★★★★☆
Four Stars

This lively production of Pericles, of which Shakespeare is believed to have written exactly half of the lines, is a highly creative, if not always smoothly unfolding, example of student drama. The audience enters the tiny – or intimate – Burton Taylor Studio to find the actors ranked in seats against the wall, in plain black costumes with appropriate accessories, but apparently out of character. 

The production’s concept is an ambitious one: 47 characters are rendered by only seven actors. With a plot line as scattered as this travelling drama/comedy/romance, confusing the audience was a very real danger. One way the cast successfully negotiated the challenge, however, was by making intelligent use of simple, symbolic character markers in the costume shifts. Bright silken waistcoats, furs, the occasional royal bling, pirate bandanas, and PVC parkas were alternately donned by the actors as the scenes advanced from one side of the world to the other. Costume props were also used to serve the efficient portrayal of action, with for instance the death of the royal nurse Lychorida being conveyed by Gower, the narrator-figure, swinging a scarf over her nose and mouth from behind. 

Costumes aside, the actual stage setting was turned into a makeshift map of the hero’s peregrinations, and some of the main narrative points (“MARINA R.I.P.”, for example). The characters took turns in tagging the pleasantly authentic brown paper which covered the stage background. This both helped our understanding of the play’s developments and hindered our enjoyment of their dramatization of it: while characters were engaged in pivotal moments of the plot, in the background their fellow actors would be squeakily and distractingly scribbling their current status (generally, the options were dead or alive). 

The cast themselves were bursting with enthusiasm. The desperate King of Tarsus pulls off his balancing act between extravagance and self-pity, comic scepticism and heartfelt gratitude. The same actor had, in the opening scene, been a fabulously gaudy and truculent Antiochus, the incestuous King. Helicanus, Pericles’ councillor, was convincingly rigorous and upstanding as the loyal and straight-talking man of state. His capacity for conversion was also impressive, as he donned a coat of unforgettable pink mohair and lace night cap to play the Bawd. His nasal-voiced mincing was farcically over-the-top, as he literally vibrated with outrage at Marina’s virtuous triumph over the clients he presents her with.

He and his co-actress switched genders to play their respective roles as Pandar and Bawd. The transformation of Pandar’s posture, accent and tone was equally remarkable, given that instants beforehand she had been the nobly devout princess of Pentapolis, Pericles’ queen and mother to Marina. Likewise, she had been a good evil figure as Dionyza, the calculating and deceitful queen of Tarsus, boasting a brilliantly Machiavellian chuckle and two-faced facial expressions. Despite this drastic change in style, the grotesque pair made by Pandar and Pimp had the audience frankly laughing at their sheer lewdness, as they deftly played on lines like “are you a woman” (asked of an actor blatantly in drag).

Gower’s clear diction and dramatic poise warrant praise, as do his incredibly rapid metamorphoses in the “tournament” scene, in which he embodies a hilarious stream of caricatural princes vying for Thaisa’s hand in marriage. Her father, King Simonides, was an adorably contented figure, eager to see his daughter wed and not overly subtle about it either (notably, “What do you think of my daughter?”). Eavesdropping with delicious innocence, he carried off his portrayal of a besotted father and pliable king effectively. Marina, for her part, jumped around with a naive and gold-hearted playfulness which suited her reputation as a “paragon” of innocence and grace, and almost undoes the assassin Dionyza mandated to kill her out of envy.

The one low point in terms of acting was, astonishingly, the play’s hero, Pericles himself. He started off at a somewhat flat vocal level, so that his speech often sounded like a droning recitation He tripped up in a number of monologues or every few lines in the dialogues, and once or twice garbled scene endings, perhaps, in his defence, because of the rapid pace of the play. His body language was also distinctly jarring, perpetually cross armed, and if not then hands in pockets; while he seriously lacked virulence in his reactions (his horror at learning of the royal incest at Antiochus is quietly non-existent). Admittedly, the cast were not unilaterally perfect either, also occasionally stumbling in their lines. It must be said that Pericles’ performance improved vastly as he warmed up, as with his persuasively sheepish singing bit as he charms the Pentapolan court in a bid to win their trust (and their princess). Mercifully, he finally reached believable levels of dramatic engagement by the time his wife died in childbirth.

