Settling down to watch Michael Anderson’s 1976 sci-fi classic Logan’s Run, I was struck by an acute awareness of two things. One was that I felt intense relief having escaped existence in a future age where skin-grafted polo-necks are mandatory. The other was a brutal awakening to the comparative squalor of my surroundings. Logan (Oxford alumnus Michael York) might be forced to run from the governing computer’s distinctly ageist machinations, but the running is done safe in the sanitary comfort of endless reams of gleaming corridors and white, varnished tunnels. More than this, there is a distinct lack of anything recognisably homely; furnishings are utilitarian and usually pod-shaped. No wonder 23rd century entertainment relies on sex.

Whilst to some, the achingly 70s aesthetics might seem bizarre, it is undoubtedly an Obsessive Compulsive’s utopia, with not a speck out of place. This theme of exterior cleanliness covering internal corruption pervades the look of many films of a futuristic ilk. The realm of the similarly tyrannous computer Hal, is the chalky caverns of the spacecraft in the fantastic 2001: A Space Odyssey. Here the stark backdrop glares in an incessant spotlight that provides no shield from Hal’s unblinking, one-eyed surveillance.

It is a terrifying brilliance mirrored in Danny Boyle’s more recent Sunshine, which, though an altogether uneven film, is most successful when pronouncing its indebtedness to Kubrick. The awesome presence of the sun is kept on the peripheral, until glimpsed in flares and agonising moments of fear, paralysed in the glare of white light. Again, the action is trapped within a cold, white shuttle. The presence of earth and dirt is a reminder of nature and home, and a relief to the eye from all that whiteness.

Journeying into the future becomes a kind of cinematic equivalent to the medieval morality play; they both ask the audience to reflect upon reality, having been exposed to the fictitious consequences of bad choices played out. Costumes and scenery, even down to basic representative colors, are used functionally, to aid interpretive tracking through the morality tale. The ‘futuristic’ use of white suggests and signifies clinical sterility, and by extension an absence of humanity. A tradition of dystopian worlds blanketed in snowy white-wash has been established in films ranging from A Clockwork Orange to I Robot.

If suspiciously clean surroundings, then, are used as warning bells to send chills down our radar, the leading man must stand out from this bland uniformity. Casting Ewan Mcgregor in The Island seems risky when his natural facial fuzz and characteristic mole denote irreverent grit, unbefitting of the perfection of his white onesie.

However, it is exactly these imperfections that distinguish a sci-fi hero as ‘the man against the system’, translating into wholesomeness and trustworthiness. With Ryan Gosling recently announced to star in a Logan’s Run remake, all that is left to discover is how to make him less than perfect.

A love story, a spaceship, some anarchists and futuristic holograms all come together in Broken Stars, Oxford’s latest new writing which will be performed for the first time in 8th week. Broken Stars is the brainchild of a pair of writers-cum-directors: Zoe McGee and Jordan Saxby. The pair is clearly passionate about their play, but the combination of sci-fi and co-writing breeds a confusing plot despite interesting concepts.

The play draws on ideas from Orwell’s famous 1984 novel, with themes of dystopia and control by an ultimate party: ‘the Simons’(the Broken Stars sci-fi version of policemen). However, although the concepts are meaningful, the play lacks the depths created by Orwell’s novel.  Instead the anarchists seem one-dimensional, the Simons are pitied, and the relationship between the couple in space and the current world is bewildering.

The play has two main plots – that of an urban dystopia with anarchists vs Simons, and then a love story set on a spaceship narrated by ‘hologram’ to the anarchists. Sound confusing? The two plots seem rather nonsensical in the preview, despite being showed scenes from throughout the play. It seems that the directors were undecided between two stories with little connection, but wished to include them both anyway. Broken Stars would benefit from a deeper explanation of the interchanging plots.I certainly didn’t understand why the anarchists are watching an illegal ‘hologram’ about a couple in space, but hopefully it will be revealed in the performances in 8^th week. 

The performances themselves varied among the cast. The opening scene where the anarchists become part of the audience is both dramatic and enticing. However, their lines are often forced, and the script prevents us feeling an overwhelming amount of sympathy for the group. The anarchists’ ignorance is revealed later in the play when Sergeant Carson (Ben Cohen) as the leading ‘Simon’ bursts in on the anarchists with a notably strong performance. His passionate monologue explaining the control of the Simons lends sympathy to the controlling group. The Simons also provide intimidating performances from Huw Fullerton and DJ Gordon wielding baseball bats.

