★★★★☆
Four Stars

Thomas Middleton, the Jacobean playwright, joins Evelyn Waugh in the ranks of Oxford-educated literary figures who matriculated but never quite made it to graduation. T.S. Eliot deemed Middleton second only to Shakespeare and some argue he even had a hand in All’s Well That Ends Well. Given that his name will forever follow that of the Bard along the corridors of history, it is fitting that the Royal Shakespeare Company will stage Middleton’s city comedy A Mad World My Masters for the next three months (sadly the Royal Middleton Company does not exist and thus is in no real position to perform the farce itself).

The play is a bawdy romp through a debauched 17^th century London, but it has been brought up to date and recast as a bawdy romp through 1950s Soho. My 88-year-old granddad, who was born in Soho in 1925, was interested by the extent to which the far the West End of his youth had been romanticised for the purpose of the production. The programme describes Soho as possessing a ‘Technicolor vibrancy that could either delight or repel’. An outsider may well have been repulsed or perhaps delighted by the ‘prostitutes who prowled the streets’ amidst ‘exotic aromas’ and ‘fragments of jazz and blues’. For my granddad, though, a prostitute was a slightly sordid everyday detail, a lady hanging around outside the school gates whom they learned to know by sight (and hopefully sight alone).

In A Mad World, the lead is a hooker as beautiful as she is wily, and her ruses to make an honest – and rich – woman of herself bring the play to a head. Her name is Truly Kidman, and she is both mistress to Sir Bounteous Peersucker, a rich and impressionable old fool, and lover to his nephew, Dick Follywit. The names hint at the characters’ roles but mainly draw on the proud and venerable English tradition of smut for comic effect. Middleton named Sir Bounteous’ old and sexually frustrated butler ‘Gunwater’, but he has been here rechristened as ‘Spunky’ in a less-than-subtle updating of Jacobean slang.

The play is an extended farce filled with dirty Jacobean jokes, some of which have faded into obscurity with time: these gags were coupled with inventive and often hilarious staging to keep a modern audience entertained. The men’s knowing looks and saucy references to female characters became a little wearing after a while, but were counter-balanced by Truly Kidman’s complex and absorbing lead prostitute (played with aplomb by Sarah Ridgeway). Her most captivating solo was a rendition of ‘Ain’t Nobody’s Business’, in which she circled slowly round foggy London streetlamps and told us charmingly that she really didn’t care what society thought of her ancient profession.

The astute audience member may suspect that ‘Ain’t Nobody’s Business’, a classic blues number, was not included by Middleton in his 1605 script. The vigorous and sustained musical departure from Middleton’s original vision, though, is for me the highlight of the show. A singer with an impressive coiffure in a purple sparkly fishtail dress sashayed around to a live jazz band as the show started: the addition of musical (and sequinned) numbers would revitalise the text throughout, especially at points where it had lost some of its original bite. The production was kept light on its feet by the irresistable pull of showbiz and the glamour of trombones. A Mad World My Masters is a triumph of theatrical experience, a visual spectacle and an aural delight.

A Mad World My Masters is on from 6 June – 25 October 2013 at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

http://www.rsc.org.uk/whats-on/a-mad-world-my-masters/

Deciding precisely where you want to squander £200 on the right to listen to a Pink Floyd tribute act whilst lying comatose in a pool of your own vomit can be a painful process. Basing your pick of summer festival on which of Oxford’s discothèques you frequent makes this difficult decision a little easier.

If you like Junction, try… V

V is as simple as festivals come. It offers a no-nonsense split between rock and pop royalty, with artists of such regal magnitude as the Kings of Leon and Beyoncé ‘Queen B’ Knowles gracing the main stage. Head to Staffordshire for a weekend of debauchery, albeit debauchery liberally plastered with advertising for Virgin Media, if you frequent Junction. Or indeed Bridge. Or Park End. 

