When she was a child, the idea of play was an abstract concept for Cornelia Parker. ‘I grew up working on a small-hold, planting vegetables, and doing a lot of manual labour.  I was made to feel guilty by my father for playing, so I had to work the land.’ One of three girls growing up on a farm in rural Cheshire, Parker’s childhood was spent ‘digging holes, pruning, laying hedges. A choreography of repetitive tasks which became a vocabulary I have in my head.’ 

It’s hardly surprising then, that Parker discovered she was tactile. ‘Sculpture was second nature to me’, she tells me over drinks in her local pub in North London. ‘I’d been using my hands throughout my childhood. For me it was a bit like extended play.’ Now one of the most prominent sculptors and installation artists of the twenty-first century, Parker’s art has been characterised by the way she alters her materials to such an extent that they lose all of their original essence. She explodes buildings, flattens silver-ware and slices through found objects, only to resurrect them once again in a re-conceptualized form. For one of her most renowned pieces, Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991), Parker enlisted the help of the British Army to blow a garden shed to smithereens, an explosion which she then recreated in the Tate Modern by hanging every fragment, large or small, from the ceiling.

Parker describes this process as a form of breathing. ‘I like the idea of a building exhaling or inhaling, or if you’ve got a wind instrument, the idea that it’s exhaling so much that its flat.’ She cites Piero Manzoni, famous for his ironic approach to avante-garde art, as one of her heros. ‘He was famous for canning his own shit, but he would also put inflated balloons on pedestals and label them Breath of an Artist. Breathing was something I was preoccupied with myself.’ This explains her frequent return to the destruction of buildings; in 1997 Parker created Mass (Colder Darker Matter), and was short-listed for the Turner Prize. It consisted of the burnt remnants of a church, and again each fragment was suspended from the ceiling to hover in the air. In the foreword to a new book about Parker, Yoko Ono called these pieces ‘among the most significant artworks of our time.’ Clearly, Parker has enjoyed enough bounteous praise to turn anyone’s head, but she is a pleasure to speak to: humble, with a contagious enthusiasm for her work.

Destruction is a defining characteristic of Parker’s art and I’m interested to see why she is pre-occupied with damaging her materials so irrevocably. ‘Demolition was on the mind’, she tells me. ‘I was living in Leytonstone and our houses were about to be knocked down to make room for a motorway, and so I lived with that threat for ten years in two houses.’ This coincided with her interest in collecting silver plate, a material she has returned to several times in her career. ‘I thought I shouldn’t be attracted to the silver plate, it’s bourgeois stuff. So in a way, I could play with that, it was a representational thing which had a lot of baggage attached  to it. I quite liked the baggage but I had to do something to counter-balance it, I had to destroy it and give it new value. If it had value as a piece of silver plate, what value does a broken silver plate have?’

Questions such as these gave rise to her first epic installation piece, Thirty Pieces of Silver, in 1988, which featured circles of steam-rollered silver-ware including teapots, cutlery and candle-sticks, suspended a few inches above the floor in the Serpentine gallery. Parker also flattens musical wind instruments; in large scale installations like Perpetual Canon they hang looking like they have exhaled air for the last time. She says of her ironing out of the materials: ‘I kill them off so they won’t breath again, but then they’re resurrected because they’re upright when they’re suspended, although still robbed of their use. All the objects I use are second-hand, they’ve had a life and are on the point of expiring.’

 As we talk, the concept of the cliché recurs repeatedly. ‘I started to look at these representational things around me and I felt compelled to use them; everybody knows what they are so I don’t have to worry about what they mean, because they already have their own histories and meanings, so that was very liberating. If you start to use a clichéd object, and then if you mass-produce that cliché yourself, it becomes part of the work. Somehow you hope that the inverse of the cliché will be the most unknown place.’

