The works of Harold Pinter, one of a select few playwrights to have his own adjective, have been enjoying a run of success in Oxford recently. In Michaelmas, the Keble O’Reilly played host to a production of The Birthday Party that was rightly lauded, and it is impossible not to notice the ad campaign for Hothouse, opening at the Playhouse in February. If you can’t wait that long until your next Pinter fix, a production of his last play, Celebration is winging its way to the Michael Pinch theatre very soon.

Three couples sit in a restaurant, the most expensive in town. At one table, an anniversary celebration takes place. At another is a banker and his vacuous sycophant of a wife. They talk. They leave. The play ends. The curtain falls. Fin. Nothing happens. This is not a play of plot; rather one of dialogue, of twisted words and grim, violent malice hidden behind barely disguised insults. The two tables’ conversations veer from topic to sordid topic but never really leave the essential discussion of two things: power and sex. Most of the time, both at once. For if it’s the banker, Russell’s (Anirudh Mathur) wife (Ellie Wade) trying to ruffle his self-assured, cocky feathers by describing her sexual conquests “behind the filing cabinet” as a voluptuous young secretary, or the play’s other two wives, Julie and Prue (Juliet Roe and Isobel Ormiston, respectively) cuddling up – literally – to the restaurateur, Pinter’s dialogue depicts a malicious power play hardly hidden behind dialogue that swings, pendulum-like, between passive-aggressive chatter to outright spite.

In a play like this, it is very difficult to talk of actors performing any better or any worse than one another: the intimate nature of Pinter’s dialogue and staging demands that each actor be up to the task, lest the piece fail for want of one voice. And the actors at Jesus are up to the task. Clearly, this is a cast that appreciates its script: Pinter’s acerbic wit is delivered with a louche, deadpan insouciance, with near-perfect timing. Sometimes, however, this deadpan acting goes too far; whilst Celebration is a play concerned with the masking of emotion, it is not a play of studied emotionlessness. However, the cast at Jesus seem reserved, nervous even. This, of course, isn’t an inappropriate response, possibly even a fitting one: a Pinter production is not an easy ride, for the audience or for those performing it. This is not, however, a fault that detracts seriously from the quality of the acting, or of the production overall. For all its reserve, Celebration is a sensitive and well-acted piece of theatre, and a fitting introduction to one of Pinter for anyone who has not yet seen any of his works.

4 stars

Celebration is being performed at the Michael Pinch Studio Theatre from the 24^th to the 28^th of January.

I will confess at the start of this review that I am not a long time ballet-goer, nor am I an expert on the subject, but I nonetheless found this production able to perplex me and amuse me in equal measure.

The whole experience was rather bizarre. Coming to the slightly shabby-feeling New Theatre to watch a ballet in the first place was strange, since  I have always associated such things with grandeur and, well, “poshness”. Then, while the dancing was done with great precision and focus, everything perfect controlled, in time, graceful, beautiful, all of the sets and costumes looked like something from a village pantomime. The audience was even treating it like a pantomime, enthusiastically booing the evil fairy. It really was a bizarre mixture of the shabby with the extravagant; there was a full orchestra which was wonderful and played the music beautifully, which I was surprised and pleased to see in such a small place, but the budget had perhaps been so stretched by this that the evil chariot that the bad fairy rode in on was just a luggage trolly painted black.

The ballet was full of what can only be described as surreal moments. The bad fairy was attended by what appears to be rat-rhinoceros hybrids as she rode around on her luggage trolly of evil, the fairies looked like aliens wearing 1950s purple shower caps, ‘Fairy Canary’ was brilliantly mental, and the king (who looked exactly like Lord Farquar from Shrek) at one point inexplicably ate a giant egg off what appeared to be a candlestick at the front of the stage.

Ekaterina Bulgutova’s Sleeping Beauty was exquisite, she had a real faunish quality about her and a charm that made her really engaging and sweet to watch. Unfortunately her hair has been sprayed liberally with so much multicoloured glitter that she appeared to be receiving messages from the mothership all night. My favourite part was the dancing between the White Cat (Nadezda Vlasova) and Puss-in-Boots (Denis Pogorely). Here more than anywhere the kooky charm of this kitsch production came into its own. The choreography was witty and sexy, the costumes were cute and wonderful and the dancers were obviously enjoying themselves. It was in these more comic moments – such as the two cats dancing together and the evil fairy- that I felt the production was in its element. 

