Allo Darlin’ tackle important issues. The video to ‘My Heart is a Drummer’ shows two people in oversized cardboard hearts playing table tennis. Their lyrics include ‘I sent you a postcard from Berlin, of a fat man eating a sausage’. Europe doesn’t strive to be serious, but it possesses a quality superior to any ‘twee-pop’ stereotypes.

This is not an album simply evoking idyllic summer days and the happiness of youth. The refreshingly clean instrumentation veils in an almost euphoric haze some of the real sentiments present. In ‘Tallulah’, the sparsest song on the album, Morris’ pessimism and pain are most manifest. She wistfully reminisces over previous summer outings, ‘It’s been a long time since I’ve seen all my old friends’, yet still attempts to be optimistic: ‘I really love my new friends feel I’ve known them a long while’. However, negativity permeates through Europe, providing contrasts with the happiness and making Allo Darlin’s music far more intricate and enjoyable than that of many twee-pop acts who describe the world with an offensively fanciful view. They possess a realistic nostalgia and a clear understanding of life’s ability to fluctuate from exhilarating to oppressive.

Excessive layers of instruments do not dominate, the playful guitar sings alongside Morris, wandering off to higher reaches before reconnecting in a charming manner. Violin, reminiscent of Lanterns on the Lake, mirrors the lyrics’ sadness, while steel guitar complements positive images. Morris’ voice combines the charm of Zooey Deschanel’s with an aching vulnerability, making her less Hollywood and more human.

Allo Darlin’ have maintained the endearing warmth and excitement of an over-populated genre yet kept a firm understanding of life and included a wide spectrum of emotions. Europe is an exquisite summer record that pleases in the background and intrigues upon closer inspection.

Four stars

The Magdalen Players’ production of The Tempest was forced indoors on Wednesday night
by the constant drizzle that seems to have recently descended upon us. The last-minute move
to the college auditorium left the actors still putting together the set as the audience arrived. It
was a particular blow as this light-hearted staging of Shakespeare’s last play would have been
ideal for a balmy evening in the open air of the President’s Garden.

The production’s main twist framed Prospero not as the exiled Duke of Milan, but as the usurped ringmaster of a Milanese circus, left to while away the years with card tricks on his mysterious island. He was complemented by a hyperactive and juggling Ariel, striped costumes and an accordion and guitar duo, with engaging results that also reflected the play’s conceit of its characters as entertainers.

With all the high spirits, the staging’s chief weakness was its neglect of The Tempest’s darker side. Dylan Townley’s top-hatted Prospero was a little thin, and lacked the bitterness of a man who has been left marooned for half a lifetime by his own brother, while Antonio (Archie Cornish) and Sebastian (Cameron Quinn) looked far too approachable to be convincing cold-blooded killers.

In its comedy, however, this jaunty Tempest really shone. Andrew Wynn Owen excelled as the kindly Gonzalo, relentlessly positive but ever so mildly senile. Sam Plumb’s camp Trinculo was equally well done, giving such a startlingly natural delivery that I started to wonder if he’d gone off script and was boldly improvising on Shakespeare. The decision to stage the play as an upbeat and masque-like spectacle may have cost it some depth, but made for a charming summer production which will hopefully return to the open air where it belongs.

FOUR STARS

Though unafraid of Virginia Woolf, Edward Albee’s play did, at points, have me jumping out of my seat. Take the pig-headedness of a drunken brawl, and filter it through some intellectual minds; douse this with the age-old issue of being boxed inside an unhappy marriage, and finally add the cherries on top – two awkward guests who are (at first) as tight-skinned as onions. Plus masses of alcohol, of course. This is the cunningly brutal cocktail that our performers had forced us to down along with them in their absurd pageant.

