★★★

The last night of Chastity on the Verge was a sell-out, with people scrambling on the door for the final ticket, such that a distraught contemporary of mine was even turned away. High praise then for a play which had obviously been the subject of many a recommendation, and not merely amongst the eager first-year French students trying to find any means not to revise simply by watching a 13^th century text on stage instead.

This adaptation of the medieval courtly love narrative, La Châtelaine de Vergi, took a distinctly comic tone from the outset. To hard-core readers of the original text, travesty was afoot. Comedy is not an immediately central feature of the story, but Rachel Dickenson as the Narrator nevertheless welcomed the audience with light-hearted bounce, and by the time the Duchess and the Knight had appeared on stage, I found myself warming to the bubbly atmosphere which this production favoured. Kate Bennett was superb as the manipulative Duchess, with everything from her hand gestures to her delicate savouring of the verse oozing pure malevolence while still maintaining that hitherto intriguing element of comedy. The Knight, played by Markian Mysko von Schultze, was another terrific performance. Von Schultze managed to balance incredible sincerity with boldly comic lines, and succeeded in this rather difficult task perhaps the best of all the characters.

Such is the nature of the text that it takes a distinctly tragic turn, and at the Duchess’s revelation of the Knight and the Châtelaine’s secret love affair, which will, by dint of the principles of courtly love, obliterate their relationship, the adaptation’s insistence on the comic began to become unconvincing. The Châtelaine (Grace Mayhew) acted as the final bastion of tragedy in the piece, but whilst her touching monologue and the transition from the Knight’s drunken idiocy to the horror of realisation at his lover’s death heralded a poignant end, this was not entirely to be the case. Christopher Evans as the Duke continued his commendable but in my opinion slightly off-the-mark portrayal of a man who was having a bad day at the office, rather than someone who had just killed his wife and seen his niece and his most loved vassal lie down and die. To accompany this was a hysterical servant girl who it seemed was unsure whether she should burst out laughing or start blubbing uncontrollably. The audience were left unsure as well.

The temptation to inspire comedy into a typically tragic tale is entirely understandable, and one which was highly successful in charming the audience, something to which the guffaws of laughter throughout the 40-minute performance are testament. Maybe I went in as a French student trying too hard, a week before Prelims, to eke some higher meaning from what was essentially a very enjoyable way to spend part of an evening.

However, I just can’t help but feel that by trying to present the poem in such a different light to the original Old French, Chastity on the Verge at times left its audience confused – was it a comedy with a morally tragic conclusion or a comedy outright? It didn’t seem to know what it wanted to be, but then again I’m not sure the original text does either.

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.