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.

I am ten minutes late to my inaugural tap dancing class. The going is tough, but I struggle on. Five inches of rubber platform separate heel from rainy pavement, and my left ankle gives the occasional tetchy twinge when reminded of the agonising, nauseating pain felt when I last fell off said rubber platform. As the old adage goes, footwear appropriate to swaying lamely on a club dancefloor will not necessarily be at home or indeed welcome in a tap dancing class. Boots built to accessorise a statement crop top are not guaranteed to complement ‘riffing’, ‘shuffles’, a cheesy grin or a sparkly cane. Tap is looking increasingly unlikely.

A quick phone call later and I have procured a pair of tap shoes from an unsuspecting fresher. I trip happily across the quad, my ears ringing with the twinklings of metal on stone and a confident, . Memories flood back, of dolefully pounding out ‘Heart and Soul’ in talent shows in the wake of smug nine-year olds in spangled top hats. It is clear now that I am a diamond in the rough, the Eliza Doolittle of the tap dancing world. All I need is a bath and someone to teach my toes to pronounce the letter ‘h’.

I encounter an acquaintance and hastily stifle my chirpy tinkles, manoeuvring my feet onto their sides and crabbing diagonally into the shadows. The sudden change in direction brings the fact that the shoes are in fact three sizes too large crashing home. Each foot is a lone baked bean in a long-forgotten can, rattling from side to side and occasionally attempting to break free. Apprehension courses through me I envisage one shoe shooting across the room after a particularly enthusiastic shuffle step.

But my discomfort is short-lived. Once I enter the tap class, anything goes. Soon we are clicking toe to heel to twist to slide and back two three four like a horde of antsy crickets, inserting arbitrary hand gestures to distract potential spectators from the mal-coordinated mess of our feet.

Led by the effusive Ed Addison and accompanied by a breathless Britney Spears, it soon becomes clear that Ed is right – tap is a lot less rubbish when someone other than Bruce Forsyth is doing it. I joyously discover that I can do the steps, but I seem to be inhibited by some sort of muscle amnesia. Every new step is all-encompassing: it takes every ounce of concentration to grasp its complexity, thereby effacing the previous step. I am a goldfish in tap shoes. It’s okay though; I can maintain the façade, blindly following every step half a beat behind. Then the death knell: ‘Ok guys, so I’m going to stand still for the moment, and I’ll watch you do what we’ve just learnt’. Face red, eyes down, I throw the half-remembered scraps of routine to the wind, resorting to a crude marrying of Irish jig and Macarena.

I know I’m terrible, but I almost manage to fool myself. I feel like I’m actually tap dancing just because my feet are making the right noises. My toes tap tap tap away, my heels blithely go left instead of right, forward instead of back. But that is the beauty of (extremely) amateur tap: even if you do absolutely everything wrong, the noise of fifteen people clicking their feet against a hardwood floor in perfect time is incredibly satisfying. Even as I type I maintain a jaunty rhythm of finger to keyboard- if you’ve ever stopped writing in a lecture and sat back to imagine just how delicious it would be if the skittish, fitful tapping of keys streamlined into a rhythmic and vigorous 3/4, then tap can help you realise all you rhythmic fantasies.

It is a thing both odd and discomfiting in theatre, to enter a performance space with so much and little expectation as I did last Friday to see the John Cage circus on Finnegan’s wake. I felt the same slightly taut apprehension as one might experience going to watch a new production of a venerated and canonical work, Shakespeare, perhaps Olivier, in which the tension snaps back and forth between a static sense of the performance as a relic, something owned, a national treasure – and a self-updating sense of process, in which the perception of audience ownership is recalibrated into a current dialogue, in real-time. My worry was, explicitly, that with such exalted and unassailable bastions of creativity as Joyce and Cage, the process of dialogue and inclusion had the potential to go subtly awry.

Since we live now in an age of such entitled audience autonomy, the first hurdle for any director lies in how to tackle the proliferation and discourse of thought around their work. How can you hope to create a sense of present tense if your audience suspect you are trying to outwit them, and are resultantly trying to stay two steps ahead of you? I went to the later of the two performances that evening, so as I arrived I bore witness to the comments of those who had just departed. Sure enough, the Cage cognoscenti were already composing skits at the expense of members of the audience who had ‘missed the point’, while those who had turned up not knowing what to expect busied themselves trading increasingly protracted and less nuanced variations of ‘it wasn’t what I was expecting’.