Pericles’ ingenious, hands-on approach to staging demonstrated great inventiveness. Self-consciously theatrical, it managed to join lighting to text thanks to a superbly in-sync tech crew. Stark, white lighting was a good choice for the first tragic crux of play, Thaisa’s “death”. And when Thaisa is more or less magically brought to life in the recovery scene, the dimmed, amber-tinted lighting and beam-strung fairy lights were a technical match for the scene’s live, mystical chanting, while her revival was mimicked by increasing the brightness.

All in all then, this production of Pericles is a really innovative take on a quite ramshackle, but fertile, piece of Shakespearean drama. Although things fell apart during the performance (crate tumbling, glasses spinning across the boards, the land “ridges” on the background map steadily falling off with surprisingly loud clatters), setting and props were fantastically exploited by the imaginative team.

On a side note, it’s always good to see a production break from gender specificity, and the earnestness with which the actors take on their multiple roles testifies that they – rightly – fear no ridicule. With live guitar playing and singing, they are versatile and deft at keeping the stage feeling like an on-going party. And if the price of boisterousness is a slight tendency for miniature technical catastrophes, this cast is far too compelling and creative for us to hold it against them, and Pericles makes for a riotous, genuinely fun night of theatre.

“You can’t really fuck around with Beckett”. This is the rueful admission of Will Felton, director of Endgame. The notoriously recalcitrant playwright took an extremely dim view of people taking even the tiniest liberties with his meticulously-scripted texts. He even took legal action against a 1984 production of the play for having the audacity to move the action to a disused subway station. The limitations placed on any production of Endgame are particularly intense- characters are lame, blind and confined to bins. 

The risk is thus a play of impenetrable, interminable repetition. The cast told me that they had taken pains to find the human characters within the recursive dialogue, resisting the temptation to act in an artificial, stagey manner. Their desire, I am told, is to find the “viscerally human” story within the text. They do admirably well. 

As Hamm, Luke Howarth takes centre stage like a mad frog emperor, eyes shrouded in blackened goggles and mouth flapping manically away. His gravelly tones bestow him with the necessary authority to order around his grovelling lackey Clov, played with an air of building and sullen resentment by Jamie Biondi. Though Beckett’s script centres around stasis, there is a sense of building tension between the two. Biondi perhaps handles this relationship better, keeping his emotions barely in check as he half-stomps, half-limps around the stage. Howarth’s unerring disdain for Clov lacks this nuance. As a spectacle, though, his performance is magnetic, a toadlike king ruling over his gammy-legged toady with supreme disdain. 

Interestingly, the actors told me that this dynamic only evolved when they put down their scripts after the read-through and began to physically rehearse the play. Vocally, Hamm rules the roost- physically, Clov is God. This staging is not without its problems (cheers, Beckett). As the only character with the (limited) use of his legs, Biondi is forced for the sake of the narrative to be constantly on the move, ferrying props around as he orbits the squat and complacent Howarth. To make all this action and rearrangement of the set appear unforced is a challenge Biondi is yet to fully rise to. However, he gets bonus points for an excellent slapstick routine involving an errant flea in his pubes- a dilemma to which we can all relate.

The legless, half-deaf and near-blind duo of Nell (Dina Tsesarsky) and Nagg (Thomas Toles) bicker like Statler and Waldorf recuperating from a serious heroin overdose. Immense praise is due to the American Toles, not only for defying the transatlantic divide by mimicking Tsesarsky’s voice precisely, but also for his commendable attempt at an Irish brogue. This feat aside, he is the standout performer, rubber-faced and gently crazed. Nagg is Hamm’s father, and Toles’ performance is a wistfully faded and marginally more insane version of Howarth’s.

