For anyone who’s ever read some of Stephen Fry’s later works, you’ll know what to expect of Latin! or Tobacco and Boys. I can remember reading The Liar and Fry’s autobiography at the tender age of fourteen and being appropriately scandalised, perhaps even a little turned on. Indeed, if rent-boys, horse-shagging and the ill-conceived ‘limp biscuit’ game are the staples of Fry’s later literary diet, you can only imagine what his 22 year-old self will have concocted, and it’s our great pleasure to bring you Latin! at the BT in 2^nd week.

Latin! has been challenging, no doubt about it – a script relying on two sole characters and a number of tricky monologues always will be. Fry presents us with Dominic Clarke, the disillusioned Latin teacher at Chartham Park Prep, plagued by memories of a miserable Cambridge career and ready to explore, shall we say, pastures new. Clarke is a ‘sensitive in a world of literary rugby players’, seeking release through Cartwright, the blonde, the beautiful, the apple of his eye. Yet there’s one problem with Clarke’s muse: Cartwright is thirteen. Thrown into this tempestuous mix we encounter Brookshaw, a jaded bachelor with an almost fanatical devotion to the school and an uncanny hatred for Dominic.

 Auditions for the roles of the elder men were long and exhaustive: it was essential for so small a cast to ensure we Got It Right. Once we had, initial rehearsals inevitably focussed on building a rapport between the actors and helping each to understand the other’s character. What will strike anyone watching the play is the intensity of the script: fast-paced dialogues replete with puns-galore are set alongside more reflective, calmer scenes. Particularly for the younger Dominic, much of our rehearsal focussed on maintaining that slightly hysterical energy which abounds in so much of Fry’s work. Ultimately, the play questions the nature of love, and the nature of a true ‘education’, as well as humorously poking fun at the politics behind any staffroom door. Come to the BT in 2^nd week for Chelsea-buns, peanut-butter smearings and, er, bicycle pumps for a lesson you won’t forget. 

The Hothouse has, for the most part, been built. Most lines are learnt, all the moves are known, all the motivations carefully planned. We know the shape of it, its peaks and troughs. We even have a sense that it could be quite entertaining. There have been flashes of brilliance, in amongst the various practical challenges of moving and talking simultaneously. A phrase suddenly cauterizes the air, seems both the most natural and the most extraordinary thing to say: the director purrs, the man playing your secretary looks alarmed. And then you suddenly realise that you’re in the wrong place, that you’re supposed to be pouring imaginary whiskey from a Diet Coke bottle, that you’ve no idea which line comes next. It’s frustrating, because you just have to shove the play down your throat, and it feels clumsy and amateurish. You’re shouting all the time, save for when you forget your lines. You notice this, and deliver the next scene entirely in a hoarse whisper. The rehearsal finishes, and the director reassures you that we’ve made a lot of progress, that it’s still very early in the process. He tells you not to worry, and to be honest, you don’t: you’re too busy working things out, and learning it all.

This bit of the process is necessary but frustrating. The Hothouse is just emerging from it. Act One is fixed, Act Two is nearly there. We approach our first full run of Act One for anticipation that we might get it locked down with more than a week to go. We do it, with the other actors as our audience. And suddenly the play seems leaden. It’s as though, by wrestling the text to the ground, by mastering it, we’ve made it quite dull. No-one laughs, except when someone stumbles over a line. There is a sense that we’re sleep-walking through the scenes. One of the watching actors gives up, and begins to read a textbook.

When it’s finished, the atmosphere is sombre. “A bit limp” mutters one. “Deeply undynamic” says another. The director politely agrees, but reassures us that now the structure is in place, we can play, and knock most of it down. Playing will bring it to life, he says. Agreements are muttered. We all trudge outside, for a cigarette or a shiver. Suddenly we seem to have realised that it is possible that the show won’t be any good. We remember we have an open rehearsal for the student press that evening. We all feel a bit shame-faced.

And then, that afternoon, we play. We’re given secret instructions: “You have to get out of that room”, “You must remain as close to his face as possible”, “She is now your 13-year-old daughter”. The results are frequently farcical, but always liberating and occasionally revelatory. The director then tells us to stick to our original motivations, but up their intensity ten-fold. Suddenly “I want to squash Lush” means that you’ve pushed him to the ground, and are spitting your lines into his ear. Everything expands: you’re obscenely drunk, ecstatic, devastated. The whole scope of the play is expanded. Most of it is dross, but it is always enlightening. You’re reminded of your sheer range of options. The constraints of all the play-building you’ve been doing are transformed into jumping-off points for a whole new set of performances. We do the open rehearsal, and it goes well. I’ve no idea what the journos thought, but it went swimmingly for us, still clowning and capering, pushing intensity and changing tack, dancing through the text.