If you like Babylove, try… Latitude

If to you ‘clubbing’ means ‘standing round looking cool with an edgy haircut smoking rollies and talking about photography’, the laid-back atmosphere of the achingly cool music-comedy-poetry-cabaret-dance melting-pot in Suffolk will suit you perfectly. From Kraftwerk to Eddie Izzard, from Bloc Party to the Ballet Boyz, this is the festival for Oxford’s abundance of hipsters to enjoy sneering at. 

If you like Purple Turtle, try… Tramlines

Purple Turtle costs nothing to enter, and with good reason. The previously free Tramlines festival now costs a mere £6 for a day pass, but whereas at PT you will only hear Rebecca Black and moans of despair, you can catch Lianne Le Havas, Toddla T and more at Sheffield’s 3-day shindig. 

If you like Mutiny at Purple Turtle on Sundays, try… Download

To the best of my knowledge, Oxford offers only a solitary metal night. Likewise, Download is more or less the default option as far as hard rock festivals are concerned, offering Slipknot, Iron Maiden and Rammstein amongst others. If you like your guitars thrashed, your pits moshed and your crowds predominantly male and dressed in black, look no further. 

If you like Switch, try… Wakestock

The mid-range acts of the O2’s new EDM night are best mirrored in the convivial atmosphere of Wales’ mid-range music-cum-wakeboarding festival. However, the names at Wakestock are slightly bigger (Bastille, Rudimental, Magnetic Man), and whilst the O2 is essentially a dirty box with some speakers in, the festival on the LlÅ·n Peninsula promises golden sands, roaring surf and (potentially) blue skies.

If you like Cellar, try… Womad

This is perhaps one of the more stretched comparisons on the list. Nonetheless, Cellar’s intermittent Balkan electro-gypsy and reggaeton-dancehall fusion nights come closest to an Oxford approximation of Womad’s globe-spanning eclecticism.  Rokia Traoré and former Brazilian government minister Gilberto Gil spearhead a cosmopolitan line-up.

If you like Carbon, try… Glastonbury

There’s no point of comparison here at all, but nothing Oxford has to offer can compete with Glasto, and this article couldn’t go by without mentioning the almighty grandfather of the UK festival scene. It’s less about the headliners (though the Arctic Monkeys and the Rolling Stones are not to be sneezed at) and more about the vast variety of acts, the eccentricity of the crowd and the sheer scale of it all. If you can, go.

And so, with a frantic denouement of suitcase shovelling and traffic hangovers, the academic year that was 2012-13 has hastily ceased to be. The next fortnight may have been strictly reserved for renewing acquaintances with the family fridge, but few Oxonians can repress that bookish itch for long. Whether basking in the sun, or pressing your nose against wet English windows,  you will want a trusty paperback tucked in your back pocket – and preferably something that isn’t in the Gladstone Link. Here are a few of our choices for any summery circumstances:

Ernest Hemingway – The Sun Also Rises

Hemingway meets interrailing. Young folks have been tearing up the noble cities of Europe in pursuit of The Great Hedonistic Summer for aeons; and if you are planning to party your way through the continent in the coming weeks, you will be glad to know that you are in fine literary company (see also Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night). Hemingway’s first novel pithily follows the Lost Generation from Paris to Pamplona to San Sebastian, with just the right mix of cocktails, culture, and existential tourist guilt (largely about the alcohol trumping the appreciation) to appeal to your average Oxford interrailer.

P. G. Wodehouse – Summer Lightning

Of course, you may just be pottering around at home for a while; and in the (quite likely) event that your domestic life lacks the thrills of a pig-theft mystery, conniving servants or affairs with chorus girls, you can always dip into the splendidly silly world of Blandings Castle. Lord Emsworth’s farcical family and friends make great company on a rainy Thursday morning – if Wodehouse’s playfulness can’t cheer you up, nothing will – and Jeremy Kyle re-runs have nothing on Uncle Galahad’s tale of Sir Gregory Parlsoe-Parsloe and the prawns.

