“You can’t really fuck around with Beckett”. This is the rueful admission of Will Felton, director of Endgame. The notoriously recalcitrant playwright took an extremely dim view of people taking even the tiniest liberties with his meticulously-scripted texts. He even took legal action against a 1984 production of the play for having the audacity to move the action to a disused subway station. The limitations placed on any production of Endgame are particularly intense- characters are lame, blind and confined to bins. 

The risk is thus a play of impenetrable, interminable repetition. The cast told me that they had taken pains to find the human characters within the recursive dialogue, resisting the temptation to act in an artificial, stagey manner. Their desire, I am told, is to find the “viscerally human” story within the text. They do admirably well. 

As Hamm, Luke Howarth takes centre stage like a mad frog emperor, eyes shrouded in blackened goggles and mouth flapping manically away. His gravelly tones bestow him with the necessary authority to order around his grovelling lackey Clov, played with an air of building and sullen resentment by Jamie Biondi. Though Beckett’s script centres around stasis, there is a sense of building tension between the two. Biondi perhaps handles this relationship better, keeping his emotions barely in check as he half-stomps, half-limps around the stage. Howarth’s unerring disdain for Clov lacks this nuance. As a spectacle, though, his performance is magnetic, a toadlike king ruling over his gammy-legged toady with supreme disdain. 

Interestingly, the actors told me that this dynamic only evolved when they put down their scripts after the read-through and began to physically rehearse the play. Vocally, Hamm rules the roost- physically, Clov is God. This staging is not without its problems (cheers, Beckett). As the only character with the (limited) use of his legs, Biondi is forced for the sake of the narrative to be constantly on the move, ferrying props around as he orbits the squat and complacent Howarth. To make all this action and rearrangement of the set appear unforced is a challenge Biondi is yet to fully rise to. However, he gets bonus points for an excellent slapstick routine involving an errant flea in his pubes- a dilemma to which we can all relate.

The legless, half-deaf and near-blind duo of Nell (Dina Tsesarsky) and Nagg (Thomas Toles) bicker like Statler and Waldorf recuperating from a serious heroin overdose. Immense praise is due to the American Toles, not only for defying the transatlantic divide by mimicking Tsesarsky’s voice precisely, but also for his commendable attempt at an Irish brogue. This feat aside, he is the standout performer, rubber-faced and gently crazed. Nagg is Hamm’s father, and Toles’ performance is a wistfully faded and marginally more insane version of Howarth’s.

Tsesarsky, like Biondi, has the difficult task of taking the more understated role in her partnership and ensuring it is not drowned out by her husband’s mad orations. At the moment, the dominant personalities in the play are swamping the more submissive. Tsesarksy’s performance is something of a pale imitation of Toles’. Though this is in part a product of her character’s less effusive nature, she faces the challenge of establishing a distinct persona for herself within the confines of an oil-drum and a relatively passive presence within the script.

In the two scenes I see, the two pairs of characters do not really interact. Come 8^th week at the Burton Taylor, it will be interesting to see how they come together to draw out the unerring sense of impending doom from Beckett’s richly ambiguous script. Endgame will almost certainly be excellent. 

Endgame will be performed at 7:30pm at the BT Studio from Tuesday 3rd to Saturday 7th December. Tickets are available here

Tuesday’s opening night of the Edgar Wind Society’s first ever exhibition ‘The Material’, at Freud, was intensely cool. The president of the society, Tori McKenna, selected five artists from the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art to exhibit, including Sonia Bernaciak, Mateo Revillo Imbernon (and his friend Juluan Mignot from Paris), Irina Iordache, Louisa Siem and Lili Pickett-Palmer, who were all present and ready to offer an insight into their inspired works.

Do you know the secret to making the best paper airplane in the world, how to grow a crystal, or how to find north in the dark?

Most of the time, writers don’t talk like they write. It’s no bad thing: watch Midnight in Paris, and you’ll realise how much of a prat Hemingway might have sounded.

But Conn Iggulden does – and if you’ve ever had the pleasure of flicking through The Dangerous Book for Boys, you’ll be glad to hear it. There’s a lot of common sense, a hearty dollop of nostalgia, a wonderfully romantic idea of what the world really ought to be like – and an infectious joie de vivre.

