Here’s a play that came into being with no set outcome in mind, for a change. Born out of improvisation sessions, the comedy A Structured Panic  created by the four actors and their director from Linacre comes in bits and pieces, deals with a little bit of everything but makes sense if you enjoy a good laugh  and don’t take life nor drama too seriously.

When the lights are switched off, and some last chatters are still audible from the tiers, disharmonious notes from a guitar jingle to us, the audience, from somewhere in the darkness  and thus leave us from the start with a big question mark that will stay with us throughout the play. 

When the lights are switched on again, we are faced with four characters, each of them peculiar in their own right. They seem to be working in a perfume company, and take us through the ordinary odyssee of a business man or woman’s life: the secretary’s seductive advances towards her boss, the boss’ sleazy dispatch of the job applicant, the dreams and hopes of an employee in the lower third of the hierarchy all look familiar.

Then there’s another layer: the four stylised characters have, strangely enough, animal names, and as it dawns on the spectator after a while, the characters operating in the human structure of the company office are in fact animals that have survived the big Flood in the safety of the Arch, and have now gone on to normal life and work again.

The experience has been traumatizing for all of them, though, as they vividly manifest during various ‘meditative therapy’ sessions. As the secretary and ‘Peacock’, played by Philly Howarth, bursts out in tears declaring that make-up is her ‘real, unimaginery problem’, or as Samuel Elliott, acting exceptionally well as Lama a.k.a. unconfident job applicant, dreams of being a Zebra, or as Becky Hancock as the Hedgehog/employee feels unloved and all prickly, or, finally, as Aidan Robinson as the boss and Badger has a coming out when he confesses really being a skunk, it is clear that these guys know their acting.  

There were slips of the tongue, there was nervousness, but they may be blamed on the frequent changes to the play throughout its preparation (there have even been modifications a couple of hours before the staging of the play). There was the fragmentary, rather confusing structure of the play (a sequence of scenes interrupted by darkness and guitar playing), there was a jigsaw of issues tackled (such as identity and the professional world), but it’s not like they didn’t warn us from the start by calling their piece A Structured Panic. Splendid acting, engaging humour, and a variety of day-to-day aches and pains, but to come back to my initial advice: not to be taken too seriously. 

Two players, one game: getting a driver’s license. As simplistic as the plot was the stage setting of DMV Tyrant. A laptop on a table, a chair and a straightforward topic were more than enough for the two actresses from St Catz to keep an unfortunately tiny audience amused for an entertaining half hour. A smart but subtle critique of our everyday battles with an agonizingly slow bureaucracy and a refreshing reminder that sometimes less is more, especially in drama.

Well, there is, of course, a little bit more to it. To be precise, the young girl who wants to get her driver’s license has already passed her driving test but has come to the DMV office because she is desperately trying to renew her provisional license, and the draconic official who successfully avoids being helpful at all is reading a book while consistently ignoring the polite, then gradually less well-behaved customer in front of her. Add a good portion of humour and the expertise of a playwright, the critically acclaimed Christopher Durang, whose speciality is absurd comedy, and off you go.

It would have been a walk-over to overact the madness of the DMV Tyrant in her silly but eloquent stubbornness or the (justified) fury of the poor girl, incredulous at such an obstinate lack of cooperation. But the actresses were well advised to avoid exaggeration for the sake of authenticity.

If Genevieve Hoeler, playing the DMV officer, convincingly adopted and rendered the all too well-known attitude and tone of those middle-aged civil servants, compensating their bitterness in life with smug self-righteousness at work, her partner, Megan Hughes, had no difficulty in slipping into the role of the outraged young woman either. Although her acting was at times slightly static and, when she was barking at the clerk (without effect, of course), perhaps over the top, the admittedly very scarce movement was nevertheless fully counterbalanced with a verbal sparring that ran like clockwork.

While common sense regrettably didn’t win over the absurd narrow-mindedness of bureaucracy in DMV Tyrant, the actresses, evidently enjoying themselves and obviously well-cast, certainly did win over their audience. 

