★★★☆☆
Three Stars

Another Country is not a reflection of Oxford, but one might be forgiven for seeing in it the worst excesses of Oxford stereotypes: boarding school slang, crisp English accents and wood panelling abound.

Set in the 1930s, Another Country is overtly political. Systems of government, or systems of boarding school hierarchy, are discussed time and again, and the main character, Guy Bennett, is based on the spy Guy Burgess, one of the Cambridge Five. But don’t go along hoping to see anything about espionage; the action here stays firmly school-bound.

If, that is, “action” is the right word. “Spice and semi-colons” is how one of the characters relates a teacher’s advice on letter-writing. The phrase could describe the play. The audience succumb to frequent laughter, but the script tends to bumble back and forth between various amusing situations without ever going anywhere in particular. Little makes one want to see the next scene rather than just get to the next punch-line, and it does not help that scene changes are frequently lengthy. An overarching plot is decidedly lacking.

But despite flaws in the script, the company do their best to bring out its strengths. Joseph Allan as the communist Tommy Judd manages to create a character that is both irritating and loveable, while Tom Lambert’s performance as Wharton, a fag (in the 30s sense of the word), makes it hard to believe the man is a fresher, not a twelve year old.

The rest of the cast were strong, too, with the notable exception of James Methven, who played Vaughan Cunningham, an uncle of one of the boys who comes round for tea one afternoon. Methven flounces on, whirling around like a spinning top, and generally hamming up his role. The subtlety to the portrayal of homosexuality that is created by Peter Huhne (playing Guy Bennett) comes under significant stress. Methven’s has to be among the more cringe-worthy performances at a Playhouse show.

As surreal, though more intentionally, is the set. Most of it is very realistic, except for a gouge that rips through the wood-panelled room, and for the odd-coloured and rich lighting in the background. The effect is unsettling, and works well with the tone of the play.

Another Country is not an excellent play, nor is everything in this production excellent. But the final scenes are powerful, and one walks away moved, if unsure quite how the script manages to go so far towards redeeming itself at the very last moment.

★★★☆☆

Three Stars

“This town ain’t big enough for the two of us/And it ain’t me who’s going to
leave,” insists Russel Mael in the eponymous Sparks song. In You Maverick, written by Matt Parvin, two young men sing a similar tune at each other, except the town is an unnamed Oxford college and leaving means expulsion, something most students here envision only in nightmares.

The play opens on what appears to be a legal meeting but is revealed to
be an academic hearing of sorts. The bumbling man in a suit is not a lawyer but Timbey (Charlie Metcalfe), a counsellor mourning the glory days he never had as an undergraduate at the college where he now works. “This is a welfare meeting,” he tells Gregory (Charlie Hooper), a fast-talking lad accused of plagiarism. Kasper (Tim Drummond) is the kid whose paper he has, by all appearances, ripped off, and who sits silently as Gregory delivers a dubious self-defence. He has clearly copied, says Timbey—why not come clean. No, Gregory chides; he has apparently done so—and he’ll stake his academic fate on the difference.

If the many elements of You Maverick are laced with a single theme, it is the danger of mistaking evidence for clarity. The meeting of the opening scene proves the first of several, as Kasper levies allegations of increasing consequence against Gregory, and Timbey’s sensibilities are torn between the outsider with whom he identifies and the insider whom he wishes to be. That Gregory has done all that he stands accused of we never doubt, but as the punishment he faces becomes more severe, roles of victim and aggressor become increasingly duplicitous. “Maybe I can be both fragile and scare you,” Kasper tells Gregory, and we believe him.

If You Maverick has a weakness, it is occasional heavy-handedness. Gregory and Timbey deliver what amount to soliloquys in the guise of dialogue, and Kasper’s homoerotic taunting of Gregory once the tables have turned feels cliché, or at least overplayed—as does some superfluous symbolism having to do with sunlight. One hopes that Parvin will approach future scripts with more confidence in the subtlety of his own writing and the intuition of his audience to read between the lines. When Timbey tells Gregory, “I’m here to help, not accuse,” his naiveté in thinking the two distinct is not lost on us.

TV dating shows have come in many guises since the birth of the genre in the ’70s. But from the days of Cilla Black having a lorra lorra fun on Blind Date to the frankly terrifying trend of reality shows like The Bachelor, the fundamental principle has remained the same: get people together and see if sparks fly. At any one time, there is some form of dating show on; it’s a seemingly endless genre respawning itself into oblivion on a channel whose name is some combination of the words Sky Entertainment Lifestyle Reality HD +1. 

It is imperative to remember that dates are about tricking the other party into thinking you are a nice, normal, well-rounded person. But increasingly, TV dating seems to be moving away from this attempt at self-sanitisation. Take Baggage (C4) a show essentially about shame. Three potential suitors reveal their embarrassing secrets, or ‘baggage’, and it is then up to the contestant to decide which they find the least off-putting. Humiliation is encouraged, although a good 40 per cent of the show seems to involve Gok Wan just repeating the word ‘baggage’.

Similarly in Sing Date (Sky Living), the audience revels in seeing singletons making fools of themselves. It’s pure car-crash telly, but this mortifying karaoke-based torture results in a surprising number of promising matches.

