For the hundredth time, I have to bite back the reply that The Woman in Black isn’t scary at all – it is actually full of bunnies and rainbows.

I’m working as an usher at a the Fortune theatre.There is something especially unique about working in a theatre that has housed the same ghost story for almost a quarter of a century. 

It may, perhaps, seem surprising that this is London’s second longest-running play (The Mousetrap takes first place). It is an extremely simple production with a rather clichéd plot and very few effects, what with (officially) only two actors on the stage and an extremely sparse array of props. 

Part of the explanation may be that the play now seems to be tied to this tiny, old theatre which has, somehow, become part of the set, with rumours of ghosts haunting the building itself. The intimate auditorium lends itself to creating the perfect atmosphere of isolation, on which the play’s suspense-filled moments depend.

The fact that this is a ‘play within a play’ provides a meta-theatrical experience which can be, in turns, both comforting and unsettling. While there may only be two characters on stage most of the time, their lively and occasionally
humorous dialogue means that you soon start to collude with them. You quickly supplement the scarcity of props with your imagination, sharing this experience with the actors as well as your fellow audience members. 

So much of the play relies on the audience’s imagination, which makes the Woman herself much more of a terrifying figure: the boundary between reality and fiction becomes blurred. Indeed, this probably explains why there are myths surrounding the play itself. There are always a few audience members adamant that no aisle seat is safe, or convinced that they saw something out of the corner of their eye. It may be set in another era but the investment of the audience’s minds in the events on stage maintains a timeless connection, enthralling you in a way that few other plays can do. The active role, that the audience has no choice but to take, is what, primarily, explains its continued existence in the West End. It is what makes this play worth not just seeing, but experiencing.

In her debut novel, published this April, Meike Ziervogel reinvigorates a topic that has been visited countless times before. Magda sees the rise and fall of Nazi Germany through the perspectives of three women: Magda Goebbels, the wife of Hitler’s propaganda minister, her daughter Helga, and her mother. Effortlessly unifying fact and fiction, Ziervogel’s exclusive use of female perspective to broach the subject of life under Nazi rule is a bold decision that pays off; Magda becomes as much about destructive mother-daughter relationships as it is about Hitler’s innermost circle of Nazi associates, and is a novel with deeper reaching implications because of it.

The author’s portrayal of how it is impossible to grow up untainted by the cruelties of Nazi rule is brutal; she masterfully exposes how the concept of childhood is distorted and broken in the suffocating confines of Hitler’s bunker, putting the reader in the difficult position of empathising with the enemy. Heavy irony abounds in Magda; the use of ‘Dear Gretchen’ to begin the diary account of Helga’s experience of growing up confined in Hitler’s bunker draws a painfully bitter parallel with Anne Frank’s own ‘Dear Kitty’, collapsing the conventional dichotomies between victim and oppressor the reader may expect.  This is part of Ziervogel’s intention to show how every relationship in the novel is toxic, the characters’ capacity for love eaten away by the awareness that their lives as the most powerful and untouchable citizens in Germany are coming to an end.

Where Ziervogel really shines is in her expert handling of the narrative’s chronology; weaving back and forth over different points in the three women’s lives, she enables the reader to piece together an innate understanding of the motives behind Magda Goebbels, the woman who was capable of murdering her six children when she knew Germany has been defeated. While this makes for uneasy, and sometimes agonising reading, the end result is worth it; one comes away unable to forget Ziervogel’s haunting insight into one of the Nazi’s most notorious female members.

It is billed as “the first major museum retrospective of this innovative and influential artist’s photographic portraits”. Man Ray: Portraits is an exhibition that doesn’t disappoint. The National Portrait Gallery is currently displaying many singularly beautiful images that have never before been shown in Britain.

Rare works are exhibited alongside familiar favourites, such as Le Violon d’Ingres (1924),and Noire et Blanche (1926). The 150 works are presented chronologically: from his formative years in New York 1916–20; through his experience of the avant-garde of Paris 1921–28, 1929–37; into Hollywood 1940–50 and Paris 1951–76. This exhibition constructs an all-but-definitive list of the artistic and cultural behemoths of the period. Contextually as well as compositionally, the works are engrossing and entertaining. 