Tsesarsky, like Biondi, has the difficult task of taking the more understated role in her partnership and ensuring it is not drowned out by her husband’s mad orations. At the moment, the dominant personalities in the play are swamping the more submissive. Tsesarksy’s performance is something of a pale imitation of Toles’. Though this is in part a product of her character’s less effusive nature, she faces the challenge of establishing a distinct persona for herself within the confines of an oil-drum and a relatively passive presence within the script.

In the two scenes I see, the two pairs of characters do not really interact. Come 8^th week at the Burton Taylor, it will be interesting to see how they come together to draw out the unerring sense of impending doom from Beckett’s richly ambiguous script. Endgame will almost certainly be excellent. 

Endgame will be performed at 7:30pm at the BT Studio from Tuesday 3rd to Saturday 7th December. Tickets are available here

Tuesday’s opening night of the Edgar Wind Society’s first ever exhibition ‘The Material’, at Freud, was intensely cool. The president of the society, Tori McKenna, selected five artists from the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art to exhibit, including Sonia Bernaciak, Mateo Revillo Imbernon (and his friend Juluan Mignot from Paris), Irina Iordache, Louisa Siem and Lili Pickett-Palmer, who were all present and ready to offer an insight into their inspired works.

Do you know the secret to making the best paper airplane in the world, how to grow a crystal, or how to find north in the dark?

Most of the time, writers don’t talk like they write. It’s no bad thing: watch Midnight in Paris, and you’ll realise how much of a prat Hemingway might have sounded.

But Conn Iggulden does – and if you’ve ever had the pleasure of flicking through The Dangerous Book for Boys, you’ll be glad to hear it. There’s a lot of common sense, a hearty dollop of nostalgia, a wonderfully romantic idea of what the world really ought to be like – and an infectious joie de vivre.

His practicality and his idealism have been playing off one another since he first started writing books at the ripe old age of thirteen. For all his mother’s sensible advice (“you need to know about people”), the young novelist proved stubborn: “Rubbish, I’ll write about dragons”.

Unsurprisingly, the first few attempts never came to much. “I tried a few dragons”, Iggulden recalls, chuckling particularly at the memory of a Catholic conspiracy thriller: “I was way in advance of The Da Vinci Code, by the way.”

His fervent conception of how things should work – and from the sounds of things, his general enthusiasm – were sorely tried by his university degree, in English Literature at what is now Queen Mary’s. Talking to friends elsewhere – “a Cambridge history degree is a hardcore history degree” – he was certain that he was losing out somewhat, but his experience seems fairly typical. “My English degree was very much the old-fashioned idea: you stick young interested people in a room with books and hope something rubs off. There was very little actual teaching.” 

Friday night saw a lot of quasi-lefty-arty types gather together for the grand opening of Aidan Meller’s second Oxford enterprise: a new gallery on Broad Street which specialises in in Pre-Raphaelite art. The place with packed with potential buyers ready to soak up the atmosphere and the free champagne.

The gallery displays and sells sketches, prints, and objects created by the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood and their surrounding circle. These were a group of painters, poets and critics in the mid-19^th century whose aim was to create art in a way that was true to nature; more true than the art produced by the establishment, the Royal Academy.

Now, Pre-Raphaelite art is associated with the high-conservatism of the Victorian age but when the movement started it was considered to be radical and even subversive. Fighting against the artificial strictures it believed academicians had imposed upon art from the top down, it strongly identified with the socialist movement. Leading figures like John Ruskin and William Morris were prominent social theorists who believed in the social function of art. They thought that, at its core, art is a great educator. The teaching of art, Ruskin said, is “the teaching of all things” and thus it should be available to everyone, no matter their class, wealth or education.

