Alex Darby’s new piece, Vagrant, tells the story of Lara, downtrodden ideologue and student who hates the pressures of her bourgeois existence: finals, finance and family – its overwhelming.  Lara transfers (online) her money to Oxfam, and with resolute affectation joins the ranks of Oxford’s Homeless. Add a pinch of sex, a generous sprinkle of drugs and an hour and a half later she’s back at her dinner table quaffing elderflower.

The play intends to give voice to the marginalised, but this “marginalised voice” appears to be little more than a reflection of the moralist discourse of the good and great upon those poor and drug-addled Homeless. The play starts and ends with typically middle-class scenes. Lara sits with her pinched and yuppy sister. An iphone acts as a paperweight. In the intervening scenes Lara has been ‘damaged’, a state which renders her uninterested in finishing her degree and uninteresting in conversation; nevertheless we feel she’s learned something, but has she? Should she’ve endured her privilege with more grace? As a member of the middle-class, can I learn from her mistakes?

The play had moments of especial efficacy. The narrative was interspersed with interviews of the three Homeless characters; in each, the character’s voice was gradually replaced with a recording and through interpretive dance  they re-enacted the history their voiceover was recounting. The physical dynamics were powerful and symbolic, the intelligent use of space added depth to the otherwise wooden, truncular dialogue. It was a shame to lose Zoe Bullock half way through, who sensitively navigated love, hate and emotional freedom. Eliza Easton had a tough task and fared fine. Barney Fishwick’s psychedelic jittering was apt in some moments, in others overdone. As Isabelle, Lara’s sister, Bridget Dru was rigid and inattentive to tone; as the neglectful mother she was compelling.

Darby’s earnest portrayal of his subject matter was brave, his slips into a more literary language were ineffective and mistaken. The creative physical dynamics and assured movements of the characters suggest that where the script lacked, Darby’s strong and imaginative directing was recompense. 

Entering into the O’Reilly stage space, and clapping eyes on the giant pink and yellow X built into centre stage, it was obvious this production had a clear vision. The marketing had been effective, and everyone entering the theatre was aware that this production was put simply Ben Jonson meets Sex Industry. So that, the brilliantly lascivious heart-shaped bed that sat smugly in centre stage really did fulfil our expectations of a 1980s porn den. Not only was the staging suitably striking but the spaces that had been created around it were intelligently considered. Alexandra Clark’s design allowed for a gallery and stairs that added a variety of levels to the performance space, providing characters with an opportunity to bounce all over the shop. Although it would have been nice if the elaborate upper gallery could have been used for more than just entrances and exits, by and large the space was employed imaginatively.

Even with such an elaborate set, Jonson’s comedy moves rapidly between a large number of locations, not all of which could be evoked with set design alone. What was perhaps most impressive about the show was the way in which the actors engaged with the static set to impress upon the audience the movement to an office, or a court room. When Volpone emerges from his bedroom into the streets of Venice, the actors marching rapidly across the front of the stage beautifully created the impression of a busy thoroughfare.

Perhaps the most important question with this particular production is how the team have managed to cohere Jonson’s comedy and their own personal vision. The lighting and sound for this production really were the glue that held this production together. Dougie Perkins and Nathan Klein, who created the lighting and the music respectively, added a slick, polished feel to everything. The live funk band that intermittently piped up immediately lifted the energy; I will say now that, yes there is dancing, no it is not always in time, but at least it’s all very gung-ho!

With so much going on in this production, it is easy to let the acting fade into the background. Ben Cohen, as Volpone, had the unsettling charisma and ever so slightly cringey dance moves that I imagine are a prerequisite of any diehard porn king, and his energy and gleeful amorality were thrilling to watch. There were a few issues with diction, when he got a bit overexcited… and I’m sure a few good jokes were lost as a result, which is a pity. Voltore, Corvaccio,  Corvino, played by Megan Cullen, Will Stanford and XX respectively  sparkled as the hoodwinked trio and as an ensemble perhaps stole the show, there was not a weak link, and to be honest their dynamic performance was my favourite element of the play. Mosca was an interesting one, Beatrice Xu seemed to lack a certain Machiavellian ruthlessness that makes the character so compelling. Equally, there were moments when Xu seemed to not quite grasp the implications of what she was saying. Her performance was spirited, but the finer nuances of the character were notably absent in a production of such high calibre.

