I only wish I could tell you more of Alex Mill’s play itself. From what I can tell, I only saw about three pages of the script, some of which was still in its blocking phase and, owing to the Beckettesque-Pinteresque nature of the play, at the best of times deliberately disjointed and meaningless. There are only two cast members, neither of whom have names, separated by a red door and a mysterious third character, played in fact by the director, whose presence is never explained. I am told to ‘expect verbal fencing’ and  ‘disquisition upon holidays, stars, swings, storytelling and porridge, with something much more menacing just beyond’. Not that this makes things any clearer of course. 

Yet, this is part of the charm of the show. Out Through the In Door is a play about the rhythmic qualities and poetry of words in their every day use, and it’s something that Marc Pacitti and Mick Lyons, who play the two characters, are well on their way to demonstrating able to command of, as long as their don’t let their accents get in the way. Alex Mills is an intriguing director with a very eclectic musical taste. He interspersed the rehearsal by playing different songs from his iPod, in one instance to help his performers focus, in another, to help with find the rhythm in the script. It’s a wonderful idea and one that rendered nuanced and absorbing performances from the actors in the rehearsal, even if I didn’t quite know what was going on all of the time.

If all this mystère is some clever marketing trick, the person responsible for it needs a rather large pat on the back, for it has certainly worked on me, and I hope it will also work on you. 

3.5 stars

For a play where two men argue over their past lives whilst sitting in an inflatable boat, Rubber Dinghy, written by Kelvin Fawdrey and directed by Ben Cohen, packs a surprisingly remarkable punch.

For a start, it only runs at half an hour long. I probably shouldn’t admit to this but the show’s length is half the reason I like it so much. Short plays often have a tendency not to reveal enough of their characters, or not to give suitably satisfactory endings, simply because of the time frame. However, Fawdrey’s witty and intelligent script trims all the fat, trusts it’s audience’s intelligence, and says exactly what it needs to say in 30 minutes, what many a student play has said in 60.  

Ben Cohen is an audacious and confident director. It’s a gamble having a random musician sitting on stage in full sub fusc, banging drums, splashing water and playing various bizarre looking instruments into a microphone to recreate the sea and other sound effects, but it works perfectly. Equally as effective is the juxtaposition between the natural lighting of most scenes, and then the sudden washes of deep colour; a rich blue when the Siren appears and a menacing red when a flare gun is shot in the final scenes. It all adds to the really quite unsettling disjointed menace of the piece.

Credit must also go Edwin Price and Alexander Bowsher who both give strong central performances, as well as Eleanor Budge who has never made the song Blue Moon so evocative and chilling. The true test of a good performer on stage is whether they can say as much with silence and stilness as they do with words. These three succeed with flying colours.

All in all, I can barely fault Rubber Dinghy. Go see it. It’s a hot contender for best show of the term.

4 stars. 

‘So who here remembers the war years?’

This was not the first clue that this concert might not be aimed at my demographic. As soon as I had entered the Holywell music rooms, I noticed the elevated age of most around me, and realised that my expectations of a cool, alternative ukulele gig would be challenged.

Really, I shouldn’t have been surprised; Andy Eastwood, the uke virtuoso the whole night was based around, is a paid-up member of the Vaudeville and variety traditions, and as such his act is a bit more ‘end-of-the-pier’ than the internet ukulele musicians I’m used to. However, despite my initial disappointment I soon got into the swing of things, helped along by Andy’s boundless and infectious enthusiasm. The amount of energy that he put into the first half was phenomenal, every song infused with the potency of a closing number and with a sideline in cheesy jokes that never fell flat, no matter how truly groansome they were. While a few of his Formby covers left me cold, his medleys of Elvis tracks and film themes (nothing later than the early 80s) really appealed to me, and certainly got a great reception from the crowd.

Of course, while I may have had some issues with the music genre, Eastwood’s pedigree as a musician is beyond question. Whilst at New College, he was the first music student in Oxford’s history to perform his finals recital on the ukulele, going some way to redeem the image of an instrument that many dismiss out of hand. Watching him play was a joy (as it is with any truly gifted musician), and his skill was often genuinely astonishing. A particular highlight for me was a version of the William Tell overture which came towards the end of the first half – honestly, it’s something that needs to be seen to be believed, and it’s a real shame that his set didn’t contain more adaptations in that vein. Instead, Eastwood demonstrated his versatility by performing a few songs on the guitar, and even more on the violin. While this did serve to break up the ukulele songs a bit, and Eastwood is accomplished in both of these instruments, these sections seemed to fall slightly flat. Andy’s remarkability lies in his primary instrument, and his lesser skill on the others meant that it did not justify the diversion.

