There is nothing different about this new performance of the Tennessee Williams classic, The Glass Menagerie, set in 1930s America. Four actors act out the four characters, there is an attempt to employ American accents; the characters are played as you would expect. Yet, I didn’t find this boring. It wasn’t a tiresome performance – it didn’t feel overdone or generic. Looked at from an objective standpoint, there is nothing particularly special about this perfor­mance. And yet it all worked.

Andy Laithwaite introduces the play as Tom, the narrator, and, after getting off to a shaky start, he smoked his fake cigarette with confi­dence and style and introduced the audience to a seemingly normal American family. After a few lines, once the actors had warmed up and, in Miles Lawrence’s case, actually used their Ameri­can accents, all four of them were exciting to watch and easy to engage with.

Katie McGunagle was particularly thrilling, with her monologues oozing passion and despair as she realised that her daughter had secretly left business school, and Miles Lawrence’s depiction of Jim was patronising and condescending, just how Williams would have imagined him.

What works really well in The Glass Menagerie is the relationships between the actors. They are playing a family who love and care about each other but also dislike and fight with one another and this idea was thoroughly explored and un­derstood is the raw portrayal of emotion shared between McGunagie and Claire Bowman. The relationship too, between Lawrence and Bow­man was awkward, with the audience instantly sympathising with the character of Laura. The audience can immediately sense the chemistry between them – a friendly atmosphere reigns and one suspects that they are all the closest of chums (at least off stage). I can only imagine that this will become even more apparent by 3rd week when they have practised and perfected the scenes to a higher degree.

Of course, there were some elements of the play that, this being a preview, I did not get to en­joy. The director informed me of the “deliciously large stage” at Corpus Christi where the play is to be staged, but the the little room we were in did not compare to that. With all the set and costumes in place, I can imagine this play being both intense and exciting.

The relationships between both the char­acters and actors are intriguing and I highly recommend this show. Whilst there’s nothing obviously new about it, it’s a faithful and raw production of a classic, and this reviewer can rec­ommend it without hesitation.

Ashurbanipal, to be staged at LMH in 4th week, is a dramatisation of the decay of the ancient civilization of Assyria, under the king Ashurbanipal. Selena Wisnom, a DPhil student in Cuneiform Studies, is an expert in the Assyrian civilization and is incorporating ancient texts into the play for the highest pos­sible historical accuracy. The lyrical dialogues replicate classical tragedies, and the play’s structure follows the classical rules. This pro­duction, however, takes the classical tragedy elements and overlays them with modern sur­realism, making it a unique venture onto the Oxford drama scene. Selena is the first person since Kaiser Wilhelm II to attempt a dramatic representation of the period.

 Ashurbanipal is accentuated by very eye-catching choreography. In one scene the king’s sister, while counseling the king, eats grapes from a plate, with a regular, angular and styl­ized arm gesture picking up grapes one by one as she talks. The actors’ every movement across the stage is stilted and mechanic. Tom Stell, the director, tells me the inspiration for the actors’ mechanized gestures comes from ancient As­syrian friezes depicting people’s movements, in two dimensions – the aim for Ashurbanipal is to reenact these friezes on stage, producing the effect for the audience of watching shadow puppets on stage.

The actors’ heavy black and white makeup will accentuate the silhouette vision, and their monochrome costumes, including gloves so that no inch of skin is visible, add to the sur­realism and the distance felt between the au­dience and the statuesque characters on stage. The soundtrack to the production is perhaps the most surprising element: the lyrical script and stylized movement are overlaid with bursts of student-composed heavy metal. The heavy metal ties into Tom’s vision of a “height­ened grotesque, dark and a bit camp. Heavy metal is so out that it doesn’t take itself seri­ously”.

 Tom aims to put different things together to “make Ashurbanipal its own world”. He points out the attachment, in the Oxford dra­ma scene, of having plays in a specific time pe­riod and setting. The aim with Ashurbanipal is to break with this; Selena agrees with him that a play “doesn’t have to be relevant to be inter­esting. Stuff should be fun, it doesn’t have to be useful.”

The obscurity of Ashurbanipal’s subject mat­ter shouldn’t discourage you from going to watch it. With its unique mix of surrealism, lyrical poetry and a classical tragic storyline-punctuated by crashes of heavy metal- Ashur­banipal is sure to surprise and entertain.

At first glance, Love Is All You Need bears a close resemblance to musical mum-magnet, Mamma Mia. It’s set on a stunning Mediterranean island, it centres on a soon-to-be-wed couple and their parents, and it stars Pierce Brosnan. By some token of divine benevolence, he does not sing. There is a bit of dancing though. Swings and roundabouts, I guess.

The film follows Ida, a hairdresser who’s been having a tough time of it lately. Not only has she just finished a course of cancer treatment, but she’s also discovered that her husband is cheating on her. Still, things are looking up, as her daughter’s about to get married in Italy. On her way to the wedding she bumps into Philip, the groom’s father. Although a wealthy businessman, Philip’s personal life is far from perfect. He has avoided close relationships since the death of his wife; even becoming distant from his son, Patrick. His impatience clashes with the warm optimism of Ida. But while their children’s relationship falls apart during wedding preparations, Philip and Ida grow closer.