In the spaceship, watched by the anarchists far away in urban dystopia, Alice (Sophie Ablett) as half of the lovestruck couple is certainly a good actress, and acts her character well. However this means that she spends much of her time whining, and teasing, causing her to become slightly tiresome to watch. Alice’s other half; Ben (JY Hoh) is an intelligent chemist who is clearly deeply in love with Alice. The pair have good chemistry, reacting well to each other and as we watch Alice’s illness cause her to deteriorate, it is clear that this will lead to Ben’s demise also.

It is certainly difficult to translate sci-fi writing to stage without the help of special effects provided by cinema. Whilst the preview was definitely the rough cut, with the set design for now only in the minds of McGee and Saxby, the passion that has gone into this play is fantastic, and the premise is interesting. However Broken Stars has fallen into the trap of new writing where the concepts aren’t fully realised in the production. McGee and Saxby create a dystopian world with potential, but unfortunately the play is too confusing in practise without reaching necessary depths to pull-off a sci-fi play.

2.5 STARS

Alan Bennet is famed as a comedian, as the voice of Winnie the Pooh and for many of his plays, but not, strangely, for Kafka’s Dick. However, directors Ellie Keel and Tris Puri bring this rarely performed play to life with wonderfully comic subtlety during 8th week at the Burton Taylor Studio.

This humorously surreal work is based around a visit by Franz Kafka and his friend and biographer Max Brod (both of whom are dead) to the house of an insurance salesman, Sydney and his wife Linda, a nurse. Unperturbed by their deadness, Sydney, a Kafka fan, uses the visit as an opportunity to quiz both men on Kafka’s life for a biography that he intends to write. Confusion unsurprisingly follows, punctuated by the arrival of Kafka’s father Herman with various revelations about his son’s genitals and ending in a visit to heaven. The comedy plays upon the nature of biography and how artists are often perceived through facts about their life as opposed to their works – something as relevant today as it must have been when Bennet wrote the piece in 1986. As Sydney notes: ‘This is England. Facts… pass for culture. Gossip is the acceptable face of intellect.’

This universal message is delivered, as you might expect with Bennet, with an easy humour by the cast. Although I was faced with a somewhat empty stage (promises of a set for the actual performance have been made), what took place upon it was a pleasure to watch. The opening scene between a dying Kafka (Sanjay Mewada) and Brod (Peter Huhne) is a little uncertain at first but quickly warms up as the dynamic livens between Huhne’s comically ridiculous and very imposing presence and the self-pityingly huddled figure of Mewada in the bed. As is often seen with Bennet a very serious message – that of the future of Kafka’s work – is delivered through a humorous medium, and the two actors dealt with this very successfully, achieving an appropriate balance of tone.

The production improves further when we are transported to the present day – to Sydney and Linda’s (Alex Stutt and Lara McIvor) home. McIvor especially gives a very impressive performance, displaying that unawareness of her own comedy that the best comic actors possess. The surreal humour develops subtly without ever becoming unpleasantly absurd, something that is as much due to the acting as to Bennet’s script and some of the interchanges (the sexual tension between McIvor and Huhne being especially noteworthy) are incredibly funny.

As I only saw the play in the midst of its rehearsal stages, undoubtedly it could and will be tightened but despite the occasional flicker this should be an impressive production. Definitely recommended.

4 STARS

Robert Bolt’s play tells the story of the early life, imprisonment and death of Thomas More. Setting it in a church provides two things: firstly a rather handy ready-made set which lends itself very well to the Tudor period, and a constant reminder of the religious significance of everything going on. Even when the action moves away from religious places, the actual altar of the church stands at the back, centre stage, with the cross as the focal point. Powerfully, we sit in a religious building that is a consequence of the actions that we are watching played out on the stage.

The characters wear very authentic (to my eyes – I shall confess I am not a medieval costumes expert, but I was utterly convinced) period costume, and yet we see these metatheatrical everymen and everywomen putting on seemingly naturalistic costumes before our eyes. At once the illusion is complete and carried through with conviction, but also very theatrically aware.