His practicality and his idealism have been playing off one another since he first started writing books at the ripe old age of thirteen. For all his mother’s sensible advice (“you need to know about people”), the young novelist proved stubborn: “Rubbish, I’ll write about dragons”.

Unsurprisingly, the first few attempts never came to much. “I tried a few dragons”, Iggulden recalls, chuckling particularly at the memory of a Catholic conspiracy thriller: “I was way in advance of The Da Vinci Code, by the way.”

His fervent conception of how things should work – and from the sounds of things, his general enthusiasm – were sorely tried by his university degree, in English Literature at what is now Queen Mary’s. Talking to friends elsewhere – “a Cambridge history degree is a hardcore history degree” – he was certain that he was losing out somewhat, but his experience seems fairly typical. “My English degree was very much the old-fashioned idea: you stick young interested people in a room with books and hope something rubs off. There was very little actual teaching.” 

Friday night saw a lot of quasi-lefty-arty types gather together for the grand opening of Aidan Meller’s second Oxford enterprise: a new gallery on Broad Street which specialises in in Pre-Raphaelite art. The place with packed with potential buyers ready to soak up the atmosphere and the free champagne.

The gallery displays and sells sketches, prints, and objects created by the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood and their surrounding circle. These were a group of painters, poets and critics in the mid-19^th century whose aim was to create art in a way that was true to nature; more true than the art produced by the establishment, the Royal Academy.

Now, Pre-Raphaelite art is associated with the high-conservatism of the Victorian age but when the movement started it was considered to be radical and even subversive. Fighting against the artificial strictures it believed academicians had imposed upon art from the top down, it strongly identified with the socialist movement. Leading figures like John Ruskin and William Morris were prominent social theorists who believed in the social function of art. They thought that, at its core, art is a great educator. The teaching of art, Ruskin said, is “the teaching of all things” and thus it should be available to everyone, no matter their class, wealth or education.

Hence it is appropriate that Meller’s gallery is in Oxford, the great city of education. This is even more so because, as Meller explained in his welcoming speech, Oxford has strong ties with the Pre-Raphaelites. Two of its key members William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones met as students at Exeter College and Dante Gabriel-Rossetti got married in St Michael at the Northgate Church. Many of the colleges house works of pre-Raphaelite art. These include the stained glass windows in Christ Church and Harris Manchester and perhaps most famously Holman-Hunt’s The Light of the World in Keble College Chapel. The Ashmolean also has an internationally recognised collection and the Union is home to the celebrated Rossetti murals. In some ways, it is fantastic that there is another platform in Oxford for us, as students, to learn about the cultural history of the city. It is helping the art to live out its didactic function.

I am troubled, however, as to whether the gallery can really be said to be championing art in the way the movement intended. We must interrogate whether a space which commercialises and commoditizes art as object-for-consumption is loyal to a movement that was deeply socialist and, at its heart, egalitarian. The Pre-Raphaelite artists helped to set up the first state museum, the Victoria and Albert (you can still eat in the William Morris designed dining room today). But a gallery whose existence is founded upon the sale of art undermines that socialist agenda.

I speak to Meller about this, and he tells me that the gallery makes at least one sale every day it is open. The cost of the art works range from £300 – £250,000 and the average price of the pieces on sale at the opening was £11,000. He details at some length the success the art world is having at the moment; but by this he meant financial success, mentioning the Giacometti which recently sold for $50 million and Munch’s The Scream which went for $120 million. Of course, we could now add the latest record breakers, the $142 million Francis Bacon triptych and the $105 million Andy Warhol to that list.

Meller explains that the reason for this boom lay in the decreased size of the market. As works are sold, originals become a rarer commodity which in turn pushes the prices up. Meller is clearly thrilled by this. He asserts that the purpose of his gallery was to help us get into that market and have a part in the success. We, too, could “take things home with us”.

Yet as a student for whom £11, 000 is more than a year’s tuition and a term’s maintenance loan put together, I could not help but be sceptical about this. There is no way I will be taking home any of this art in the next year, probably even in the next 10 years given the current state of the graduate job market. I’m more concerned about actually being able to afford a home. Nor am I really persuaded that owning art was desirable. Meller’s message was incoherent and decidedly hypocritical. At first, he seemed to be championing the educative and socialist function of art and its role the public sphere, but swiftly turned to how we could secrete this art away into our own homes and remove it from public view.