It is somewhat hard to know what to expect while on your way to a play which involves a reference to the infamously revolting “two girls, one cup” internet phenomenon. Luckily this witty production put on by three Magdalen first year Literature students induces no such mucky traumas in the viewer. 

However, Three Guys, One Cuppers certainly deals with fetishes – Conor’s obsession with tea, Gabriel’s sexual arousement as a result of literature in the form of Barthes and Frank’s frantic despair as both of his fellow students procrastinate in their desperate attempt to put together a play for cuppers (presented in a sort of Matyoshka doll effect) all form part of a hilarious drama concoction. 

The play, written entirely by its cast and featuring Conor Robinson, Frank Lawton and Gabriel Rolfe Macculum seemed in many ways to mirror the more manic aspects of student life, with moments of awkward silence followed by intense screaming and argument – it was, in many senses, surreal; a bizarre caricature of student life.  

The success of these three guys lies in the fact that that their humour is young, fresh and student-oriented. We can all sympathise with the anguish at meeting essay deadlines while being constantly distracted by friends, tea and… spontaneous dancing. The characters developed for the stage are clearly based on the actor’s own experiences at Oxford, and thus strike an important chord among a student audience. 

As the 15 pounds worth of tea bags were thrown in the air in the midst of an insane finale, the audience left with a visible grin – and some, admittedly, with some free tea.

Robin Geddes directed the St John’s Cupper’s play, the exceedingly enjoyable Making a Scene. Starring Martin Urshel, Mayank Banerjee, Claudia Hill, William Law and Caitlin Farrar as actors making inter-rehearsal drama of their own in the theatre toilets, Making a Scene was an overall very well acted and at times, hilarious, look into the personal lives of these wonderfully manipulative characters. The scene was set by a toilet flush before the lights opened on a row of cubicles, cleverly represented by a use of chairs, cut out cardboard toilet seats and a large amount of well executed mime from the cast. An especial highlight of this invisible toilet door set up was when the character Sophie, a young 16-year old girl on her first foray into professional theatre, stuck her foot out from under it in order to signal for more toilet paper. The audience found this a greatly funny in its true-to-lifeness, as did I. More importantly however, the mimed cubicles let us see what was going on the toilets, whether it was Mayank snorting cocaine as failing Hollywood star Alex Riley, or Martin Urshel and William Law, as John Riley and Michael Aikley, using talk about their different styles of peeing to discuss the women characters in the play. This doubletalk was splendidly received by the audience with ripples of laugher as their “piss talk” got steadily more and more pointed and innuendo laden.

Performances of especial note would include Caitlin Farrar as cold hearted and manipulative actress Helen Archer. She placated, incited rage and generally played the whole cast with delicious ease in a strikingly naturalistic performance that was never forced, and used the different levels in her voice to great effect. Props also to her and William Law for really going for it in their snog scene, which, when not interrupted on cue, forced William to banter with the audience “It would be great if we were interrupted right now,” provoking giggles all round. Martin Urshcel was also magnificent in his camp rage as the clichéd, accented director despairing at the ways of actors, with proper force behind his throwing down of Michael in the final showdown. The finish with lines from Uncle Vanya was probably the weakest part as it could have been said with more finality, but in such a strong performance this is hardly a criticism. Overall a skilfully-acted play that left the audience with a feeling of quality. Well done John’s!

FOUR STARS

Naming a book Future Perfect is audacious to put it mildly but, with his compelling explanation of how collaboration can drive progress Steven Johnson just about gets away with it. Only through dispersed and diverse networks of action, Johnson argues, can we confront the more intractable challenges of the twenty-first century, such as broken government, the fading publishing industry and income inequality.

Surprisingly for a nominally future-facing text, Johnson begins by persuasively asserting that things right now aren’t nearly as bad as they seem: the “if it bleeds it leads” ethos prevalent in modern media tends to distract us from some of the substantive social gains made in recent decades, from falling crime rates to rapidly improving airline safety.