The press preview was challenging because, being in a church, there were all kinds of good Christian churchgoers and tourists milling around. At the start I wasn’t entirely sold on Barney Iley-Williamson’s Thomas More, but as the play went on – perhaps as he started to ignore all of the chatter around, perhaps as he warmed up, or perhaps as the character develops in the actual script – he really grew on me, and by the end of the preview it was a very strong performance. The cast show several strengths, particularly Jean-Patrick Vieu as Wolsey and Natasha Heliotis as Alice More. There is a real humanity to the performance of these characters, who were brought out by sensitive directing and careful performances.

Partly it’s just a great play, but every part of the direction, design and acting is carried out with precision and attention to detail. And it is this meticulousness that made this production stand out for me, even down to an authentically made ‘custard’ – a pudding from the time. No Mr Kipling standing in, but even for the press preview, a genuine period dessert. 

Every part of the illusion of this production is presented with care and conviction. Along with the thoughtful church setting, the play shows us that these are not historically distant events, but things to which we can connect and of which we can still feel the consequences.

3.5 STARS

In a time where we regularly hear reports of theatres closing and arts bodies feeling the force of cuts, it may seem surprising to hear that the enclosed economy of Oxford University student drama is faring rather well. In fact, it has been doing extremely well. In the last year alone, three student shows at The Oxford Playhouse, A Streetcar Named Desire (MT10), The Seagull (HT11), and The Picture of Dorian Gray (MT11), have each made profits of over £10,000 and, in addition to this, the Oxford University Drama Society has doubled its wealth since 2009.

This leads us to question why recent shows have been so successful. Perhaps it is because the marketing campaigns have been particularly strong and far-reaching, perhaps there is a current ‘golden generation’ of actors, which has resulted in recent shows being especially impressive, perhaps it is merely because the shows referred to above are easy to sell and would have sold even better in more prosperous economic times. Or perhaps it is because those involved are now especially good at forcing their reluctant friends to come and see every show they are in even though said friends are bored out of their minds each time they go to the theatre (although I’m pretty sure this last reason alone cannot fill the 613 seats per night at the Oxford Playhouse).

It is true that Oxford students wishing to get involved in drama now find themselves in an incredibly fortunate position because there is money available for them to fulfill more ambitious visions; however, the system is self-supporting and vast sums of new money in grants are not pumped in each year. Instead, all profits made in Oxford student drama are reinvested in the system, and so these profits are used to cover the losses of other shows and to help fund future projects – no student should ever personally gain money by being involved in a play within the University. Moreover, even if a few shows lose a large sum of money, the whole system suffers, so we have to be realistic and ensure that every show has a chance of breaking even. We must also not forget that theatres are hired at subsidised rates compared to professional shows and the realms of student drama are very different to the ‘real world’. Nevertheless, taking the losses of other shows into account, Oxford student drama as a whole is at least £25,000 better off than this time one year ago, a figure which I find be striking.

The fact that recent shows have been so successful allows for some of the more adventurous ideas of students to now potentially be realised, especially with regard to set designs and technical plans. In my role as treasurer of the Oxford Drama Society last year, we would keep hearing exciting and innovative plans that regularly had to be revaluated because there was not enough money to support them, which was always frustrating. Although I believe that budgets for student shows have to be reasonable and that no student show in Oxford should ever set out knowing they are going to make a loss, hopefully the new money in the system will mean that we will be able to raise the standard of certain aspects of student shows in Oxford, especially at the Oxford Playhouse.

Students at Oxford are incredibly privileged to have the opportunity to stage shows at this venue, where visions can become a reality, and

it provides a fantastic preparation for anyone wishing to pursue a career in theatre. Most Playhouse student shows have a budget of £15,000-£18,000 so students can afford to be really ambitious compared to other venues, especially with regard to set and technical plans. Students receive the support of a professional technical and marketing team, and the opportunity to work in a professional environment. The Hothouse by Harold Pinter, which will be staged next term at the Oxford Playhouse, has probably the largest ever budget for a student show in Oxford, and this time a year ago such plans would not have been able to be put into practice. It will hopefully have one of the most spectacular sets and designs of recent student shows, but the budget is realistic and if sales are even close to those of the shows mentioned above, then more money will be reinvested back into the system to produce equally, if not more, inspiring shows in the future.

Last August, hip-hop duo Los Aldeanos openly criticised the Cuban government from the stage of the Rotilla music festival, an independent electronic, dance and rap event that attracted around 20,000 young Cubans to a beach in Havana. 

