Kyra Hollis, an overworked teacher from a rougher than average state school comes home to her flat with a stack of books to mark. Over the course of a freezing night in her tiny flat, she will be visited by not one, but two, figures from her past – Tom, a wealthy self-made man and her former lover, and Edward, his teenage son. This elegantly simple set-up becomes, in the hands of writer David Hare and director Stephen Daldry, increasingly complex and compelling, and manages to challenge the pre-conceptions of its audience as well as the choices of its characters.

Leading man Bill Nighy has played the role of Tom Sergeant before, in a 1997 West End production, and it seems that if anything, he has grown into the role, his lined features and long limbs contrasting with the petite and doll-like figure of Mulligan. He represents Tom’s emotional repression perfectly –bluff arrogance breaking down just enough to earn the audience’s sympathy before the façade is hastily re-erected. A character who could have been deeply unlikeable is, in Nighy’s hands, made far less easy to categorise. The audience might not agree with Tom about much – or anything – but he charms us, and it is easy to understand why Kyra was – and is – so drawn to him.

In contrast to the experience of Nighy, Skylight is Carey Mulligan’s West End debut. From the outset she portrays Kyra with delicacy and capability, but it is in the play’s second act, when Kyra’s restraint is stripped away to reveal the tougher and less compromising emotions beneath that we see Mulligan’s undeniable talent really shine through.

Nighy and Mulligan may be the big-ticket names, but there’s also a winning performance from Matthew Beard as Tom’s son, which perfectly captures the lanky awkwardness characteristic of boys in their late teens. His anxious pretention plays perfectly against Mulligan’s amused fondness, and his manner and mannerisms echo Nighy’s in a realistically familial way.

Skylight is a love story, but like all really compelling love stories, it is so much more besides. It is an examination of the relative merits of vocation and self-interest, slumming it and social-climbing, liberalism and conservatism. The play was first performed in 1995, but, were it not for some telling details – Edward’s Walkman, the flat’s tiny gas heater – it could just as easily be taking place in the present day. It is a sign of Hare’s consummate skill as a playwright that he has penned a work which not only continues to be of immediate interest, but perhaps has become even more relevant in the seventeen years since it was last on the West End.

Performance art owes a great deal to Marine Abramović. The self-proclaimed ‘grandmother of performance art’ is both one of its inventors and most influential proponents. The Serbian 60-something began her experimentation with the medium in the 70s, with her series of ‘Rhythms’. The most famous of these was ‘Rhythm 0’ during which she laid out 72 different objects, including a feather, honey, a scalpel and a gun in the gallery and allowed the public to do anything they wished to her with the eclectic array of objects. She remained completely passive for six hours, even when members of the public undressed her, cut her hair and held the loaded gun to her neck.  It was a powerful comment on the ease with which social inhibitions and civility break down.

More recently, during the retrospective of her work in New York’s MOMA, she performed the piece ‘The Artist Is Present’. Sitting in the museum’s atrium for eight hours a day for three months, she invited the spectators to sit opposite her for a short time silently holding eye contact. Many of the museum-goers, among whom appeared James Franco, Alan Rickman and Lady Gaga, were moved to tears, to the extent that a special website was dedicated to their welling up: marinaabramovicmademecry.com. Now the matriarch of performance art has pitched up camp in London’s Serpentine Gallery, displaying her latest piece, ‘512 Hours’, specially conceived for the intimate space.   

‘512 Hours’ is completely unlike normal exhibitions. There is no admission fee and no booking, meaning you could end up at the back of a queue slinking all the way through Kensington Gardens or gain immediate entry, as I was lucky enough to. One hundred and sixty visitors are allowed in at any one time and are encouraged to spend as long as they wish in the exhibition. The public are told, rather pretentiously, to ‘leave their baggage both literally and metaphorically in order to enter the exhibition’. The public’s worldly clobber is stowed in a row of metallic lockers before they proceed into the exhibition. Not only material, but also auditory distractions are removed when one of Marina’s team of forty-five black-clad helpers hands you a pair of soundproof headphones. The only sound is that of one’s own thoughts. 

The first room, overwhelmingly white, contained nothing but an low platform upon which stood a few of Marina’s helpers, facing one another seemingly in a trance-like state. One of them cam away from the group and led me by the hand into the next room where there were row after row of chairs and desks, on each of which was a piece of paper, a pencil and a little heap of jumbled rice grains and lentils. She sat me down at one of the desks and whispered to me in soothing tones: ‘separate the lentils and rice and count them, use the paper if you need to’.

This was a Sisyphean task – I knew that as soon as I left my seat, one of the helpers would undo my laborious work and re-arrange the jumble. However, the point of this exercise was not its completion but its undertaking.  The fact that there were 823 lentils (I gave up counting the rice grains) was far less meaningful than the process of counting them. Some people, who hadn’t been led and instructed by the helper wandered through the room of people absorbed in their rice and lentil separating, trying to gage what they were doing and join in. Why do people feel such a need to be the same as everyone else, even when it means performing such a fruitless task?