The craziest (and in my humble opinion, most exciting) part of this performance was the way you almost feel present: George and a Martha might well be mentally clubbing each other to death in front of you. At first, you almost feel like you’re intruding. A front-row seat meant that at points I was literally sitting a few inches away from George. Being squeezed into a room about the size of a luxurious living room, with curtains drawn against the cheerful, sunny view of Brasenose, you are lulled into a false sense of security. From the word go, you’re locked into place by the easy bickering (or bellowing), the interrupting and the talking over one another – you follow it at the same pace as any other conversation. If you actually read the script, I’ve no doubt you’d pick up a billion more stinging puns than the few thousand that flew back and forth like pins – but you wouldn’t get the same hot-cold concoction of hard fear as you watch four real people let loose on each other. Sound exaggerated? There was even a fight scene.

Although you do end up leaving your cosy seat more than slightly traumatized, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? isn’t just a truckload of insanity and malice being tipped onto your head. Jokes, and good ones too, are thrown in so casually that it’s hard to believe it’s scripted. And don’t forget those die-hard practical jokes, too – nothing adds more flavour to sheer horror than humour.

A laugh or no – this play was certainly a scream.

FOUR STARS

Billed as ‘an original law drama’, Hanzla MacDonald’s new play Court certainly is that. It follows the trial of Suleyman Jones (Tim Schneider), a recent convert to Islam, who is being prosecuted for assisting with seven suicides while sojourning in an Indian mental asylum. He is flanked throughout by his dirt-obsessed lawyer, Adil Aziz (Ibrahim Khan), and the troubled lesbian Prosecution, Harriet Macaulay (Fi Johnston). Then there are the manifestations of both lawyers’ guilty consciences: a skittish convict named Mickey Turner, and Harriet’s father, Paul (both played by Gabriel Nicklin). You’d be forgiven for any confusion in attempting to reconcile these seemingly disparate elements.

Court takes us between past and present, real and imagined, and everything in between. Without effectively used alterations of lighting state, the audience would no doubt have been lost in this complex script. Unlike many writers in Oxford, MacDonald is not a novice: two of his plays have been professionally staged at Coventry’s Belgrade Theatre, and that experience is easily detected. The dialogue feels like it was written by someone comfortable with their own voice, and not – thankfully – like a poor-man’s Pinter. Sometimes, however, MacDonald himself is too pervasive, giving lines laced with that authorial smugness which comes through when A Clever Thing to Say is put in a mouth which doesn’t suit it.

In playing ‘a sort of narrator’, Schneider’s background in stand-up is evident. The assurance with which he chats to the audience ably glides over the initial unease emanating from the stalls, yet he employs a sarcastic knowingness which, though a mainstay of comedians, jars here. Perhaps it is intentional that he never quite connects with his fellow performers, but it renders the story somewhat disjunctive. The performance is overly cynical, ramming home an artifice which precludes any care about the outcome of Suleyman’s trial (in which his life is at stake). Khan struggles to give anything meaningful to a character who serves mostly to feed us clever turns of phrase and discourses on the similarities between dirt and law, though manages to sustain a sinister affability throughout. Similarly, Johnston (beyond some first-night jitters) never quite manages to show any emotional truth with which we could engage. By contrast, Nicklin’s vivid characterisations bring a welcome bolt of energy and excitement to proceedings. It is testament to his skill that, when he burst into the scene having switched role, it took me a while to realise that it was the same actor (despite the costume change being minimal). The prevailing dissonance between actor and character is nowhere to be seen here, allowing him to drag an otherwise rather languid play into a genuinely dramatic penultimate scene. Sadly, he highlights what could have been if director Eamon Jubbawy had pushed the rest of his cast to play the journeys of their characters faithfully and without reserve.

We are instructed to ‘call it meta-theatre; call it mental theatre’, and Court is undoubtedly at its best when it abandons the intellectual pretensions of the former and descends into the abject surrealism of the latter (the recounting of Suleyman’s journey to Islam, from ‘circumspection to circumcision’, is a highlight). Were these sections placed within a narrative which allowed the characters – not the playwright – to take centre-stage, Court could really engags with the themes which it touches upon but refuses to speak meaningfully about. As it is, we are left with a confusing ‘conceptual muddle’.

THREE STARS