There seems to be a current vogue for plays which show the gradual breakdown of bourgeois propriety into vulgar chaos. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and God of Carnage (which, incidentally, is being put on as part of Brasenose Arts Festival) both narrate how two couples come together for a civilised evening, which quickly descends into infantile anarchy. Following in the steps of these plays, but by no means imitating them, comes New College student James Mannion’s new play, Surprise.

Surprise features seven characters: six recent graduates who all went to university together – Oxford is not stated, but heavily implied – and the outisder Guy (Benedict Nicholson) are all brought together for a birthday party. Underlying tensions are clear from the outset: married couple, Ruth (Laura O’Driscoll) and Gideon (Cormac Connelly-Smith) can barely stand each other’s company, Clara (Clare Saxby) has just been dumped by her fiancé and Paul (James Watson) starts to feel his unrequited love for her again.

At the start of the play, party hostess, Philippa (Olivia Dunlop) paces around her flat, puffing nervously on a cigarette and greeting her motley assortment of guests one by one. The first arrival is the mysterious Guy, who has an “astounding memory”, wears an interesting combination of clashing stripes and smokes a lot of weed.

Although I only saw the first act, Mannion describes to me how Guy’s “power and influence shifts throughout the play through the way he manipulates the other characters. He becomes more and more influential so that by the end he is very much orchestrating the party.”

Nicholson expertly conveys this Machiavellian figure’s frenetic energy which becomes increasingly disconcerting, as does the fact that he insists upon drinking lemonade while the other characters get ever more tiddly on the abundance of booze at the party. Although the play has a slightly slow start, the clever dialogue and excellent acting mean that by the end of the first act I was utterly hooked.

Mannion dubs his play a ‘psychedelic comedy’. Apart form structural jokes (expect a lot of puns with the word ‘surprise’), much of the comedy comes from the double act between zookeeper, Gideon and solicitor, Rod (Keelan Kember), who chain smoke, make misogynistic jokes and spout pretentious truisms, such as “mockery is the sincerest form of flattery”.

And I won’t tell you what the psychedelic part of it means, because, well…that would ruin the surprise!

Surprise is on at the Keble O’Reilly on May 20-24. Standard ticket £8, concessions £6. 

There is a tension at the heart of ‘Matisse: The Cut-Outs’, one that pulls between childish simplicity and complexity; between exuberance and violence; between idealism and a certain kind of wistfulness. It is a tension revealed by the title of the exhibition itself: ‘cut-out’. This is a medium that belongs to the tactility and play inherent in a child’s experimentation with art, but one that has been combined with such sophisticated precision that makes it radical and new; full of bold possibility.

The Tate’s exhibition recreates the spirit of creativity and flux in Matisse’s studio, a succession of hotel bedrooms in the South of France. Riddled with bowel cancer and restricted to a wheelchair, the walls became Matisse’s canvas — his “little garden” — as he filled it with the joys and wonders of the outside world. He de- scribed these final years as “une seconde vie”, a second life, a hint at the energy and rejuvenation that shines through his work.

Paper coloured with different shades of gouache paint was cut out and pinned to the walls, creating formations and designs that were in constant states of change and renewal. They were never still, but imbued with movement. Fish and birds, intertwined in vibrant fauna, dive and circle around each other; circus artists leap and throw knives; mermaids undulate; smoke rises out of enchanted lamps. There is a poignancy in the sheer excess of life teeming off these walls, fluttering in the breeze from an open window, waving gently as people passed by, and the physical constraints of Matisse himself as he conjured up this magical world around him.

The Tate’s rooms are filled with relics from these days: pins, heaps of cut paper shapes, colour scales of gouache paint and glass shards from his design for the Rosary Chapel in Vence. Photographs show the cut-outs as they first appeared in Matisse’s living quarters-cum-studio, jumbled up with the objects of every-day life. Film footage shows Matisse himself as he cuts seamlessly into paper, the shape growing, bending and curling around the scissors as he works.

As we see from the beginning of the exhibition, the power of the cut-out stemmed from its ability to change and be transformed, from its power of experimentation. Two matching still-lifes (Still-life with shell) stand beside each other; one a painting, the other a collection of cut-out shapes. Matisse used the cut-out to experiment with the composition of his painting, right down to the edge of the table, evoked by a piece of string to be re-angled and repositioned at will. It is a combination of precision and experimentation that appears again at the end of the show, in Acanthuses, which — according to the curators — appeared with the perforations of more than a thousand tiny pin-holes in them.

Motifs echo throughout — not just thematically, but in the basic components of each image. Repeating shapes crop up in ever- changing contexts: the bursting red heart and yellow stars in The Fall of Icarus adorn the body of The Clown, lending it a sense of scarring violence, while the two dancers from a maquette studying the ballet Rouge et Noir reappear in print on a magazine cover for Verve IV with the same erupting centres, red superimposed over yellow.

