Dear Cherwell,

When reading a letter sent from the Côte d’Azur, you might expect a narrative bejewelled by tales of glamorous encounters. Instead, I’m taking this opportunity to wow you with some public transport anecdotes, a theme which I thought I’d abandoned with the rest of my French GCSE syllabus. My purse, scattered with an obscene amount of used bus and train tickets, forced together and left to swelter, epitomises the lives of many here in Nice: the daily grind – métro, boulot, dodo.

If you speak to the most of the locals here about public transport, the first response you will receive is “il faut faire attention dans les transports en commun, il y a des fous!” (“Be careful on public transport, there are some crazy people.”) But I’ve made several delightful acquaintances on the trams, trains and buses here – from a homeless guy named Mohammed who wanted to practise his English with me, to a 6’8” Sudanese bouncer named Trésor, to a Chinese student on a working holiday and a tall, dark and handsome stranger who offered me his seat and his number (which I ironically lost when clearing out my abundance of used tickets).

Life isn’t all a bed of roses on the number 23, however. There are several aspects which me font chier (really piss me off) The first thing to note is delays. Liberté, Fraternité, Égalité, Delais. The laid back way of life here seems to extend to sticking to timetables and as a result I’ve been left waiting for a train for 2 hours far too many times for my liking. Although, this can be handy when you yourself are running late – being able to reassure yourself that your train will be at least 5 minutes en retard always helps matters. Of course, delays go hand in hand with strikes – which, incidentally, do not mean days off work. Using transport strikes as an excuse would be akin to missing work due to rain in the UK (a more valid reason for absence here in the South of the France, might I add).

Once finally on board, you have another three things to deal with. Firstly, there’s the unconceivable amount of PDA you will witness. There must be something about public transport that really revs French people’s engines. Sitting opposite my 15 year old students snogging and gyrating is always enough to put me off my pain au chocolat.

Secondly, the etiquette of giving up your seat here is painfully awkward. In England, it’s simply a matter of good manners to stand up for your elders. Here, I’ve learnt the hard way that it causes mortal offence for a female to offer her seat to a man, no matter what his age. Now, I always stand.

Thirdly, you have to escape the wrath of the Transport Police. They rarely make an appearance, but when they do they strut down the aisles as if members of the CIA – making everyone flinch as they walk past. It is tempting to stop buying tickets when you are only checked once every blue moon. But the one time you choose not to will almost certainly be the time that the Gallic Dementors decide to sweep into your carriage and inflict their kiss upon you, in the form of €100 fine.

Despite this vent, on the whole, j’aime le transport en commun here in Nice. It is like a best friend; erratic and quirky but it is difficult to stay angry at it for long. It’s a big, mundane part of an otherwise exciting and enriching Year Abroad. It keeps you grounded. Je vous remercie le transport en commun.

Bisous,

Annie 

In a small town named Halberstadt in Central Germany, an empty stone room reverberates with noise. Over the 950 years of its existence, the St Burchardi Church has served variously as monastery, barn, distillery and pigsty, but since 2001 it has played host to a performance of John Cage’s composition ‘Organ²/ASLSP’.

The performance is scheduled to continue for the next 627 years.Cage, the mischievous experimental composer, decreed that the composition should be played ASAP: ‘As Slow As Possible’. The record for the longest performance by single person stands at an entirely respectable14 hours and 56 minutes, but the mechanical organ in St. Buchardi’s Church pushes the work to its limits. The next note change in the current 78-year movement will not sound until 2020.The piece demands that we contemplate the bounds of human endeavour.

There is no upper limit to its longevity except that defined by our technical ingenuity and the transience of our existence. ‘The Clock of the Long Now’ is a similar fusion between the artistic and the mechanical, designed to keep striking for 10,000 years without recourse to digital programming. As well as testing the artifice of its engineers (the $42,000,000 project is still ongoing), it is intended to serve as an “icon for long thinking”.