Hence it is appropriate that Meller’s gallery is in Oxford, the great city of education. This is even more so because, as Meller explained in his welcoming speech, Oxford has strong ties with the Pre-Raphaelites. Two of its key members William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones met as students at Exeter College and Dante Gabriel-Rossetti got married in St Michael at the Northgate Church. Many of the colleges house works of pre-Raphaelite art. These include the stained glass windows in Christ Church and Harris Manchester and perhaps most famously Holman-Hunt’s The Light of the World in Keble College Chapel. The Ashmolean also has an internationally recognised collection and the Union is home to the celebrated Rossetti murals. In some ways, it is fantastic that there is another platform in Oxford for us, as students, to learn about the cultural history of the city. It is helping the art to live out its didactic function.

I am troubled, however, as to whether the gallery can really be said to be championing art in the way the movement intended. We must interrogate whether a space which commercialises and commoditizes art as object-for-consumption is loyal to a movement that was deeply socialist and, at its heart, egalitarian. The Pre-Raphaelite artists helped to set up the first state museum, the Victoria and Albert (you can still eat in the William Morris designed dining room today). But a gallery whose existence is founded upon the sale of art undermines that socialist agenda.

I speak to Meller about this, and he tells me that the gallery makes at least one sale every day it is open. The cost of the art works range from £300 – £250,000 and the average price of the pieces on sale at the opening was £11,000. He details at some length the success the art world is having at the moment; but by this he meant financial success, mentioning the Giacometti which recently sold for $50 million and Munch’s The Scream which went for $120 million. Of course, we could now add the latest record breakers, the $142 million Francis Bacon triptych and the $105 million Andy Warhol to that list.

Meller explains that the reason for this boom lay in the decreased size of the market. As works are sold, originals become a rarer commodity which in turn pushes the prices up. Meller is clearly thrilled by this. He asserts that the purpose of his gallery was to help us get into that market and have a part in the success. We, too, could “take things home with us”.

Yet as a student for whom £11, 000 is more than a year’s tuition and a term’s maintenance loan put together, I could not help but be sceptical about this. There is no way I will be taking home any of this art in the next year, probably even in the next 10 years given the current state of the graduate job market. I’m more concerned about actually being able to afford a home. Nor am I really persuaded that owning art was desirable. Meller’s message was incoherent and decidedly hypocritical. At first, he seemed to be championing the educative and socialist function of art and its role the public sphere, but swiftly turned to how we could secrete this art away into our own homes and remove it from public view.

Therefore the only thing I can exhort you to do is to get down to the gallery as quickly as possible. Let this art live out its original purpose by learning from it before it is sold.  

Handel’s Hercules, acclaimed as one of the masterpieces of its age, comes to Oxford later this month. The faintly absurd plot is put in modern dress, with vocals provided by a talented young cast of some of Oxford’s finest.

David le Provost excels in the title role, bringing dramatic immediacy supported by a fine voice to the tragic hero, with a firm command of both the stage and Handel’s fiendish score. Likewise Johanna Harrison as Dejanira, Hercules’ accidentally-murderous wife, owns the compulsory mad scene, alternately seeing Furies and despairing all over the floor. Edward Edgcumbe’s Lichas does remarkably well to maintain dramatic interest with sparse staging and lengthy arias to contend with.

Warming into her musical role throughout the preview was Tara Mansfield’s Iole, culminating in one of Handel’s exquisitely gentle show-stoppers as the captured princess comforts the weeping Dejanira. Singing quite high and very loud is Andrew Hayman as Hyllus, Hercules’ tenor son; a difficult role to make something of, being awkwardly balanced between the tenor-love-interest-type and the Baroque-bit-part-type.

Here is a cast that will undoubtedly give very fine performances, provided they can escape the slight sense that arms are a relic from Handel’s time which nobody’s quite sure what to do with. James Potter conducts, and demonstrates strong musical conviction for what Handel’s score is capable of; letting the drama through but never losing sight of beauty.

The confused identity of Handel’s opera/oratorio/thing presents a challenge for any director, one which Isaac Louth has surmounted, allowing the drama and Handel’s glorious music precedence at all times – if you’d like another side of Hercules to the Disney hero with floppy locks, you could do worse than this.

Oxford Opera’s Handel will play from 21st to 23rd November at the Church of St John the Evangelist, Iffley Road, OX4 1EH Oxford.