The simplicity and rawness at the heart of this experimentation, that sense of heightened tactility, become more apparent when viewing the Jazz collection, and comparing the original mock-ups to their printed counterparts. The contrast in texture, juxtaposition of serrated and smooth edges, intertwining of paper — all of this is lost in print, where a smooth flatness replaces the maquettes’ bold physicality.

The overflowing exuberance of this exhibition belies the tumult of the external and personal worlds that surrounded Matisse. He was hobbled by illness and left by his wife of forty- one years; his muse, assistant and lover Lydia Delectorskaya attempting to commit suicide; his daughter soon to be arrested and tortured by the Nazis because of her work for the Resistance. A dark wistfulness permeates these beautiful gardens of life and magic, evoking an unattainable idealism, a desire for an impossible paradise. When asked by the poet and writer Louis Aragon how such brilliance could have been produced in a time of such darkness, Matisse’s response was simple and sad: “I do it in self-defence”.

These works will inspire unmitigated joy and wonder, but it is a beauty which does not come untouched by complexity or melancholy.

The way something looks, no matter what it is, has huge relevance to the way in which we perceive it. What a person wears, the shape of their body and the complexities of their face can, whether they should or not, have a signifi cant impact on how we view them and even how we treat them.

This is no different in the world of culture. From 40,000-year-old cave paintings in Spain to the latest Captain America fi lm, visual spectacle has always impressed us. And it’s not just man-made images and visuals that have an impact on us. The beauty of nature has long been a subject dear to Man’s heart. Frescos from Minoan Greece dated around 1500 BC include loving depictions of leaping bulls, mythical creatures and swimming dolphins. Like ancient David Attenboroughs, doubtless these artists were considered national treasures.

Of course, some of the earliest art was devoted to the improvement of architecture. Designing impressive and beautiful buildings was, for the ancients, one of the best ways of displaying their power and Ancient Greek architecture remains to this day some of the most beautiful. Furthermore, one only has to take a trip to Canary Wharf to see that we still display our power through the impressiveness of our architecture.

Beauty for beauty’s sake is not the sole purpose of art, however. In Ancient Greece, most art was created as a form of worship – the iconic Parthenon in Athens and the temple at Delphi are prime examples. Some of the greatest works of art throughout history have been in the service of religion, from the Sistine Chapel and da Vinci’s The Last Supper to the first sculpture of Buddha, which began to appear in the 5th century BC (though none would represent him in a full anthropomorphic manner until the 1st century AD).

Though religion would seem to be an inherently spiritual phenomenon, concerned with how one feels on the inside rather than how things look on the outside, visual culture has always played a large part in the worship of deities. Even aspects of culture which do not seem to explicitly involve visual representations are intricately tied up with what they look like. Yes, we’re not supposed to judge books by their covers, but it seems unlikely that Harry Potter would have been as successful if it had had a vomit green cover and no writing or pictures. 

Even the look of the words on the page is important, as any member of Cherwell staff (who has obsessed over which of two almost identical fonts to use for the culture spread) would tell you. In poetry, it is often vitally important how the words are presented – see Simon Armitage’s poem, Ankylosing Spondylitis, which resembles on the page the twisted spine which it describes.

Early novelists such as Laurence Sterne liked to experiment with ideas like this in their books. In his novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Sterne uses numerous visual subversions of the traditional novel. A black page “mourns” the death of one character, squiggly graphs indicate the progress of the narrative line and at one point the author off ers an empty page to the reader so that they can include their own description of a character’s beauty.

And in our technologically advanced age, visuals have begun to play an ever-increasing role in various forms of culture. Every other film these days is described as a ‘visual spectacle’ for its special effects, its use of 3D, its CGI monsters. But visual effects have always been important in performance art. Ancient Greek actors wore exaggerated masks to show what emotions they were supposed to be feeling, for those audience members who were too far away to see.

In the Middle Ages, dramatizations of Bible stories demanded accurate costumes for the participants. Despite modern perceptions of the theatre as a place where one has to use one’s imagination, high-tech stages like that of the National Theatre show that technology is advancing the visual potential of plays as well. What’s more, concerts are getting more and more extravagant. Justin Timberlake’s The 20/20 Experience World Tour involved an insane light show, massive visuals of Justin’s face and a section of the stage shaped like a bridge going above the audience. Lady Gaga seems to break some performance boundary or other every time she takes to the stage.

Visual culture is an expansive study, and the philosophy of aesthetics is a popular school covering many of the ideas about beauty and images over which the human mind naturally obsesses. The way our world looks is vitally important to us, and we are constantly transfi xed by its beauty.

The aim of art is at its most simple level to add to or reflect the beauty already in the world, and as technology advances, the scale of visuals that
we can create increases exponentially. It seems we will never cease to be entranced by wonderful and spectacular pictures both natural and man-made.