★★★★☆
Four Stars

The club in which Gabe Day is set seems to have the ambience of Babylove, the clientele of a Monday night at Purple Turtle and a gurning DJ of the sort you might see supporting his cousin at Carbon. Incompetence, personal disagreements and a general atmosphere of Jäger-laced chaos provide the comedic backbone to this highly promising piece of new writing.

Rory Platt, who wrote the play and directs alongside Kate Legh, has done well to give his actors naturalistic dialogue free of the cliché and sloppiness which typifies much student writing, especially comedy. There is a laser-like accuracy in the way he consistently finds exactly the right words each situation demands; a reference to a feckless DJ sniffing “Toilet Duck” and a dismissal of the club as a “wet-arsed indie night” are two examples of this wit and precision.

Less convincing is the narrative arc concerning a televangelist’s prediction of doomsday, which coincides with the less eschatological chaos within the club. The connection feels somewhat arbitrary, despite Platt’s attempts to explain it to me, and it is to be hoped this will not detract from a play which feels more like an episode of a sitcom than anything more laden with ambiguity and portents of doom.

It is Fawlty Towers which springs most immediately to mind. The relationship between club promoters Charlie (played by George Ferguson) and Kate (Sara Ahmed) is in many respects a carbon copy of that between Basil and Sybil. Ferguson does an excellent job of manifesting a deeply unappealing cocktail of Cleese-esque bluster, bombast and prejudice, and this is tempered by the sardonic sniping of the equally convincing Ahmed.  Some of the dialogue, particularly the profanity, does sound unnatural in Ferguson’s pompous tones, but whether deliberate or not this artificiality in fact befits his characterisation as a man utterly out of his depth.

If this is Fawlty in the Club, then the role of bumbling waiter Manuel is taken by the manically gurning DJ Cooper, a role performed with gusto by Michael Roderick. The comedy here derives not from a thick Catalan accent but from the amphetamines Cooper has been shovelling up his flared nostrils by the bucketload. Physically, his impressive performance nears pantomime, as the jerky exuberance of the chemically impaired is matched by moments of glassy-eyed earnestness and different parts of his jaw appear to move entirely autonomously of one another.

Vocally, he does miss the mark a little; his delivery is too forceful and his cadence at times too aggressive for a man in the grip of ecstasy. It is also a shame that Simon (Nick Fanthorpe) is reduced to the role of a sober straight man, as Cooper writhes on his lap sharing intimate philosophical truths and complimenting his eyebrows.

With other cast members Maude Morrison and Priya Manwaring absent due to exams, and scripts still in hand, it seems likely these issues will be ironed out by the time the company makes the daunting trip to a two-week run at the Fringe. The cast is strong enough and the script packed with enough vivacity and bite that Gabe Day can aspire to great things, bringing wit, charm and the spirit of Oxford’s finest clubbing establishments to Edinburgh this summer.

★★★★☆
Four Stars

Midway through watching the Merton Floats’ accomplished production of Dion Boucicault’s London Assurance this evening, it occurred to me how surprising it is that the piece is not better known. The play is wittily scripted, its plot satisfyingly intricate and its characters hilarious, yet I had never come across it until a friend mentioned it to me earlier this term. This is all the more surprising when one considers the popularity of the plays of Oscar Wilde and the books of P G Wodehouse, both of which, to a greater and lesser respect respectively, can be viewed as the play’s literary descendants.

The play is immediately familiar territory to anyone who has seen Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, as the play tracks and trivialises the romantic exploits of a small group of eccentric Victorian aristocrats over the course of a short stay at a country house. The plot becomes increasingly complex as characters fall in love left, right and centre, and go on to deceive each another as to their true feelings and identities.  The play culminates in the aftermath of a duel and ends predictably and satisfyingly with the two principle younger characters, Charles Courtly and Grace Harkaway, agreeing to be married.

