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.”

At 8pm on Saturday, a motley crew of thesps, budding directors and writers, met up in the White Rabbit pub to begin their mission: crafting, rehearsing and putting on a play, all in twenty-four hours. The brainstorming began with thoughts of a Shakespeare medley – but this seemed to carry on too much from last year’s expedited version of the Comedy of Errors. Eventually discussions turned to the idea of villains, getting under their skin and seeing stories from their point of view for a change. Rehearsals started in the morning on Sunday and the result was performed in Brasenose College at 8pm the next day.

I’m told the play, in its initial stages, was meant to be “a lot darker”; this surprises me as the whole thing was laugh-out-loud funny. Cruella DeVille (Ella Waldman) is first introduced on video, adding a high-tech edge to the production. She explains the main premise of the plot: villains are invited to join De Ville’s Villain Rehabilitation Centre, learning what they had done wrong in order to get killed the first time round. Invited to rehab sessions at “The Satanic Mill, Gingerbread Street, Mordor”, classic Gaston, Captain Hook, Ursula, the Evil Queen and Scar congregate in an Alcoholics-Anonymous-style circle of chairs, and hilarity ensues as each of them tells their story of failed villainy.

Twenty-four hours – “more like 5 hours” of rehearsing proper, retorts Waldman – is clearly long enough for this improvised team of thesps to produce some seriously funny parodies. Captain Hook (Tim Gibson) is made incredibly camp and excitable, Gaston (Nick Lyons) is hugely confident with a tendency to burst into song at several intervals, and Scar is delightfully bitter and twisted about his failure to “kill the kid!” Cruella’s advice to them is to avoid high places (this is especially relevant to the Evil Queen, played by Ellie Page, from Snow White) and never trust anyone.

Katie Ebner-Landy, president of OUDS, said this year was the first time video was incorporated. The technological element is likely to develop more year by year, and special effects are surely not that far off in the future.
Griffith Rees doubles up as director and the charming and frighteningly accurate voice-over of Mickey Mouse, whom Cruella phones during a break to consider the villains’ propensities to appear in a sequel. The more profound element of the play is discovered here: a commentary on two-faced corporatism and how it uses personalities for the entertainment of the masses. This comes back to bite Cruella as her rehab patients rebel at the end, refusing to sign contracts for Disney sequels, following her very own villain lessons: number 2 “Don’t trust anyone”.

The writing was fresh, perhaps because of its immediacy and rapid inception, and the stock characters provided by Disney provided a good base for original comedy. In a drama scene where improvisation is the realm of just one comedy group – the Imps – fast-paced improvisational initiatives such as the 24-hour play should be encouraged and rewarded.

The Oxford Revue made their first steps on the way to the Ed­inburgh Free Fringe with a lo­cal showcase of their material.

The Oxford Revue is well known for its witty works and its latest concoction, Desperate Liaisons, did not disappoint. The audience was primed by the skilful self-depreca­tion of compère Alex Fox. Although the act began with two somewhat stock sketches, involving superhe­roes and sexual health issues, these were a gateway to their distinctive brand of comedy, with increasingly nuanced sketches. The group incor­porated ingredients of deadpan, farce and parody to produce a come­dy cocktail that goes down a treat for even the most implacable audience. Garnished with self-conscious melo­drama and risky boundary-pushing, the pieces were served with a char­acteristic kick. The group was apt at contrasting the subject matter of their sketches with the responses of their characters, particularly effec­tively in the deliciously inappropri­ate ‘parents’ evening’ scene.

What was especially striking about this act was their abil­ity to exploit the audience’s expectations to their co­medic ends. Again and again they would lull the crowd into assump­tions, only to masterfully subvert them and instead lead them down the absurd passages of their alterna­tives. This was combined with mim­icry of generic dramatic narratives, such as picking up a street-walker, whereby they played on the phrase ‘it’s my birthday’, taking it literally.

The attention to detail was like­wise impressive. They made innova­tive use of the curtain, transforming it into bed clothes at one moment and encasing themselves within it at the next to become ‘floating’ heads. The underground of the stage was used to create portals through which characters could pop up, cre­ating a sense of off-stage action.

The movement of the actors them­selves was similarly impressive, as they managed to differentiate their characters between sketches alter­ing their posture and gestures, as well as their voices. They made equal­ly inventive use of sound in their performance, using it to introduce transitions of mood. It was clear that there was a structure to the perfor­mance as a whole, as a short scene in­volving hats recurred several times forming a recognisable motif which was exploited in the closing scene to make a hilarious ending. Such origi­nality and ingenuity certainly left me tempted to make a trip to Edin­burgh this summer.

★★★★☆
Four Stars

According to Cameron Cook, who directs Dealer’s Choice as well as playing Mugsy, the bril­liance of the script is that “the words are very funny”. This sums up the ap­peal of the play, which is being per­formed at the Burton Taylor in 8th week.

There is something ineffably pleas­ing about the dialogue Patrick Mar­ber has written. Marber is, like Cook, an ex-Revue man, and the script is clearly the product of a mind used to fast-paced sketch humour. The scenes I saw did not contain con­trived set pieces, absurd slapstick or even many laugh-out-loud lines. Rather, as a motley crowd of huck­sters, shysters and gamblers gather in London’s East End for a poker game, there is a constant flow of con­versation as the cast rattle through a script which doesn’t waste its words.

As an audience member, it is a strangely soothing experience. We are privy to the private conversa­tions of characters who are clearly very close, exchanging insults and one-liners in (often questionable) Cockney accents. It is like being amongst friends; the experience is curiously restful whilst also provid­ing a chuckle on almost every line. That said, the actors face an uphill struggle to make a low-key play set around kitchen tables and bat­tered sofas visually engaging, and the scenes I saw would benefit from stronger direction.

A delightfully sardonic vocal performance from Markian Mysko von Schultze as Sweeney, for exam­ple, was marred by weak physical interpretation — despite playing a chef, there was no need for him to mime vegetable preparation for ten minutes. Cook himself sometimes slipped into clichéd use of gesture. In general, the onus is on the di­rector to add dynamism to scenes which are currently well-rehearsed but lack vitality.

The action develops significantly from the relatively light-hearted opening, as themes of gambling, avarice and sexual tension come up throughout the play. Of the three ac­tors I saw perform, Andy Laithwaite as Frankie appears to have best in­corporated these subtleties into his character, with his wisecracks tem­pered by an undercurrent of brood­ing arrogance. The well-delivered lines with Cook attempting to co­erce von Schultze into playing in the pivotal poker game exposed themes of addiction, and showcased the complex emotions in the play.

The play hinges on quick-fire hu­mour but also on relationships, as we realise these men are “all losers” in life, not just at the poker table. Cook has done well to assemble a competent and engaging cast who can handle the darker side of this blackly comic piece as well as the jokes.

Cook described the script as “tight” in its quickfire humour. What is required now is innovative and assertive direction to ensure the play is equally tight in perfor­mance. I am confident this impres­sive cast will, come opening night, find the effervescence and pace the play needs to come alive.