Standing in the foyer, my sense of resignation and misanthropy, which typically hovers around ‘what’s the point?’ was ticking dangerously towards ‘homicidal’, when a rather charming lady who I have since assumed to be Lore Lixenberg, who directed the piece, came out. She politely asked for our attention, and explained how our allocated seats worked. Consecutive numbers were not necessarily placed next to each other, and once we had found them, there was a chance that a mesostic (a poem in which a vertical phrase intersects lines of horizontal text in the middle of the lines) might be on our chair. If we had a mesostic, we were told, there would be an opportunity to read it aloud during the performance, if we so chose. I entered the performance space thinking of the mesostic form, and why it meant so much to Cage. In a way it represents the perfect intersection of indeterminacy and precision. The mesostic form relies heavily on the chance encounters of proximate words, yet the construction itself is uncompromising. Similarly, there was an element of absolute ordainment and precision in the knowledge that whoever sat on a certain chair would receive a mesostic, but no guarantee that the occupant would choose to read it, or even that the chair would be occupied.

Each of the four walls was lined with chairs, and I took mine, which was on what would typically be the stage, with some trepidation. For the first twenty minutes or so, we were at perfect liberty to wander the space, and if not interact with the performers, then at least co-exist with them. I did not. I sat still and quiet and alert. We watched things and let them lap at the shores of our consciousness, for by that point, barely five minutes in; we were a ‘we’. As an audience we surrendered our autonomy with ease, collectively, like a family – though it did not feel at all like a capitulation. It was subtle and incremental, and the sleepers on the floor – swathed as they were with a long sheet – created a sweet soporific thrum with movements that were at once random and wholly calculated. Minutes, I don’t know how many, passed. We were aware obviously of a general trend which took the shape of increasingly cacophonous momentum, yet still, each coming and going of a performer felt in some way like an isolated episode. I found that intimate, and at times, exquisite. I was put in mind of an essay Virginia Woolf wrote for Good Housekeeping, entitled The Docks of London, in which she catalogues the bizarre phenomenon she observed when watching the cranes at the docks. Initially, she reports, their motion was startling, spasmodic, and unpredictable, though time and patience gave way to something more harmonious and she grew attuned to their rhythm – for rhythm there was. In watching and waiting, she noticed that the cranes achieved an organic cohesion and prosody. The performance ended, but lingered. The silence which followed the climax remained rich and unbroken for many minutes. It wasn’t what I was expecting.

Cage: Circus on Finnegan’s wake will next be performed  on 20 February as part of the one-day conference ‘Twentieth Century Collaborations: Cunningham, Cage, Joyce’ hosted by St Hilda’s. Tickets can be found here: http://bit.ly/1em1ufK

When I graduated in July I was awarded a grant to travel to Alberta, Canada, to make a solo documentary about the oil/tar sands. Although the tar sands are rarely mentioned in the UK, they are in fact the largest construction project and single site of capital investment on earth, and over the past decade they have become the lynchpin of Canadian politics, more important than Justin Bieber, hockey riots, Quebec separatism and even Rob Ford.

The tar sands are colossal fields of bitumen, mixed in with sand, peat and ice, over an area the size of England itself. They’re the third largest deposits of oil in the world, behind those of Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. They take about four times as much energy to mine as conventional crude, as well as much more water, and no-one has worked out how to dispose of the toxic waste. They also leave heavy metals in the river, which is being linked to a spike in rare cancer rates in native communities downstream. But the energy industry has now decided to refer to them as ‘oil sands’, because it sounds cleaner, and in fact the way one chooses to refer to them has become a sort of preemptive signifier of your allegiance.

While I was there I travelled about 1200 miles by Greyhound bus in -30ËšC, interviewing the Irish doctor who first discovered the rare cancers, a native fur trapper in his shack in the middle of the freezing prairies, a disgruntled politician, and a First Nation (native) community trying to sue Shell Oil. Despite my best efforts, the oil companies themselves declined to talk to me. I’m not quite Louis Theroux, but the experience has been enlightening.