I had a wonderful night- the whole thing was hilarious. I’m not sure it was supposed to be, but the rest of the audience seemed to be laughing when I was and it really was very entertaining. But did I feel the magic? Sadly, not. And a bit of magic was what I had been hoping for, what I had been expecting. In the end it was a gaudy spectacle, eye-catching, entertaining, but that was it. Perhaps there would be more for the ballet aficionado who could, better than I, appreciate the technical precision of the dancers, but for me it was great fun, and unfortunately nothing more. 

2 and a half stars

Maybe you like theatre, maybe you like Harold Pinter, maybe you just have eyes – however you’ve done it, you’ve probably  realised that Oxford drama is positively Pinterrific this term. But slow down – do you actually know anything about Harold Pinter, the man behind Michaelmas’ five-star smash The Birthday Party, the upcoming Hothouse, and Celebration?  

Hackney-born Harold Pinter won a multitude of awards, one of which was the Nobel Prize, which he is reputed to have won without even trying. However, he is best known for ‘doing the pauses’ and having extramarital sex. Before he died he enjoyed cricket. Mainly we remember him for doing the pauses.Still, it’s all very well us sitting here in Oxford, smoking cheroots and fondling each other – what do the Great British Public think of this hesitant award-encrusted adulterer? I was keen to find out and conducted some social science by asking the opinions of four elderly people on a train. It was clear that they were impressively familiar with his oeuvre. But old people love the theatre and would still love it if it coughed heavily in their face, so they’re not great indicators of public mood. What could be behind this small-scale Pinter revival? Clearly something in his work has been identified as relevant and timely. Sure, he’s always there, cruising the peripheries of our collective unconscious, but so are Bombay Mix and Lara Croft, and thrusting young creatives aren’t suddenly demanding the rights to those. It is as though all the elements – earth, air, water, pollen – have combined to make us insatiable. Take my hand and let us go deeper into Pintception.

In 2007, Michael Billington identified a wave of national Pintermania as the alignment of ‘political vision’ between playwright and audience, and that’s probably what’s going on here. In a climate of upheaval these plays feel like they were written for the occasion. The three mentioned above are, in one way or another, difficult births under strained circumstances: the literal birth that kickstarts The Hothouse, a product of rape in a hospital of sanitised bureaucratic efficiency; The Birthday Party’s mental wrench of interrogation, collapse and regression that winks at genesis in its title, and Celebration, Pinter’s last play and perhaps most effective in distilling these ideas. Its posh restaurant is hermetically sealed perfection, a womb to the unhinged waiting staff and a temporary respite from consuming, bickering, and screwing.

 Pinter’s friend and collaborator Henry Woolf remarked that rooms in his work were like the mind, places ‘where all the real stuff goes on’ – the spectacle here is essentially two lots of empty-headed materialists pouring wallpaper patterns and booze into their skull cavities to hold off ‘killing everyone in sight.’ It ends uncertainly and fittingly. We’re not sure if we’ll ever ‘get right out of it’, of the bedlam that awaits us when we kick-bollock-scramble out of our uteruses. Only that we should want to.

Seasonal Suicide Notes by Roger Lewis describes an occasion on which a dining Pinter shouted “What a stupid fucking question!” when asked if he’d prefer sparkling water or still water. He comes off as an arsehole. I reckon he was just inducing labour.

 

‘For years, I had effectively renounced the idiot box, claiming that, as  a film critic, I had no time for such frippery’
–  Mark Kermode, 2007

 

America leads the way

In this age of media convergence, as the distinction between the systems of production and channels of distribution continue to break down, HBO is playing a major role in the merger between the film and television industries. Since receiving prestigious awards back in 2003 at Sundance (American Splendor) and Cannes (Elephant) for movies that they financially backed, HBO Films have exhibited a restless fascination with the very meaning of originality and strategically distanced themselves from the formulaic excesses of Hollywood. Even when working with familiar territory in their made-for-TV canon, they have been able to successfully exploit the freedoms granted to subscription TV (often involving, but not limited to, excessive violence, swearing and sexual content) and capitalise on the up-and-coming talents in the worlds of screenwriting and directing. Working from Oscar Wilde’s claim that “it is personalities, not principles, that move the age,” the single largest output of HBO Films have been those that grapple with the cultural memory of a public figure. The most recent biopics of the underrepresented Jack Kevorkian (You Don’t Know Jack) and Temple Grandin (Temple Grandin) convey the optimistic message that perhaps the times we live in are better thanks to the efforts and achievements of such recent agents of progress. In a similar way, I like to think we owe a lot to HBO’s championing of complex and maverick film making for both their cinematic originality and social provocation.  

