There is very little of merit in Oxford IPlayer’s production of On the Line, a new political satire about a Muslim MP embroiled in controversy over plans for the laying of a new railway line through Slough’s local mosque. For a start the play is showing at the Wadham Moser, which, as we all know, is just a glorified badminton court. The writing, when it is funny (which is nothing more than a smirk) relies on stereotype. The Imam, played by Ibrahim Khan, provides most of these comic moments, and his strength of characterisation gives a welcome relief to the abysmal crowd acting and those characters who have been directed to, or just do for whatever reason, shout all of the time, not least Frank, played by Khushall Ved. The acting thus offers little nuance or originality, although there is a glimmer of hope in Miles Lawrence, playing Walter. It is just a shame that he is given such a drab part- not that any other role would howevever have showcased his talent any better. Indeed, I often get the feeling that the actors are just playing older versions of (or just) themselves. 

Scene changes are clumsy, and take far too long, with actors even tripping over the items of set in the dark. Lighting cues are not known, even when it is just a case of lighting one side of the stage, and then the other, and the set, which is just office junk, cheapens the whole performance. Moreover, lines are often fluffed, cues missed and attempts within the script to be profound and meaningful, such as the final line of “Politics. Fucking politics’ or something to that affect, just fall flat. In all, the performance just smacks of amateurishness. I hope things like this will improve over the run, indeed, I was told before the show that the performance had been made leaner after a bad preview (didn’t fill me with confidence it has to be said). Although it is true that the performance now romps along well enough, I am afraid more work still needs to be done to really fill this play’s potential.

2 stars  

Preview

While scores of scholars clashed in the battle between religion and science, God entrusted one man with a solution to combine the two and bring peace on earth. That man was John Murray Spear. 

Inspired by the true story of this extraordinary 19^th century character, two highly animated writers, Matt Fuller and Adam Lebovits, have issued forth a creation that simply needed to be born.

With all the voyeuristic appeal of biography, and all the ironic idealism of a perfectly gauged university production, Messiah Man brings us a tale of obsessive faith, of self-aggrandizing naïveté couched in hyper-innocent charm.

Ben Cohen is emotive and compelling in the role of John. Not leading so much as being led by the play, John is a sympathetic, charismatic soul. In one of multiple layered oppositions in the performance, he evokes the smiling clown, the essential tragedy of the comic character.

Intentional anachronism emphasizes the timelessness of the story, while twisted realism draws out questions of faith, humanity, love, and sanity.

The conviction of the acting enhances the earnest exploration of this well-crafted play, and the writers’ vision shines through in each scene. Performing in the round foregrounds the audience’s role in this fitting homage to a singular figure, following John through a handful of pivotal experiences not too outlandish for fiction.

Come take on your role with the enthusiastic and cohesive cast, in the Burton Taylor Studio, Tuesday-Saturday of 4^th week at 9:30pm. Tickets are £6 / £5 concessions, including a glimpse of the incredible God Machine!  

4 stars

The man behind the play…

John Murray Spear paces around his machine. Looking through darkness into the eyes of the expectant crowd, he wipes the sweat from his brow. The pregnant volunteer is in position. The crowd is in position. Placing his hands on the glass cylinders either side of the chair, he looks to the sky. The time is now.

You won’t have heard of John Murray Spear. Don’t worry, until recently, neither had we. A 19^th century political activist, and one of the first Americans to advocate the abolition of slavery no less, John began life with his feet firmly on the ground. However, marred by his own incompetence and inability to express himself, John’s activism soon petered out. But what was the alternative for a man with a desperate desire to help humanity but no clear idea how? John soon joined the Church.

But this too was met with failure. Naive and innocent, John wandered the country, challenging the orthodoxies of the day – and being repeatedly beaten up in return. Of course, there are only so many beatings a person can take before they either call time on their career or do something radical, so John had a decision to make.

Stay with us, this is where things get weird. Walking a path paved with the ghosts of geology professors and Benjamin Franklin, violent preachers and three hundred lost orphans, John Murray Spear worked his way towards his ultimate work: the God Machine.

The challenge of staging the life of possibly the sweetest and most bizarre man who ever lived was always going to be huge. His bustling, surreal story bursts at the seams of an hour-long show, and this meant that a severe edit was in order. The sex communes and the invention of the ingenious Duck-Boat sadly had to go, but what was left was even stranger.

To perform this story in a conventional style would require a cast of hundreds and a budget of thousands. We have neither. Therefore, we turned to a more picaresque style, with just five actors playing a huge array of characters, and a manic use of music and lights. John stands in the middle of the production, a not-entirely-stable centre around which the madness spins. When the dust settles, maybe this time people will remember his name.

