★★☆☆☆
Two Stars

In Edvard Munch’s The Sick Child, a young girl lies on her deathbed, bright red hair jarring with her greyish pallor.  It is a portrait of a memory – of Munch’s sister, who died when she was fifteen and he was thirteen.  Munch became obsessed with this image, producing six versions of the very same scene.  It is almost as if he recognised the hold the past had over the living, transforming his sister into his own personal ghost, a dead figure who haunted him even in the act of creation.

It is not surprising then that Ibsen’s Ghosts held such resonance for him.  It is a dead character whose presence is felt most keenly in the play, and whose past taints those left behind.  Munch designed the set for a 1906 Berlin production, but the drawings appear as personal pictorial responses to the play rather than design.  The Alvings’ living-room is intimate, bordering on claustrophobic.  A hard black armchair, owned by Munch’s violent father, dominates the foreground, but stands suggestively half turned away from us.  Echoes appear in the compression of stiff black figures, bent inwards by the walls and ceiling pressing down on them.

Translated onto stage, this becomes a very different picture.  In his Munch-inspired production, Stephen Unwin’s set is backed by a wide screen projecting endless rain, transforming the natural elements into a force that invades the Alvings’ home.  But this extension into the outside world heightens the stage’s natural breadth, and all claustrophobia is lost.  The domineering black chair is shoved into the background, registering only the vaguest hint of menace.  More predictably, the gaze of the dead Captain Alving burdens the characters on set, as he surveys them impassively from his portrait.  The threat of despair is still present – but less radically and subtly so than in Munch’s vision.     

Overall the production fails to provide any new insight into the play, and is stuck in fussy convention.  The play’s turning point, as Mrs Alving’s orphanage is burnt down, catalyses no genuine shock or despair, but rather a flurry of sartorial activity.  Hats are demanded for, women cocooned in elaborate shawls, and only after this prolonged hassle does anyone venture outside towards the disaster. 

Characters also end up as dated caricature. Patrick Drury plays Pastor Manders with exaggerated tightness, motionless from the neck down and jumping away at the merest approach of a female.  Manders is a complicated figure to bring across in the 21st century – the moral norm of Ibsen’s time, his beliefs are now comically priggish, dogmatic and self-serving.  Drury adds nothing to this unsympathetic exterior.  Ultimately we can only laugh disbelievingly at him, never considering him to be as trapped in lies and self-deceit as those he condemns. 

Florence Hall as Regina and Pip Donaghy as Jacob are similarly affected, a strange conglomeration of Scottish and Northern accents playing havoc every time they speak.  What kind of geographical or political point this is meant to establish remains extremely unclear. Hall’s entire emotional credibility is hampered, as the falsity of her voice overshadows the brittle fracturing of Regina’s bright exterior.

Mrs Alving should be the riveting centre of the play, a character entombed in the false life she has so assiduously created and fed to the public.  Ibsen identified her as an older Nora from A Doll’s House, but one who never escaped, who never shut the door on husband and children.  However Kelly Hunter overacts the tragedy of her character to absurd effect, filling each moment with extravagant gestures, preceding each word with a farcically long dramatic pause. As the play builds up towards its climax, Hunter’s technique to convey tension is simply to elongate these pauses.  By the end she manages to reach a chant-like state, intoning her words with agonisingly exaggerated import.  Coupled with the strange use of music – banally sentimental melody between scenes, one violently deafening chord at the end – any hint of subtlety at the characters’ fates is completely undermined.

All of which is a shame, as the one truly gripping presence throughout is Mark Quartley’s Oswald. From the moment he appears on stage, dragging himself around in a mixture of affected worldliness and real undisguisable physical and mental torture, Quartley embodies Oswald from within his feverish core. His split between vulnerability and repulsiveness inspires us to recoil from him, while at the same time overwhelming us with a shared sense of futile despair.  Where he is silent, his contorted frame, wracked with inborn illness and shame, speaks volumes.  This is a character who could have walked straight out of Munch’s pictures, and whose muted screams reach out of this dated production, right into the heart of modernity.          

Ghosts was performed by the English Touring Theatre – see their website for more information about upcoming productions

The Ghosts at Barucone Manor is a society tale plagued by the undead. Eli Keren, writer of Hilary’s The Aleph, has moved from sci-fi to (parodied) horror. The ghosts are there on stage, spoken to by cast members with wide-eyed conviction, but invisible to the audience.

The play will slot into the Burton Taylor Studio’s 3rd week late shift after The Death of Maria and before the inevitable throngs of girls in cat ears take to Oxford’s clubs. The two plays will form a coherent Halloween duo – both are pieces of original writing which incorporate death and the supernatural.