Man Ray’s description of Hemingway, alongside the 1923 portrait, “a tall young man… with his hair low on his forehead, a clear complexion and a small moustache” hardly does justice to the the intensity of the author’s frank and uncompromising gaze. Man Ray’s penetrating scrutiny is evident in each of the works of the exhibition. The intensity in the eyes of each figure (where visible) is thrillingly expressive. 

At times, though, I felt the lack of inclusion of art in other media limited my appreciation of certain works, such as stills of avant-garde films, La Retour á la Raison (1923) and Emak Bakia (1926). 

Undeniably, there is much to be fascinated by in this well executed exhibition: the meticulous and subtle composition of each portrait, the survey of Ray’s use of innovative photographic techniques, and the surrealist humour that dances through these playful works. One photograph showed fellow Dadaist, Marcel Duchamp, uncannily disguised in drag. 

This retrospective not only provides a narrative of the artist’s photographic career, but shows the development and legitimisation of photography as an art form. The closing portrait in the exhibition – of French actress Catherine Deneuve, 1968 – is a final, potent, compelling testament to the unique power and potential of the photograph. And for this, perhaps above all else, I do not hesitate to recommend a visit to the exhibition before it closes on 27th May.

While studying law at London School of Economics and Sheffield, Hilary Mantel’s favourite non-academic activities at university were ‘sex and housekeeping’. In the surprisingly prudish age of the 1970s, Mantel had to marry her boyfriend in order for them to live together.

She explains, ‘no one would rent us a flat without a marriage certificate, and we couldn’t afford to pay rent twice, even if we’d wanted to. Even in those days of grants and no fees, the system didn’t always work and students could find themselves very poor.’

I ask Mantel whether her flair for writing showed itself when she was a student. It turns out that initially, writing was not something that came naturally to her at all.

‘When I went to LSE to study law I had no thought of being a writer in the creative sense of the word. I had a serviceable style and sometimes a flash turn of phrase, but I felt style breaking down under the pressure of answer- ing ‘problems’ in a set format and reading case law. It took me a year for my prose to regain flexibility.’

For Mantel, university was a time that revealed to her ‘a huge frustration about the way life could have been.’ Arriving two years after the activism of 1968, she was ‘a bit late to be a student revolutionary, and to be truthful, I’d already got through that stage. But it’s probably no accident that my characters in A Place Of Greater Safety were revolutionaries and lawyers.’ Mantel started writing her first novel in 1974, a work centred on the French revolution. Though she spent her twenties writing it, it was not published until much later in her life.

Meanwhile, the Law Faculty lost track of Mantel, who preferred to spend her time in psychology lectures and the University’s Labour Club. In fact, being a Labour Club girl is what helped her realise that ‘politics, besides being desperately serious, was desperately funny’ – a sense of humour that has translated directly into her books.

Mantel moved to Sheffield part-way through her course at LSE to be with her boyfriend. She says, ‘there were some difficult events in both our families, and they drove us together rather than apart’. She didn’t make friends in Sheffield, however, though her Geologist boyfriend (and future husband) enjoyed the camaraderie of university field trips. They also struggled to make ends meet: ‘I devoted myself to the art of shrewd shopping and stewing cheap cuts. We were very ingenious with two electric rings and probably ate better than we do now.’

Mantel remembers working very hard – too hard to take up student theatre – ‘though maybe not at my subject’, she admits. However, law did in fact influence Mantel’s writing in unforseen ways. She explains, ‘lawyers have a way of thinking and reasoning that’s hard for non-lawyers to pick up.’ Translating this into her two Man Booker prize winning novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, has been her life’s endeavour, and she is now being
richly rewarded with critical and popular success. Whilst Mantel does not attribute this solely to her diverse university experience, she has certainly been influenced by her unorthodox path through the pit-falls of post-adolescent life.

And after all, ‘the more ways of thinking you have, the better.’