The second half, unfortunately, seemed to lack a lot of the energy of the first, and there were far fewer songs that I could identify. By the time Andy and his band had started their patriotic 1940s medley, my mind had begun to wander. Overall, while I had a good time, I was slightly disappointed. But that’s really not fair on Eastwood; his technique was flawless, and while I may not have been his target audience I still found plenty to appreciate. Fundamentally, my flawed expectations are to blame for my reaction, with most of the audience seeming to have a fantastic time. In any case, I have a lot of respect for someone who wears their passions on their sleeve, someone who’ll stand up to play in front of a crowd no matter how silly their instrument is seen as. To steal one of Eastwood’s puns – it takes some pluck.

Over the past few weeks, apparently from nowhere, Gotye (pronounced ‘Gautillier’), the stage name of Belgian born Australian experimentalist musician Wouter De Backer, has stealthily climbed the UK charts with his song ‘Somebody I Used to Know’, the lead single from Making Mirrors. Despite the success of the single, the success of this, his third album, is hindered by two simply unavoidable problems. The first of these being the wide range of differing styles which the album contains, the second being the brilliance of that flagship single, ‘Somebody I Used to Know’.

You might be forgiven for thinking that a good song would be to the benefit of an album as a whole, but this is certainly not the case in this instance. The album features songs ranging from the upbeat Motown-inspired ‘I Feel Better’ to the slower, electronic sounds of ‘State of the Art’, which is apparently a song about pipe organs. Whilst experimentalism of this kind should be encouraged, the disparate styles on display on Making Mirrors means that the album exhibits a severe lack of coherence with it sometimes being difficult to believe that you are still listening to the same artist from song to song.

If, then, there is no coherence, which there isn’t, the album must rely on the strength of its individual songs for its success, and this is where the colossus that is ‘Somebody I Used to Know’ really shoots its parent in the foot. The song contains its own compelling storyline of lost love and everything it sets out to achieve is achieved. Although the other songs on the album are by no means poor – ‘Eyes Wide Upon’, ‘Save Me’ and ‘Bronte’ are all well worth a listen – they are nowhere near the standard of ‘Somebody I Used to Know’, to the extent that the listener cannot help but be left wondering why they should bother with them at all.

3 STARS

In 2004, Marcus Hopson dropped out of high school in Los Angeles, determined to become a rapper. With an ‘eight dollar microphone from Wal-Mart,’ do-it-yourself beat-making software and a pair of white contact lenses, he took to his parents’ basement to start a rap career from scratch. Eight years, two albums, and a nationwide tour later, having ditched his record deal to go it alone, the self-styled ‘rap maniac with the hooligan eyes’ is finally on the brink of superstardom. ‘It’s going really good,’ Hopsin tells me, in his first UK interview. ‘In my particular situation, it’s probably going as good as it could get, you know. Everything’s nice right now.’

It reads like the classic hip-hop rags-to-riches story. Notably absent from the narrative, however, are the usually (assumed to be) attendant tropes of glorified violence, gang allegiance and drug-taking, Marcus eschewing the violent glamour of South Central LA for the subterranean home comforts of his basement laboratory. Given the location of his early career, it is perhaps appropriate that, on a cold Christmas vacation night, I am calling California from my bedroom in my parents’ house. ‘How was your interview with the rapper?’ my mother will ask me later.

Despite a certain witty bravado, Hopsin’s lyrics are far from the self-hagiography that has come to be endemic in modern rap music. While not shy about proclaiming himself the ‘saviour’ of hip-hop, the self-promotion seems limited to a fairly undeniable musical talent. On an autobiographical level his songs tell the tale of ‘the Special Ed kid at lunchtime the bitches wouldn’t stand around with’, masturbating at his parents’ house or ‘sitting alone with my Capri Sun and raisins’ in the playground. While not necessarily in the way his teachers might have hoped, Hopsin’s schooldays were certainly formative years.