Joseph Newall

The Cinema experience

For me, the joy of film is bound up with the ceremony of the cinema. Nothing can compare to the big screen with its immersive sound system, dimmed lighting and velvety seats, the hushed voices and collective gasps and guffaws of strangers. No one can argue that a TV screen experience comes anywhere near close, not even in the age of the inordinately sized HD flat screen. Why? Because, my dear cinephiles, cinema is a state of mind. The sensory experience aside, there is nothing like stepping into the Phoenix or Ultimate Picture Palace in fifth week and being forced to empty your mind of the essay deadlines, underwhelming tutes and midterm spats. This is not something a dose of iPlayer at your desk can remedy; it was this cruel piece of furniture that witnessed the tears and trauma, remember? If you stay stagnating in your pokey college room, you can only expect to feel jaded, even if the last hour counts as veritable downtime. 

At the cinema, you are entering into a safe place where quotidian Oxford concerns must be abandoned for a total focus on the drama of another. A trip to the cinema can often feel like a short holiday, leaving you stimulated, invigorated and somehow better equipped to go back to the outside world. The significant social aspect also cannot be ignored; sharing a film with someone can be like sharing a secret, months from now you will still be able to reference it, not as you might with a TV show, but as an experience. How many times after a piece of quality TV do you sit down with your squared-eyed companion for a wine fuelled discussion of its ambiguities and subtleties? Post-cinema chat in Oxford, I grant you, can be shockingly pretentious, in which case I would suggest making a quick exit.

Cecilia Stinton

The joys of serialisation

As the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’ birth falls this year, all channel controllers took the opportunity to infiltrate our TV guides with every single film and series vaguely related to his life. My emphasis on ‘vaguely’ directly applies to the ‘Great Sexpectations’-style plotline of Alfonso Cuarón Orozco’s 1998 film shown on Sky Movies 1 starring Hawke and Paltrow. In this sexed up version of Dickens’s quintessentially Victorian novel, ‘Finn’ (because ‘Pip’ simply doesn’t sound realistic enough) associates this romantic pursuit directly with the physical conquest of Estella. A knife would not be a strong enough instrument to cut through the sexual tension of this film. 

After Christmas, when all eyes were glued to either the Downton Abbey or Made in Chelsea Christmas specials, the BBC chose the optimum moment to throw another appropriated Dickens in our overfed, sofa-dwelling direction. Over three nights we watched the one-time Burberry model Douglas Booth play ‘Pip’ against a brilliant depiction of nineteenth-century rural poverty and London smog. Eerie cinematography rendered this production compellingly chilling. Miss Havisham’s blanched exterior visually contended with the darkness of Pip’s home, the ‘forge’, displaying the complex binaries of Dickens’ novel. 

As it’s probably clear, my preference was for the television update of Great Expectations. That’s not to say that the 90s film was second-rate in comparison: it simply had the wrong title. Not only did the BBC production retain the background illustrated by Dickens, with its inheritance of the industrial revolution, class prejudice and poor health, but also,  and most importantly , it was a series. When Dickens wrote his novels, he serialised them — each chapter was bound and printed sequentially, providing his readers with another instalment of his extensive story every month or so. With this adaptation we were taken back in time to the Victorian system of publication. While we can ordinarily fast-forward, rewind, skip the adverts and watch the ‘behind the scenes’ footage of a programme before it’s even been shown in full on terrestrial TV, we were forced to wait for the second and third episodes of Great Expectations, and were therefore subbjected to the authentic Dickensian experience.                          