Matt Fuller and Benjamin Kirby

A quick note before we start: this curse has nothing to do with either myself or the many others who populate this most illustrious section of your favourite free student newspaper. Very few of us dabble in the occult, to the best of my knowledge. Rather, this curse is rather different. Review is spelt differently. This is the Curse of the Oxford Revue.

Specifically, this curse is placed on a small village called Blight-upon-Cripple, a place that is as strange as it is charmingly-named, and it is to this town that intrepid reporter Kirsty Kirstyson is sent, chasing a story about a vole that bears a striking resemblance to Geri Halliwell. Instead, she stumbles across a town that has been living under the shadow of a terrifying curse for the past three decades. Being the intrepid reporter that she is, she decides to investigate. But none of that matters, to be quite frank. This is a sketch show, in the manner of so many flying circuses and pairs of Ronnies. Plot barely figures. Neither does character. The small troupe display a remarkable range, fleshing out a variety of characters, some one-offs and others recurring figures. An early sketch, and a particularly brilliant one at that has the Brazilian president and his advisor celebrating the rebound of their country’s economy based upon the revival of their most vital export, the Brazilian Darkness chocolate. Another is a song on the subject of the Viking funeral, a truly spectacular piece of verbal acrobatics. You get the idea.

Whilst some sketches are nothing short of genius, however, some fall flat. This is hardly the fault of the cast, who remain polished and professional throughout. One can hardly criticise their sense of timing, or their self-confidence: the troupe act with bombast and poise regardless of the quality of their material. You’ll notice that I refer to the actors here in the plural: it is very hard to pick a stand-out performer, or one who is significantly less talented than the others. Rather, it is the writing that tends to fall flat. The sketches take a Python-esque aspect, hinging around the sheer mass of non-sequitur and sheer inanity that characterises, say, And Now for Something Completely Different. Sometimes, this works spectacularly. Take, for example, the song about Viking funerals that I mentioned earlier: wonderfully, gleefully silly. A sketch depicting two couples playing a game of something called Beaver-ball that involved verbal abuse and interpretive dance had the audience, myself included, in paroxysms of laughter and sheer bafflement, and was arguably the high point of the proceedings. Others, though, less good. Talking about these is slightly harder: they’re just not memorable. It’s not that they were dreadful. The comedy wasn’t dissimilar, the acting was still excellent. They just weren’t as funny.

And this is what makes summing up this review very difficult. Whilst the Curse of the Oxford Revue did contain sketches of sheer, comic genius, acted out by some undoubtedly fine comedians, it also contained moments which just fell flat. In a traditional play, this kind of inconsistency would prove fatal, but the Curse of the Oxford Revue is not such a play; rather, it is a sketch show. Should it be judged by the same standards as a play, as the same sort of unified whole? More crucially, however, should a sketch show be so uneven as to inspire my pedantic musing in search of some form of critical justification one way or the other? Probably not.

3 stars

Were it not for the weekly reminders in the NME, I might have thought that everywhere east of Glasgow was capable only of either trotting out Scandidisco remixes of our wonderful Anglo-Saxon music, or donning cardigans and burbling their own winsome, yet unmarketable, folk songs. Denmark’s The Asteroids Galaxy Tour are every bit the aesthetic fulfillment of such a preconception. The tone of surprise and expectation of intrinsic national “quirkiness” that colours every piece of writing about a genuinely good album produced by a band that happens to hail from Denmark, Sweden or Norway is nothing more or less than a prejudice, a kind of unconscious cultural condescension. Funnily enough, like most other peoples of the globe, Scandinavians are actually capable of making some really great music – and the Asteroids Galaxy Tour are no exception.

The album really isn’t bad at all. The retro-revival brass section trend (that Mark Ronson has been forced to shoulder the responsibility for) is certainly present, and used correctly for once. This is no Lily Allen parody of a sound that deserves to be taken seriously, but a genuine and enthusiastic stylistic choice. Regrettably, that choice is occasionally ignored in favour of a diluted semi-synthpop (as heard on ‘Heart Attack’ and the title track), that never quite tears itself away from the ‘nu-soul’ rhythms to which the brass section was so ideally suited.

It is music that you will have heard before. Almost every song on Out of Frequency sounds like a cousin of ‘The Golden Age’, the breakout single that made the band’s name and soundtracked that Heineken advert. Some would use this apparent lack of imagination as a stick with which to beat the album. However, I feel that the Asteroids Galaxy Tour are best when they stick to their guns. This is not ‘ideas’ music; it’s a bit of fun. It’s something to put on when you need cheering up, or a little mindless bounce in your step. Sure, the lyrics are meaningless; every song feels the same; Lindberg’s voice can get a big grating – but this music makes me want to dance. They’ve found a formula that works – a danceable beat, a hint of the futuristic, horns and trumpets, a yelp or two from frontwoman Mette Lindberg, and it’s good as gold.

3.5/5 (or four at a push)