Nevertheless, by the final dance piece (Yes that’s right, more dancing), it was clear that the cast were having a jolly good time. The overwhelming impression from the production is the polish and cohesion of all the separate elements. This is a thoroughly enjoyable play, and I had a great time, anyone that has a free evening in 7^th week should make sure they don’t miss this excellent production.  

FOUR STARS

It might only be November but that doesn’t stop Cherwell deciding that a thorough(ish) round up of 2012’s musical offerings is in order. Oh no sir-ee.

It might only be November but that doesn’t stop Cherwell deciding that a thorough(ish) round up of 2012’s musical offerings is in order. Oh no sir-ee.

While 2012 has seen strong follow up albums for well established artists (Radlands from the Mystery Jets, Battle Born from The Killers) we’ve also seen an excellent wave of new music in the form of Alt J’s An Awesome Wave (a deserving Mercury Prize winner) and Django Django’s eponymous debut album. So who said the age of the album was done, dead and buried?

Choosing just one album out of the scores of deserving ones is an admittedly gargantuan task. In fact, it’s pretty much impossible so in offering Clock Opera’s debut album Ways to Forget I’m choosing one of scores of worthy albums. In fact in one week’s time this will probably be no longer my favourite album; I’m fickle that way.

Kicking off with opening track ‘Once and For All’ and its exultant climax, there remains something heart-wrenchingly uplifting about this album. Guy Connelly’s raw falsetto retains something of an angelic purity in the midst of frenetic synth and electro-keyboards.

Meanwhile ‘Move to the Mountains’ is a humble, quaint and gentle tale of leaving the city in the return to nature, and its staccato beat is ridiculously infectious.‘Man Made’, on the other hand, is suffused with a synth-heavy euphoria and layered up sound. While none of this distinguishes it massively from other music floating out there, Clock Opera’s Ways to Forget represents a gloriously idiosyncratic variety.

You’ll probably think there are ‘better’ albums out there (and you may well be right) but the dynamism and innovation underpinning Ways to Forget surely marks it out as one of the year’s triumphs. And music is all about the subjective anyway, right?

The New Pornographers are one of my favourite bands. They are a Canadian supergroup, featuring members of many other notable bands (including Destroyer and Neko Case), and they possess a seemingly superhuman level of enthusiasm and energy. They are also an indie band, but without the snobbish, cooler-than-thou aspect that many artists under that description seem to enjoy flaunting. The music they make is joyful and accessible, but unfortunately they didn’t release anything this year.

Thankfully their frontman, Carl Newman, released a solo album under the name of A.C. Newman. Shut Down the Streets is a more chilled-out affair than his New Pornographers output. Where albums such as Twin Cinema or Together were organised chaos, this is all strummed acoustic guitars, boy-girl vocal lines and chamber-pop flutes.

I admit that this description makes the album sound like a mixture of Belle & Sebastian and Jethro Tull, but I assure you that it’s better than that. Quirky lyrics, lush orchestration and passionate singing haul the basic material from the trap of kooky-folkiness into the realms of respectable and, crucially, exciting music. Newman is a talented and genuine artist in his own right, and this album proves that he is more than just a component of a supergroup.

My only regret is that I haven’t seen any of the songs performed live. ‘I’m Not Talking’ would be an excellent crowd pleaser, and I can imagine that the stomp of ‘Hostages’ would translate well to a stage. Sure, there’s a chance that the slower songs on the album could dissolve into iPhone-aloft sway-alongs, but that’s true with any album.

Although there have been some strong contenders, including Channel Orange by Frank Ocean and What We Saw From The Cheap Seats by Regina Spektor, I think this album is the best that 2012 had to offer.

Twitter: giving a voice to the disenfranchised TV viewer or stroking the egos of prissy bubble-wrapped bloggers? Enhancing your watching experience with a public commentary or ruining your Saturday evening with incessant mentions of ‘Rylan from X-Factor’? Really easy to get to grips with or about as useful as the Marauder’s Map to a muggle? Well, we’re here to help you get started or, if after six months you still have only 30 followers, kickstart your microblogging experience into twitter fame and fortune.