Pierce Brosnan’s job as a fruit and vegetable magnate lends itself to some highly entertaining lines: “Radishes are our top priority. Forget anything else!” This penchant for plants even extends to the couple’s bizarre fruit-based flirtation. “I couldn’t imagine a world without lemons,” Ida sighs passionately. “No, nor could I,” Brosnan smoulders, before delivering the worst chat-up line in history: “Did you know, botanically speaking, the lemon is a berry?” Phwoar – is it just me or is it getting a little hot in here? I can’t wait ‘til he tells her he used to work for MI6.

The trailer for Love Is All You Need downplays the fact that the majority of the film is in Danish; cannily luring in the unsuspecting, subtitle-averse English audience. It is amusing to watch Pierce heroically pretend to understand his colleagues, while never failing to reply to them in English. You’d think he’d have picked up a couple of words, seeing as he runs a successful company in Denmark and all.

The trajectory of the romance between Ida and Philip is clearly supposed to begin with mutual hatred. They make a half-hearted attempt at bickering in the taxi to the villa, but I never got the sense that they were anything more than ambivalent towards one another. The scenes between them felt stilted; made worse by an unnatural English dialogue riddled with clichés. On the other hand, the deteriorating relationship of the young fiancés was engaging and sensitively handled. Though maybe that’s just because my Danish is a bit rusty.

As a pleasant romcom with some well-executed subplots, Love Is All You Need is far from being a bad film. Trine Dryholm is endearing as Ida, and her cancer is handled with a tact which never veers towards sentimentality or melodrama. Unfortunately, the absence of originality and strong comic lines lets this film down.

When Dan Stevens decided he wanted to leave Downton Abbey, the writers and producers were faced with a problem. They couldn’t force Stevens to keep working – and yet it would be difficult to give Matthew an exit that made sense inside the show’s universe. Simply upping and leaving his responsibilities would be out of character. So they resolved to kill him off, invoking the ire of many of the show’s viewers, who found the death cheap and melodramatic (especially so soon after Jessica Brown Findlay had left in similar circumstances). This is a problem which affects a great deal of film and TV today: the connection between characters and the actors that play them.

The challenge facing most programme-makers is to achieve the ‘great lie’: ensuring characters and stories exist consistently within the rules of the world they have created. With regard to actors, this means that they must be ‘believable’– so you could imagine their character looking, sounding and acting like their facilitator. While occasionally there is a piece of woeful miscasting, people generally fit their roles at least passably (there is a whole industry based around casting). The larger issue is those actors who do it well. For some, this means typecasting – whether through their skill or natural similarities, in the audience’s eyes they are their character. Ironically, they have succeeded in creating a character so realistic that now their appearance anywhere else illuminates its artificiality.

So what do you do when actors leave?

Characters’ storylines often have to veer wildly from what may have been expected in order to fit with their actors’ lives. They age quicker, have other commitments and sometimes (in the most unfortunate of cases) pass away. Probably the most organic way to deal with an actor moving on is to simply replace the cast members with new characters that fill similar roles. This can vary in effect. In some cases it inspires greater creativity, as in Being Human. Necessity acted as the father of invention due to former cast members changing commitments, but new actors ended up revitalising later episodes after a sluggish season three. On the other hand, another genre show, Misfits, suffered from a question of relevance as the original cast almost all died, emigrated or were incarcerated. The introduction of new characters felt forced, and too much time was spent integrating them into the world whilst not entirely convincing us of their significance. By the end of series four, things looked more promising – but it had taken the length of those episodes to get there. More characters means more exposition, and that means less actual story.

Perhaps a simpler solution is just recasting a character. In The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Vivian Banks was recast a couple of seasons in, and despite the huge differences between the actresses there did not seem to be much of an effect on the show. More recently, Game of Thrones has occasionally recast minor characters whose importance has grown in later books. This can be jarring in a more basic way than characters behaving or leaving oddly, but if handled well it can maintain the quality of story to a greater degree. If the audience is willing to play along, there is no reason for the characters to leave with the actors.

Doctor Who and James Bond have built recasting into the very structure of their franchises. A weakness becomes a strength through the recognition that restructuring long-running characters is often a plus. In Doctor Who, the jarring effect of recasting even becomes canonical. Thanks to the ‘renewal’ idea brought in to replace original Doctor William Hartnell, by the Tom Baker era the show had the concept of ‘regeneration’ firmly in place. Admittedly this is easier in a science-fiction show where the rules are different, but the James Bond franchise’s approach (before it was the all-conquering juggernaut that it is today), kept the series fresh with every new 007. 

Could Downton’s Matthew have been saved? Probably not. The sight of Dan Stevens bursting with light and morphing into another actor would probably be too much even for the most die-hard of fans, and the structure of the show means that it couldn’t feasibly have been reconstructed without him. But it’s important to remember that actors don’t own characters, and that creative consistency is the most important thing.

