In the nineteenth century, figures in art were not expected to directly address the viewer. Manet inverted this convention, establishing eye contact between the subject of the painting and the beholder. Visitors to an exhibition were no longer comfortable in an elevated and secure position in front of a painting. Manet’s paintings teased them. In ‘Olympia’, the female figure’s brazen stare challenges the viewer: they find themselves locked in the gaze of a prostitute.

Olympia, the naked courtesan lying on her canopy, glares fiercely, yet melancholically, out of the painting. She knows that she has to be passive and available, and consciously affects this. When the work was first exhibited in 1865, French audiences were shocked. They felt offended and attacked, calling Olympia ‘vulgar’, ‘a female gorilla’. The painting was even banished to a barely visible place in a corner of the exhibition.

Prostitution was omnipresent but clandestine in nineteenth-century Paris, occupying the so-called chambres séparées: private side-rooms in varietés and café-concerts. And although the activities happening behind closed doors were generally known, nobodywanted them to be put on display – least of all in an oil painting. Manet, however, intended to reveal rather than conceal through his art, and he did so in an eclectic manner: blending influences of pornographic photography with conventions traditional to the medium of painting. He even dared to incorporate compositional allusions to the Old Master Titian’s Venus of Urbino, which would have been obvious to art connoisseurs. Basing the portrait of a courtesan on that of goddess was considered a scandalous affront.

Contemporary critics claimed that Manet’s paintings would ‘knock a hole into the wall’. The paintings not only created a space in convention through which modernism would rush, but also smashed through the fourth wall. The beckoning gaze of the woman in the picture forced the beholder into a direct dialogue. The spectator was no longer allowed the indulgence of being a voyeur; for when one views a Manet, seeing is intrinsically linked with being seen: Olympia looks back at you. The French expression çela me regarde alludes to this thought, meaning both ‘it looks at me’ as well as ‘it concerns me’.

‘Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour – landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one’s hair!’ This is how the narrator of Virginia Woolf’s remarkable The Mark on the Wall (1917) characterizes the experience of using London’s Underground network.

This year the Tube is celebrating its 150th anniversary, with a scintillating display of posters to show for it. The current exhibition of material selected from the London Transport Museum’s archive proves Woolf’s narrator to have been justified in her exhilaration; it demonstrates the extraordinary diversity of talent that has been put to work on making urban journeys beautiful.

The posters are organized thematically, under titles like ‘Finding your way’ – posters to reassure newcomers and remind passengers of the appropriate etiquette. Under the theme ‘Capital culture’, presenting ‘cultural encoun- ters, be these at the zoo or galleries and museums’, a tiger has been constructed out of segments of the iconic Underground roundel, advertising the zoo at Regent’s Park. The ‘Keeps London going’ posters emphasise reliability and technological advancement. No doubt any Londoner who saw the bold announcement of 1909, ‘NO WAITING’, will wonder, while waiting between stations on the Piccadilly line, whether it was truer then than it is now.

The posters on display embody the sprawling spirit of the city, and exhibit its changing relationship with the Underground: some early posters emphasise the Tube as a democratic space and present carriages populated by people of diverse classes. A 1911 poster in dignified suffragette colours depicts a woman pointing confidently at a sign reading ‘THE WAY FOR ALL’. Posters of the ’20s and ’30s are characterized by a close association with glamour and modernity. Bursting with bold shapes and dynamic lines, these often advertise social and sporting events: the Boat Race, the football, the dogs and innumerable sleek bobs. The war changes the face of posters in the ’40s, the transport authorities requesting the public’s patience as the system undergoes rehabilitation.

A cornerstone of the Tube’s public image is the Johnston typeface, introduced in 1916 and used ever since; although now in a modified form. The development of typographic design can be traced from the posters on display: the very earliest are covered with the ungainly jumble characteristic of Victorian advertising.

The exhibition’s greatest strength is its fantastic range of styles and concerns. The modernism of Moholy-Nagy sits next to the traditionally pastoral green and pleasant meadow in Hampstead. Individual artistic accomplishments of the designers are impressive, but together they create a portrait of London as a city steeped in history and culture. The Tube is an icon of London life, with a formidably strong aesthetic identity, and the current exhibition is a fitting way to celebrate its continuing service and importance to endless streams of travellers through the city.

‘Poster Art 150’ is on at the London Transport Museum from 15 February to 27 October 2013. The museum is wheelchair-accessible.

I arrive for my interview with Peace to the sound of ‘Higher Than The Sun’. The tour manager confirms that the soundcheck has run over, so I have a beer with support act Jaws as they are interviewed by another journo. My OxStu counterpart turns up during this and immediately makes the unfortunate error of mistaking us all for Peace. They don’t seem to mind (I certainly don’t!), and the interview turns into a conversation between the seven of us.