The production was a little slow to get going. Vyvyan Almond as Sir Harcourt Courtly impressed from the start with his studied floaty and mincing mannerisms, but was, along with the other actors, initially a little mechanical in his delivery. Things improved rapidly, however, and by the end Almond was thoroughly convincing as the flamboyant but aging dandy. Perhaps the best and most consistent performance came from Benedict Morrison as Mr Richard Dazzle, a friend of Charles’ and in large part the orchestrator of the events of the play. Morrison’s channelling of Frankie Howerd camp was a delight to watch, his variety of tone being matched wonderfully by his always animated facial expressions.

The rest of the cast were also uniformly very good. Joshua Wilce was excellent as Charles, impressing with his ability to turn quickly from the jocular irreverence of Charles’ alter-ego, Augustus, to the gormless weirdness of Charles as he misleadingly presents himself to his father, Sir Harcourt. Sophie Eager as Grace Harkaway and Matt Small as Squire Max Harkaway were solid as the play’s sweet but mischievous heroine and her avuncular if slow-witted uncle. Both were occasionally a little quiet, although this was probably because their characters were among the least flamboyant. Carrie Grierson as the lawyer Mark Meddle was satisfyingly both officious and unhinged and Emily Troup was brilliantly bumbling and reminiscent of the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz as Lady Gay Spanker’s hapless, henpecked and incongruously female husband.  

Alice Caulfield as Lady Gay herself was as boisterous and obnoxious as could be hoped from her name, her laugh calling to mind P G Wodehouse’s description of someone’s laugh as like ‘a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge.’ Last but not least, James Mannion as the butler, Cool, and Linnet Kaymer as the maid, Jenny, acquitted themselves well, Mannion stealing the scene on several occasions with his acerbic, deadpan delivery.

Much credit must also go to the play’s directors, Tim Coleman and Finola Austin, and to its producers and assorted technical staff. The play was very well chosen for its setting, the Merton gardens with their steps and hedges providing a very convincing country house. The costumes were excellent, a highlight being a particularly pungent purple overcoat worn by Sir Harcourt. The production was full of nice little touches which combined to create a very professional atmosphere. Two of my favourite such touches were the use of oddly specific signs (‘afternoon c. 5.42pm’) to indicate the setting or circumstances of some of the scenes, adding to the general feeling of surrealism, as well as using the act of bringing furniture on and off stage to develop the romance of the two servants.

To conclude, the play was largely a delight. Admittedly, it was a little slow to get going, but I suspect this was due to first night nerves. All in all, I don’t see why, with marginal improvements, the play should not be well on the way to five stars in future performances.   

Anyone who has been around this term surely cannot have failed to notice the recent spate of Al-Jazeera events at the Union. The man behind all the big names and TV cameras is none other than Mehdi Hasan, the Political Director of the Huffington Post and the host of Al Jazeera’s new Head to Head series.

The format of the show, for anyone who didn’t manage to make it to any of the recordings, is meant to be highly combative. As Mehdi says, “this is not a BBC HardTalk interview series where I’m a neutral presenter. The whole conceit of this show apart from doing it in the Oxford Union with an audience full of Oxford boffins is the fact that I am opinionated and I come to the interview with a perspective and a strong view. The name of the show does describe what is going on – we are going head to head.”

His guests are no ordinary fare either, including the ex-head of the FSA, Lord Adair Turner and New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, Mehdi has faced some of the toughest opponents possible, covering topics from the failure of global capitalism to the role of the US in the world. Although as the host, Mehdi found that the best debates were not the ones he expected – “The ones I thought would be the really interesting ones for me personally because of my background and my interests were Dani Dayan, the leader of the settlers in the West Bank who came out from the Occupied West Bank in order to do this programme, and Irshad Manji, the lesbian Muslim so-called “refusenik” who’s been very critical of Islam and Muslims… but actually in the end, I think the best debate and probably the most important debate given what’s going on in the world was the one which kicks the series off this Friday, which is Bernard Henri-Levy.”

Henri-Levy is a French Philosopher of equal fame and infamy, a friend of Nicolas Sarkozy and a passionate proponent of humanitarian intervention. His episode is dedicated to the issue of foreign military intervention, and was one of the more fearsome trials of Mehdi’s resolve. “He’s regarded as one of the cleverest men in the world, so someone like myself, who got a 2:1 degree in PPE going against one of the world’s great public intellectuals could be slightly nervous!”

