You’ve almost certainly seen the large green butt-plug resembling installation by Paul McCarthy, put on display in Paris earlier this month. The work, entitled ‘Tree’, was gone within a day; what has been called a conservative backlash of ‘vandalism’ finally caused security services to deflate the ‘abstracted Christmas tree’. McCarthy was actually slapped in the face by a passer by.

This little exhibition at the Tate Britain gives a strange insight into the personal relationship between two of the recent greats of the British art scene. Lucien Freud’s private collection of Auerbach’s work hung in his London home until his death three years ago and now (to avoid inheritance tax) the works are being displayed together for the last time before being distributed across UK galleries.

★★★☆☆
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.