My old man, Roote, is coming on nicely. He’s been assembled from a variety of corpses: half-faded memories of teachers from primary school, a friend’s grandfather, an author on Desert Island Disks. I’ve stitched them together, and he’s just beginning to twitch into life. On Monday, I will shave my head, and most of my beard off. My nose, running almost at the same angle as my forehead, should look brutish, transformed from shrewish to shark-like. Without sideburns and neck hair, my face will look shorter, and my brow will be more prominent. With a moustache, my chin, already weak, will look quite forlorn. Hopefully, this is what Roote looks like. Hopefully, it will jolt him into animation. If not, at least I’ll be bang on trend.

With the 2012 Oscars coming up at the end of February, Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist is the one film I hope, and expect, to take home the biggest awards: Best Director, Best Picture, Best Actor and Actress, Best Original Screenplay, Best Original Score – this film deserves recognition for every brilliant aspect.

The film’s story explores Hollywood’s transition from the age of silent pictures to talkies. Jean Dujardin plays George Valentin, looking like a Clark Gable or Errol Flynn, and takes the audience from the height of Valentin’s extraordinary silent-film career into its inevitable and troublesome lull, exploring the personal trauma it wreaks before arriving, re-born, at the other end. Bérénice Bejo plays Peppy Miller, a cross between Marilyn Monroe and Clara Bow, displaying a young talent flourishing during an exciting era of cinematic history, stealing the heart and, momentarily, the career of Valentin.

What is extraordinary about Dujardin and Bejo, aside from their captivating and palpable chemistry, is their complete mastery of dramatic expression. For these two talents, sound is not needed to communicate powerful emotion or enrapture the audience in scenes of great comedy and tragedy. What most filled me with joy and awe is Hazanavicius’ remarkable prowess in playing with both form and subject matter. Valentin is trapped within the very medium that structures the film: one scene has him crying out in anguish, yet emitting no sound, in response to the infiltration of sound into his silent universe (a clever and humorously postmodern shock). Another scene, using the self-conscious absence of sound to create comedy, has Valentin attempting suicide by placing a revolver into his mouth – after a tense, almost chilling, emotional build-up the film jump shots to the written declaration, ‘BANG!’. The next shot shows Miller’s car crashed into a tree.

Each actor, and every scene, is furnished with a component that stands out on its own merits too – the score. It is exceedingly difficult to strain against the emotional trajectory that The Artist wants to take you through when every stride and flourish is blessed with such poignant and delightful melodies. The score compliments and reinforces every part of this wonderful story, spilling out and begging to be a background to our own reality.

The Artist is simple storytelling at its very best, infused with modern spices, and has something for everyone – it should be compulsory viewing for any lover of modern and classic cinema and will definitely give you something to talk about.

FIVE STARS

Gonjasufi’s 2010 LP A Sufi and a Killer set itself apart from any other self-styled ‘electronic’ record from that year, mostly because of his amazing voice. Pitched somewhere between the anguished ghost of a long-dead Delta bluesman and the sound of an injured dog, when paired with masterful, smoky production from The Gaslamp Killer it led to a sprawling patchwork quilt of an album, encompassing a huge stylistic range, from Grateful Dead-style guitar noodling to freeform instrumental hip-hop of the Flying Lotus school.

On MU.ZZ.LE, a 25 minute ‘mini-LP’, Gonjasufi narrows his focus and tones down some of the more aggressive elements of A Sufi, without losing anything in intensity. The layers of scuzz and distortion are still present over his skewed instrumental samples, carpet-bombed beats and gravel-wouldn’t-melt vocals, but the tempo and atmosphere have been taken down to a slower, more seductive pace. Opener ‘White Picket Fence’ immediately throws us into an echoey sludge of decomposed guitar and languid drums reminiscent of early Portishead if they were lost in the Sahara desert, rather than in a port town just outside Bristol. Even on more beat-heavy tracks such as ‘Nickels and Dimes’ and ‘Skin’, the commitment to injecting these tracks with a queasy, claustrophobic unease beyond a standard B-boy aesthetic is admirable. ‘I’ve done some things in my time / Even I’m ashamed of me,’ he croons softly on ‘The Blame’, and rather than an empty platitude, his pained, worn near-whisper sounds like he means it.

MU.ZZ.LE isn’t perfect, however – taken by itself, closing track ‘Sniffin’ is an underwhelming end, sounding more like a doodle to test out distortion effects used sparingly and evocatively elsewhere. However, MU.ZZ.LE is best taken in as a whole. As its compacted and tightly structured length weaves seamlessly from one track to the next, you could almost be listening to an ancient mystic, rather than one of the most idiosyncratic modern musicians going.