‘I was in high school and I didn’t really do too much work,’ he explains, ‘but it wasn’t because I was lazy. It was just because it wasn’t what I really wanted to do in my heart. I wanted to skateboard, I wanted to draw and I wanted to make music. I saw other people who made livings off of those so I thought, ‘Why can’t I?’ This is what I want to do and school has nothing for me.’

At times, the 26-year-old Hopsin seems to channel the 16 year old Marcus, and a natural switch to present tense in recalling his past fosters the called-to-principal’s-office dynamic: ‘It’s not that I’m lazy and I wanna be rebellious but they don’t have nothing for me, so fuck it! They have me here for nothing so I’m gonna throw tantrums in class ‘cos I don’t care!’

Growing up, both in terms of pushing past negative experiences at school, and overcoming restricting cultural pigeonholes, was important. ‘I was brainwashed,’ he says, when asked about the pressure to conform to a stereotypical West-Coast ‘thug’ or ‘gangsta’ image. ‘I was thinking in the box, thinking West-Coast rappers had to be West-Coast rappers and East-Coast rappers had to be East-Coast rappers. But then as you get older, and you start to find yourself as a man, that doesn’t matter. I am me, and I know how to rap, and if people like my music they’re just gonna like it. It doesn’t matter where I’m from. So that thankfully got eliminated once I started becoming a real adult.’

The West-Coast streets that raised Marcus were not those of Long Beach or Compton, but those of Panorama City, known less for its hip-hop credentials than for being the filming location of The Office. It is also, according to Wikipedia, ‘known as the San Fernando Valley’s first planned community,’ and this is perhaps an appropriate location for the start of a career in which it seems that from day one, nothing has left been to chance.

‘Everything that I’m doing is planned,’ he insists, ‘There’s not really any accidents.’ Always autonomous in the production of his music, and now, after an acrimonious split from Eazy-E’s Ruthless Records in 2009, the head of his own label, Hopsin’s outlook is fiercely independent. ‘People think that I’m just a rapper, and they assume that most rappers don’t do everything, but I do everything,’ he stresses.

‘From the beats to the videos to working on my image to doing my choruses, everything is planned out. I know the majority of rappers don’t do that ‘cos I see rappers every freakin’ night damn near when I’m at a show, and I know what they do and they don’t do. 

‘A rapper may feel like they can beat me in a battle or competition, which realistically they could. I’m not the best rapper. But there’s not many full packages out there in the world.’

Searching for a metaphor, the teenage Marcus once again resurfaces. ‘It’s kind of like the Dragonballs in Dragonball Z. There’s only seven of them in the world,’ he explains with an endearingly goofy, Comic-Con chuckle, ‘Those Dragonballs – that’s how I feel good, high quality artists are in general: there’s not many of them. There’s a lot of rappers, but those super full packages, there’s not a lot of them.’

Making full use of the internet, turning makeshift home videos into YouTube sensations and gathering Facebook fans at an exponential rate, Hopsin is a living lesson in the creative opportunities available to young people doing it on their own.

‘That’s the message that I wanna give to everybody. I want them to stop being lazy, stop depending on people, stop saying ‘Oh I need a manager! Oh I don’t have anybody to make my beats.’ I didn’t have that either. I was the king of not having that. I didn’t have anything at all. I had to get up and learn how to do everything that I didn’t want to learn! I didn’t wanna make beats! I didn’t wanna learn how to do videos! I didn’t wanna learn how to mix stuff! But if I didn’t learn that then I’d be 26 years old right now just chilling here being a bum, and probably have a kid and be hating my life. You gotta get up and do something.’

It was on YouTube that Hopsin first started to turn British heads this summer with the final instalment of his ‘Ill Mind of Hopsin’ video series, part State of the Union address, part manifesto for the future of rap. In a whirlwind tour of what’s wrong with the rap industry, the ‘wack beats and gap teeth’ of Tyler, the Creator, at the time the Biggest Thing in Rap, were singled out for special scrutiny. I suggest he’s not afraid to speak his mind about other rappers.

‘No I don’t have a problem with speaking my mind at all,’ he retorts. ‘I hear hundreds of people say crap about all these other rappers, and I’m one of those people too, who talk crap about rappers, about the garbage that’s on the radio and this and that, but I rap so I can actually voice my opinion on a song.’ 

It’s clearly a battleground that he relishes.

‘There’s people who give their opinions about me as well: people saying, ‘Hopsin’s wack, he bites Eminem, his contacts are ugly…’ But a lot of people who say those things don’t rap, and if they did rap they could diss me as well and do the same thing to me.’