As well as humiliation, superficiality abounds in TV dating formats. In Take Me Out (Saturdays, ITV), a panel of 30 women can turn their light off (indicating they don’t want a date) just from one look at a contestant, while a nation muses over just how many more tedious jokes Paddy McGuinness can feasibly make. Dating in the Dark (Sky Living) attempts to eschew this shallowness by getting its hapless couples to meet each other in a pitch-black room. But wandering hands and sneaky smooches are usually regretted once the light-reveal allows potential matches to see one another. All too often compatible partners are dismissed on the basis that they’re now visible.

It is for that reason that I find Channel 4’s The Undateables, now in its second series, so refreshing. I have qualms with the title, but the show itself is touching, genuine, and sensitively presented. In each episode, we meet three new people, all of them living with a challenging condition that can make dating difficult. Instead of accentuating these people’s differences, The Undateables succeeds in showing how universal their experiences are.

Heterosexuality dominates, as does the prevailing idea that absolutely everybody in the world must either have a partner, or be looking for one. Dating on TV has a lot to answer for. It reinforces gender norms, and embraces vacuity. I am grateful that occasionally a show like The Undateables comes along to restore faith in humanity.

Any film that (however unconsciously) evokes the genre of Rom-Zom-Com (Romantic Zombie-Comedy) will always have a lot to live up to; however, Warm Bodies is not just a Shaun of the Dead ripoff with an American sheen. Rather, it is a witty, self-conscious and, well, warm affair that plays up the ridiculous nature of the film’s premise without diluting the sincerity of the central story.

Set in a generic, post-zombieapocalypse America, Warm Bodies revolves around R (Nicholas Hoult), a lonely amnesiac zombie who struggles to find connections in an undead world where people just shuffle around moaning. Yes, this is something of a parable for finding connections in an increasingly isolated world, but it’s handled with a light touch, and is offset by the playful dark humour and sense of self-parody that the film embraces.

When looking for food with some rotting chums, R meets the blood-pumping girl of his dreams, Julie (Teresa Palmer) – and eats her boyfriend’s brains. This sets in motion the path to his redemption and establishes a message about the all-conquering healing power of love that works surprisingly well considering its utter ridiculousness and lack of explanation.

However, one of this film’s strengths is the way it comes across so strongly and coherently despite the leaps in plausibility that its plot involves (though arguably discussing ‘plausibility’ in a zombie film is a moot point). This is largely due to a great script that works around the inherent problems in the genre (the ‘zombie dialogue’ gives the film its funniest moments) and the work of the cast, most notably Nicholas Hoult, who really sells the ‘creepy staring corpse’ chic and monosyllabic dialogue of his undead protagonist to create a likable and – weird though it may seem – believable character. 

In many ways, the scope is quite limited, both in terms of locations and events. John Malkovich as Julie’s gung-ho solider father seems a little
glossed over too, with some interesting hints of his motivation and antagonism towards the ‘corpses’ not fully explored (it’s hinted that he killed his wife once zombified, and the events of the film show that her fate may not have been sealed.) But really the surprising thing about this
film is how easy it is to ignore its flaws, limitations and sentimental conclusions and just get on board with it.

Whoever said romance was (un)dead?

★★★★☆
Four Stars

Rough-Hewn’s new production is daring, striking and effective. Addressing the issues of multicultural Britain through the mind of a teenage girl, it allows the audience to engage with an absorbing, complex character and her description of what happened on one eventful summer evening in Luton. Out with her twenty-four-year-old boyfriend, Abe, events leave Katie’s control after he gets in a fight with an Asian boy. She ends up in the worst part of Luton with three men and no knickers.

Though a set of monologues are no rarity in student theatre, it is a bold move to use only one actor. To do so inevitably necessitates intricate and shrewd direction, along with very strong acting. Fortunately, Tommo Fowler and Emma D’Arcy have achieved this, resulting in a production which maintains an impressive balance between entertainment and emotional weight.

Katie is not a “bunny”, she’s a scared little girl. Through his intimate monologue, Bunny’s writer (Jack Thorne) plays on this dichotomy. The eighteen-year-old teenager is vivacious and captivating, with charming giggles and an excess of thoughts from giving blowjobs to reminiscing about her overweight friend at school. On the other hand, as the play progresses we increasingly see the other side to her: dangerously naive, perplexed, and ultimately a terrified child.

In her portrayal of Katie, D’Arcy is believable throughout. With a Luton accent, in school uniform, her speech and mannerisms are very convincing as she moves seamlessly between her incomplete thoughts and justifications – delightfully delivered with faultless comic timing – and narration of the story. For the whole hour, D’Arcy has the audience at her fingertips, which would be an extremely remarkable feat for a professional, let alone a student. Her stage presence means that one look in your eyes and you are entranced.

The most salient points of the play happen when, having drawn the audience in, enhanced by the intimacy of the Burton Taylor studio, we are hit with the racism of Abe’s vile friend Asif. The first very loud silence occurs when she impersonates Asif, who exclaimed “fucking suicide bombers, the lot of them!” The other striking element is her sexual naivety. She crudely, and yet somehow innocently, muses about her sexual ventures. Katie doesn’t quite know what to do with her sexuality, making her vulnerable.

The production is minimalist, utilising only a projected screen of Joel Macpherson’s cartoons, illustrating her childish nature. The focus is on Katie’s face; the fascinating world of her thoughts. In achieving what it sets out to do, the play is very difficult to fault.

I wholeheartedly recommend going to see what is a phenomenal display of acting, and an incredibly intriguing script.