When I wandered back into the centre room, a helper immediately grabbed my hand and led me onto the platform, instructing me by example to close my eyes. Holding hands with a stranger went entirely against what social conventions had ever taught me. And yet, it was liberating. In the room on the left people were pacing up and down with exaggeratedly slow steps, either by themselves or with helper-guides. Marina Abramović herself wove her way through the statue-like members of the public, placing a gentle hand on their backs, stroking their eyes shut and exchanging a jovial word.

The guides had a faint air of pretention about them, but there was nothing artificial about Marina Abramović’s movements. Her life and art co-exist in complete harmony and this is evident from her poise and gravitas. In performing her art she is merely living. Like John Cage’s ‘4.33’ or Malevich’s ‘Black Square’ (currently being exhibited at the Tate Modern), this piece is the reduction of art to its bare form, the end to art. Like its musical and visual counterparts, the performance piece’s title bears little comment on its meaning, being a mere description of its duration. By expressing so little, it expresses everything.  In most of Marina Abramović’s pieces she uses her body as both subject and object, they are physical and mental tests of her endurance. The one hour I spent in this exhibition felt like an age and it is a veritable feat of stamina that Marina Abramović will be doing it for 512. 

★★★☆☆
Three Stars

Like the apes of the title, first impressions of this big-budget blockbuster suggest an exercise in simplicity, yet on closer inspection it reveals high minded concerns lurking just beneath the surface. Arriving midway through the summer blockbuster season, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, a sequel to 2011’s surprise smash Rise of the Planet of the Apes, departs from the traditional action movie formula by featuring a large ensemble cast and non-human protagonists. The subtlety of the film’s examination of the precarious co-existence of differing groups of people is refreshing, and though this is supported by great work from its director, motion capture cast and effects team, the film ends up an uneasy marriage of social commentary and blockbuster bravado thanks to its undercooked narrative.

The plot concerns itself with two societies living side by side after an outbreak of “simian flu” has wiped out untold millions of people. Surviving in a San Francisco mall is a depleted human community led by Gary Oldman’s Dreyfus, whilst in the mountains to the north of the city, Caesar, played by Andy Serkis, leads a fledgling tribe of apes who have developed primitive language, weapons and organisation. The film follows both groups as tensions mount and internal conflicts threaten the balance of power as the humans attempt to restore a hydroelectric dam deep in ape territory, whilst fears amongst the apes regarding human motivations give rise to an opportunist coup.

That the film can be enjoyed as a populist blockbuster or as an allegory of the tensions of colonialism and Western foreign policy is a testament to an ambitious script. However, director Matt Reeve’s interest in the social commentary occasionally threatens to derail the film’s pace, particularly in the second act, when the internal power struggles that lead to the inevitable Simian coup mire the plot in repetitive confrontations between Caesar and his rival, Koba. Furthermore, the human cast are saddled with embarrassingly transparent scenes which attempt to add depth to their characters by spelling out motivations and backstories which do little but thematically underline the more interesting simian sub-plots, whilst characters are introduced who serve no purpose but to antagonise the apes and thus unnecessarily complicate the plot. Moreover, the disappearance of two central human characters midway through the third act serves to further negate the presence of these vaguely drawn human stories. Ultimately however, the time invested in establishing the precariousness of Caesar’s power pays off in a satisfying, though, by blockbuster standards, surprisingly intimate finale where the majority of the human and simian story strands combine to deliver a poignant and violent resolution, even if the ending feels more like an attempt to artificially extend the franchise than to conclude the story sincerely.

From the opening close-up of Caesar’s determined gaze to the climactic crowd scenes of hundreds of charging apes, the success of the film is inseparable from the convincingness of its effects, and thankfully they’re mostly successful. The opening 15 minutes, amongst the film’s most compelling, are carried entirely and effortlessly by motion captured characters, and the combination of jaw-droppingly real CGI and great performances gradually reveal the relationships, personalities and emotions of the well differentiated primates, who are never less than entirely convincing on screen. That Reeves allows the film’s emotional climax to play almost entirely in close ups of two motion captured characters speaks to the strengths of both the actors and the effects team; that it works is even more surprising. Devoting so much time to the intelligent and complex internal struggles of these characters brings out their emerging humanity, allowing the climactic showdown featuring hordes of machine gun totting chimps to never seem too ridiculous. 

Regarding the performances, Serkis leads an incredible motion capture cast who ground the apes with a human expressiveness that never seems incongruous. Every glance and facial twitch registers on Caesar’s face, perfectly expressing his conflicting desires. Elsewhere Nick Thurston delivers a soulful performance as Blue Eyes, Caesar’s son, bringing life to a stock coming-of-age arc by imbuing his character with palpable anger and indecision. Toby Kebbel also shines as Koba, creating a formidable and fearsome villain that is nevertheless grounded in understandable frustration. It’s unfortunate then that such strong simian performances are not matched by the uninspiring human cast. The greatest weakness is Jason Clarke’s bland performance as the human lead, which feels ineffectual and often seems lost amongst the special effects. Elsewhere, Gary Oldman cashes a cheque in a throwaway role that feels unnecessarily expanded to justify his presence, whilst Keri Russell is hampered by a part that allows her to do little else than express concern, in a film that values its female characters solely by their nurturing instincts. Of the humans, only Kodi Smit-McPhee delivers a credible turn in a supporting role as a sweet-natured teen who crosses the man-ape divide.