This summer the organisers, Matraka Productions, were informed that the government was taking over the festival, which had been running, with state support, since 1998. A statement issued by Matraka said categorically that their festival was not happening this year, denouncing the ‘theft, plagiarism, and kidnapping’ and ‘stubborn and excessive censorship’ of what they described as a ‘life project’. Their words, like Los Aldeanos’ incendiary lyrics, damn the state’s control over creativity: ‘What moves us is the hope that someone will discuss our problems / Necessities, violence and lies of the state / Its mechanism has become corrupt and manipulated / And police that instead of inspiring hate make me ashamed.’

Yet the government hasn’t always been this hostile towards Cuban rap. Founded in 1995, the Festival de Rap Cubano which took place annually in Alamar, a suburb in East Havana, had government backing for nearly a decade. The Cuban authorities even proclaimed their support for rap in 1999, calling it ‘an authentic expression of Cuban culture’. This was despite being initially wary of a musical movement that was so obviously influenced by the US.

Cubans began with hip-hop dancing, and at dance battles crowds would chant ‘Las cajas! Las cajas!’, a colloquial way of saying ‘You’ve been defeated!’ Initially, hip-hop culture was absorbed in ‘an innocent way’, according to Pablo Herrera, Cuba’s ‘premier’ rap producer from the scene’s beginning in the early 90s and during its boom years. Cubans were ‘very naively rapping, emulating the style of the US about living in the Bronx even though they didn’t live there.’

Early Cuban hip-hop, then, seemed to be just one in a long line of musical genres that had crossed the Florida Straits, following jazz, soul and big band, amongst many others. Fidel Castro was even reported to have rapped at a baseball game. What then soured the relationship between rappers and the state?

The decline in the establishment’s enthusiasm for rap can be traced back to the collapse of the Soviet Union, which plunged the country into the crisis of what Castro delicately labelled the ‘Special Period’. With people reduced to eating tree bark and banana skins with sugarwater, by the mid 90s rap had become a way for Cubans to express their experiences of the hardships. 

These rappers, rather than singing about guns, bitches and bling, wanted to feel, as their revolutionary parents and grandparents had been able to, like they could do something positive for their society. They used hip-hop to address issues like racism, religion and prostitution. The artists were more thoughtful than their American counterparts, and highly educated too, beneficiaries of the free universities in Cuba. We met rap duo Alianza in Cerro, a barrio of grim, Soviet era concrete apartment blocks in Havana. As Navy Prop, one half of the duo, explained, they are inspired by the stories on the streets of Cerro. What is typically ‘Cuban’ about their music, he told us, is the way their messages are transmitted.

It was this new-found willingness to examine the status quo, paired with a surge in the genre’s popularity around ten years ago (the scene’s zenith saw up to 500 groups across the island) that made the government nervous. As Herrera explained, ‘They didn’t want to rewrite their own history. They don’t want to say we messed up here.’ The Cuban state, with a gerontocracy still trapped in a paranoid ‘trench mentality’, wasn’t ready to let the musicians take on the social problems themselves. 

The authorities, looking to clamp down on the growing hip-hop scene, found their opportunity when Hurricane Charley hit Havana in August 2004, just in time to cancel the rap festival in Alamar the following night. Herrera stressed that the relationship between rap artists and the Ministry of Culture had been ‘working well’ until that point in time. The festival’s cancellation however, ‘severed the progress and momentum’ of Cuba’s hip-hop scene, in what he describes as ‘the beginning of a treacherous agenda with respect to Cuban cultural politics.’

The second catalyst in the declining fortunes of hip-hop was pinpointed by musician and producer Ashlie, from rap duo Tradicion Yoruba, as the rise of the hugely popular Los Aldeanos; they were the first rappers to make entire albums that criticised the government. ‘Rap became known for speaking out and being anti-government,’ he explained. ‘This made it harder for the rest of the rappers to work.’ He compared the group’s refusal to censor what they said in state venues to ‘going to your parents’ house and saying disrespectful things.’ 

Michael Matos, director of Rotilla festival, said that Los Aldeanos were one reason for the event’s hijack. ‘Los Aldeanos had a crowd of more than 10,000 people who showed up just for them. The authorities are afraid that Rotilla might generate a revolution, a social explosion among the youth.’

However, while there has clearly been a crackdown on rappers’ freedom in recent years, the situation is not black and white, state versus artists. The reality is that artists like Los Aldeanos do not languish behind bars. Their music is freely available, and increasingly vocal. One half of Los Aldeanos, El B, won the Red Bull rap battle in Havana this year, and was allowed to travel to Mexico to compete. The group also travelled with other artists recently to perform in Miami, ‘the cradle of Cuban-American mafia’.