The soundtrack to Spring Breakers was compiled largely by Cliff Martinez, famed for his work for the Drive soundtrack, and Skrillex himself, the hooded horseman of the dance music apocalypse. As evident in the unlikely pairing of the two, the album, like the film itself, is about extremes, hopping from meditative ambience to the garish and abrasive. It opens with Skrillex’s distinctive anthem, ‘Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites’, a song that sounds like the aural equivalent of a Jägerbomb and sets the scene for the rest of the record – that is, a fantastic pastiche of a particular brand of American teen culture.

This ebb and flow of original incidental music interspersed with pre-existing dance and hip-hop songs continues throughout the record, with a Skrillex remix of Birdy Nam Nam’s ‘Goin’ In’ filling in for the EDM whilst Waka Flocka Flame and Gucci Mane provide the hip-hop. A rare occurrence in Flocka’s ‘Fuck This Industry’ sees the rapper sound less like a snare drum than usual, as he trades in his yelling for a softer, more restrained whisper. It goes beyond a novel inclusion of signature party music but shows considered compilation, as Waka Flocka Flame of all people begins to sound introspective.

The penultimate track, which had me guffawing in the cinema as I recognized Martinez’s strings carving out the melody to Skrillex’s ‘Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites’ in the aptly titled ‘Scary Monsters on Strings’. Yet as much as I enjoyed the music whilst watching the film or think that the songs are tastefully chosen, the record on its own isn’t all that enjoyable.

Conceptually, it works. In tandem with the film, it works. Divorced of its context, however, the album loses its humour and its novelty, and the combination of “ambience and abrasive” begins to turn into mere boredom and annoyance.

Download: ‘Fuck This Industry’

Finally, the follow-up to 2009’s breakthrough Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix is here. Its been four years since the French quartet’s last offering, with standout tracks such as ‘1901’ and ‘Liztomania’, and it seems as if these last four years have been time well spent with an altogether more experimental, and more ambiguous, ‘sound’ being displayed on their forthcoming album Bankrupt!
First-single ‘Entertainment’ shows a foregrounding of the 80s Depeche Mode-style synths which offer an insanely catchy, Japanese-tinged, pop with the synths in question being reminiscent of the sort of thing you’d find in a year 7 music class. This doesn’t override the album and becomes interspersed by moments of straight-forward guitar-driven rock, similar in style to smore mainstream synth-rock bands such as the Killers or Bastille.

The French-rockers have always been branded as peripheral, and oozing indie. However, this is not necessarily true of their latest offering. Although often characterised with their ambiguous and intelligent song-writing, their ‘sound’ remains very much accessible especially in tracks such as ‘Everything is Everything’. Continuously catchy, the group seem to focus on creating a well-written song before considering the experimental aspect, of their material which is subtly interwoven.

Although very much a progression from the band’s previous offerings, Phoenix still musically borrow from Wolfgang. The title track is similar to ‘Love Like a Sunset’, which slowly yet interestingly builds to some sort of climax in the final few minutes. However, unlike the explosive blast in ‘Sunset’, ‘Bankrupt!’ plateaus and ends on a gentler note. With Bankrupt! Phoenix offer a musically and lyrically more mature album, still catchy, still experimental, and still a great listen.

Download: ‘Entertainment’

As you enter the British Museum’s reconstituted Reading Room, you are immediately presented with what this exhibition is all about: the quotidian. That is to use the term in its most literal sense. For all its devastation, the eruption of Vesuvias in A.D. 79 immaculately preserved snapshots of everyday Roman life.

The range of exhibits is impressive, but what makes this exhibition unique is the juxtaposition of everyday objects (furniture, cooking implements), ‘organic matter’ (food, animals, people) and art. Books and exhibitions centred around Rome often concentrate on art over life, or life over art. This exhibition successfully interweaves the two; still life frescos of food are situated next to carbonised loaves of bread, and guard dog mosaics are exhibited beside the remains of an actual guard dog.

