How kindly do you treat the strangers you meet every day? Bernadette Russell’s 366 Days of Kindness, currently touring the UK, is a multimedia show, part-stand-up and part-documentary, which tackles this slippery question. The big question is scrawled at the front of the stage, “Can kindness change the world?”

It was her experience of the 2011 UK riots that inspired Bernadette’s project. “It was scary”, she says simply. “There were more fires in London than there had been since the blitz; shops broken into and goods pillaged; and the ensuing severe sentences did little to calm the mudslinging charges of blame.”

Bernadette’s response was part self-deprecation, part genuine question: “What can I do about it?” And thus the idea for 366 Days was born. Bernadette would do an “uncommon act of kindness” every day. She gave flowers to strangers in Tesco, decorated telephone boxes, and baked cakes labelled “eat me”.

The play features Bernadette and Gareth, both of whom are performers and writers. Bernadette plays herself, Gareth those she encounters through her year-long journey. It’s genuinely funny, with musical interludes, film footage, and terrific energy from the duo. This is a show that depends on audience response to the people on stage — if we’re not taken in by their niceness, who’s going to respond?

They’ve a message of hope, not of optimism; it is genuinely uplifting. Can kindness make a difference? One interviewee says that if she didn’t believe it could, there would be no point getting out of bed. “It takes real strength to counter sadness”, Bernadette points out.

Near the start, 366 Days of Kindness features an interview with Dan Thompson, who started #riotcleanup. He explains that the clean-up took off because it was something achievable: something “small, simple, visible”. As Bernadette points out, she didn’t give up all her possessions and turn her back on her previous life. So, can kindness change the world? Bernadette and Gareth say yes.

366 Days of Kindness is touring until 28th May. See here for more information. 

Opera is certainly tricky. Foreign-language librettos, endless recitatives and
laughably implausible and convoluted plot lines are not very easy to stage, and sometimes no easier to sit through. And this is why Oxford’s very own student-run Heartstrings Opera Company have decided to put on a more
accessible production of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro.

The opera takes place in the house of Count Almaviva (Louis Geary). His valet Figaro (William Pargeter) is happily preparing for the Count’s marriage to Susannah (Betty Makharinsky), the Countess’s maid. However, the love rat Count, bored by the constraining bonds of marriage, indulges his roaming eye, which happens to fall on none other than the pretty bride-to-be.

Cherubino (Abigail Finch), a local prankster, starts to cause problems of his own, while Figaro, Susannah and the wronged Countess conspire to expose the Count’s lecherousness. The mayhem that follows includes cross-dressing,
wardrobe hiding places and Oedipal revelations of parenthood.

In the Heartstrings Opera Company’s daring production, LorenzoDa Ponte’s original Italian libretto is replaced by a modern-day English translation, which
is the work of one of the cast members, Betty Makharinsky. The Countess singing Hannah Montana’s catchphrase ‘say what’ to the accompaniment of Mozart’s magnificent ariosi is unexpected, and yet somehow it works. Courtly Italian dress becomes Hawaiian shirts and silk corsets. And to top it all, instead of a conventional stage, the setting for one of the performances will be the elevated platform in “Camera” – a favourite night-time haunt for many Oxford students.

I was shown a snippet from Act II during which the Countess and Susannah disguise Cherubino as Susannah using a great deal of red lipstick and quite possibly the biggest bra known to man. Geary, playing the Count, gave a particularly strong performance as the bullying, scheming, skirt-chasing baritone. The production promises to be an absolute treat and will certainly inject a bit of (much-needed) culture into the weekly FOMO Friday night at Camera. And perhaps opera will finally make its leap into the mainstream.

Any Classics student having a sordid affair with etymology will have mused upon the fact that, whilst the word “audience” comes from the Latin audientia, meaning the act of listening, most people go to the theatre and talk about the play that they have “seen”. When I went the see Chekhov’s The Seagull at the Oxford Playhouse last year, we staggered out into the cold night air raving not about the dialogue (although it had been a vibrant, feisty, and “fuck”-filled translation), but about the evening’s spectacular visual effects.

