. Despite having the same primary actor as Baktrack, the acting and dialogue is less natural and the parts of the film where the camera simply dwells on the river he sits beside are some of the best. The plot and any sense of reality in the film seem not to be the primary points, and instead, Darby and director of photography Nick Lory bring a certain poeticism to the imagery. Interspersed with the river shots are flashback scenes explaining the accident, and if there is one complaint to be made about Waterbird, it’s that the films shies away a mite when facing the moment of greatest dramatic tension. Where we might like to see a reaction from the main character in the face of tragedy, we cut straight back to the present instead. Nonetheless, it’s a quiet and thoughtful film.

Waterbird is followed by a film named Lick. Lick is a film different to all the others in a number of ways difficult to define. The OBA description simply reads: “‘I like your jacket.’ ‘Thanks.’”

It turns out that this is a reference to one of the more comic moments of black humour in an otherwise very intense, very hectic short film. Suddenly, the camera is jumping from car to church ritual to stage performance-cum-motivational talk with little or no explanation. Things get very surreal, very quickly, but despite being oblique, moments of self-parody and oddity help Lick to work well. It could easily have descended into pretention, and I doubt anyone in the audience made any real sense of it, but ultimately Lick is carried out with enough conviction in acting and directing that it doesn’t. The film makes incredibly good use of oppressive and intimidating music (as do all the films, incidentally) and its climax (in which the title is at least partially explained) is a brilliant – if momentary – examination of control, manipulation and mass mentality, for which actor Barney White deserves praise. Out of all the films, it is probably the one which most demands a second watching.

If Lick is the least-understood film shown on the night, then the film following it, Genius, is undoubtedly the most anticipated. People have been loudly asking what time it would be shown in the line-up whilst waiting outside, and it is also one mentioned specifically by Alex Darby (the producer) in the run-up to the screening as one to look out for. OBA’s programme says: “This mockumentary follows a naïve young playwright, Tim, as he tries to take his first play from script to stage. Determined to overcome their dwindling Twitter following and the crippling aesthetic burden of postmodernism, lovable charlatans Eli, Sasha and Tiff are unaware of the darker realisations they’ll face when the curtain goes up on their doomed production.”

A quote from the film sums it up more succinctly: “If you can’t see it, it must be genius, right?” (arguably a logic that could be applied to Lick). Members of the Oxford Revue feature heavily in this clever film, which is essentially a piss-take of Oxford’s thesps, and it comes through in the calibre of the comedy. Will Hislop and Barney Fishwick stand out, handling a script that is sometimes over the top with finesse. This is the only film to receive a round of applause before it has even begun in earnest, and for anyone who is familiar with the Oxford drama scene it’s a must-see. In fact, fuck it; for anyone familiar with Oxford University it’s a must-see. Sycophantic lines aimed at “genius” director Eli (“Instead of a ringtone, he’s got the audiobook of Hamlet”) and knowing declarations from the man himself (“Everyone who knows anything in Oxford drama knows Aids is the holy grail. The little golden goose laying little golden eggs worth five stars.”) puncture everything. The mockumentary format is pulled off with ease, and newbie playwright Tim, played by Jo Allan, draws our sympathy effectively too.

Genius – release trailer from Tom Edkins Films on Vimeo.

My only wonder is whether in a cinema comprised mostly of Oxford thesps patting themselves on the back for being so hilarious and/or talented, anyone realised the slight irony. But why let that spoil a film where even the credits are hilarious? Genius is undeniably one of the most professional films in the screening.

Catkins, Darby’s second and the partner piece to Waterbird, comes next. OBA says: “Mark escapes from London to find the courage to save his rocky marriage. Feeling liberated among nature and alone with his thoughts, he inadvertently becomes witness to a haunting encounter. The intermingling of passion, sorrow and loss grant him the answers he so desperately needs.”

Understandably, this immediately evokes Waterbird, and it would have been lovely to have watched both films back-to-back. Again, the slow shows of river and flower are poetic, but Catkins is the better film. It more fully realises the almost Romantic mood that Darby aims for, with pretty people sitting in a meadow of English flowers. It’s also surprisingly fresh to see a character over 30 in one of the films for the first time — the middle-aged man who tries to save his marriage. He has no lines of his own to speak, incidentally, because Richard E. Grant does the voiceover, telling the story. Whilst there’s not much to distinguish his voice from anyone else’s apart from a cut-glass accent, it’s a nice touch.

That said, the dialogue doesn’t quite live up to the lovely visuals and the engaging concept. Female a cappella singing in both Waterbird and Catkins works very well to draw the viewer into the almost oneiric natural world, and Catkins is quite touching, despite the fact that the film could have cut all the dialogue and been as strong. You can tell when a film – student-made or otherwise – makes people think because there is a pause before the final applause or before people shift in their seats. Catkins gives rise to this type of pause.

It’s followed by Wight, another slow burner (or at least, as slow a burner as a short film can be). Wight is described by OBA’s programme as follows: “A boy, living alone on a farm, finds a half-wild girl squatting on his land. At first, he is afraid. But as days pass, he begins to see that she needs his help.”

Immediately it’s clear that the premise isn’t an original one, but Wight does what it sets out to do very well nonetheless. We leave Oxford behind for a lonely farm, a setting equal parts ambiguous and creepy. Is this going to be a horror film? A fantasy? The “wight” herself is brilliantly put together, covered in mud and grime and suffering mysterious wrist and ankle welts. As viewers, we quickly understand why the boy is terrified, yet enthralled and fascinated by her. She is part creature, her face hidden behind limp blond hair. There is no dialogue at all until we see her in clothes, nor do we see her face until then, cleverly humanising the character as a result. Of course, it doesn’t hurt the film that both she and the boy are very pretty.