 Harriet Clarfelt

What Cinema thinks about TV

TV can get a rough time from its older brother, the cinema. A bit like a jealous sibling; the movies invent all kinds of stories. In films the humble television can be a portal to something horrid. In Poltergeist, a TV set abducts a young girl. In Ringu, quite the reverse. An alien invades Earth through a family’s satellite dish in 80s rubbish TerrorVision, while in 1992’s Stay Tuned a couch potato gets sucked up into his. 

Even when there isn’t a monster climbing out of it television is a risky business. Like in Requiem for a Dream, where a pensioner’s TV habit leads inevitably to drug addiction and madness. Or in neon pantomime Batman Forever, where Jim Carrey sucks the population’s brainpower out through its screens (we all know that feeling). Or, a whole different kettle of mutated fish, in David Cronenberg’s sublimely mind- and flesh-bending Videodrome television gets up to just about everything you can and can’t think of.

It’s not surprising when the people behind TV are only one step above Bond villains. Making a modern day black-face minstrel show in Bamboozled. Rigging a quiz show, in Quiz Show, so that Gentiles beat Jews. Giving Jim Carrey air-time in The Truman Show. Or being an actual Bond villain in Tomorrow Never Dies. But, despite the ghost- and brainwashing-related risks, is TV really any the less popular? Cinema giant Orson Welles once said, ‘I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can’t stop eating peanuts.

James Aber

The rise of the mini-series

Perhaps only ten years ago, TV and Film were treated as distinct formats. Few people streamed movies online, and most television series weren’t held in particularly high regard. But now the two have merged somewhat, into a varied grey area, where plenty of films and series now reside. Perhaps the main reason for this is the increased budget of the entertainment sector. The advent of on-demand television and a wider variety of TV channels has increased the popularity of television, thereby allowing some series access to a budget comparable to the biggest Hollywood blockbusters.

When on-demand TV is coupled with the prevalence of pirated movies online, we can see that many people are now able to view movies and programmes in a very similar way. That is, cooped-up in front of our laptops in a darkened room, listening through headphones that inevitably belonged to a now misplaced iPod.

The production values of both formats are now effectively equal too, since even the most famous producers dabble in both art forms. For example, Martin Scorsese, JJ Abrams, and Stephen Spielberg produced Boardwalk Empire, Lost, and The Pacific, respectively. These are perhaps the series to have been revered most vocally throughout the last decade. The interesting thing about the latter is that is was a ‘mini-series’, a format that audaciously strides the middle ground between TV and Film. British journalist Francis Wheen states, “Both soap operas and primetime series cannot afford to allow their leading characters to develop, since the shows are made with the intention of running indefinitely.  In a mini-series on the other hand, there is a clearly defined beginning, middle and end, enabling characters to change, mature, or die as the serial proceeds.” 

Clearly one can see how series are encroaching on the space that once belonged purely to film. Some may complain that this change dilutes the purity of both TV and Film, but I for one am happy to embrace this new broader spectrum. After all, who would want a rainbow that goes straight from red to violet?

Nathan O’Neill

 

During a rehearsal break for his current production of Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls, I am lucky enough to grab an interview with Max Stafford-Clark, the longest serving artistic director at the Royal Court and founder of touring company Out of Joint. The play, a 20th century masterpiece, has not been performed in the last ten years. I ask him about the experience of directing the same play again, after having commissioned and directed its world premiere for the Royal Court in 1982.

‘Top Girls is a historical play, but it concerns itself with recent history. Re-staging this play now amounts to re-excavating a period of history.’ The major difference is that the audience today, unlike the 1982 audience, is not necessarily familiar with Margaret Thatcher’s England.

‘This is the beginning of a historical period led by a conservative government,’ he says, ‘Top Girls is very much prompted by the political presence of a woman Prime Minister. Unlike the controversial film The Iron Lady, Top Girls does not present Margaret Thatcher and her policies empathetically. Top Girls could equally have been called Bottom Girls, i.e. a picture of Angie, the girl who doesn’t make it.

’Max Stafford-Clark has always promoted, commissioned and directed new writing, and has nurtured many of the country’s leading writers, such as Timberlake Wertenbaker, David Hare, and Caryl Churchill.  ‘I believe the job of any artist is to reflect the time they’re living in’, Stafford-Clark says. Perhaps inevitably, therefore, our conversation then turns to the current government’s giant funding cuts in the artistic sector. In a time when David Cameron is encouraging the theatre and film industries to become more ‘mainstream’, he ironically comments, the Arts Council has cut Out of Joint’s yearly funding by over £130,000 ­– nearly a 30% budget cut, the consequences of which are already affecting the company’s output. This year the company will only be able to stage one production, instead of two. ‘It also means that the actors will have to live in horrible digs instead of hotels.