A moment which remains with me in the accumulating archive of pretentious-yet transcendental moments of Oxford theatre, occurred when a criss-cross of black bands, which created a goldfish bowl effect across the front of the stage, sprang spectacularly away. We were left gazing at the raw, unrestricted
scene of the play with no barriers dividing Us from Them.

As well as causing most of the audience to anxiously check their medicine cabinets for statins out of fear of a heart attack, this moment reminded us all of the disconcerting fact that up until that moment we had been lulled into a false suspension of our disbelief – forgetting the play’s nature as a fiction.

As with the myth of Father Christmas, past a certain point no one thought the play was real, but we were willing to put that aside for the evening. What we did not want was for some artsy director (in this case, Blanche McIntyre), to come rip down the stockings, eat the mince pies, and remind us that the whole thing was a construction. We were all a bit taken aback by the sudden disappearance of The Fourth Wall. 

The back of the theatre and the two wings are three separate “walls” and the fourth wall is, as Denis Diderot coined, an imaginary gap between audience and actors. On one side is fiction and the other, reality, complete with rustling sweet wrappers, fumbling couples, and the snores of a deliberately unimpressed rival actor.

There are numerous examples of plays which break the fourth wall completely: pantomimes in which troubled characters call on the help of small and enthused fans from the front row do exactly that. Children are apparently the perfect audience for a reassuring break-down of the fourth wall.

A play I saw in Edinburgh aimed at children, The Handmade Tales, was made up of a series of short stories framed by the actors speaking to the audience, ending up encouraging them to go away and make up their own story. This was the fourth wall at its most reassuring and least alienating level.

My experience of The Seagull was all the more unusual because it reminded us of the fourth wall but then refused to do anything about it. No actors spoke to us; they never even spared us a glance. The characters were nearly all actors,
aspiring actors, or authors, so we never really escaped a kind of meta-theatricality. The walls of illusion only tumbled down when the
black threads across the stage snapped.

Oddly, the fourth wall is so frequently broken in literature that it seems to be far less of “thing”. Apparently we’re all cool with narrators addressing us directly; the infamous Jane Eyre line, “reader, I married him”, would be one of many examples of a character staring at us in the eyes.

Some films employ the fourth wall in an equally soothing way. When the husky tones of Hugh Grant explain that he lives in the flat “with the blue door”, his character is temporarily suspending the illusions of fiction by acknowledging
the audience, as he drifts mournfully around Notting Hill pulling celebrities.Of course he actually he is a celebrity so this is Richard Curtis’ ironic little joke, “it’s like his real life from the other side!”

So next time you make eye contact with an actor, you’ll know the name for it. Though sadly, being vaguely aware of the theory behind the theatre won’t make you any less susceptible to the potential heart attacks that these actors delight in imposing.

It is hard to know what to label the performance that will be 12 Angry Women, on Monday 4 February, and it doesn’t seem to be much help asking the director or producer – “an experiment”, “a reading”, “a trail”, “like a first reading”. But one thing is for certain: it not your average play. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. It is not that the play is not fully formed in concept, quite the opposite.

The ‘experiment’ is seemingly the point. The the cast are assuredly excellent and the script is fantastic. The play retains the original and entire script of the classic play 12 Angry Men, but the focus is changed considerably when women inhabit the roles previously acted and written for men. Since this disjunct between the language and situation that the play involves, and the play as it stands with the female performances is the primary focus of the project the actors will be reading from scripts.

As the show’s director, Katie Ebner-Landy, said, “We aim to promote discussion and get people thinking.” However, from the pre and post play entertainment, this hardly seems all of what they wish to achieve. There will be live DJ sets either end of the performance, mixing hip-hop, classic RnB and funk. Moreover, it is to be performed in a truly wonderful venue – the Macmillan Room in the Oxford Union. The period features and all-round grandeur of the room will oddly compliment the ahistorical take on this classic.