As the head of his own label, Funk Volume, Hopsin is well placed to discuss rap as a business, as well as an art form, and behind the contacts, there is always an eye to the industry as a whole. As well as the digs at individual rappers and their music, the standard model of the ‘hip-hop lifestyle’ – the women, the drugs, and ‘all these songs about cash’ – is comprehensively contested.

‘I can’t knock somebody for making money,’ he clarifies, ‘That’s a good thing. They can support themselves financially and that’s good. It’s the way that they promote it. These rappers promote money, they promote drinking, they promote smoking, they promote strippers and all that stuff; all these things that don’t really play any real serious part in really, really actually living and finding happiness. These are things that only contribute to you being older and thinking, ‘Why the hell did I do that? What the hell was I thinking? Oh my God, I’m such an idiot.’

It’s a standpoint that you might argue is easy to take when such luxuries are out of financial reach. But even now that Hopsin is making ‘pretty good money’ – although ‘not a millionaire or nothing’ – he has so far not been overcome by temptation.

‘I walk in the mall and I’m like, ‘What do I want?’ None of that stuff is really going to make me happy. When I finally made enough money to buy a new car I was like, ‘I don’t even want it!’ It was like, ‘Why am I gonna get this shit?’ You start breaking things down like, ‘Why?’

‘If I buy this new car, what am I really buying it for? Am I buying it to impress girls? I already have a girlfriend. Am I buying it to impress my friends? Who cares about them, they know me for who I really am, what is this gonna really do?

‘Anybody who portrays money to be that way, is putting off false advertisement, and any rapper or any artist who has power to control minds, they need to know their responsibilities. 

Again, Hopsin finds his metaphor in the comic-book drawer. ‘It’s like in Spider-Man, Aunt May says with great power comes great responsibility… No, no, that could have been the uncle in Spider-Man. I forgot who said it but it was in Spider-Man… With great power comes great responsibility. So anybody who has the power to capture minds, they need to know that they have a responsibility and they can’t mislead people in the wrong direction. If they wanna do that, fuck it, go ahead, but I personally don’t feel that that’s right and I’m gonna fight for that.’

Does he feel he’s fighting alone?

‘I know there are others out there like me, but I don’t meet too many rappers like me, to be honest. I kind of do feel like I’m alone, but I don’t feel like I’m weak. It’s like I’m a one man army, but I have nuclear bombs in my backpack.’

Antarctica gets off to a good start even before it really begins, with chilly lighting and a well-executed preset that works gently in the background while theatre-types, adoring friends and bored Arts students filter into the BT. So far, so good. Indeed, much of this production is very good, with moments of incredible clarity and very solid, controlled direction jostling for space with an unremittingly strange script.

Strange doesn’t have to mean bad, though, and mostly it isn’t. The premise (a stranger makes an intrepid visit to a guesthouse that may or may not be made of whalebones and is set underground, in a snowy future) works well. It might work better if it were not so much like Harold Pinter’s Birthday Party. Unfortunately, anything that even appears to be trying to work as a pastiche of this piece will struggle not to look like a shoddy imitation. There are an awful lot of similarities. A sinister albeit charming visitor makes an unexpected visit to a deserted guesthouse; there is an alarming and violent scene in quasi-darkness; the conclusion is inconclusive; the dialogue is stilted – and the whole shebang begins with a desiccated breakfast scene. Writer Rob Williams deals, like Pinter, in striking oscillations of tone and register. Sometimes, these are carried with aplomb, and serve not only to increase dramatic tension, but also to encourage an appropriately dissonant tone of discomfit. Sometimes, they feel a little bit like showing off. Where the dissonance works, however, it is admittedly due to the fact that Williams is clearly an excellent writer. I do almost wonder whether I might prefer his poetry. The floridity of the prose is occasionally a bit distracting, especially with narrative development that is already cloudy.

This might be my biggest problem with the production: the narrative quickly grows very intense, without a proper foundation of character development or the stakes involved ever really being delivered. The three adult characters talk in almost exactly the same way, and the dialogue sometimes feels like a vehicle for William to air his (admittedly very good) ‘creative writing.’ Enough of the script, though: what of the execution? Giacomo Sain is to be applauded (though I recommend that he ask his tech crew to check their cues). A rather brutal scene between the visitor and the daughter is handled with extreme tact and precision, while props are judiciously used throughout to enhance already rich imagery. Ellie Geldard’s (Cath) scene with Simon Devenport (Johnny) was, for me, a real highlight of the show – taut and well-carried. Devenport is excellent, with his initial entrance through the house working well to establish a feeling of unpleasantness. In his words, in his speech and in his gait, he is chilling, and truly grotesque – often to very comedic effect. I cannot speak highly enough of Sain’s direction.