How to tweet…

Live-tweeting is a dangerous game because you’re entering a market that is saturated with the unregulated opinions of thousands of other guppy, TV-addled armchair pundits. Observations like ‘RIP Lady Sybil’ or ‘Dimbleby’s forehead is so sweaty!!’ are unlikely to win you legions of admirers, because, let’s face it, you’re not saying anything interesting. Whilst it’s almost always preferable to wait until after the broadcast in order to give your scathing/insightful/sycophantic input, if you have to live-tweet make sure you say something worth the 140 characters, or something profoundly shocking. Try ‘so glad that Lady Sybil’s dead’ or ‘I’d like to lick the sweat off Dimbleby’s forehead’ in order to get a few extra followers.If you’ve just seen a film and are desperate to tweet about it then it’s best to not even wait until the popcorn’s been swept up. The moment the credits are rolling no one can really tell you to put your phone away, so whip it out and give that opinion that the universe has been craving. ‘That was soooo good! I smell Oscars’ is a useless tweet to anyone who doesn’t know which movie you’ve just watched, whereas ‘Paranormal Activity 4 gave me nightmares about a world where people make shit films (and there are ghosts)’ is a much more specific tweet for your adoring public. Does anyone really want to hear your opinion? No, but if you relentlessly self-promote then, eventually, you’ll deceive a certain amount of people into believing you have some authority about what you’re saying.

Who to follow…

The best tweeters come from far and wide, but regularly come up with pithy one-line opinions that express exactly what you’re thinking – just more funnily and with fewer typos. Some of the best film tweeters represent the funniest film websites, so try checking out  @ultraculture, @IncredibleSuit and  @TheShiznitfor consistently witty opinions. For more erudite views, you might like to check out this term’s interviewee @PeterBradshaw1, The Times film critic  @MuirKate and Wittertainment’s @KermodeMovie.TV is much more of a free-for-all, so it might be best for you to pin your colours to the mast of a TV comedian. @DavidSchneider is back from the break he took for *unexplained* reasons, and regularly provides us with gems. Likewise, @StephenFry is often interested in what’s on the box and @RickyGervais can usually be counted on to express the opposite opinion to whatever consensus has emerged. But your best bet is to check out which TV shows are trending and explore from there. If anyone is really writing psycho-sexual tweets about David Dimbleby then you need to get following them asap. Oh, and while you’re at it, why not follow our recently launched, and totally amazing, @CherwellFilmTV? We sometimes retweet the hilarious, broken English promotional tweets from the Turf Tavern and, if that isn’t worth reading, then I don’t know what is…

What not to do…

The list of ‘what not to do’ on Twitter is potentially inexhaustible. It starts with the patently obvious, like not tweeting a close-up picture of your penis Soulja Boy, to avoiding accidentally tweeting your flirty DMs. When it comes to Film and TV, the main problems occur when you are (a) not relevant, (b) not funny, or (c) really racist. The first two are much more common problems but do not carry the threat of gaol time, so try and focus equally on all of these things.You can avoid the irrelevance issue by resisting the temptation to tweet about  Seinfeld, anything on TCM or the 1996 Steven Seagal movie, The Glimmer Man. You can avoid being unfunny by retweeting the carefully composed tweets of our recommended tweeters (or just outright stealing them; IP is as important to Twitter as it is to the Chinese government), suddenly becoming really funny (potentially difficult, might require you to get bitten by Eddie Izzard) or just sticking to tweets where you have something original to say. Avoiding the third of our problems is really reliant on you being an intelligent, tolerant person and vigorously applauding all Spike Lee movies.Well, now you’re ready for Twitter. Go out there and spread your seed over the internet in gobbets of 140 characters or less. Tweet us with all your film and TV opinions (nonboring ones, please) to  @CherwellFilmTV or use the hashtag  #CherwellFilmTV and we’ll aggressively retweet you to thank you for making it to the end of this article. 