This optimism underpins the rest of Johnson’s argument. Seeing past and present trends through rosier-tinted glasses allows him to wax hopeful about the future too. The most prominent example of such ‘networked thinking’ at present is of course the Internet, which accounts for many of the most positive recent developments in society. Wisely, however, Johnson doesn’t pretend that the Internet is a panacea, just that it is a “way of thinking” about today’s problems – thus avoiding the over-exuberant ‘cyber-utopianism’ of writers such as Clay Shirky.

Nonetheless, the ‘peer progressive’ philosophy Johnson espouses here does inspire its fair share of wide-eyed wackiness alongside some genuinely well-thought out ideas. In the section on democracy for instance, Johnson proposes that citizens be allowed to hand off votes in various elections to better-informed friends or experts to decide on their behalf. Quite how this would solve rather than exacerbate the problem of money in American politics isn’t very clear.

Overall however, Johnson’s peer progressive paradigm is a surprisingly perceptive way of explaining past success stories, like Wikipedia and Kickstarter, and predicting where future breakthroughs will come from, especially in the areas of urban development, corporate responsibility and the evolution of the media. A perfect future may be beyond our reach, but Johnson artfully argues that by using the collaborative technology of today, our best days might yet lie ahead of us.

With just a fortnight left of Oxford term, I’ve been looking through the concerts yet to come. One programme which I’m particularly looking forward to is that of the Oxford University Sinfonietta (29th November, Jacqueline Du Pré Music Building). This chamber orchestra typically blends music from the early classical period with more contemporary compositions, and this concert is no exception. Ranging from Mozart to Ligeti (with Prokofiev and Pärt for good measure), the eclectic programme promises an exciting evening.

First on the programme is one of Mozart’s most famous works, his Symphony No. 31 (‘Paris’). A three movement work which lasts barely 15 minutes, the symphony was Mozart’s first to introduce clarinets (albeit cautiously in the low register).  From the opening brass chords, the bright D major first movement exudes confidence with a flurry of scales and jaunty rhythms. The lyrical Andante glides between different key areas, the glossy veneer disturbed by various interuptions. The bustling string passagework of the first movement returns in the Allegro Finale, the dynamic energy carrying the music through minore digressions and chamber passages to the horn calls of the triumphant conclusion.

A jump from the 1770s to the 1960s takes us to Ligeti’s ‘Nouvelles Aventures’ and ‘Ramifications’. Both pieces are written for unusual combinations of instruments: the former for three singers and instrumental septet, the latter for a twelve-part string ensemble (seven violins, two violas, two cellos and a double bass).  Ligeti’s writing will certainly test the OU Sinfonietta performers. The wordless vocal part of ‘Nouvelles Aventures’ and the chaos of white noise in ‘Ramifications’ produce an unsettling atmosphere. ‘Ramifications’ is a tour de force of extended technique, with half of the strings tuned a quarter-tone above the other. Apocalyptic chaos follows sparse textures and vertiginous violin notes teeter before plunging into a deep registral chasm.

Arvo Pärt’s Symphony No. 1 comes as a shock to those familiar with the simplicity of Cantus In Memoriam Benjamin Britten. A two movement assault beginning with a blaring trombone second, the first movement ’Canons’ is an exercise in contrapuntal rigour. Hurried woodwind staccato and rigid ostinati create a 10-minute kaleidoscope, exposing each and every player in the ensemble. ‘Prelude and Fugue’ opens with violin a capella meditations punctuated by the woodwind, before motoric rhythms drive piece onwards. The end is abrupt, the preceding frenzy followed by a sustained violin second which echoes in the ears of the listeners.

The final piece of the programme sees a return to more familiar territory with Prokofiev’s Symphony No.1 ‘Classical’. Harking back to Haydn in its traditional 4-movement form, Prokofiev imbues the work with his characteristic dry humour. The spiky harmony and jaunty rhythms of the work show the influence of Prokofiev’s time at the St Petersburg Conservatory. After a light-hearted Larghetto and the unpredictable tonal diversion of the Gavotte, the Finale brings the work (and the concert) to a virtuosic close.

This is certainly a programme which will test the mettle of the Oxford University Sinfonietta. With such a refreshing range of repertoire (the Pärt and Ligeti rarely heard), it’s definitely a date in my diary.