Inverted clichés appear invariably throughout Parker’s repertoire: iconic buildings like the Big Ben and the Empire State are cast from moulds in lead then flattened or hung upside down until their recognisable attributes are abstracted and ephemeral. One of her most iconic and diverse pieces, The Maybe, featured Tilda Swinton, apparently asleep in a glass vitrine, with objects belonging to famous deceased figures placed around her, including a pillow and blanket from Freud’s couch, Charles Dickens’ quill pen, and Queen Victoria’s stocking. ‘It’s a played out breath, the collaboration with Tilda. What I liked about it was the idea of breathing. She was an exquisite corpse, but still dreaming like us. Her lying there vulnerable in the first place made the absence of those in the past more present.’

I suggest that Parker enjoys making light of her materials, but she corrects me. ‘It’s more about making the material have a tragedy embedded in it…sort of like a tragic comedy.’

Parker is coming to the Ashmolean on the 21st June to speak in conversation with Iwona Blazwick.

Little Shop of Horrors is perhaps the craziest musical in existence. It’s so ridiculous, in fact, that one feels slightly awkward when guffawing at its characters. Walking in to Nun’s Garden of The Queen’s College, the location of the musical, you’ll be confronted with an audience of contented family and friends, drinking wine, eating cookies, and chatting away merrily. For the first half an hour of action, this agreeable atmosphere is maintained on stage, but from then on it takes you to the limits of schadenfreude. The first lines of Audrey’s ‘Somewhere that’s green’, ‘I know Seymour’s the greatest, But I’m dating a semi-sadist’, perfectly encapsulate the ludicrous nature of this finely crafted production.

Little Shop of Horrors certainly conforms to the conception of humour as something slightly inappropriate and uncomfortable, but it is precisely this interplay of the psychopathic and the side-splitting that renders the musical so devilishly enjoyable. The highlights of the production are Orin Scrivello, Audrey’s abusive boyfriend, and the voice of Audrey II, the carnivorous plant. Orin’s rendition of the song ‘Dentist!’ is over-the-top, bizarre, but totally brilliant. Blending comedy and pain, his performance is riveting, and I almost wanted to give him a standing ovation just for that number. The voice of Audrey II, equally, is brash and booming, filling the garden atmosphere with its honeyed tones as it seduces both the characters and the audience.

The chemistry between Audrey and Seymour is not always quite there, and the singing of Mr. Mushnik is sometimes dodgy, but one forgives these minor setbacks because the experience of watching the musical is just so fun. Tom Nichols, the musical director, conducts exceptionally well, the band are well-drilled, sharp, and precise, and you will undoubtedly leave the play humming some of their most memorable songs. One fear I had before attending ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ was whether the music would fit together within a garden play, but I was pleasantly surprised. Occasionally the instruments drown out the singers, to such an extent that, if you’re sitting at the back of the garden, it can be difficult to make out all the words. However, all things considered this is a well organized and hugely pleasing musical that will make you laugh out loud.

Owen Jones’ Chavs explores the differences between the disappearance of middle class Madeleine McCann, and the kidnapping of Shannon Matthews by her working class mother Karen Matthews. The stark differences between Daily Mail headlines, between public levels of suspicion and sympathy, make for an uncomfortable read: it is precisely this discomfort that Carla Kingham hopes to translate to the stage in her new play Middle England.

Paul (Francis Thomas) is a paediatrician whose stay-at-home wife Mai (Claire Bowman) finds herself caught in the middle of a media storm after their six-year-old daughter Jessica is taken. The two live comfortably in what we assume is a London townhouse. Charlie (Phoebe Hames) is a working class mother who lives on an estate just round the corner from Mai, and whose daughter Grace was taken at the same time. Charlie and her wife Dan (Ed Price) assume working class accents which come less naturally than Thomas and Bowman’s cut-glass intonation. However, this became less obvious as the preview went on, and this trend will certainly continue through rehearsals.  

I was shown three short sections at a preview last Saturday. The first section opens with both couples speaking in stereo as they each discover their child has disappeared. The actions takes place within the audience’s seating area: there is no stage to speak of and so the audience is very, very close to the action. Technically, four people conducting two conversations at the same time is difficult to implement, and still needs a little tightening up. However, the scene I saw with just the two mothers speaking was moving and confidently executed.

