He is unknowingly despondent, working an unfulfilling office job by day and or­dering takeaways by night in his drab, Ikea-furnished apartment, most likely in the midst of the anonymity of a huge urban sprawl like London, New York or LA. He probably calls his parents every week, but only sees them a couple of times a year. He is also probably still getting over the break-up of his last long-term relationship, a year previous. He is sleepwalk­ing through life without quite realising how.

Then she turns up! Straight outta a small town and ready to take on the big, wide world in all its beauty and variety and thrills, she wears polka dots and has a fringe and doesn’t care what other people think about her. She is impulsive and she is unafraid. She owns a Po­laroid camera. She deliberately never stays in a job more than a few months, and probably works in a book shop or a kindergarten.

They meet under quirky, semi-coincidental circumstances. He falls for her immediately, and he intrigues her. He is something of a proj­ect. She sets out to make him happy. Fulfilled. To change him. She succeeds.

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She could, of course, be a character in any number of movies. It was film critic Nathan Rabin who first christened her the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (MPDG), and critics claim to have spotted her in everything from 500 Days of Summer to Scott Pilgrim vs. The World to Elizabethtown to Ruby Sparks. Some have named Annie Hall as her earliest incarnation. Cin­ema loves MPDGs.

Except that Rabin himself dis­owned the term earlier this year. He originally came up with it to describe a situation in which a female character only exists in order to change a male character — to give him a new lease of life or show him the error of his ways. She has no aspirations of her own, nor does she seem to have her own family, friends or career. There are undeniably instances when female characters fill this trope, but more often than not, the myth is decon­structed by the girl, who proves not to be the saviour the leading man thinks. The Pixie Girl is essentially a fallacy of a character.

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It’s clearest in films like 500 Days of Summer and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. 500 Days’ Summer and Eternal Sunshine’s Clemen­tine both meet men who are stuck (Tom and Joel respectively). Tom “could be a great archi­tect if he wanted to be”, Summer remarks as he wastes his talents writing greeting cards, and Joel is an introverted, ultra-shy loner un­til Clem brings out the spontaneity and con­fidence hidden beneath his sensitive surface. The two female characters fit the Dream Girl bill to a tee, breezing in to change the men’s lives for the better, until we see that they soon grow tired or frustrated in their relationships and move on. Tom and Joel become wrecks; Summer and Clementine move on (one finds a new guy and gets married, the other has all her memories of the relationship erased medi­cally); it’s clear where the agency is, and which characters know what they want and how to progress towards it: the women.

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Annie Hall is the same. Ruby Sparks writer and star Zoe Kazan pointed out, when con­fronted with the term, that the apparent post­er girl for the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is actu­ally largely based on Diane Keaton, clearly a subtle, nuanced and very real person. To brand such a seminal character in the genre of ro­mantic comedy with a label as lazy as that of the MPDG speaks volumes about our lack of respect for both the character and the genre it­self. Ultimately, it is Clementine who, as she does so often in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, speaks sense on the matter when she tells Joel: “Too many guys think I’m a concept, or I com­plete them, or I’m gonna make them alive. But I’m just a fucked-up girl who’s looking for my own peace of mind; don’t assign me yours.” 

★★★☆☆
Three Stars

Apparently Christopher Nolan, patron saint of discerning blockbuster audiences, saw the comparisons between him and Stanley Kubrick. His Interstellar, an achingly ambitious but derivative space-opera, embraces its debt to Kubrick’s seminal 2001 even whilst it tackles a Spielbergian story of a family separated on an in­tergalactic scale. The film follows Cooper, a farmer and father played by mumbling everyman Matthew McConaughey, on a journey from our dying earth to the edges of the space-time con­tinuum in order to find a new planet for the hu­man race to populate. Taking on two of western cinema’s most revered masters seems almost as ambitious as the plot’s mission. What surprises is that Nolan almost sticks the landing.

Yet whilst Kubrick’s classic takes us to the birth of mankind’s successor, Interstellar tells an alto­gether more hopeful story about the betterment of humanity itself. It’s at times majestic, electri­fying and riveting, at others a heart-breaking human story connecting its two central father-daughter relationships across galaxies. But between these dizzying heights, there are mo­ments lacking focus, dropped narrative threads, and plot machinations as clunky as the film’s array of space-faring machinery. With Interstel­lar, Nolan is undoubtedly working on his biggest canvas yet, so it’s unsurprising, if a little disap­pointing, that his broader brush strokes paint in a little less detail.