In keeping with this synthesis of art and life, the various rooms of the exhibition mimic the rooms of a Roman villa. So the lights dim as you enter the ‘cubiculum’ to convey the lack of natural light in Roman bedrooms; the ‘hortus’ is accompanied by birdsong; and the ‘atrium’ contains an ‘impluvium’ (though the water isn’t real, as the mother of a child who fell in discovered to her relief). Thankfully, though, there is no compromise on what, for me, was the main attraction: the art of these two Roman towns.

In ancient times, houses were decorated by painting directly onto the walls. Because these frescos were an inextricable part of the house, when the fabric of the building perished, so too did the frescos, leaving a lamentably small proportion of painted scenes from antiquity. The preserved villa walls of Pompeii are a satisfying exception.

And what a selection the British Museum has! The infamous erotic frescos include a much-overlooked painting where a man teaches his lover how to play the lyre. There is a spectacular full-size mock-up of the House of the Golden Bracelet’s garden room – a paradigm of Second style trompe l’oeil, peppered with birds and foliage. My favourite is the quasi-Orientalising lararium fresco from the House of Iucundus, which features Dionysus sauntering down the slopes of a still intact Vesuvius. The looming presence of the volcano is never far away, and the exhibition ends with several corpse casts. The most sensational of these was fashioned by pouring epoxy resin into the cavity left behind in the volcanic ash by the decomposing body.

Still, the exhibition is not without its flaws. Those exquisitely haunting bodies, for example, are tucked away in corners and under sloping rooflines. I realise this is an accurate representation of how they perished – cramped and cowering in their houses – but this section would benefit by being viewable in the round, just like the Nereids in Gallery 17. Even so, I cannot recommend the experience enough. One warning: cave capram. Pan’s bestiality is not for the faint-hearted.

It requires a second glance at the press release to confirm that Dog Is Dead’s debut album, All Our Favourite Stories, was only released six months ago, in October 2012. This band’s infectious hooks, four-part harmonies and soaring solos seem like they’ve been around forever, and we certainly can’t imagine how we got by before they burst onto the scene. We caught up with bassist (and saxophonist!) Lawrence ‘Trev’ Cole, one of the three founding members of Dog Is Dead, now a five piece to see what was going on with the band ahead of their new headline UK tour.

Beginning at the beginning, Trev tells us how the band came into being, meeting at school in Nottingham and playing “Jamie T covers and talent shows”. We don’t ask whether the saxophone found its way into any Jamie T covers, but it’s certainly clear that their music has come a long way since those days. One of the most distinctive parts of Dog Is Dead’s sound is their use of powerful, almost choir-like four-part harmonies, and Trev explains that although this lends a folky feel to the songs on occasion, they are ”definitely not New Folk”. It’s a movement that he says the band has a lot of respect for, but Dog Is Dead’s music is more about “making good pop music and putting our own weird angle on it”.

He really opens up as our conversation turns to the aspects of being in a band which he evidently enjoys the most. He explains that a Dog Is Dead gig is basically just “five guys losing their shit on stage” and speaks of his love of the “wild abandon” of a music festival where “everyone’s looking for a party”. The final track on All Our Favourite Stories, an outtake track from the studio, shows more of the band’s funny side. A highlight is a heated argument among the band about keyboardist Joss Van Wilder’s views on Italian (“it’s basically just French with ‘o’s on the end”). Telling the story behind this extraordinary exchange, Trev explains that for single ‘Talk Through The Night’ they wanted it to have a party track in the background, but had to make it themselves. This process moved swiftly from “surrounding one mic [making] awkward party noises” to the band chatting among themselves to the moment when “Joss sprang that one on the group and things got a bit… heated”. This all adds up to something that Trev really wants to be made known, that the band have a good time, explaining that when he was younger he always preferred it if the band he liked looked like they were enjoying themselves. It’s clear from our conversation that Lawrence Cole is loving life in Dog Is Dead both on stage and in the studio and he’s right, that does make us that little bit happier.