Raymond Carver – Cathedral

Alternatively, give in to the navel-gazing ennui of the endless empty afternoons, and get Raymond Carver to show you just how petrifyingly inane a day in the life can be. With an acute minimalism that cuts right to the core, Carver’s short stories trace their protagonists through their dead-end jobs, loveless relationships, alcohol problems and stilted conversations with the sort of nihilist coldness that makes Hemingway look like a travelling Punch and Judy showman. Consequently, the occasional touch of human warmth makes for a worthwhile emotional pay-off – and might put the various dolours of sofa-lounging into perspective.

Virginia Woolf – To the Lighthouse

Family holidays are never smooth affairs, and the Ramsay clan’s trip to their summer cottage is no exception. The presence of eight children and a number of guests is perhaps slightly atypical, but bickering about making a group trip, worrying about whether the dinner is any good, and messing around in the garden and on the beach are all part of the family holiday experience. The editors can only hope that your favourite vacation is never retold with all the Freudian framework, and the nasty bits about the ravishing destruction of time and war.

W. E. Bowman – The Ascent of the Rum Doodle

One of the classics in the (as yet underappreciated) mountaineering-burlesque genre – and a must-read for anyone setting out on any kind of outward bound holiday. Bowman’s book is a blatant parody of the high seriousness of the major expedition chronicles of the early twentieth century, and brilliantly undercuts the boisterous bravado of the great British orienteers. This is the Catch-22 of adventure writing, and the tale of the crew – “Humphrey Jungle, radio expert and route-finder”, “Ridley Prone, doctor”, and so on – is certain to amuse.

I‘ve really seen the face of darkness…. I’m not even going to have my name on this book because it’s so dark and dangerous; when you see the face of evil, stare into the abyss… I think I’ve come really close to the fire and if I get through this book and don’t get consumed alive I think I may be done with the dark side.” It was going to be an exciting interview when this was the answer to my first question, on why Neil Strauss professed to only be interested in exploring the dark side of human experience.

There are few people who’ve mined the well of human hedonism, fame and insanity as deeply as him; he’s shot guns with Ludacris, been kidnapped by Courtney Love, made Lady Gaga cry. He’s gone drinking with Bruce Springsteen, tried to prevent Motley Crue from getting arrested, received Scientology Lessons from Snoop Dogg, flown a helicopter with Madonna, been taught mind reading by the CIA and been soaked in a hot tub by Marilyn Manson. He’s also slept with more of the world’s most beautiful women than you can imagine, as chronicled in the his infamous “The Game”, which details how he became one of the world’s greatest pickup artists, an sobriquet that has earned him the ire of the majority of women and the burning jealousy of the majority of men.

I put to him a proposition that many, from Rainer Maria Rilke to Christopher Hitchens to Robert Fisk have all advanced; if you want to be a writer it must not be a question of wanting to write; rather it is that you must write; it has to be the only thing you know you can do. He tells me “Yeah I think that’s very true; I was the kid in second grade who always had his nose in a book. When I was 11, I wrote my first book and earlier than that I made a magazine. In second grade I wrote this essay that said that when I grow up, I want to be a writer and own a million books.”

He goes on to say “I don’t think there’s any lifestyle more exciting than journalism. A rock star or a politician or whatever is stuck in their lifestyle; as a journalist you get to jump into whatever you want; it’s a roulette wheel. When I was writing for the New York Times I’d think ‘what would I like to explore?’ and then I’d get to go to Cuba and Iran and Uzbekistan and hang out with movie stars and religious leaders. You can enjoy whatever lifestyle you want and you don’t have to stay with it.”

His list of interviews surely dwarfs that of any other celebrity journalist. I ask him for his advice on what to do when an interview starts to go wrong. “The bad interviews sometimes make for the best articles; I had an interview with the Julian Casablancas of the Strokes where he just got wasted and kept turning off the tape recorder and tried to kiss me and then just rolled off in a wheelchair. At the time I thought the interview was a disaster, but it makes for a really funny article and it shows you who they are.”
As for a less interesting descent into madness, “African blues singer Ali Farka Toure just answered everything monosyllabically. It’s really funny because it just shows his personality.”