The Ghosts of Barucone Manor hovers between mystery and comedy, employing all the haunted house tropes without trying to actually scare its audience. Newcomer Ruben (Harry Lee) arrives at his aunt’s mansion intending to stay the night: he finds two adolescent twins, Lissa (Emma Turnbull) and Flick (Izzy Renton), whose quickfire squabbling and dogged pursuit of their hand- some visitor add pace and comedy throughout. The household is clearly bored, and Ruben is delightfully unsuspecting of the humans’ infight- ing and the ghosts’ presence.

The housekeeper Baxby (Alex Wood) is the frustrated victim of the twins’ mischief, while the butler (Will Law) is a capable and watchable presence on stagee. Law adds gravity to proceed- ings with his plummy tones and mature man- ner. I only saw half of the hour-long run-time, but I’m told the relatively light-hearted opening will give way to a darker second half, boasting more ghosts and at least one murder.

Acting is sharp and dialogue flows nicely, especially between the twins; however, facial ex- pression is sometimes lacking and I found one exchange between Ruben and Lissa slightly jarring. Nevertheless, Turnbull’s Lissa is pleasantly unhinged, infusing scenes with Luna Lovegood whimsy.

The idea of acting to and playing off invisible ghosts is a difficult one to pull off on stage. Kate Bennett as Lady Barucone has to conduct an en- tire conversation with her fully sane nephew on one side and invisible dead husband on the other. The effect is funny but sometimes laboured, and the effect is slightly over-hammed.

However, in a week’s time, the cast will have communing with the dead down to a fine art. Go along and support Oxford’s new writing scene.

The Ghosts of Barucone Manor is playing from 29th Oct to 2nd Nov at the BT, tickets £5

Maria Hollins, played by Evie Ioannidi, is a woman living in Germany, who in 1593 is arrested and accused of child cannibalism; digging up and eating a buried baby. For this she is tortured in prison between fifty and sixty times before she is released. The character is based on a real story of a woman incarcerated and tortured under allegations of malevolent sorcery, and the play was in- spired by writer and history student Camilla Rees’s module in witchcraft.

Of course, witchcraft is generally taken as a joke, but with Halloween coming up Camilla wanted to draw attention to the thousands of real people unfairly imprisoned or executed on the spurious grounds of ‘maleficium’.

The first scene I saw was the second scene of the play: Maria is imprisoned and her husband Thomas is alone, unguarded against the advances of his old flame, Ursula. The direction is quite striking – the stage split, Maria can be seen curled up in her cell stage left, while Thomas and Ursula are stage right.

Jordan Reed as Thomas plays an angry, con- fused man clearly distraught at the allegations levelled against his wife. His rough voice often fractures on stage; this aggressive upset con- trasts very well with Ursula’s needling whine. A woman unhinged, her vulnerability and desperation is almost as distressing as Maria’s on the other half of the stage. Tentatively strok- ing Thomas’s arm, she asks, “Why not me?” and pitifully attempts to flatter him, “You were so clever… you knew much more than me…” His coarse shout of “You’re deluded!” implicitly asks, who’s the mad one in the situation?

The second scene is not emotionally fraught but equally hard to watch. Maria is being interrogated by a man, played by Andrew Dickinson, who seems to conflate sex and violence. His physicality could be more threatening but he does manage to be both creepy and brutish. Bringing out several instruments for inflict- ing pain, he justifies himself with a misplaced sense of duty: “We need to be careful…”

There are some harrowing moments and though currently they’re not as convincing as they could be, by 3rd week the acting should be tight enough to do the intensity in the script justice.

The Death of Maria will be on at the Burton Taylor studio at 7.30pm from the 29th to 2nd of November. Tickets are £5/6.

Drawing calmed you. Your poker infernal pen
Was like a branding iron. Objects
Suffered into their new presence, tortured
Into final position. As you drew
I felt released, calm.

—from “Drawing” by Ted Hughes

Regardless of your opinion of Sylvia Plath, there is no denying she made a considerable mark in her short life. From the moment she arrived in Cambridge as a Fulbright scholar from Boston, she accrued almost mythical status – and a cult-like following as a poet, novelist, wife, bright mind and victim of her own genius. This new book by Faber and Faber is set to introduce fans and scholars alike to a further facet of Plath’s life as their first ever collection of her drawings is published this
month; exploring her credentials as an artist.

The sketches in their publication, Sylvia Plath: Drawings, were made in the period immediately following Plath’s 1956 marriage until her suicide in 1963. Following her death, the drawings lay in Hughes’ care and were passed down to their two children, Frieda and Nicholas, when they came of age. Following Nicholas’ suicide in 2009, Frieda became the sole owner of the drawings and is the editor of this edition.

The book itself is a beautiful and well-compiled introduction to this little known side of Plath. As well as an introduction by her daughter Frieda, it contains a wide selection of works from different periods of her life, separated into the places and countries in which they were drawn. Interspersed throughout are letters and diary entries from Plath discussing her artwork.