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The film occasionally struggles to elucidate the profundity of its human drama, instead sometimes resorting to signifiers to do the heavy lifting — a character is conspicuously named Dr. Mann, the planet-saving spaceship called En­deavour, and the project titled ‘Lazarus’. This lack of subtlety seeps into the relationship between Cooper and his daughter Murphy, named after the Law. Nolan struggles to convincingly dra­matize his signature heavy exposition, and the script relies on its talented cast to get through some painfully forced dialogue.

Despite the film representing a departure in many ways, it is full of returning Nolan col­laborators. Hans Zimmer’s surprisingly delicate score foregoes much of the Dark Knight trilogy’s bombast in favour of more introspective, but no less mesmerising music. You can practically hear the twinkling stars. Editor Lee Smith’s presence is apparent in the Inception-style climactic cross­cutting, which keeps a coherent sense of escalat­ing tension across both the space-set and earth-bound narratives. Anne Hathaway also makes a return appearance, though, like her fellow cast mate Jessica Chastain, is given depressingly little to do. Apparently Nolan can conceive of the hu­man race entering the fifth dimension, but not a female character that isn’t defined almost exclu­sively by her love of an honest man.

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One new arrival is cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema. Hoytema uses the blackness and lim­ited light sources of the film’s space photogra­phy to create imagery that surpasses your usual blockbuster spectacle. Yet it’s in the American heartland’s endless vistas that he delivers his most haunting work, wringing every possible ounce of nostalgia from its corn fields, blue skies and dusty roads. Elsewhere, the special effects dazzle — one set piece on a watery planet particu­larly impresses — whilst the production design in the film’s dimension-bending finale is truly awe-inspiring. Audiences looking for a spectacle will not be disappointed.

It’s easy to forgive many of Interstellar’s mis­steps given the complex scientific and emotional territory being traversed, and the sheer amount of plot the film churns through in its three hour runtime. But Interstellar remains a flawed masterpiece, a film whose ambition slightly, but crucially, overreaches its grasp. Its ultimate conclusions about destiny and family are a little hard to swallow, particularly coming from such a typically clinical filmmaker as Nolan. It seems somewhat disingenuous to tell a story about love pushing us to our limits and pulling us back together, when the establishment of our charac­ters’ relationships feels so forced. Still, as Interstellar enters its final act, Nolan finds his way to the film’s heart, and on the way finds our own.

Adults are smarter, funnier, quicker and louder than kids — so say all of us. It is a sad, and often neglected fact of life that children go unheard. With Monkey Bars, Chris Goode’s verbatim script provides a platform for those voices that are so tirelessly drowned out by the self-important discourse of the working adult, voices that are bright, perceptive and refuse to be silenced. It arrives at the BT Studio on Tuesday of Sixth Week.

In rehearsals, director Siwan Clark conducts the play’s 30-odd inconsecutive scenes, in which adult characters recount the true tales of hundreds of young children interviewed by Goode, with as much energy as if it were her own material.  

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The play, Clark urges, is precisely suited to a student audience; performed for those still battling that infamous ‘in-between stage’, the voice of the child turned adult resonates in new and exciting ways. “We still remember what it’s like to be a child or teenager,” says Clark. “We still remember what it’s like not to be listened to.”

Of course, the director’s ambition stretches further than a simple appeal to our empathic adolescence, arguing that if we, at this age, are more likely to foster ‘anti-children’ sentiments, then the performance has scope for dislodging such prejudices while they are forming. 

Perhaps clouded by visions of a revived Freaky Friday scenario, my fears that this particular revision of the youth/adulthood dichotomy was just a little contrived, or worse a tad preachy, were swiftly abandoned. This is a script with real topical significance. Not only does it discuss issues such as the conflict in Syria or the London Riots, but at the heart of the play is a discussion on the sexual abuse scandal in Wales a few years back and the questionable ways in which the children’s complaints were dealt with.

Monkey Bars strikes a strident contemporary chord, as Clark articulates a national awareness of the fact that now, more than ever, “denying someone a voice is not without its consequences.”