With this in mind, I ask him about the technique involved with coaxing important or revealing information about of an interviewee, as well as his favourite “gotcha moment,” for which he scolds me. “I never think of it as a gotcha moment – I’m never going in antagonistically. Most important of all, be non-judgemental; I’ve been on both sides of an interview many times, and I can say when people feel judged they shut down and maybe just tell you what you want to hear.”

“When I’m doing an interview, particularly if it’s something big like a Rolling Stone Profile, I’ll read every story ever written on this person and I’ll try to avoid anything they’ve already said. I want to push the public’s knowledge about this person further.”

He goes on to illustrate this with one of his most poignant anecdotes; “I remember when I first interviewed Christina Aguilera and she just kept looking out of the window of the car and spacing out. I said to myself ‘what kind of people just disconnect like that?’ People who are abused as children do that, because they can’t run away so just go somewhere in their heads.

“At this time she’d never talked about her past, so I asked her if she’d been around abuse and she opened up. She talked about growing up around domestic violence; when I first met her she was just this bubblegum teenage girl into shopping and I thought this would be the worst experience ever; but at the end we really grew close.”

He goes on to relate a similar story about his recent Rolling Stone profile of Skrillex. “When it was the last day after the interview he was saying that people make fun of his hair. The reason he shapes it like that is because he has acne scars. It’s to show that he’s not afraid to show who he is. It was a beautiful, vulnerable moment and that only came out after building that special kind of rapport.”

The conversation then turned to the more salacious part of his journalistic oeuvre – his expose of the world of Seduction community, a group of previous beta males turned wannabe Casanovas that topped the New York Times bestseller list and earned him scores of closet readers. I wish I could tell my readers that I read this book purely out of journalistic interest. One thing that struck me about the book was that its ending plays it out as a moral fable, with Strauss renouncing seduction for a girl he falls truly in love with.

Life itself tends to dislike simple happy endings and the relationship broke down shortly after the book’s publication. I ask him if he has any regrets about making the book’s moral hook something that turned out to be transient and fleeting: “Not a word, and I’ve never even thought about changing it. I ask you, if a relationship doesn’t last for ever, does that make it a failure?”

Rather put on the spot, I mumble a rather banal truism about how what is important about a relationship is what you learn from it and if it helps you grow. He replies, “I think there’s a funny idea in this culture that if a relationship doesn’t last forever then it’s a failure. What I wrote about Lisa, everything was true. It was a great relationship and it got me out of the dysfunctional Pick Up Artist world and taught me a lot about myself; she was and still is an awesome person.

“I think we have a lot of ideas in our culture like this – that love or a relationship has to be forever to make it worthwhile and I just don’t think that’s true.”

The Game, unsurprisingly, is often accused of being fervently misogynistic. It recounts a series of ploys and tactics that turn women into sexual objects worthy of conquest rather than value. Pick Up Artists claim that they are merely levelling the playing field for men, who Neil describes as “guys who are virgins at 30, guys who may have never even been on a date or held a girls hand” having lost natures lottery of looks, charm or attractiveness. I put forward Saul Bellow’s quip about the American dream to Neil. These men have ‘the universal eligibility to be noble.’

“I think that’s an interesting thought. It’s funny, because to me whenever someone criticizes ‘the game’, they think the book’s a giant endorsement of this lifestyle when it opens with the ‘world’s greatest pick up artist’ having a complete mental breakdown and preparing to kill himself. To me it’s a book about male insecurity much more than tactics to have sex with women.”

He continued, “I had to go through the dark side, losing authenticity, separating men and women in this odd way. If you take this journey with some self-awareness, I encourage guys to take control of an area of their lives that many men are particularly uncomfortable with and struggle with. There are loads of people who are living life and aren’t comfortable in their own skins. That’s the message I was trying to get across.”