Being the procrastination prone people that we students are, you’ll have probably come across Prue Leith by way of The BBC’s series The Great British Menu on which she is a judge. This was my initial knowledge of Leith and I had mentally prepared myself for a glorious 20 minute conversation on what is one of my favourite TV shows.

However, when doing background research I was staggered at the number of things which Leith has achieved throughout her career so far, leaving my previous line of inane questioning (“how do you manage to eat so much food in one day?”) somewhat redundant.

Leith’s professional career began in 1960 with the launch of what would go on to become Leith’s Good Food, a catering company which supplied food for events. Since then she has opened a Michelin starred restaurant, been a food columnist for various UK papers, held senior positions in companies such as British Rail and The Halifax Bank, worked closely with The Schools Food Trust, been awarded the Veuve Cliquot Business Woman of the Year in 1990, an OBE, a CBE, written her autobiography and published five novels. When asked how she managed to have such a glittering career she replies “I’ve got a lot of energy and have the nature that if something is bust then I want to fix it. In essence, I can’t help interfering in things I think I might be good at.”

On top of her OBE and CBE Leith has also been awarded no fewer than eleven honorary degrees from various universities. “Ridiculous isn’t it. I’m very flattered and pleased to have them but I’ve never actually finished a degree.” Despite being so decorated in the public sphere she claims that what she is most proud of is achieving harmony in her private life. She tells me a story of her son reading an article in praise of her in one of the papers: “My son asked me if I really ran all those businesses. I said, ‘Of course I do, why do you think I don’t?’ He replied ‘because you’re always here.’ He thought I lived at home and made cakes!”

Despite her glittering career in business and the food industry Leith explains that she considers herself “first of all as a novelist but the writing became secondary when the business became full time.” She wrote and co-wrote various cookery books but it wasn’t until 1995 that her first work of fiction, Leaving Patrick, was published and she made the move to becoming predominately a novelist. She cites Anthony Trollope as being her inspiration, explaining that, “he understands the business world, the commercial world, and what makes people work. If I could write a novel half as good as him I’d be happy.”

It wasn’t her fiction which grabbed the headlines earlier this year though. Conceived as a means by which she could raise her profile as a writer, in September Leith published her autobiography, Relish: My Life on a Plate. 

In it she details the thirteen year affair which she conducted with (now her husband) the writer Rayne Kruger, then the husband of her mother’s best friend. The UK press seized upon this fact and all of the attention was focused on this salacious love story rather than on Leith’s career achievements. This is obviously something which irks Leith: “I knew it would be talked about but I didn’t think they’d concentrate on it  that much.”

As I learned in preparation for my interview, it is well worth delving below the surface to find out a bit more about Leith and her quite remarkable career. Questions about consuming large quantities of food should probably be left to members of the University rugby tea

Oxford already offers rich pickings for choir connoisseurs.  With the Chapel Choirs of Merton and Queen’s joining the highly regarded trinity (Magdalen, New and Christ Church), the new recording from Worcester has some tough competition. This is a CD which proves that they can definitely hold their own.

‘This Christmas Night’ brings together a selection of contemporary carols inspired by the Christmas story. Ranging from Judith Bingham to Cecilia McDowall, the CD spans a wide range of repertoire and includes an impressive 11 world premiere recordings. Even as the soprano line of Hafliði Hallgrímsson’s ‘Joseph and the Angel’ echoes around Keble College Chapel at the very start of the disc, the Worcester singers envelop their listener in the mood of an advent service. Although the space may be large, the warmth of the tone prevents the music from sounding impersonal. The sound is well blended and chord voicing generally good, but at points the texture does appear to be somewhat top-heavy: the sopranos often slightly protruded (at times possessing slight discrepancies of intonation).

The choir revel in dissonances, from the bluesy inflections of Mark-Anthony Turnage to the poignant appoggiaturas of Richard Allain’s ‘Balulalow’. Although they are attentive to fluctuations of mood throughout the disc, this aspect is brought to the forefront in their emotive interpretation of the Allain. However, it is the sense of enjoyment which the choir brings to this repertoire which makes this CD such a delight to listen to. They hold a variety of colours at their disposal to great effect, allowing them to illuminate McDowall’s playful rhythms in ‘Of a Rose’ and lend clarity to the soaring octave contours in Skempton’s ‘There is no rose’. A personal highlight is Peter Maxwell Davies’ ‘Fleecy Care Carol’: the singers tackle the angular melodic lines with confidence, emerging into a rich and full climax.