What I fear is not being communicated here is the extent to which this is an interesting, worthy and occasionally hilarious piece, where jokes about penises lie close to a surface that, at first glance, appears to consist only of flamboyant versification. At its best and most subtle points, Antarctica works rather like one of Williams’ more lovely images: raspberries under a blanket of snow.

Three and a half stars.

In June 2011 Nobel prize-winning author, V.S. Naipaul, said that he’d never read a woman writer to equal him. In an interview with the Royal Geographic Society he said he could tell a woman’s writing within a ‘paragraph or two’. ‘Women’s fiction’ is a sub-genre of its own, and marketed by pink covers, high heels, handbags, or bodices. But that is not the shelf of books Naipaul was referring to. He meant the inadequacy and inferiority of female produced literary fiction, women trying the avant-garde and experimental,  attempting voyages into the external and internal world. There are several myths about female writing that must be changed in order to take full advantage of a vast and varied world of literature: firstly, that women write about domestic life, and relationships while men – inheritor’s of the epic tradition – write about the bigger picture. Secondly, that women’s writing is copious, emotional, sentimental. And thirdly, mostly damningly, that one can tell the gender of an author from the prose. There is no need for us to defend women’s writing, or respond to Naipaul with a burst of indignation. We don’t believe women’s fiction and men’s fiction have any major intrinsic differences, except for their treatment by markets and readerly expectations. To that end, and in order to suggest a few places to go to extend your palate – whether they’re familiar or new names – Cherwell would like to introduce you to a few female writers we like.

1. Jeanette Winterson

In 1985 Jeanette Winterson published her first novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a semi-autobiographical story of lost loves, coming of age and losing faith. The resulting novel is one of the most startling and affecting books I’ve ever read. Then in 2011 Winterson published Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal, her actual autobiography, and back came the exorcisms, the world service and two women in the local sweetshop who her mother said dealt in unnatural passions. Winterson’s novels intensely and unashamedly explore female relationships as a norm. From her characters’ mothers,  to other women, to their own bodies, Winterson’s writing allows the reader to explore new, very feminine, worlds.

Grace Goddard

2. Margaret Atwood

I’d heard a lot of people drop Margaret Atwood’s name into conversation before, but it wasn’t until a relaxed browse in Waterstones a few months ago that I picked up one of her novels. It’s difficult to describe what is so fantastic about her writing because it’s so diverse. Her stories are complex, often weaving backwards and forwards in time. The narratives withhold, they hint, they partially reveal, they keep you guessing. Even beyond their end. But despite how challenging her novels can be, ultimately they’re also really simple, because they’re about the most basic and most timeless aspects of life: love, loss, desire, betrayal. It’s all there.  Start with the Blind Assassin and you’ll see what I mean.

Fay Lomas

3. Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison writes with a beautifully lyrical hand that also has an incredibly sharp edge to it. She is able to lull you into a sense of security with eloquent prose and then whip the rug from under your feet with a twist or a bitter revelation of brutality. Beloved is a novel which is constantly evolving. From love story to tragedy to ghost story, there is no one single box that this text will fit into. This is a tale of the traumatic experience of Sethe, an escaped slave who has been abused and degraded beyond recognition in the slave trade of the southern states. She has found happiness in her freedom but the extraordinary measures she takes to keep that freedom have dark and mysterious consequences

Imogen Truphet

4. Wendy Cope

Wendy Cope ruled herself out early on in the race for Poet Laureate when Andrew Motion stepped down. But she is nonetheless the laureate of readers who like poems with rhyme and a spring in their step. Some of my poetry friends think she is old fashioned and insular, an establishment poet. They might be right, in the sense that like Kingsley Amis for whom her first collection was named (Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis), she writes with the irony of the secure bourgeois, only nearly self-undermining. Her best poems have a Wodehousian charm. That is, they invoke mighty difficulties in the understanding of life, but they still make us smile while we think of them.

Tom  Cutterham