The drawings record scattered details of her short life – a cow, a shop front, an umbrella stand, a portrait of her husband Ted Hughes, a bottle of wine, the Parisian skyline – all relayed with a fl urry of pen scratches.

The works are odd, cold studies; ebony ink on now yellowed paper. They contain an impassioned vision relayed with a strong hand whose tension is apparent through its strikes upon the paper. Objects and scenes appear not just depicted but bound to the paper by the ties of Plath’s tensely wrought lines.

There is also something achingly sad about the reasons for their public appearance this year. Frieda Hughes, the last surviving member of the Hughes and Plath lines, sold them at auction two years ago – effectively bequeathing them to Plath’s fans. “I didn’t have children. If I had, to be honest, I probably would have hung onto them and left them for the children”.

These drawings will not bring one closer to an understanding of Plath’s poetry. Nor are they of sufficient talent to establish a reputation for her as an artist. But if you are simply one of those fascinated with Plath the person, myth and cultural icon (of which there are many on both sides of the Atlantic), the drawings will be an endless source of fascination for the fresh glimpses of her life that it contains.

Syvlia Plath: Drawings is edited by Frieda Hughes and published by Faber and Faber. It is available here. 

Far from the soothing bubble-bath of deep house which currently has the UK in thrall, juke house is abrasive, stuttering and full of reverberating space. This is dance music at its most Spartan level- sparsely syncopated drums, eerily pitch-shifted vocal samples and crackling distortion. Juke is house music at its most kinetic and impossibly percussive- there is space in the music, but no room to breathe.

In fact, it is difficult to separate the music from the footwork dance style which accompanies it everywhere in Chicago. Check out this compilation from Ghetto Teknitianz, giants in the Chi scene.  The bassline is as choppy as the jerky footwork of the dancers, and the tense atmosphere of the dance battles reverberates in the constant reloading of the vocal samples.

Dance music is repetition, but the repetition in juke is all slightly out of kilter. The samples come back in a fraction of a second too soon, and the drums jerk back every couple of seconds without completing full loops. The listener is constantly wrong-footed, forever trying to keep up with the tense reverberations of the 808s. This is what unheimlich sounds likeat 160bpm.

Juke has been gestating in the projects of the Windy City for over 15 years: it is only since the release of the seminal Bangs & Works compilations on Planet Mu and recent big-name drops on Hyperdub that the rest of the West has caught on. These tracks scratch the surface.

RP Boo- 11 – 47 – 99  

If any one man invented footwork, it was RP Boo. This cut is also known as The Gozilla Track, Heavy Heat and Another RP Track, but the numerical title is the original. The Godzilla Track is perhaps the most appropriate moniker- the production here is monstrous, slamming the mad horn line back across the mix rather than simply reloading it, as RP pushes his battered drum machine to the absolute limit. 11-47-99 is a call to arms and a call to the dancefloor.

DJ Solo- What Have You Done?

The sample here is stretched to breaking point in every direction. Already mournful, Solo drags it from melancholy to demonic. It is constantly on the point of collapsing into a drone and at time cuts out altogether as a solitary snare crashes in the silence. The sample and the drum line are so far apart they scarcely seem connected, only occasionally coming into contact as they roam through the track. Archetypal minimal juke. 

DJ Roc- One Blood

In Douglas Adams’ Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, he suggests that counting within earshot of a sentient robot is the equivalent of sidling up to someone and murmuring “Blood. Blood. Blood.” It seems unlikely this is DJ Roc’s point of reference. However, the harrowing sample from Junior Reed’s conscious reggae track of the same name is just as unnerving as Adams imagines. Far below, the drum machine bursts like gunfire. One Blood is about as heavy as juke gets.

Boylan- High Lite (Sinjin Hawke Remix)

Not pure Chicago house, but an indication of where the juke style might head next as it continues to intersect with European trend. The staccato drums are still there, but intersecting with a more melodic house template absent from the Chi scene. Vocal samples are not jerked across the track, but abruptly fade into the mix. Other producers whose music is some way along the evolutionary path from RP Boo’s footwork originals include Om Unit, Ital Tek, Addison Groove and Machinedrum.

DJ Rashad- Ghost

The most structurally complex track listed here, Ghost even boasts fragmentary bursts of piano  amidst the stuttering samples. At times, it even achieves a fragile beauty, as the fragile female voice seems to escape the endless recursions of the 808. By the end of the track, though, the piano and the glimmering female sample are survived by the juddering male voice endlessly repeating “Ghost. Ghost. Ghost.” It is as if putting a name to the beautiful spectres which hover around the bassline means they cease to exist.

Also worth checking out are:
Young Smoke- Let Go, Jlin- Erotic Heat, DJ Clent- DJ Clent #1, DJ CLent- Third Wurle, Ital Tek- Gonga, Addison Groove- Footcrab, Adam F- Circles (Phillip K Dick edit).