Milja Fenger never intended to come to Oxford. Born in a small town in Holland, she came to England for the first time when she was eighteen to take part in a two week directing course at East 15 drama school, famous for its unusual rehearsal methods, many of which Fenger has adapted for her own rehearsals.

I ask about a technique she uses called laughter runs.  ‘Laughing is actually really hard – we need to laugh more. I thought that if people had giggle fits together, then they wouldn’t be ashamed of opening up in front of each other. English people are often quite guarded – they’re scared of doing something wrong so I make them do something crazy.

‘I don’t think good acting is about being slick or witty, it’s about emotion and freeing your own imagination.’

To date Fenger has written over fifteen plays, and with her second full-length play, I Am Green, she was accepted onto the Royal Court’s Young Writers Program. Her first screenplay – The Road Home, about an Indian boy brought up in England who is forced to return to India – has toured over 50 festivals world-wide as well as winning the Jury Award at the Palm Springs Festival and shortlisted for the Best Short Film Oscar for 2012.

I ask a little more about Mephisto, the play she is directing at the Oxford Playhouse in 6th week. Based on the autobiographical novel by Klaus Mann, Mephisto tells the true story of the rise and fall of a radical cabaret troupe during Hitler’s rise to power. Fenger is hesitant to give too much away; ‘Mephisto is an incredible story: it’s about sexuality and race and politics and moral compromise. And it’s about the power and responsibility of theatre – most of the play takes place in various dingy theatres with the actors playing actors and performing to another audience: its very ‘meta’.’

Moving on, I mention something about student drama ultimately being about having fun. She chuckles, ‘I didn’t do it for fun. I did it for a challenge and because I think it’s an incredible story and a brilliant cast. At the moment I don’t have a life, I just have rehearsals – about 40 hours a week. I don’t even see my own boyfriend!’

Why, then, does Fenger do it? ‘It’s important to think about how other people live. Living is hard and it’s not easy to make decisions. This is where theatre can help us – at its best theatre can be extraordinarily powerful – and I love that. If there is anything that I do well it’s just because I am curious about the world and about human nature.’

Finally, I couldn’t help but ask what was coming up next for such an accomplished and up-and-coming director. Again she is hesitant to give too much away, ‘I have been commissioned to write a feature film. I can’t say for whom because you will know what the film is about. All I can say is that it’s set in Columbia…’

I try my luck to find out some details. ‘I’m sorry – confidentiality contract! As for theatre, I’ve said in the past that Mephisto would be my last play in Oxford as I should really get back to studying – I love my course- but actually I might do just one more…’

Despite his best efforts, Chekhov’s works are often more tragic than funny.  Director Jessie Norman, in this production of seven of his short plays, intends to offer an antithesis to this common perception. From the pun-inspired posters to the physical comedy and absurdist humour, these plays promise to be light, finely-tuned and about as far from The Seagull as it is possible to get.

The excerpt I was shown consisted of two ten minute plays, The Alien Corn and The Sneeze. The first was an exchange between a brash Russian landowner, Kamyshev, and  a timid French tutor, Champugne, who has stayed on the Russian man’s estate despite the fact that all the children have grown up and left home. Chekhov, being Chekhov, uses the mild xenophobia of the landowner to reveal something of his loneliness, and the interplay between the narrator’s introduction and the sketch itself is what brings the piece out of the realm of pure comedy.

The Sneeze, while also very light on the surface, equally drew out the terror of a junior official at the prospect of offending his superior. The actors will all take on several roles across the seven plays, and even in the two shorts I saw showed an admirable versatility – special mention should go to Ed Barr-Sim for his leap from morose servitude as a footman to panicky fervour as the minor official in the second play.

Although I did not see set or costumes, the plans sound interesting and innovative. The scene changes, Norman tells me, will be effected by the actors themselves without the use of blackouts, to give a parlour or music-hall air to proceedings.

The most exciting aspect of the set promises to be a live string quartet, with music composed specifically for the production. The Sneeze used the string music to add to the physical comedy, and the music will also be used to choreograph the scene changes.

If all goes to plan, this promises to be both a fun and polished production. The short pieces I saw were well rehearsed and, for the most part, trod the line between comedy and farce well. The Sneeze veered a little into over-hammed comedy, as much must be communicated by face and gesture, but this will probably be tempered by the first night.

Overall, I was impressed by the strong cast of versatile actors and some excellent and innovative direction. 

4 stars

‘I just wanted great art’ is how Howard Hodgkin, famous print-maker and painter, explains the rationale behind his collection of Indian paintings. His collection, exhibited in full for the first time at the Ashmolean this spring, is an eclectic medley of sketches, portraits, marblings, large-scale paintings and mini-scenes. Although the Ashmolean has sought to group the pieces into regional sections (the Mughal, the Daccani, the Pahari etc.), this grouping is only superficially successful. The paintings are so soaked in the culture of the nation that they form a cohesive representation of the various styles of national art than they do of regional styles. 

The exhibition opens with a simple statement from Hodgkin: ‘These pictures were chosen because I thought they were beautiful … and not for any scholarly purposes.’

In the first room, Moghul, the paintings are a riot of colourfully clashing hunters and leopards; mythological lady archers, and doped up dervishes, mixed in with sober portraits of elephants, maharajas, and yet more elephants. There’s even one named ‘Lord of happiness’, who is decorated with enough bells to adorn the feet of a dozen dancers. 

These sedate elephant portraits are beautiful, but the next rooms celebrate a different side of these powerful animals. In one stunning mixed media picture an elephant crashes in from the left side of the composition, splaying a shrieking Guernica-like horse beneath it. The animals are rendered in simple brush drawing but it is the background which makes the picture: a whirligig of vibrant and abstract marbling which dramatises the conflict, swirling around and about the clashing beasts in a pulsating, technicolour roar of expressive pattern. 