Speaking of her personal attachment to the script, it quickly becomes obvious that Clark’s motivations as director are truly admirable ones. Jarred by the reality that anyone can openly profess, “Me? I hate kids!” and get away with it, for Clark the piece flags this kind of social acceptance of everyday child prejudice, and questions it. “Children have thoughts like the rest of us, they get lonely like the rest of us, and they have affections, memories, ambitions like anybody else.”

“It’s counter-intuitive, yes,” admits cast-member Benjamin Goldstein when asked about the challenges of a role in which both adult and juvenile dimensions are so unnaturally fused, “but it’s not impossible.”

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The rehearsal, like a flashback to those Stagecoach glory days, begins with a suitably playful and energised round of “Smack,” the “Monkey Bar” version of the notorious warm-up exercise, “Splat.” The cast then grapple with the task of exposing and removing those quirks and mannerisms that make us so characteristically adult by impersonating one another, with the mantra, “always accurate; never cruel”. Clearly, these are not just actors playing children. These are adult mouthpieces to the earnest, uninhibited speech of those who so often go ignored.

“People had to leave because they were peeing with laughter,” Rosalind Brody tells of her first experience of the play at the 2012 Fringe. As this would suggest, Monkey Bars is at once a pithy, thought-provoking and hilarious script to which Clark’s cast will no doubt do justice. Urging you to draw your own conclusions, this is a verbatim play that aptly and truthfully speaks for itself. 

★★★☆☆
Three Stars

In a Guardian review of Stephen Wright’s adaptation of ‘His Dark Materials’ at the National Theatre in 2003, Michael Billington described the play as ‘like a clipped hedge compared to Philip Pullman’s forest’. He notes that Pullman’s tale is a complex exploration of much theologically-themed fiction, which suffers from being culled for stage. As an admirer of Pullman’s work, whilst I agree that the adaptation itself is somewhat lacking in the story’s original magic, I found this production to be a valiant attempt at the difficult task of telling the epic adventures of Lyra and Will. Performing this play in Oxford gave it an extra level of meaning that could not have been achieved anywhere else: not least including the ironic mockery of the academics at the fictional ‘Jordan’ College – known as Exeter to you and I.

The production was well directed, by Madeleine Perham, and confidently acted save a few rough edges. Among the most memorable performances were those of Christian Bevan, who maturely played Lord Asrael and was painfully succesful at portraying the harsh father-figure, and Will Yeldham, who played the slimy Lord Boreal. A good word must also be given for Alex Mckenzie’s portrayal of Roger, who played the curious boy startlingly well, making his cruel demise at the end of the first part all the more horrific. Alex Sage’s Lyra was also well-performed – an impressive transformation to a 12-year-old girl. Her energy is the drive of this production. At points the child-like energy became a bit tiring. We might have seen more of the sensitive Lyra, of her conflicts and passions, since the story places us in the position of watching her grow from a child to a young woman.

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Theo Chevalier was perfectly cast as the voice for the puppet of Pantalaimon, Lyra’s daemon. Clearly it is challenging to achieve this convincingly, and he was the most successful at this in the production. However, I was not entirely convinced by the use of War Horse-esque puppets to represent the daemons. Although the idea has potential, under the conditions of a student production it is logistically impossible to have a daemon for every character. As a result only the main character’s daemons were portrayed. Daemons are the most inviting parts of Pullman’s world, and are the idea that drives the story. The lack of them onstage made it difficult to relate to the feeling of shock at Lyra’s first sighting of a child without a daemon. More confusing is that fact that it is impossible to portray the daemons changing shape, which in the books is what provides the cathartic heart-wrench of watching Lyra and Will grow and their daemons fix. Indeed, in this production Pantalaimon was permanently a pine martin, which I imagine will remove the climax of his fixing form during the part 2 production next term.

Just before I left the theatre, I heard a stranger exclaim to a friend: ‘I had no idea what was going on’. I do wonder, then, whether as someone who knows the stories inside out, I am the right person to be reviewing this production – I could be both over-critical and too generous, considering that I know the story inside out. But overall, the fact that not all of the first book and a half could be squeezed into one small production served to remind me that I want to reread the books I discovered as a child, now as a student in the Oxford of ‘our’ Universe.