Nixon returns to the Oxford Union for the third time with Peter Morgan’s
Frost/Nixon, staged in 4th week in the debate chamber – the venue that hosted the former President’s two visits to the place in 1958 and 1978. You would be forgiven for thinking the two previous visits were made by different men. In 1958, Nixon was Vice-President in an administration that oversaw the birth of NASA and a mutual agreement between Russia, the UK and the USA to stop developing armaments for three years.

Come 1978, it was an entirely different story. Nixon had resigned over the Watergate scandal, in which it had emerged that his cronies wiretapped his opponents to gain an electoral advantage. More than that – Nixon himself had been involved in covering up the crime. His resignation had simply been a way of avoiding shameful impeachment. That year, the whole debacle had just reached catharsis. It had also been a year since an infamous set of interviews conducted by David Frost. The sensational no-holds-barred conversations pulled in audiences of over 45 million viewers in America alone. It remains the largest ever television audience for a political interview. Nixon admitted that he had disgraced the presidential office. But he also dropped the bombshell: “I believe it’s not illegal if the president does it”.

As a result the televised interviews – conceived as an attempt to raise his profile – tanked, while the interviews sent Frost’s career into the stratosphere. A poll showed 75% of viewers thought Nixon had no more role to play in public life.

The play is infused with a real sense of competitiveness between the two sides; the Frost and Nixon camps rehearsing separately. The directors see the chamber as a boxing ring, and projections of people filming the show live will give the audience the sense of a TV show. Nixon was not a man who gave up easily. His 1978 trip to Europe was a bid to re-establish himself as a speaker with an agenda to make a difference in the world, and to promote his recently published memoirs. Among his stops were the Sorbonne, Berlin and Oxford. The Union, then a conservative-leaning organization, had invited him to speak in great secret. For security reasons, he was not even on the termcard for the Michaelmas when he visited. Even while the event was going on, the level of security was very high: Nixon’s men from the Security Service scoured the building for potential threats, and a whole wing of the Radcliffe Infirmary was reserved in case anything happened. There was so much public interest that the event was restricted to life members. Needless to say, the number of life memberships rapidly jumped following the disclosure of the visit.

Much like the visit of Julian Assange earlier this year, Nixon’s appearance attracted a great deal of controversy. Although Union memberships were snapped up on news of the visit, not everyone wanted to hear what Nixon had to say. A protest was organized by American graduate student Andy Paalborg, who studied at Pembroke at the time. Paalborg was intent on stopping Nixon benefitting from the prestige of Oxford and on hampering Nixon’s plans of only speaking at conservative societies to ensure a good reception. He managed to attract the attention of the international media to his protest by publicising that a large protest was planned – and the news reached papers all over the world. When Nixon arrived on the night in a black limousine, he was pelted with eggs. Paalborg told Cherwell, “There were 12 arrests that day. The protesters surged toward his car and rocked it back and forth.” The protesters allegedly numbered in the hundreds and carried anti-Nixon banners. They crowded around the Union as Nixon delivered his speech, tuning into the BBC to listen in to the address and shouting “Bullshit!” among other cries of disagreement during the Question Time-style session.

Although those who attended the event testify that the protests were not too disruptive, the demonstration was covered across the Atlantic. Paalborg and his protest was splashed across the British and American news channels whilst Time magazine published photos of the protesters. Some opine that the protests were the result of Oxford’s left at the time revolting against conservatism: Anti-Nixon sentiment merely provided a convenient excuse for action. The Union then was less open to all ends of the political spectrum as it is today. The term card cnsisted mostly, if not to say exclusively, of rightwing speakers.

There was at the same time a strong communist, even neo-Trotskyite, anti-American contingent that was trying to raise the profile of OUSU which was then a newly-born and penniless association. But what did Nixon actually speak about? Not that much to do with the burning topic of Watergate, apparently, although of course it was the thing that everyone wanted to hear about following the Frost interviews. Instead, he focused on looking forward: he spoke about the threat posed to the world by the Soviet Union, and how the West (which he defined as Japan, the US, the UK, Canada and Europe) can compete with the Communist states.

His only comments about the big scandal that brought him down were reluctantly made during question time, when he admitted “I screwed it up” and “I made a mistake”.