Violence is countered with very different kinds of paintings. Only a little further on, in an architecturally mapped-out courtyard, a nobleman sporting a pair of pink slippers gazes ruminatively at a goose. In the next room, in a three scene composition, a nobleman is entertained by the ladies of his court. He is shown watching a dancer perform, bathing in a pool, and helping the women to gather blossoms which hover and float about the scene, as though the figures have stumbled into a snowstorm of pink petals.

It is a very eclectic mix of paintings. There is certainly no ‘scholarly purpose,’ as Hodgkin puts it, but it is a beautiful selection, built up and honed over a lifetime. Even if the 115 paintings that we can see have little relation to each other, they are each individually beautiful.   

It’s that time again. I know we’ve had the Golden Globes and the BAFTAs, but this one’s the big one. The 84th Academy Awards, jam-packed with gushing acceptance speeches, dazzling smiles and floor sweeping dresses beamed to you all the way from the shiny bright Kodak Theatre, the venue of choice for the Hollywood elite.

2010 was The Hurt Locker versus Avatar, 2011 The King’s Speech versus The Social Network and this year? Actually it’s been blown wide open. Silent movie The Artist is an obvious favourite with the ‘novelty factor’ bringing back the good old days. This film’s ten nominations include Jean Dujardin for best actor, Berenice Bejo for actress in a supporting role and this movie is also in contention for the much coveted best picture award. However, it’s not going to be easy. For a start the Actor In a Leading Role category is crammed with the likes of George Clooney for his highly emotive performance in The Descendants, Brad Pitt’s in there for his portrayal of Oakland A Manager ‘Billy Beane’ in Moneyball (an actual decent sports movie!) and not forgetting the nod to Gary Oldman for British film Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the adaptation of John Le Carre’s  1974 spy novel. So that category’s anyone’s guess.

Perhaps most interesting is the 11 nominations for Scorsese’s 3D fantasy Hugo. For those of you who haven’t seen this astounding piece of cinematography, its set in 1930s Paris and tells the remarkable story of an orphaned boy who goes on a quest to discover the secret held by a broken automaton. Not convinced? Believe me this is the one to watch.

Then there’s the Actress In a Leading Role category. For the ladies it’s been the year of the biopic with Michelle Williams nominated for her incarnation of Marilyn Monroe and Meryl Streep taking on the role of the mighty Margaret Thatcher. A nod also goes to Viola Davis who plays maid Aibileen Clark in The Help, a film set in Civil Rights era America managing to balance just the right amount of comedy and weighty drama. I think we all know that Meryl’s got it sewn up for The Iron Lady, but with relative newcomer Rooney Mara in there for her turn as feisty oddball Lisbeth Salander in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo you never know what might happen.

And the most important one? The Best Picture category contains an abundance of drama with the epic War Horse, 3D Hugo and black and white movie The Artist going head to head. The Help with its watchability factor and the heart-wrenching tale of The Descendants are fair contenders. It seems the winner of the category could be any of the above, however, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a film slipped in amidst the box office smashes. This film starring Oscar royalty Sandra Bullock and Tom Hanks features first-time actor Oskar Schell as an eleven-year old New Yorker left a key by his father after 9/11. His search across the city unfolds into an extraordinary tale of discovery. It’s not released in the UK until February 17^th but with its great cast, serious storyline and a hero to root for, this could be the dark horse of the Academy Awards.

Predictions made, all will be revealed on February 26^th. I know I’ll be there…

I re-watched The Graduate over New Years Eve, as a sort of ‘celebration’—not exactly a party (I was alone, sprawled on my bed in my parents house). But there was the requisite alcohol, and, besides, it wasn’t mods revision.  

Perhaps because of the circumstances, the opening sequence struck me as a sort of devastating epiphany, in a way it had not in my first, 12-year-old viewing. Benjamin Braddock—arriving in the Los Angeles airport, after graduating from an un-specified college ‘back east’—was, in some sense, me. There was the superficial similarity—I’d also flown back home (in my case, from Oxford to New York). But the mechanical voiceover (‘Ladies and gentleman…’), Benjamin’s blank, vaguely bewildered, face against the greyish-white walls, and, of course, Simon and Garfunkel’s haunting, unforgettable ‘Sounds of Silence’, captured something I’d felt, but couldn’t quite express: a crushing combination of apathy and alienation, a sense of being somehow dislocated in a place I knew all too well. 

Then comes the graduation-party, with its culmination, in a piece of advice from one of Benjamin’s parent’s friends: ‘plastics.’ It’s a hilarious, one-word, skewering of the middle class notions of success, dangled before a disaffected, yet directionless, Benjamin. In my stressed-out state, this also rang ridiculously true. Despite the fact that my degree is hardly career-oriented, wasn’t I, after all, studying so hard, so I could be what someone else vapidly calls Benjamin, ‘our award-winning scholar’? Yet again, The Graduate just got it. 

At the same time, The Graduate is a very 60s take on the disenchantment of privileged post-adolescents. While, unlike Easy Rider—the other iconic film of the period—there are no hippie communes or acid trips, The Graduate is deeply embedded in youth counterculture, with its critique of the status quo. Whether in the form of plastics, or (even more famously) Mrs. Robinson, the innocent, awkward Benjamin faces seduction by the older generation, portrayed as hollow and corrupt. But the affair grows stale and dissatisfying—as another apt Simon and Garfunkel track puts it, ‘a love once new has now grown old’—and Benjamin turns his attentions to her fresh-faced daughter, Elaine Robinson. The result will be more-or-less predictable to anyone familiar with movie romances, but perfectly evokes the thrill—and profound uncertainty—of the young characters’ brave new world.