I have not seen the play, but I feel oddly assured of its success, only for the fact that it seems to evoke such confidence and joy from its team. Both Ebner-Laney and Roughan seemed comfortable and relaxed with how everything was shaping up, which fills one with confidence for the performance. “It is the most fun I’ve had doing a play”, said Rebecca Roughan, the producer, and quite frankly, I believe her. It seems, as the play is not motivated by money – it being free entry for union members – there has been a focus purely on the play for the play’s sake – which is a pleasant surprise.

All in all, I should think that this would be a very entertaining, not to mention though-provoking evening. As much as someone who has not seen any of the play can advise, I would say that this is a performance which would be thoroughly enjoyable.

Last week, Putin gave a particularly unreassuring interview about the Sochi Olympics The rhetoric deployed was self-consciously sincere and relentlessly slippery. With three weeks to go until the beginning of the games, he played the part of a wise head of state finally levelling with his critics on the eve of battle. Questions about corruption in the run-up to Sochi were met with a moue of concern and a plea for anyone who had information about bribes changing hands to ‘please, give it to us. We will be grateful’.

His draconian views on homosexuality stem, he assures us, from a sincere desire to keep Russia democratic and protect children from paedophilia. This is nothing new: Putin should be expected to defend his policies, but it is shocking to see his ‘reasoning’ in action. Politicians do not all inspire confidence, but Putin’s willingness to justify hate with love and dress up oppression as democracy is remarkable in its flagrancy and disingenuity.  His comments calling gay people paedophiles were qualified with a glorified version of, ‘I’m not racist, some of my friends are black’: he cited Elton John, a gay person who, in Putin’s eyes, has made something of himself and can therefore be respected in spite of his sexuality. ‘When they achieve great results, our people sincerely love them with no regard for sexual orientation’.

Putin’s claims that Russians ‘sincerely love’ Elton John ring false in a country where ‘suspected’ lesbians have been deemed mentally unsound to bring up their children. His thin veneer of ‘sincere’ is nothing more than foundation, just like his assurances that gay visitors to Sochi will have ‘no problems’ over the month or so the games are going on. But his sugar-coating of human rights violation has taken unprecedented forms in recent months. The most transparent and casuist example of this is the sudden and theatrical release of Pussy Riot and the Greenpeace protestors. This is clearly a stunt, but it raises questions of authenticity in politics.

When Nadezhda Tolokonnikova was languishing in a Siberian penal colony on hunger strike, she began to correspond with Slovenian Marxist philosopher  Slavoj Žižek. In his first letter to Nadya, he described radical dissidents as people who are unafraid to ‘hold a tuning-fork and sound A, and everybody knows it really is A, though the time-honoured pitch is G flat.’ This collective double-think works both ways – the people who allowed themselves to be shocked by Pussy Riot’s delivery but refused to engage with the frankness of their message are the same people who are willing to harmonise their discourse with Putin’s phony tuning forks. The notes Putin is playing are certainly time-honoured, but they are not what he says they are. This gradual uncovering and recovering of Vladimir Putin’s real motivations constitutes various permutations of portraying G flat as A. Ironically, even his rhetoric of hatred against gay people helps distract commentators from other sinister developments, such as the expulsion of journalist David Satter (the first US journalist to be expelled from Russia since the USSR) and Ukraine’s slide into Putin-style repression of free speech.

When the Olympics came to London in 2012, the press sat on the fence, unsure how such a display of patriotism would go down in a country of established cynics. Danny Boyle and Team GB pulled it off, though, and the day after the closing ceremony saw newspaper stands brimming with effusive headlines and photo after photo of fireworks. The Olympics have a capacity to delight, charm and unite, but this allure becomes dangerous when engineered by a man as unscrupulous as Vladimir Putin. In Tolokonnikova’s words, ‘the continued trade of raw materials constitutes a tacit approval of the Russian regime.’ We have not boycotted these Games and we continue to trade with Russia; however, it is crucial that the spectacle of the Sochi does not detract from what is really going on in the wings.