Romeo and Juliet, Australia, Moulin Rouge: Baz Luhrmann loves a challenge. But has he bitten off more than he can chew with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby?

It was always going to be a tall order, and arguably a task that should never have been undertaken. The story begins with Nick Carraway, who finds himself in Perkins Sanitorium reliving his first encounter with Gatsby. A few minutes of archive footage and rather a lot of voiceover later, it’s all champagne and hip-hop music as we’re swept amongst the masses in Gatsby’s back garden (well, back field, complete with fountains and swimming pools, obviously). These opening scenes are just a bit too hectic, almost as though production had about ten packets of Haribo too many and chucked in fireworks and dancing and every extra they had – to the point where it’s difficult to know where to look first.

Sometimes it’s best to keep things simple, and the beginning of this movie is a prime example of this. To add to this we have Tobey Maguire providing a voiceover which, if you’ve already read the book, is more than a bit annoying. If we wanted an audio book, we’d go out and buy one. The first part of the movie plays like a sugar-infused sparkle-fest, moves very fast and feels more like theatre than screen. Do not, however, be perturbed.

Based on the start, this film could have reduced a highly regarded piece of literature down to a riotous party, and an animated reconstruction of twenties New York. Mercilessly it doesn’t. By the time we meet Gatsby, everything takes a slightly calmer turn. DiCaprio proves himself a natural choice to play Jay Gatsby, the mysterious and filthy rich neighbour to Nick Carraway, and owner of what can best be described as Disneyland for alcoholics and flapper girls. As we begin familiarising ourselves with the walking complexity that is Gatsby, Carey Mulligan steps up to add yet more confusion to the mix. The problem is that Daisy Buchanan is Gatsby’s one and only. They met when he was a soldier and, despite falling head over heels, circumstances pulled them apart. Daisy married Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton), her rude and arrogant husband also known as ‘the polo player’. Tom counts being unfaithful to Daisy as one of his hobbies, and this is the injustice at the heart of Fitzgerald’s story: here are two people who should be together, but they just can’t seem to get it right. It’s through their portrayal of this struggle that Mulligan and DiCaprio really prove their acting credentials, and Gatsby earns its place opening the Cannes Film Festival this month.

After a rocky start, this movie settles into a well-crafted, modern version of F Scott. Fitzgerald’s original story. There are a few gripes, such as the return of the voiceover and the dodgy use of floating text which makes it look slightly like a Waterstones’s advert, but there was a definite effort to stay true to the story and portray the dilemmas of the characters in a real and relatable way.
In preparation for his first meeting with Daisy after many years, Gatsby fills Nick’s living room with flowers and then asks ‘Do you think it’s too much?’ This really is representative of the whole movie. It’s bright, shiny, chaotic and overflowing with madness of the highest order. It’s not too much, old sport: yet again, Luhrmann’s got it just right.

Opera Lyrica’s production of Il Barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville) by Rossini, performed in the chapel at St Peter’s, was a pleasing venture by a company which aims to improve the accessibility of opera to the public and provide opportunities for those who are keen to get involved. The cast of singers came from around the world, and certainly merited a platform for their talents.

The production was very conventional, featuring the masked characters central to commedia dell’arte, an Italian operatic tradition. The costumes were also opulent and traditional, which meant that the stage itself could be left rather sparse, with touches to suggest a period setting rather than using an overly complicated and cluttered set in such a small venue.

Jorge Franco Bajo, who played Conte d’Almaviva, the romantic lead, brought much charm to his character, and his lovesick pleas to Rosina (Colette Lam) perfectly conveyed the adoration which – seemingly normally in the opera world – can stem from merely glimpsing a girl on a balcony. Rosina herself was played in a scheming and flirtatious manner, which gave depth to the character. The scenes of her pouting and primping at her dressing table contrasted greatly with Dmitry Yumashev’s Don Bartolo, a successful portrayal of the grumpy and cantankerous older man. The most famous moment in the opera is probably when Figaro (Alexandru Nagy) declares his own importance in a piece of music which is beautifully humorous. Paloma Bruce gave a wonderful performance as Berta, whose lovelorn lament both moved and amused. The role of Don Basilio was played subtly by Bragi Jónnson, who brought together the other characters in a scene in which they all attempt to make him leave – mirroring the experience, I’m sure, of most people when a rather boring guest refuses to leave one’s room in college.

Overall. the cast and production were very successful. I hope that Opera Lyrica continues to bring opera to Oxford with many more productions of this calibre.

A surreal experience is guaranteed to anyone who takes up their invitation to Oxford’s maddest tea-party, accessible, so a little caterpillar tells me, only via a rabbit hole (read here: garden path transformed with a little Wonderland imagination). To be hosted in a cosy corner of the Trinity lawns, you adventuring Alices will find a quaint cluster of tables, laden with teatime treats all for your indulgence, and a decidedly schizophrenic group of fellow guests. I am, of course, in circuitous fashion referring to a new dramatic adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s vintage classic Alice in Wonderland that promises to populate Trinity’s lawns with all those favourite oddities, the Mad Hatter, March Hare, sleepy Dormouse and that fearsome Queen of Hearts demanding all heads to be lopped off.

