We are The Awkward Silence, a comedy sketch double-act based in Oxford but clambering up to London whenever possible. We are Ralph Jones (me) and Vyvyan Almond (him); I write all of our material but Vyvyan makes up for this by being a better actor. We run and host two monthly nights, both of which are ruddy great: one’s in Oxford, called Laughter Track, and the other’s in London, called The Awkward Silence + Special Guests. At the last Laughter Track Vyvyan smashed one of the venue’s lights with a tennis racquet; he’s a passionate performer.

At our Special Guests night, which has been running for almost two years, we have hosted performers like Isy Suttie, Paul Foot, Simon Munnery, The Pajama Men, and The Penny Dreadfuls. We began at the Etcetera Theatre but are now at the Wilmington Arms, a fantastic venue in Clerkenwell. Our next night there is November 28.

Laughter Track takes place monthly at the Port Mahon on St. Clement’s, and the next two are scheduled to be on November 19 and December 12. On November 19 we are commemorating the 412th birthday of Charles 1 and on December 12 – well, we all know what December 12 is. It’s Bill Nighy’s birthday. So, we’ll be raising a toast to Bill and the evening’s entertainment will revolve exclusively around him (not literally). Our Oxford night is very dear to us because we are able to showcase some of the wonderful talent that Oxford has to offer: a poet named George Chopping, for example, or Paul Fung, a sickeningly good stand-up. 

As a sketch group, people often ask what kind of thing we do, which is a curious thing: I can’t imagine stand-ups being asked the same question very often. I therefore find myself using the words ‘surreal’, ‘weird’, and ‘lots of different characters’ far too often, none of which sells the product to the person asking. Prominent reference points are also hard to find, so I find myself comparing us to Little Britain or Monty Python simply because they are well-known, not because we are particularly alike. (Some people say they haven’t heard of Monty Python, at which point I just slice off their legs with a chainsaw.) What I mean is that we are at our strongest when we are inhabiting strange and wonderful worlds with strange and wonderful characters; I believe our strength lies in portraying a range of accents, ages, weirdos etc. Mind you, we also have a sketch in which we just make hideously orgasmic noises while playing tennis.

Our website, should you wish to peruse some of our material while stroking your face, is www.theawkwardsilence.co.uk.

At Oxford we’re pressed for time. So, if you decide to spend some hours reading, you want value for money. Sebastian Faulks’ A Possible Life gives you a five-in-one deal: five stories, each of which could stand on its own as a novella.

But the novel is not fragmentary. In a world in which machine-generated nonsense can pass as poetry on the internet and postmodernists keep winning the Nobel Prize, Faulks’ novel stands as a piece of good, solid literature. The stories are united around recurring, age-old themes: soul-mates, loss, and the moment of self-reflexive epiphany that comes shortly before death.

The attentive reader will notice ingenious connections between the novel’s five parts: places from someone’s dream recur in another’s reality, and a certain statuette of the Virgin Mary resurfaces a century later.

That said, A Possible Life is sometimes too well calculated. All stories are designed to fit the scheme of the whole book, and some seem more honest than others. The second one, whose main characters embody the two sides of the faith vs. science debate, felt a little flat. The cognitive scientist consumed by her work at the expense of true emotion was more a record of certain prejudices than a person. The story in which Faulks writes from the point of view of a working-class Londoner also raises some issues. William the dockyards worker says “we was” not “we were”, but his outlook on life is not much different to the aforementioned brain scientist. Does that show respect or condescension? I’m not sure.

Faulks has set out to write a book that defines our shared humanity across time periods, nations, and social classes. For those modern souls among us who are used to random code-generated poetry, this might seem like a bit too much. How much structure can you have before your writing begins to seem rather academic? But, for all the hopes and doubts it leaves you with, reading it you will dream of love and travel; you will reflect about where your life is going. Faulks gives you all these things that literature was invented for in the first place. 

THREE STARS

Power pervades Peter Ackroyd’s Tudors. With a focus on sedition, peril, war and plot, Tudors focuses heavily on a high political narrative.

This is a legitimate route to take, but anyone who has read Ackroyd’s novels – which bring figures like Milton, John Dee and Karl Marx (and a bevy of historical Londoners) to life – will be disappointed if they expect a book which brings the past back to life.

The focus is on the power play of princes, bishops and whispering advisers, rather than on the pain of reformation, or bustle and stench of London.

Tudors is engaging: Ackroyd’s style is highly readable. But he has created a narrative of the 16th century that is too standard.

One of Ackroyd’s greatest works is London: The Biography, a work that combines real life testimonies with his own curious insights into psycho-geography, connecting the prehistoric stone, fossils and murky druidical practices to the city we all know today.

That is what he does best. Ackroyd’s novels and non-fictional works bring the past to life, and make it relevant. He is aware that history lives and breathes in the world we inhabit, and that ghosts tend to wander our subconscious.