Therefore the only thing I can exhort you to do is to get down to the gallery as quickly as possible. Let this art live out its original purpose by learning from it before it is sold.  

Handel’s Hercules, acclaimed as one of the masterpieces of its age, comes to Oxford later this month. The faintly absurd plot is put in modern dress, with vocals provided by a talented young cast of some of Oxford’s finest.

David le Provost excels in the title role, bringing dramatic immediacy supported by a fine voice to the tragic hero, with a firm command of both the stage and Handel’s fiendish score. Likewise Johanna Harrison as Dejanira, Hercules’ accidentally-murderous wife, owns the compulsory mad scene, alternately seeing Furies and despairing all over the floor. Edward Edgcumbe’s Lichas does remarkably well to maintain dramatic interest with sparse staging and lengthy arias to contend with.

Warming into her musical role throughout the preview was Tara Mansfield’s Iole, culminating in one of Handel’s exquisitely gentle show-stoppers as the captured princess comforts the weeping Dejanira. Singing quite high and very loud is Andrew Hayman as Hyllus, Hercules’ tenor son; a difficult role to make something of, being awkwardly balanced between the tenor-love-interest-type and the Baroque-bit-part-type.

Here is a cast that will undoubtedly give very fine performances, provided they can escape the slight sense that arms are a relic from Handel’s time which nobody’s quite sure what to do with. James Potter conducts, and demonstrates strong musical conviction for what Handel’s score is capable of; letting the drama through but never losing sight of beauty.

The confused identity of Handel’s opera/oratorio/thing presents a challenge for any director, one which Isaac Louth has surmounted, allowing the drama and Handel’s glorious music precedence at all times – if you’d like another side of Hercules to the Disney hero with floppy locks, you could do worse than this.

Oxford Opera’s Handel will play from 21st to 23rd November at the Church of St John the Evangelist, Iffley Road, OX4 1EH Oxford.

Melvyn Bragg eats academics for breakfast. He’s formed a career out of
scholarly sparring with the best minds of his generation, touching knuckles with Norman Mailer, getting Gore Vidal on the ropes, flooring Francis Bacon (whilst both steaming drunk). He’s an intellectual heavyweight champion and I am worried that I’ll get the full In Our Time treatment. I spend the interview apprehensively awaiting a trademark, “Let me just pick you up on your last point…”

He proves, however, to be scrupulously charming, chatting to me about his own experiences on Cherwell during his Oxford days – “I managed to spend a long time as their film reviewer without ever once meeting the editor. I think his name was Peter. Not sure.” – and comparing Cowley living-out experiences. Listening to an inordinate amount of Radio 4 for someone thirty years younger than its target generation, his buttery northern accent is disconcertingly familiar.

He is the man Adrian Mole dreamt of becoming – not only a leading arts broadcaster, but the person who, for years, defined what ‘the arts’ encompassed. Over the course of the South Bank show’s 800 episodes, Bragg was intrinsic to re-moulding boundaries of what passed as culturally important, the pop and the pulp alongside the classical and establishment.

It was a conscious manifesto to “treat McCartney with as much importance as Mailer”, and in in 1978 the South Bank show’s agenda proved a controversial one. “We got hammered by the press. Absolutely hammered. The Telegraph was saying ‘Melvyn Bragg has started a new arts program but he doesn’t seem to know what the arts are about’.”

It’s now commonplace to find graphic novels in the Guardian Review and hear Lady Gaga on Front Row. Macca played the London Olympics opening ceremony, alongside both the London Symphony Orchestra and Mike Oldfield. We, as a nation, have learnt to take the contemporary seriously. But back in the seventies, Bragg conjectures, the change came as a relief to the British population. “People thought, I like listening to Eric Clapton as well as Michael Tippet – why should one have a free pass as ‘Art’?”.

After a brief hiatus and a move from ITV to Sky Arts, the South Bank show is still running, as is its engaging seriousness and unapologetic intellectualism.

They are, furthermore, qualities Bragg brought with him to his other most celebrated brainchild, the unashamedly academic In Our Time, which each week features Bragg in conversation with three university professors on a topic cultural, historical, philosophical or scientific.