French undergraduates determinedly chewing their way through the 3000 pages of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu will be well aware that its gross length is a result of the author’s endlessly rambling and discursive style rather than a deliberate attempt to challenge the fortitude of his readers. The 17th-century novel Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus is four times as long as Proust’s half-arsed attempt, and the Tibetan Epic of King Gesar stretches ten times longer even than this, running for some 20,000,000 words in its totality. There is a distinction to be drawn between works of art which are long for the sake of being long, and those such as Artamène or the Epic, whose scale is simply a by-product of their complex narratives.

This is largely because written works are not performed or experienced in continuous, unbroken duration in the way that the visual or aural arts are. The world’s longest film, a plotless and deeply disturbing art-house venture which splices heavy metal and clips from pornographic films with a poetry reading over the course of 87 gruelling hours, is notwithout reason entitled A Cure for Insomnia. Theatre is doubly limited by the energy and patience of both audience and actors, and neither of the two performances cited as the longest in the world (The Warp and The Bald Soprano) break the 24-hour mark. Film, installation art and music test our endurance as consumers in a more relentless fashion than books, which are absorbed at the reader’s own pace.

The creators of ‘The Clock of the Long Now’ hope the installation will “do for thinking about time what photographs of Earth from space have done for thinking about the environment”. The steady beating of the mechanical oscillator at the heart of the Clock of the Long Now and the relentless dirge of the organ in the Church of St. Buchardi serve the same purpose: they set the brevity of our lives against the enormity of time.

I put my gun to an innocent bystander’s head. His only crime was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Kicking and screaming, I drag him down an alleyway to the sound of ricocheting bullets and wailing sirens. With the barely audible thud of a silenced Luger, I silence him forever. Of course, you are not reading “Cherwell Culture tries… Assault and Battery” (though if we run out of ideas later in the term a little violent crime might not go amiss). Rather, I have ventured into the stygian world of Grand Theft Auto V. 

“It’s great,” my friend blithely assures me. “You can torture people and everything, look.” With an innocuous waggle of a joystick his on-screen avatar picks up some unfortunatelooking pliers. A further flutter of fingers over his control pad and some extremely amateurish dental work is suddenly being performed before my eyes. I still have nightmares about the giant pie machine in Chicken Run, so this was frankly all a bit much. “Yeah, great,” I murmur, suppressing my breakfast and eyeing the room for possible exits. “Really tests the bounds of human morality and stuff. Yeah. Really artistic.”

My friend doesn’t hear me – his eyes glaze over as he pounds frantically on the buttons, giving his animated victim a shot of adrenaline to restart his heart so he can continue applying animated electrodes to his animated nipples. “Definitely really artistic,” I repeat to myself. To give the game’s producers their credit, it’s a gorgeously-produced artwork, animated nipples and all. When I take the control padand clumsily roam the fictional city of Los Santos, I can recognise the freedom bestowed and the breathtaking scope of the game. My only point of reference is Snake on my trusty Nokia 5110. It seems things have moved on a bit in the computer world since then.

One thing that has not changed since those days of merrily charging around a green-lit screen is the portly girth of my pudgy fingers. I mash wildly at my control pad, while my friend provides calm and lucid direction. “Left! Not your left, my left! No, other left! Don’t let him – OK, well, get the – put down the – Jesus. Pick up the thing. Not the thing, the thing! The thing. I said the thing.” “Shut up,” I retort wittily. Despite my best efforts, my character blunders around with the grace of a potato. If there is a car, Iwill crash it. If there is a wall, I will run into it. If I am sitting quietly an empty room with padded walls and no exits, my head will explode for no apparent reason.

My friend’s continuous refrain is “I don’t even know how you did that”, as I find a myriad unexpected ways to blow my own brains out. By the end, I am prodding at the control pad with my eyes shut, whimpering as my friend sighs reproachfully beside me. “I did say to pick up the thing”. I’d rather hook up my real nipples to an A/C generator than spend another gory and chaotic hour running roundin circles and inadvertently shooting myself in the ear.