Like most blockbusters then, the human drama of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes does little to engage audiences, but instead it differentiates itself from the pack by offering up fascinating insights and a complex, biblical family drama that unfolds amongst a cast of faultlessly realised non-human characters. Disappointingly however, the film’s quietly pacifistic message seems at odds with the sheer joy it knowingly engineers in such scenes, like a rampaging monkey driving a tank through the centre of San Francisco. Ultimately though, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes succeeds on its sheer dedication to subverting expectations, engaging the mind and heart even as it capitulates to the bombastic conventions of more generic summer fare.

British theatre very rarely takes political drama seriously. Most of the political drama featured on our stages takes a decided bent towards the satirical and the farcical. The only real way for our dramatists to decry the corrupt and the incompetent in the British public sector, it seems, is to render them laughably ridiculous, and Great Britain, currently showing at the National Theatre, is no exception. The National Theatre is, after all, known for the development of these satirical works – over the last forty years, the bill has included works like The National Health, Pravda, and This House.

The announcement of Great Britain – written by Richard Bean, author of the National Theatre’s smash hit One Man, Two Guvnors – about two weeks ago came as a bit of a shock to both the theatre world and the public. Having been cast and rehearsed in complete secret since before Easter, the play focuses on the rise and fall of a tabloid newspaper, and decries – amongst a vast range of transgressions –Page Three, phone hacking, police corruption, and political skulduggery. Almost every sphere of public life is examined and found wanting.

The need for secrecy during production and development is clear – the announcement came as Andy Coulson’s trial for phone hacking, and by extension, the Leveson Inquiry, drew to a close. Had the play been publicised before the end of the legal process, its creators might well have been indicted for contempt of court. As it is, the timing of the play makes it so topical as to inevitably render it a box-office success. The astute references to the current cultural and political climate make it irresistibly entertaining to an audience of intelligentsia who like to consider themselves in the know. Multimedia meme-style videos of the Police Commissioner’s public apologies and attempts at redemption recall the autotuned Nick Clegg “Apology Song”. The horsey senior editor who has no idea what is actually going on in her offices is a clear stab at Rebekah Brooks, ex-editor of the now-defunct News of the World. The editor-turned media guru to the Prime Minister mirrors David Cameron’s disastrous misstep of appointing Coulson to the very same position.

These references are funny, but I can’t help but feel that the play overall is lazy. It is only too easy to cruise along on the ludicrousness of actual events, without offering any insight or solution to the ensuing chaos. Billie Piper – of Doctor Who and Secret Diary of a Call-Girl fame – is surprisingly unengaging to watch, despite being billed as the star of the show. It could just be that her character – the ruthlessly ambitious and uncompromising sub-editor who will do anything to catch a story – is so relentlessly unlikeable, but Piper herself does little to make the character multi-faceted, instead playing her on one villainous note. Perhaps my personal dislike for asides has coloured my enjoyment of the script – but it takes far more skill and is ultimately more engaging for a playwright to gradually reveal motivations and relationships through dialogue rather than mounting them as occasional explain-all monologues directed at the audience.

The design is glossy and flexible, with sliding glass partitions which reveal variously the police commissioner’s home, the newspaper offices and even the Ivy restaurant. The use of multimedia and projection is one of the play’s strongest points, and parodies of national newspapers (“The Guardener” which carries the subtitle ‘We think so you don’t have to’, and “The Mail”, which only ever features headlines about immigrants) are one of the main sources of laughter. Supporting cast members – such as Oliver Chris, as the Vice-Commissioner who compromises his own moral code so severely that he feels obliged to bring himself to a sticky end –  give excellent performances, and the overall feel of the play is high-powered and glossy.

The National Theatre’s choice to commission a play about the corruption of the press is an interesting one. Pravda, written by David Hare and Howard Brenton, focuses on a similar topic, although its specific subject matter is a thinly-veiled parody of Rupert Murdoch’s ascension to power over Fleet Street, whereas Great Britain’s Murdoch-figure has already made it in the newspaper business, and is now aiming at an approximation of the BskyB bid. Personally I think that Hare’s version is more witty and more skilfully constructed, however, whilst Pravda was hugely successful during the immediate aftermath of Murdoch’s rise, it is now largely obsolete as a political play, because times have moved on. Though Great Britain is entertaining now, its power to amuse is rooted firmly in the present.

Watch Great Britain like you might read Private Eye – as an immediately amusing construction rather than as a lasting masterpiece of writing.