’Changing the subject a little, I was surprised to discover that the playwright usually stays with Stafford-Clark in rehearsal from the first to the last day, and so I quiz him further on such a close writer-director relationship. ‘When you enter a rehearsal room and are there with the writer, it is like designing an aeroplane and not knowing until the end whether or not it will take off. It is an adventure with the unknown.’ Here he is keen to stress the differences between British and continental theatre. When he speaks with German and French directors, they invariably ask him how long he allows the writer to stay with him in the rehearsal room. They do not allow the writer to witness the rehearsals for ‘more than two or three days.

’Finally, I could not refrain from asking such an acclaimed director to define for me the essence of directing. Again, he refers to the British theatrical tradition and compares it with the continental one. ‘In this country, you start with the play. In Germany, you start with the concept of the play. Moreover, I believe that most plays depend on a company. It would be useless to stage Hamlet if there was no one to act as Hamlet. With most plays I undertake, the director has the responsibility of creating an ensemble, and clearly understanding and explaining the play. A director should also nurture the atmosphere. Plays are called plays for a reason, and as such they should be playful.’

Having flourished at the turn of the twentieth century, etched and inked for adverts and featured in decorative periodicals such as Les Maîtres de l’Affiche, The Studio, and Jugend, it feels only fitting that an exhibition of Art Nouveau works is being held on the commercial shop-floor of Sanders, Oxford High Street’s fine print shop.  These lithographs, embellished in the boldest of colours and lines, bring together art, advertising and industry in a manner as smooth as the curves and flicks they feature.

Works such as William Nicholson’s ‘Beefeater’ advertisement for a Harper Magazine of 1896 witness the marriage of cultures past and present, experimental and traditional. It features an arresting and almost illusory image of the titular subject, depicted by bold black strokes streaking through a field of scarlet.  The theme of commercial art is continued in pieces such as Meunier’s lithograph for Concert Ysaye, with popping primary colours used within an extremely serene scene, centred on a singular star above a night-time lake and a solitary female figure.  Grasset’s advert for La Meillure de Toutes les Encres, on the other hand, is a piece brimming with energy, filled with swirls of hair and flurries of ink and paper, centred around the contorted figure of a woman, whose shape embodies the ‘whiplash’ form so characteristic of Art Nouveau images. Perhaps the standout work of advertising, however, is Gorguet & Orazi’s ‘Theodora’ – a lithograph designed for and featuring the actress Sarah Bernhardt as the Byzantine empress. Described by Maindron as ‘une affiche parfaite’, its mosaic-like aesthetic is married with a storytelling montage of images reminiscent of the serials and “penny dreadfuls” of nineteenth-century Europe.  The whole piece is bedecked with swathes of shining gold, giving a suitably bold, byzantine finish.

Elsewhere, the collection demonstrates the more demure side of Art Nouveau. Armand Rassenfosse’s ‘Danse’ captures a delicately drawn image of a classical figure in desaturated shades.  Guinier’s ‘Nuit Douce’ is a sketched study of a young woman’s profile in a style reminiscent of Rossetti, and Grasset’s Froideur is suggestive of a more domestic element to his work, in both its conservative colours and content, and its miniature-like dimensions.Drama and wit are brought to the exhibition in a collection of prints by Aubrey Beardsley.  An artist for the infamous and scandalous ‘yellow books’ of the age, Beardsley’s brave works engage his audience with both darkly dramatic compositions such as ‘Salome’s Toilette’ and ‘The Kiss of Judas’ – monochromatic contortions reminiscent of troubled Freudian dreamscapes – as well as a sense of humour; A Poster incorporates a square of blank space that constitutes nearly half the work. Elsewhere, a cover designed for Pierrot magazine depicts a pierrot clown in a library. It is this awareness of and engagement with the intersection of forms so often constituted in Art Nouveau works that makes Beardsley a master of the style, and a highlight of this sensuous and sensational exhibition.