The timing of this second series of The Hour has worked out pretty nicely for the scriptwriter: the programme centres around a struggling BBC news programme whose head has been sacked and whose stories are being stolen by an ITV rival. Ben Whishaw has shot to international fame as Q in the latest James Bond since playing Freddie Lyons in series one, and – just as we’d all started experiencing severe withdrawal at the lack of Peter Capaldi verbally eviscerating people on our screens – here he is being parachuted in as the new head of news, threatening people left, right and centre.

If the timing has worked out well for the show itself, we can’t say the same for its characters. Hector (Dominic West), the show’s host, has been late to work every day for six months. Having become something of a celebrity he prefers spending his time in nightclubs rather than actually coming to the office or ever going home to his long suffering wife. She shows refreshing signs of mounting a backlash: now she has been waiting 18 months for a baby and stands at home in her marshmallow-pink prison of a kitchen, frantically baking as she watches the clock – ‘homemaking when there’s nothing to homemake for.’

On Freddie’s surprise return to the team, at first it seems best friend Bel (Romola Garai) may have finally realised in his absence that she’s as in love with him as he always has been with her, only to turn up at his house two months late – two months after his marriage to Camille. In the midst of all this personal angst there is the continuing presence of the major period stories. Before it was the Suez crisis dominating the news; this time its Sputnik and the nuclear arms race. One difficulty with the programme is that it doesn’t seem sure what it’s trying to be: political thriller, period soap, or murder mystery? There are elements of all of these in this opener, as Morgan sets up a lot of potential plot strands without following any of them too far.

Regardless, the cast is exceptionally strong, the supporting roles (Anna Chancellor, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Peter Capaldi) as much as the central three who are played to perfection. It’s smart, stylish and beautifully shot, so whatever this series is set to become, it’s sure to be worth a watch each week.

4 STARS

Since his string of hits like Hollywoodland, Smokin’ Aces and The Town it seems Ben Affleck is incapable of putting a foot wrong. The latest from the actor, producer and director sees the CIA devise a plan to rescue six hostages from the American Embassy during the hostage crisis when the Iranian Revolution peaked in 1979. This seems like unusual subject matter but the intrigue  will get even the most dubious cinema-goer on board. It is the fascinating nature of this declassified operation combined with real footage inserted smoothly throughout which gives a real feel for the era and the reality of the situation facing our helpless hostages. 

The moustachioed Affleck adds to the dodgy tie, over-sized glasses and slightly ‘socks and sandals’ look invoked in the operations room providing a sense of comedy to proceedings in the face of severe technological limitations. It is in this smoky ops. room that we get the set-up: six hostages stuck in a country experiencing great unrest with the majority of the population searching for the embassy workers to settle their score, how do we get them out? 

Once the conundrum is set and we’ve glimpsed the rioting throngs of flag-burning Iranians, up crops ‘the best bad idea we have.’ In comes Tony Mendez, one of the agency’s best, with a rather eccentric pitch. The plan: we fake it as a film crew for a sci-fi movie called ‘Argo’, pretend we’re seeking film locations in Iran,  absorb the hostages into the crew and out we head straight to the airport. However, the audience would be greatly mistaken for believing much hilarity and a slow descent into comedy would follow. Although there are laughs throughout, the sense of seriousness is slowly built to the point where the audience is struggling to resist shouting encouragement at the screen. The fact is, this film is incredibly absorbing; the writers don’t engage in predictable love stories or hysterical captives, they do something different. They let you draw your own conclusions and let Affleck display his acting prowess and the dimensions of his character. But above all they let the audience empathise with the characters on a basic human level without needing to know their various relationship histories or all the usual features of over-writing which make the initial scenes of so many movies a drag. Take note film-makers: different is good. Different leads to you finding yourself almost falling off the edge of your seat with tension. This is the sign of a truly great movie. 

It is important to mention this film is not all about Affleck. Old hand John Goodman (The Big Lebowski, Monsters Inc, The Artist) puts in a great double-act performance with academy award winning Alan Arkin (Little Miss Sunshine, Edward Scissorhands, Get Smart) to provide light relief amongst all the nail-biting. One of this film’s strengths is that when such quality acting as a given, more time is spent on the story, the visuals and the writing. One thing is for sure, it definitely shows.

5 STARS