Orwell was a dedicated Social Democrat, committed to fighting the twin evils of state oppression and inequality. This was the commitment that propelled him into fighting the Spanish Civil war, a campaign that would see him get shot through the neck by one of Franco’s snipers. However, for all his left-leaning credits it seems to be a truth not universally acknowledged that Orwell’s dedication to ending inequality was not something that always played out in his own life.

Orwell had a complicated relationship with women. In 1929, upon returning from Paris, Orwell met and hastily proposed to Brenda Salkeld, who rejected his offer but became a lifelong friend.

A few years later, Orwell married Eileen O’Shaughnessy. The marriage was marred by suspicion about Orwell’s continued correspondence with Salkeld, and the writer’s engagements in Spain. Indeed, Orwell set off to fight a foreign war only a few months after the wedding bells had ceased pealing.

O’Shaughnessy died in 1945, aged only 39, with her husband across the channel in France. It is reported that Orwell’s response to her death was characteristically muted. “Such a shame,” he purportedly said, “she was a good old stick”.

Although one should be wary of psychoanalysing the dead, it appears that Orwell’s attiutudes towards women can appear less than savoury. His personal diaries recount a meeting with a certain Mrs M. This lady “as usual, does not understand much about politics but has adopted her husband’s views as a wife ought to; she pronounces the word “comrade” with manifest discomfort”. Reading this calls to mind characters from Orwell’s fiction. Julia, the liberated heroine of Nineteen Eighty Four is “only a rebel from the waist down”. Lying in bed with Winston, who is pouring over a copy of Goldstein’s The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, she is thoroughly uninterested by the political revolution.

Mollie, the shallow, vain carthorse from Animal Farm, can also be read uncontroversially as an indictment of the female gender. Orwell’s work is intended largely to be observational. He imbues his fiction with as much insightfulness and animosity as he does his non-fiction. It seems at odds that such a staunch campaigner for social equality could overlook the bias that underpins some of his most influential work.

In seeking a reason for why Orwell might hold these prejudices, one is not attempting to excuse them. Mabel Fierz, a close friend of Orwell’s in his later years recalls that “he used to say the one thing he wished in this world was that he’d been attractive to women”. Following the death of O’Shaughnessy in 1945, a desperate Orwell made failed marriage proposals to four younger women before successfully courting Sonia Brownwell, whom he married shortly before his death in 1950.

This final lonely period shouldn’t necessarily be the lens through which we should read Orwell’s writing; it seems all too simple a narrative. Yet isolation was a fever that marked the writer’s life just as keenly as the Tuberculosis that eventually took him. Orwell flitted from job to job, often struggling to publish his work. Many of his friends have remarked on the self-consciousness that Orwell was afflicted with; an affliction shared by his characters Winston Smith from Nineteen Eighty Four and John Flory from Burmese Days amongst others.

It is sad, but perhaps fitting, that Orwell now rests as Eric Blair, in a graveyard not of his choosing, surrounded by those he never knew.

Imagine you’re a funding board for theatre in Oxford. Among the myriad ideas heading your way comes this curveball: an experimental rendition of life in the higher echelons of ancient Babylonian society, complete with – wait for it- a heavy metal soundtrack. The premise of Ashurbanipal: The Last Great King of Assyria is exactly that, an intriguing attempt to reconcile three seemingly disparate corners of the arts.

Examining playwright Selena Wisnom’s attempts to understand the bloodthirsty writings of Ashurbanipal himself, the reasoning behind the choice of music becomes more apparent. However, the soundtrack does not merely pander to metal’s stereotypes of evil unwashed Satanists; it’s an altogether more erudite affair, pairing crunching prog riffs with more ambient electronic passages. “Our aims…were to provide momentum through the more experimental scenes” state Andrew Garner and Tom Clucas, the composers of the soundtrack.

With obvious inspiration from the likes of Opeth, Mastodon and Porcupine Tree, nobody could accuse the soundtrack of being original. However, Garner has plans to add a range of vocals over the top of the soundtrack, providing a narration of the play in ancient Akkadian, for all of those Classicists who will understand…

How does the rest of the team feel about working with a metal soundtrack? “It was a big risk” admits Wisnom, but it appears to have paid off; with 3-6 hours put in to every minute of the music, it has been carefully tailored to meet the needs of the play. Others weren’t quite so keen to begin with- “I can’t say I was exactly thrilled when this was announced to me,” said producer Alexander Woolley, “…but I’ve come round to Tom’s way of thinking: the heavy metal will impart a vitality to the play that a more traditional, slightly operatic soundtrack would have been unable to provide.”

So will this evolution in thinking spark a metal revolution in the Oxford drama scene? Garner certainly hopes so: “I have plans to write a metal musical at some point” he says; Wisnom also intends to create a series of plays on the topic of Assyrian Kings if Ashurbanipal is a success.

Unfortunately for metalheads everywhere, the genre remains stereotyped and divisive; however, if Ashurbanipal is a success, Oxford should start to seriously consider the versatility of metal as an art form.