Not only is the virtuosity of the ensemble on show, but also that of individual singers. Several tracks contain well-executed solos (although special mention must go to the performer of the formidable solo part in Lutyens’ ‘Nativity’). Organist Stephen Farr is given the chance to shine both as soloist and accompanist. The premiere recording of Thomas Hyde’s ‘Improvisation on Puer natus’’ sees him bring out the subtleties of the music through changes of register and his formidable technique. Farr is equally skilled as an accompanist, further elevating the choir.

This refreshing selection of contemporary carols is given capable performances by Worcester College Chapel Mixed Choir. With so much new repertoire, this is a CD which invites multiple listenings. It certainly makes a change from the standard fare, and marks Worcester College Chapel Mixed Choir out as one to watch.

‘This Christmas Night’ is available from Resonus Classics (http://www.resonusclassics.com/this-christmas-night). Worcester College Chapel Mixed Choir will launch the CD with a concert in Worcester College Chapel on Saturday 24th November 2012 at 19:30. Tickets are £5/1 (concessions and students).

I’ve had many dramatic daydreams in the English Faculty’s Lecture Theatre 2, but never thought to make them reality. Director Richard Elliot and Assistant Director Esme Hicks are doing just this, transforming a basement teaching space into the site of Shakespeare’s bloodiest tragedy and revising the function of an end-on performance space to create a much more interactive experience, Goths and Romans entering through the audience, characters appearing above the audience in the balcony.

It sounds exciting and dynamic, very different from your typical Shakespeare lecture, but the university setting provides a further function. Elliot has chosen to set the play in 1968, in the wake of student radicalism (think Jimi Hendrix, Richard Nixon, Vietnam). The idea is to bring out the culture clash of the two communities, at the expense of questions of race and imperialism. Aaron’s (Andrew Laithwaite’s) blackness is metaphorical. His charisma, Elliot explains, is that of the revolutionary rock star. Rome is the elitist establishment.

In preview this interpretation isn’t too domineering and I hope the point isn’t hammered home too hard in the final piece. It could cheapen what looks to be shaping up to be a very successful production. What worked well in the scenes I saw was the energy of the cast and the strength of the acting. Katie McGunagle (Tamora) was particularly engaging, maintaining a queenly dominance even while attempting to seduce the equally authoritative Laithwaite or instructing her sons to rape and maim. Lara Panahy, as Lavinia, was also convincing, especially in the scene following her mutilation – a testament to the attention I felt had been paid to working on the physicality of all the actors’ performances.

This is certainly no Shakespeare recital. The actors are always active and personal space continually invaded. This can lead to a few problems. Bassianus and Chiron (Matt Broomfield
and Anirudh Mandagere) seem less menacing the longer Lavinia pleads with Tamora for mercy because there is little way for them to go once they have started manhandling their victim. These issues can easily be ironed out in the week leading up to the performance. My advice to the cast would be to concentrate on their reactions. Line delivery is uniformly strong but some more thought needs to be put into their responses while silent.

Joseph Prentice (Titus himself) was slightly disappointing in the one scene I saw him in, seeming a little too reasonable given the tragedy surrounding him. Out of the context of his character’s development throughout the play, however, it was hard to judge whether this was a conscious decision or indicative of a slightly limited emotional range. The responses of Panahy, Edward Lewis (Marcus) and Sarah Smierciak (Young Lucius) were all spot on, though I felt the girls were a little inhibited by the awkward staging in the fly killing scene.

The coherence between such a large cast was impressive and the preview entertaining – I would happily have watched much more and think the production’s youthful energy will appeal to those who may find the plot unfamiliar. If the team can turn their innovative performing space to their advantage and not lose sight of the primacy of performance, rather than period setting, this production may be one to catch this Michaelmas.

4 STARS