As the film progresses, we begin to wonder how it’s going to resolve. When eventually it does, finally offering explanation as to the girl’s appearance and grounding Wight closer to reality, the film suffers from a similar problem to Waterbird: it shies away from conflict at last moment. Something more difficult to watch and confront might perhaps have enhanced the film. Despite this, Wight has a great, understated ending, in the same vein as most of the film itself.

Alvin Yu’s The Dancing Vendetta comes next. OBA’s programme doesn’t have a huge amount to say: “When an embarrassing video of Johnny dancing is taped by his arch-nemesis Kas, to what lengths will he go to retrieve this video back?” The brevity is soon explained. In the screening’s shortest film, a charming and farcical affair, lead actor (dancer) Wes Lineham almost channels Rowan Atkinson and Mr Bean in the flamboyance of his physical performance. More than any, this seems like it must have been bloody fun to film. It is raucous and absurd, short and sweet, and it makes everybody in the audience happy. Job done.

The Dancing Vendetta from James Barrett on Vimeo.

The strains of Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs fade away, and we come to the final film of the evening, The Wishing Horse. For this one, the programme sets expectations high: “The Wishing Horse is a beautiful and moving story about the grief of a young girl. Alone and unsure, she is unable to cope with her father’s failing health and a difficult relationship with her mother. Nothing can comfort her until a folk story her father used to tell her comes alive.”It is the third of Alex Darby’s three features, and by now some of his trademarks are clear — a cappella singing over the opening shots, themes of loss and emotional introspection, et cetera. Seeing three of Darby’s films screened together is interesting, and it strikes me that it would be great to see some of the other directors’ work to compare.

As with Waterbird and Catkins, there is a dreamlike quality to the film. The horse itself (both a metaphorical white horse and the Uffington White Horse near Oxford) is an integral part of the plot, but also transcends it, entering the realms of symbolism. Once again, Nick Lory’s photography lingers accusingly on a smashed mug, or manages to capture the sensation of feeling horsehair under fingers somehow; the sensory experience of the young main character, and by extension the viewer, seems key. Furthermore, The Wishing Horse doesn’t skirt the uncomfortable scenes in the way some of the other films do, and for that it should be commended. Confrontation and tension pervade.

With that, the screening is over. There is supposed to be one final film by an Oxford alumnus, but the event has overrun and it’s cut from the running order. No one seems hugely bothered, and as we all file out of the Picture House I what exactly it is that makes a good short film. Do the comic films work better, or those more stylised? This is of course subjective, but I think so. What is certainly clear is that OBA has the talented individuals to make films like these and bucketloads more, and that’s no bad thing. Bring on next year’s screening.

Since screening, Waterbird and Catkins have been featured on Kickstarter’s Staff Picks page. They will be submitted to Edinburgh International Film Festival, Message to Man festival in Russia, Uppsala International Short Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, and the Cambridge Film Festival, among others.

The title of James P Mannion’s new play Ridley’s Choice is somewhat deceptive. Because in reality Ridley makes a whole multitude of choices. George Ridley is a failed playwright and a failing father. When an eminent critic slates his latest play he chooses to up sticks and live in the woods, renouncing technology and the ‘material world’. One day a young local boy films him ranting about modern society and reciting the beginning of his pseudo-philosophical new book — also called Ridley’s Choice — making him into a minor Youtube sensation. When the media hunt him down, he chooses to let them interview him. Getting more and more caught up in his illusory fame, he makes one last fateful choice….

George Varley as Ridley has all the traits of a tortured writer experiencing an extreme form of mid-life crisis, while Archie Thomson gives an energetic performance in his role as Ridley’s mysterious friend, Clive. Although this play undoubtedly revolves around these two characters (or are they really two separate characters?), the supporting roles are equally strong: for example, Ali Ackland-Snow is by turn seductive and unnerving as the journalist who never strays from her industry speak, and James P Mannion is wonderfully irritating as the local youth who takes a video of Ridley — “mate” — on his iPhone.

The script intermingles the existential with the mundane — “Do bears shit in the woods? And if so, will they respect that this is a residential area?”, Ridley humorously ponders. It raises bold issues about our age: the inescapability of technology, the shallowness of the press, the dangerous allure of fame. This story, in which almost every character is a divorcé, also makes a profound comment on the viability of lasting marriage in modern society.

The themes and tropes are familiar but knowingly so: during the relentlessly fast-paced interview scene Ridley is accused of acting out a Walden-esque fantasy, and the character of Polly is an obvious nod to hacky Murdochian style of journalism. It is satirical without being moralistic and there are no real goodies or baddies. In addition, the fourth wall is well and truly broken when Ridley starts a rant about how in his play ‘characters come in when you least expect them to just to drive the plot along’ and is interrupted by the timely entrance of his daughter.

The play will be set in the intimate Burton Taylor theatre with a semi-thrust stage, which will create a claustrophobic space, evocative of the small woodland enclave. The experimental lighting will create a fluid sense of time, which will make it impossible to gage how long Ridley has been in his forest hideout and establish the all-important dissonance between fantasy and reality. The bathetic ending leaves the audience with plenty of questions, including the extent to which the drama has merely been playing out in Ridley’s imagination.

With tickets at just a fiver, this play is definitely worth a see. Not only because original student writing deserves support, but also because it looks bloody good.

Ridley’s Choice will be on at the BT from November 25-29 at 7.30.