Not that Hasan is any slouch. Throughout the series he has proved more than able to score points against his opponents, memorably stunning Tom Friedman with the suggestion that Israel should face similar sanctions for its nuclear arms as Iran does. “The point about that is that a lot of commentators like Tom, famous and respected and talented as they are tend to engage in egregious double standards and one of them is, for example, the nuclear debate. At the moment, if a Martian was to arrive from outer space, he might wonder why the “international community have sanctions on a country that doesn’t have nuclear weapons rather than the country in the Middle East that does have nuclear weapons, on the country that does allow in UN inspectors to its nuclear sites as opposed to the country that never allowed in UN inspectors to its nuclear sites.”

And, in the pilot (a one-off Christmas show that spawned the series), Hasan took on one of the so-called Four Horsemen of New Atheism, Richard Dawkins, in an interview (as the option to debate was originally turned down by the professor) that resulted in Dawkins attacking Hasan’s Islamic beliefs as naïve, equivalent to belief in fairies.

Hasan seems to have taken this in his stride, in the spirit of public debate – ”I think what it’s indicative of is of a growing strain of slightly intolerant, slightly self-obsessed, quite arrogant New Atheists, who want to ridicule religion and believers and marginalise us in public life and mock us. That’s fine, we live in a free society – do what you want – but some of us are going to push back.” Less acceptable to him, however, is how the interview degenerated into a confrontation.  “He turned down that opportunity, but during the actual programme … he decided to try and turn the tables and start mocking my beliefs and questioning why I believe in miracles, which is certainly fair enough, but is a little bit disingenuous given the fact that he was given the opportunity to debate with me and turned it down.”

Mehdi’s beliefs seem, to some extent to define his writing, but this is, he argues, merely contingent on the political reality of the world in which we live. “When I was at the New Statesman, a very secular leftist publication, people would complain that I always wrote about  religion, God and Islam, and part of me wanted to say “Do you think I want to?”. Muslims don’t want to be in the public eye all the time for all the wrong reasons,  I don’t want to have to write pieces saying that suicide bombings aren’t Islamic, I wish there weren’t any suicide bombings. … I wish I never had to write any of these pieces and I could just write about austerity or the NHS, but, unfortunately, that’s not the world we live in.”

However, he is no doctrinaire apologist for UK Muslims. He has, on many occasions, spoken out about problems within the community, even at the risk of giving ammunition to their enemies, both in the tabloid press and the extreme political fringes. He claims, however, that this is not the same thing as helping these enemies – “I think the fact that I’m a Muslim myself – it’s not that it gives me cover, as some people have accused me of – but that I’m writing from within the community without perhaps the agendas you see on the comment pages of the Express or occasionally the Mail. And that’s what’s missing. When people say you’re just as bad as the other critics – not at all – Goodness Gracious Me was able to put out a series making fun of Asians in a way that a bunch of white comedians wouldn’t have been able to do.”

Hasan has himself come up against the barriers of what it is and, more to the point, isn’t acceptable to write about in the past. His piece on abortion for the New Statesman, setting out his feelings about the emotional complexity of the matter in a pro-life manner seemed to take over the Twittersphere for at least a week, enraging many and pleasing few. “All the pieces I’ve ever written on Israel, anti-Semitism, on Islam, on terrorism, on suicide bombings, on the Iraq war, on Iran – I’ve had some pretty heated reactions to pieces I write. Never have I had a reaction like that.” Mehdi has since expressed regret about the way in which he expressed himself in that piece, but does still feel that the discussion is worth having, if not necessarily through the medium of microblogging. “You simply can’t have that debate, not on Twitter, not even in column length, you need book length. If you’re at university, as I was 14 years ago, you’ll have to write essays about the ethics of abortion … vast sections of moral philosophy are devoted to the subject.” The complexity and passion behind the issue seems to have deterred him from writing any future pieces on the subject.

However, abortion aside, there is no issue which Mehdi seems unwilling to debate, which is what made his events at the Union, and the programmes that resulted, such an interesting, informative and even exciting watch.

Head to Head will be broadcast at 8pm every week from Friday 7^th June on Al Jazeera and will be available online soon afterwards.