He explains how, at first, the program was relegated to ‘The Death Slot’ – the Thursday morning show with the lowest weekday audience. But within six months it was getting twice the South Bank show’s audience.

“It worked because at the centre of all discussion programs is a game. Whether it’s Reunion or it’s Eddie Mair or it’s Today – it’s a game, and
you’ve got to know how to play. And, because they’re really clever people, these academics worked out what to do. They had to deliver very fast, to do their top job against equals whom they slightly disagree with but always respect. They couldn’t just reel out the first seven paragraphs of something they wrote in 1957.”

It is clear Bragg enjoys making these programs. He talks of “rubbing the magic lamp” when deciding who to interview for the next series of the South Bank show on Sky Arts, since very few artists, musicians or writers are churlish enough to reject the seal of cultural approval an interview with Bragg entails. In Our Time brings with it “the pleasure of talking to three clever people on a Thursday morning. I love it.”

But it is in talking about his fiction, however, that he becomes most animated. Since 1965 he has published twenty-two novels, two of which have been longlisted for the Booker and one of which won the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award in 1993, which I refrain from asking about.

His latest work, Grace and Mary, was released earlier this summer. Like many of Bragg’s books, it returns to the Cumbrian landscape of his youth, telling a semi-autobiographical story of his mother and grandmother. The writing of it was sparked by a sudden, five-o-clock in the morning apparition. He found himself inexplicably faced with the image of a woman in old-fashioned, Victorian dress wandering the lanes near his cottage in Cumbria. This woman was his grandmother, who had given birth to his mother illegitimately and whom he’d seen only twice “in little smudges of meeting”.

Bragg is careful not to present this vision as anything especially otherworldly, and looks me matter-of-factly in the eye whilst describing
it. It was, he says, a product of “the incredibly capacity of the mind to retain this stuff, this 95% we’re supposed not to use, where lines are crossed, memories invent themselves and misremembering occurs more than remembering.”

I ask where this line between reality, memory and imagination is drawn in writing autobiographical fiction, and Bragg’s response is satisfyingly Radio 4, citing an obscure fragment of scientific history as an appropriate analogy. “On one of the first islands Darwin visited in the Galapagos, he collected a type of finch. Well, the biologist Steve Jones thinks it was a parakeet, and there is an argument there, but let’s stick with finch. And on the next island, hundreds of miles away, he found another one that was a little bit diff erent. The same on the next island, and the next, until he reached the seventh or eighth island where he found a finch directly related to the first finch, but so diff erent they couldn’t even mate. It’s the same with autobiographical fiction. By the time you’ve reimagined it and written it and cut it – it’s a completely different finch.”

It is a perfect demonstration of Bragg’s unparalleled ability to make intellectual connections – between art, science and history on In
Our Time; between high and low culture on the South Bank show; between the fallible humans he interviews and the genius they show in their work; between finch sex and autobiography. He cites D H Lawrence and Thomas Hardy as favourite authors, and their influence on his writing is clear. The novels of each repeatedly revisit working-class roots and imbue their stories with a sense of what Bragg refers to as “carpentry”.

His link with them derives in “coming from a background which didn’t have opportunities, and then realising that [with writing] we’re all on equal territory. That when you’re writing it doesn’t matter where you’re born, if
you have that cast of mind – you can take them all on.”

In 1998, Bragg was appointed to the House of Lords as a Labour peer, and is about to release two BBC4 documentaries on the political radicals Thomas Paine and John Ball. “It’s the process you see. How difficult it is to get legislation through, and how to respect those difficulties. It’s cumbersome, but probably as good a way of doing it as any.”

I try to probe him on the matter of the Unions – is Miliband right to reform the donation system? He answers cagily. “I feel the Unions are to be respected. They’re good people and we must be careful. I think we’ve
got to remember that that’s where we came from.”

He tells me about the twin pulls of London and Cumbria – his life at his home in London, and in his cottage in Cumbria. “There’s a tension
there, but I’d rather have it than not have it… When you look at the biographies of writers’ they encompass so many contradictions, since there is no ‘one way’ to write. I know several writers who left to write full time and their writing’s got worse. Or they’ve got drunk. Or they’ve become conference groupies, which is worse.”

Maybe the two are linked, I suggest. You can only survive as a conference groupie by embracing alcohol. Bragg laughs and agrees with me. It’s evident he has no plans towards either.