There are a few cast members who sit in the audience’s chairs and offer a sympathetic ear or a cynical laugh to the parents every now and then. This is especially intriguing when the couples are separated to give their individual statements to the police: each parent does this simultaneously but without their interlocutors saying a word.

The effect is creepy: each parent describes what his or her daughter was wearing, why they turned their back for ‘just a moment’, who the last person to see her was; the audience watch on with critical faculties engaged, waiting for them to slip up. The cast member they are speaking to stares back. Kingham says that these cast members represent the community and the media: unlike real-life missing child cases, they remain silent and we must guess the claustrophobic effect they will come to have on the parents.

The audience is torn between sympathy and suspicion, and the hemmed-in atmosphere of the BT will make it impossible to do exactly what we would like to do once we’ve made up our mind about a couple on a TV appeal: switch it off and go about our lives. Middle England examines our prejudices at close quarters and the confrontational nature of drama means that for the audience, as for the parents, there is no escape. 

Look Back in Anger, John Osborne’s seminal 1956 work, captured the imagination of a generation. While this hackneyed phrase can be applied to almost every book or play that is any good, Look Back in Anger really did spawn a new era in Brit­ish drama: Alan Sillitoe, one of the playwrights who wrote in the years after Look Back in Anger said Osborne “didn’t contribute to British theatre, he set off a landmine and blew most of it up”. Just like you remember where you were when the twin tow­ers fell or, for a slightly older audi­ence, when JFK was shot, theatre crit­ics who grew up post-war remember their young selves pre- and post-Look Back in Anger.

Joining Bluebeard, the Oxford Revue and a mystery comedy act that the Revue will be taking along under their wing at the Edinburgh Fringe will be Eleanor Keel and Isa­bel Marr’s production of Look Back in Anger. Ellie Keel is a third year Italian and German student, who has sort­ed out a cast and crew for the show from her slightly inconvenient posi­tion as a primary teacher in North­ern Italy. Rehearsals will begin in mid-July, concluding with a two-week run in Edinburgh in August.

Walking down Edinburgh’s Royal Mile in mid-August with leaflets be­ing thrust at you from all directions, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Fringe is the single most im­portant event in any student’s exist­ence. So Ellie and Isabel’s unruffled approach is refreshing: “We’re not sure if it will be amazing. It’s a clas­sic play and it’s not as experimen­tal as some of the weirdest things the Fringe has to offer. But we hope that its simplicity will be a breath of fresh air in itself.”

Look Back in Anger was staged to great acclaim with Judi Dench and Kenneth Branagh in the classic 1989 production. Keel is keen that this not be a “carbon copy” of that produc­tion, as it is futile to try to replicate something as well-loved and cited.

They hope to capture the passion of the play in an abridged version, as the script is widely considered to be too long. It is easy to see similarities between playwright John Osborne’s life and views, and those of Jimmy. Their unhappy marriages are very similar, and Osborne was funda­mentally unafraid to speak the un­speakable: this led him to question without ceremony the existence of the British monarchy, but also per­haps left him short-sighted when it came to editing Jimmy’s hard-hit­ting but manifold tirades. Cuts have been made but adaptation would be futile, as the play is so deeply rooted in the mindset of the 50s.

The now-familiar contemptuous anti-hero who rants his way through the political wrongs of the age was done first and best by Jimmy, Os­borne’s ‘angry young man’ of the post-war Midlands. His tirades are full of delightful lyricism and un­comfortable violence: attacks on entrenched class divides are easy to nod along to, while the systematic and cruel undermining of his wife Alison is slightly more difficult to swallow.

Set in a small Derby flat which Ali­son and Jimmy share with their oth­er flatmate Cliff, who is in love with Alison, the love-square is complete with the addition of Alison’s upper-class best friend, Helena. Lines like Jimmy’s musing that “it’s pretty dreary living in the American Age — unless you’re an American of course” still ring true.

Look Back in Anger hasn’t lost its kick with age: Jimmy’s resentment remains difficult to watch for a gener­ation that has no shortage of ‘angry young men’ of its own. Here’s hoping this can be translated to the convert­ed church in Edinburgh where it’s set to be staged.