I meet Sam Koisser and Dom Boyce on the roof of the O2. After a few jibes about Oxford we get going. “We’re gonna be quizzed now”, mutters Sam, and neither of them manage to produce an answer when I ask them what year the Peloponnesian War was. With that crucial question out of the way, we can get onto talking about the band. Speaking about the early media attention which Peace received, Dom remembers when the band were NME.com’s Radar Tip of the Day, recalling that “I think we went out and got mussels”. Sam confirms mournfully that they couldn’t afford lobster and that they really only went because “Doug had 20% off at Café Rouge”. I suggest that they can get lobster after their first Wembley gig, and Sam laughs, remarking “We’re climbing the shellfish ladder”. With regard to all that early attention, Sam says he thinks that for “some people it goes to their head a bit too quickly. They act like they’ve made it. We still feel that we’re at the very beginning.”

As we talk musical influences, Dom reveals a passion for Hit, Miss or Maybe, while Sam claims most of his early music taste came from “anything used on the Tony Hawk soundtrack” and goes on to joke that he’d love to work with Slade (“they could teach us how to write a Christmas number 1”). It is then revealed that Dom the drummer didn’t have to play for Peace. He had options. “I’ve always wanted to be a carpenter” he remarks, also saying he’d probably be working in a pub if he wasn’t in a band. Sam reveals business acumen as he points out “you could build your own bench seating”. If only this ‘band’ wasn’t in the way! “I know,” he says. “It’s annoying. I’m trying to get it over and done with” (“Burn bright and fast” remarks Sam).

Peace are heading back to Birmingham right after the gig, Sam tells me mournfully. “We usually like to go out after playing.” He tells me the band were keen to visit Hi Lo on Cowley Road. During the gig itself, Peace are their usual energetic and charming selves. Lead singer Harry Koisser, Sam’s brother, seems overwhelmed at times, blowing a kiss to the audience during ‘Float Forever’. As they begin ‘California Daze’ at the start of the encore, he announces “if you’re gonna make out with someone, now’s the time to do it”. Sadly, the bouncer hasn’t let in my plus one, the charming Oliver Davies, so I’m unable to do so. Despite this major disappointment, it was a fantastic night.

On Tuesday of 3rd week, an adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial comes to the BT. The cen­tral character, Josef K, is a man caught up in a bureaucratic nightmare: he has been ac­cused of a crime, but no one will tell him what it is. He is sure of his innocence, but finds himself increasingly trapped in legal jargon and unan­swered questions. The play follows his case, from his accusation to its disturbing finish.

Directed by Sam Ward and with a cast of six who will all be on stage most of the time, the play aims to recreate the claustrophobia experi­enced by Josef K in the dark space of the Burton Taylor. The play blurs the line between what is actually happening and what is just in K’s head: I saw one scene where K meets a painter, Titorelli, and is made to feel like an ac­cessory to his erratic performance. The two are surrounded by the rest of the cast, who become animated portraits which speak and interact with K and the painter.

The novel was adapted by Steven Berkoff, who says that the sparse staging and props mean the scene can change ‘quicker than the story’: the audience’s imagination maximises the space of a theatre without long scene changes. “A set should be able to melt in an instant and never represent a real heavy piece of pseudo-reality” – in Ward’s production, each member of the cast has a host of tiny characters to play in order to ‘furnish’ the stage. This is a departure from the true-to-life staging which Berkoff describes as “lumbering pieces of dead weight”.

Berkoff is involved with ‘total-theatre’, a style of physical theatre described by one critic as “in-yer-face theatre” – music, visuals, movement and text are all given equal importance. The au­dio component of Ward’s production is original: there are various sound effects that the group have put together themselves.

Each sound effect is less of a representation of real life and more of an idea, inserted into the audience’s mind through sound. The ‘rumble’ is, as the name suggests, a deep grinding that starts imperceptibly at a very low volume. The audience will hear it and register it subconsciously until it becomes loud enough for them to consciously wonder what it is. It doesn’t come from anything onstage but instead represents K’s private doubts of his own innocence, doubts that he will not express to any of the other characters or even to him­self. The ‘sexscape’ is a perverse combination of screams and moans, some from pain and some from pleasure.

The idea of contrast is key to The Trial – Josef K is played by Alex Shavick, who is the straight ac­tor to the rest of the cast’s hysterics. He gets used, abused and seduced throughout – but says that the development of his character makes him inter­esting to act. K’s passivity becomes frustration as his quest goes on, so he goes from being a pawn to someone who is at least partially a master of his own fate.

There is also a section where K is a director, organising actors to tell a story to another char­acter, hauling the chorus into a piece of metadra­ma. The adaptation is meant to make you think but primarily entertain: there are plenty of com­ic touches and, in the cast’s own words, this dystopia also has “a lot of straddling”.

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.