With teatime being shared between audience and characters, the sense of participating in a theatrical experience rather than merely being passively privy to it is bound to be exciting as characters spill out of Wonderland, maybe even planting themselves among the audience, as the familiar story of confident Alice unfolds. The “fourth wall”, then, if not exploded through will be made decidedly unstable as the audience partakes in their tea, in the stage party. Boundaries are unsettled further as two parties seem to occur together, as we are shuttled between the Liddells’ celebration of their daughter Alice’s coming of age in prim and proper fashion and a rather more raucous occasion in Wonderland.

This dual element is a key concept behind this reimagining of the story. Carroll’s fraught relations with the Liddells, due to what we can only say was an atypical interest in their young daughter who inspired the fictional Alice, are to be inserted into a historical and controversial narrative lending dramatic energy to the coming of age party. Wonderland performs bizarre transformations on these “real” personages, with most actors playing one corresponding role within each world, often contrasting as with one actress who plays both Mrs Liddell and the Queen of Hearts.  Two polarised worlds thus collide, an adult social world whose conventional rules must be manoeuvred and a childhood Wonderland equally demanding manoeuvre, but of the imaginative kind.

The warping of characters suggests subconscious activity, and indeed this is played up to the extent of mental pathology. Interactions between madcap characters (which is just about all of them) are intense, bizarre ripostes and logical/illogical quips thrown left, right and centre, with really dynamic movement to accompany, to a potentially overwhelming degree – though who doesn’t want that kind of experience in Wonderland?

I think this sounds a fun concept, so do go along and enjoy your teapot of pimms. Don’t things just become curiouser and curiouser…?

Alice in Wonderland will run from Wednesday to Saturday of 6th week. More information can be found at www.trinitylawnsplay.co.uk 

★★★☆☆
Three Stars

Novel in its usage of the commedia dell’arte staging, recently formed company Opera Lyrica’s take on Il Barbiere di Siviglia was one which would have pleased Rossini with its concept. By adapting the various figures in a commedia dell’arte to the characters of Il Barbiere, Figaro became an arlecchino (harlequin), Rosina and Almaviva the unhappy lovers, and Dottore Bartolo the Pantalone – a miserly merchant. It was an idea that was laid onto the opera by director Paola Cuffolo, contrasting in a wholesome, traditional manner with the goofy, often cartoon-like modern stagings of the opera, where (at least in the most recent Royal Opera production), there is no notion of time or space – only action.

Opera Lyrica’s production on the contrary seized Rossini’s opera and set it pretty much according to his wishes. Il Barbiere di Siviglia is a comic opera buffa whose characters don’t possess a great deal of psychological or intellectual depth; the music is beautifully constructed and its array of arias sublime, but it was intended wholly to be an opera more about caricatures than representations of real human beings. This was a notion that was very well captured by the costumes we saw in the piece; a lot of red velvet that marked the period, Figaro’s clown outfit and pin-on nose, the wig and brown ribbon that rested on the head of Almaviva, and the stick with which the miser Dottore Bartolo presumably futilely threatens Rosina his ward. From there stemmed a lot of vivacious movement and comic effects, notably Almaviva’s disguise as a nun in Act II, where he arrives at Dottore Bartolo’s house and feigns a wish of “Gioia è pace per mill’anni” (‘A thousand years of joy and peace’) to him.

A great deal of the singing was carefully guided and technically accurate, although occasionally the more than challenging coloratura called for vocal phrases left hanging without a conclusion or sometimes with an excessive vibrato on top. Jorge Franco Bajo in the role of Almaviva possessed a luscious tenor voice with a pleasant vibrato effect, but his breath control often didn’t manage to sustain the ends of phrases, allowing the dynamics and strength of the last notes to come toppling down. Although some potent singing came from Colette Lam as Rosina, many of her movements off stage were not free or loose, and often she appeared more concerned for the correctness of her singing – which for the most part was managed technically well – than for the blossoming of her cunning character. The production’s Figaro, Alexandru Nagy, possessed a booming, huge bass which unfortunately lacked a great amount of vocal mastery. While it made sense to see him tottering around on stage, a trait which sometimes gave the impression that Figaro was drunk, his voice tottered a little too far, so that often what could have easily been round, well placed notes turned out to be flat, shaky, tremulous, wavering notes that criss-crossed the auditorium rather than filling it. The two vocal jewels of the evening were Bragi Jónsson as Don Basilio and Paloma Bruce as Berta. The former contained a great deal of force and warmth in his voice, which in addition to being potent in itself was also guided in the right direction by his careful and authoritative display of vocal technique. Paloma Bruce’s soprano was especially impressive in Berta’s aria, “Il vecchiotto cerca mogile”, which was sung not only with spontaneity and pizzazz on the young soprano’s part, but also with a wonderful spin on the piece’s coloratura and a beaming, shining, flexible instrument that gave the impression of having few technical limits.

Overall this was an extremely well thought out production with lavishly handsome costumes designed and made by Elena Marteau and Kasia Katner; a concept that made more use of its limited financial endowments than many huge opera houses make of their large ones. It caught the spirit of Rossini’s opera not only in terms of its incidents and personages, but also in terms of its background and place in the development of opera as an art form.