Therefore, it is unfortunate to read such a staid and two-dimensional work as Tudors, especially in the fortnight where Hillary Mantel’s Man Booker Prize-winning Bring Up The Bodies – the explosive account of the life of Thomas Cromwell – has achieved such a high profile.

There is no radical viewpoint on show here. Tudors is a fairly conventional retelling of a familiar tale, a good general survey of 16th century British political history.

Ackroyd’s Catholicism results in a melancholy take on the dissolution of the monasteries and stripping of churches in the Reformation, but it is combined with recognition of the genius of the court in selling the property to the middle and upper orders of society, which invested them irrevocably in the Reformation process. 

Ackroyd, who I do believe stands as one of the greatest living writers, also recognises the superb literary legacy that resulted from Protestantism’s emphasis on the written word over visual tradition: “this refashioned culture was to find its fruits in Milton and in Bunyan, in Blake and in Tennyson”, these idols of a literary world of which Ackroyd is a firm part.

It’s difficult to find anything particularly contentious in Tudors. Anyone who hasn’t read much on the period will find this a useful introduction. Indeed, Tudors’ fate may be to become a perfectly decent text to set as vacation reading for undergraduates.

Next up is the turbulent 17th century, which I expect Ackroyd is about to cover in his third volume: we can only wait and see if Ackroyd will continue his attempt to resist the partisan in his account of a world turned upside down. 

Three Stars

He’s known for his per­petual role as bumbling English gent who “uhms” and “erms” every other line. He’s been in People magazine’s ‘Sexiest Men Alive’, alongside the likes of John­ny Depp and Justin Timberlake, but unlike Captain Jack and the self-proclaimed Prince of Pop, Mr Grant was one of us.

During his stint at New Col­lege, Bridget Jones’s antagonist once had his heart set on becom­ing an art historian. But after spending his nights drinking and debauching with the Bull­ingdon-esque Piers Gaveston Society, he failed to achieve the first class degree demanded of the Courtauld Institute, and fell back on acting.

He got his start in Oxford dra­ma in the half-dozen line role of Fabian in a production of Twelfth Night. The pinnacle of his stu­dent drama days was Privileged, his big screen debut on the topic of the bed hopping of Oxford stu­dents (stick to what you know, eh?) which managed to get him spotted by a talent scout. Hughie was a fighter, and overcame the usual setbacks experienced by any emerging student ac­tor – tiresome rehearsals, script fumblings, the ramen soup diet etc. But no hurdle was as monu­mental or as celestial as his role in Hamlet, which was performed entirely in velour Star Trek cos­tumes, with flashy delta logo to match. We’re not sure Mr Spock would approve.

The beginning of Michaelmas 2012 has been marked by dull skies and seemingly unending drizzle. So quite an evening is to be had watching Bloody Poetry, a play which brings the audience across the Alps and the centuries to Geneva, 1816, conjuring up both the tran­quil shores of Lake Geneva and the heights of violently Gothic storms.

The play centres around four main characters who carry the majority of the action, making for a highly personal, character-driven play, and three of them are among the most famous names in English literature: Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Claire Clairmont, Mary’s stepsister. Following an inces­tuous summer that the four spend in Geneva, the play naturally swings between intimate expressions of emotion and declaimed contempla­tions of the nature of poetry.

In spanning both huge questions and intimate relationships, Bloody Poetry greatly depends upon the chemistry of the main actors; fortu­nately, each of the cast members in this production turn in solid per­formances. Arty Bolour Froushan is appropriately strident and seductive as Byron, and Claudia King brings depth to what could have been any lovestruck teenager in her Claire, hopelessly besotted with Byron. Amelia Sparling and Tim Schneider are both good as the Shelleys, filling out a foursome that really stands out in the chemistry they all share. Char­acters move about constantly, as if trying to run through all their possi­ble permutations – movement which could seem arbitrary and distract­ing, but which comes off as natural, ultimately selling the hedonistic developments between the four of them all the more convincingly.

Jack Sain is also to be commended as Dr Polidori, Byron’s physician and diarist, measuring the wanton im­propriety of the others through his own repression. His entrance, stand­ing stiffly upright over Claire and the Shelleys entwined on the floor, is a particularly nice moment, as is the scene in which the four torment him while acting out Plato’s cave. In both cases, as throughout the portion of the play I saw, the blocking creates and emphasises focal points, the foursome paired up variously, all fac­ing one direction.

These movements are swift and unforced, creating a nice sense of movement within the play, match­ing the dialogue’s intellectual crack­le. I do wonder whether this leads to a sacrifice of dynamics: surely, in a play where the nature of art and love are under discussion, more could be made of moments of silence, if only to allow the audience to catch up? However, since I only saw rather mo­mentous scenes, this could just be the peril of the preview. Ultimately, this production seems intriguing, and well worth a view.

FOUR STARS