On arriving at the Old Fire Station last Saturday I had no idea what I had come to see. A one man show, purporting to be comedy. Does that mean stand-up comedy? Sketches? Part of the problem with this show, written by Scott Payne and performed by Jay, is that it didn’t seem to know what it was either. Sure there were elements of humour – I think it extracted a least three chuckles from me; not nearly approaching guffaw or rumbling, inexorable belly-laugh territory but nevertheless mildly amusing. These attempts at comedy drowned in a sea of half-baked allusions to more serious theatrical genres or forms.

The premise of the performance was to trace a man’s life through his interactions with other people. The man in question was actually a jacket placed over the back of a chair, with a claw-like plastic hand protruding from one sleeve. The narrative arc, such as it was, was provided by a motley cast of characters rendered by Simon Jay, who lithely skipped between genders, ages, and regional accents, verging on the hysterical.

Despite their skilful portrayals many of these characters were lazy caricatures, from the drunken cockney football fan to the airy-fairy, spiritually attuned hack hypnotherapist Dr Strepsils. If comedy means reciting tired stereotypes for a cheap laugh then this, unfortunately, was comedy of the highest order. When the joke wasn’t about the characters themselves, all we were left with was toilet humour, the bulk of which took place in a sewer works. I’ll leave it up to you to guess what that involved.

The main trouble I had with this piece was not the immature, pedestrian attempts at humour; it was their juxtaposition with dark plot twists and tragic notes which could not be reconciled with jokes about poo. When looked at objectively there is little to laugh about in the subject’s life. His sister dies in the blitz; his mother is a prison-bound drug addict who hates him; he fails to turn up to his own wedding because he’s in bed with another woman; his wife deals with this for 39 years before divorcing him; he works in a sewer; and eventually he dies of a heart attack. In a show lasting under an hour, there was no time to marry a depressing biography with humorous asides, and on the basis of this performance it is not something to be attempted again.  

Tartuffe is both one of Moliere’s most famous and most controversial comedies. Following the story of a young sinner, Tartuffe, who has been taken in by an infatuated patriarch named Orgon, the plays’ treatment of contentious issues such as religious hypocrisy led to its being censored. However, audiences both now and then delighted in the hilarity of the farcical characters and satirical narrative.

This cast have clearly made the script their own, with the addition of hilarious interjections and witticisms to the dialogue; recurring jokes such as the persistent mispronunciation of “Tartuffe”, and the “rough translation” of English phrases spoken with French accents, for instance, really added a fresh lick of paint to a well-known classical story. 

The characters themselves were strong, and the actors should be commended for creating such memorable onstage personalities. Particularly notable, in my opinion, was Bria Thomas in the role of the outspoken servant girl Dorine, whose clever asides and pithy remarks were remarkably engaging. Tommy Siman brought many contrasting colours to the character of Tarfuffe; his alternation between the sweet, pious holy man and the dark, saucy sinner was both comedic and ironic, as the audience got a chance to glimpse the villainous man behind the facade. I also thought that Melita Cameron-Wood did a fantastic job of interpreting the role of Madame Pernelle, at once a cynical, painfully truthful old hag and a foolishly enamoured advocate of Tartuffe. 

The comedy was by no means overdone, however. Co-directors Ben Nicholson and Fay Lomas still succeeded in representing the central themes of the play; false virtue and the deceitful manipulation of doctrine for sinful personal gain. Both Siman and Joshua Wilce, who plays the master-of-the-house Orgon, both collaborated fabulously together on stage to create buckets of irony, simultaneously infuriating and comic. A nice touch during the scenes where Tartuffe seduces Orgon’s wife Elmire (Alma Prelec), was that the stage was bathed in an ominous red light. This really drew the audience’s attention to the sin unfolding onstage.

The performance certainly succeeded in doing what it set out to do; creating an entertaining piece with a laugh a minute, whilst at the same time leaving us to contemplate the darker side of religion and human nature.

Tartuffe is showing 4th – 9th of February at the Corpus Christi Auditorium.