Rappers like Los Aldeanos do, however, have the presence and reach to speak out against the government, while less established groups still appear hemmed in by the institutions of the state. At this year’s 7e Simposio de Hip Hop Cubano, two DJs spun beats against a repetitive background projection that proclaimed the Simposio’s stance against ‘military intervention, environmental contamination, social injustice, violence and discrimination.’ The government-run event, which Herrera described as ‘co-opted’, had none of the heated atmosphere that one would usually expect from a genre that spawns such volatile creativity.

Rapper Soandres ‘Soandry’ del Río, of the group Hermanos de Causa warned me of ‘a spectrum of manipulation and politicisation from the institutional side’ of Cuban rap, and said that going to the Simposio wouldn’t take anyone to the ‘doors of underground Cuban hip-hop’, since more than half of the most talented and popular rappers were considered too politically incorrect to perform there.

When interviewing artists and producers in Havana, we continually came across self-censorship. Our descriptive questions about the Agencia Cubana de Rap, a government body that employs some rappers in return for a measure of creative control, and the limitations for emerging artists, would be answered frankly, but as soon as we asked for an opinion on the relationship between creativity and the state they would look away and avoid answering. 

Within this complex blend of censorship and government co-option, it is unclear where Cuban hip-hop is headed. This is especially true given the general uncertainty about the direction of the Cuban state, now under the direction of the ageing Raul Castro, brother of the invalid Fidel. Herrera believes that ‘hip hop culture precludes a very important moment of maturity for Cuban culture’, and expressed his hope that the scene would ‘grow positively’. What is clear, however, is that groups like Los Aldeanos have thrown down a gauntlet to their government, in a challenge that has yet to be answered.

Additional translation: Lauri Saksa

Troilus and Criseyde. Romeo and Juliet. Bella and that shiny vampire kid. The struggle of love against opposing cultural backgrounds is a staple of tragedy which we can’t get enough of, and Malorie Blackman has established her position in the canon with ‘Noughts and Crosses’, set in a dystopian world in which the status of the white ‘noughts’ is suppressed by the black ‘Crosses’. It’s no surprise that this adaptation by Dominic Cooke was snapped up by the RSC, as it bears the hallmarks of a decidedly Shakespearian tragedy — a defiant romance, an unreceived letter, even a madwoman in the form of the ethereally Ophelian Lynette McGregor.

Sam Elwin and Emmanuella Kwenortey play Callum and Sephy, a nought and a Cross caught in the tumult between the two sections of society. Both were performed with an almost tangible frustration as they become victims of their surroundings. They are flawed characters, yes, but the very acute way in which their flaws were drawn out made them instantly likeable, and it is this likeability which made their slow loss of idealism all the more tragic. However, by the second half the actors were frequently stumbling over their words, which was distracting enough to give the audience license to laugh at some of the more clumsily delivered lines. This also detracted from the climax, which occurs after a gap of three years, but by which point Callum still seemed the defiant schoolboy he was in the first half. Whilst this may be a teething problem, the build up to two execution scenes were, surprisingly, quite lifeless. Conversely, Fiona Johnson’s portrayal of Callum’s mother was faultlessly raw, and so carried much of the emotional weight of the play. 

Director Phosile Mashinkila’s choice to use a projection screen was a confusing one: whilst it yielded some initial impact, this was rendered useless by the subsequent use of on-stage actors for television scenes, and the projections were not used frequently enough for it to become an effective device. Emma Glaser’s set design allowed black/white symbolism to pervade every part of this play, and was most effective in the second half when it gave slightly more to feed the audience’s imagination. 

Anything in Oxford that handles the topic of race is bound to be treading on thin ice. It was interesting to see that the Crosses were played by a racially mixed cast, whilst the noughts were exclusively white. In a story where social positions are reversed, this gives the impression of “white people vs. others” rather than the stark duality of  “one race vs. another race” (as intended by the original), and is therefore dangerously accusatory, instead of a polemic on equality. It’s discomforting to acknowledge, but I suspect this was an expediency at the scarcity of black actors in Oxford, and so the production itself highlights the racism endemic to elitist education: a theme it so brilliantly evokes in the first half. Despite a flawed production, I would still say therefore that anyone at Oxford needs to see this play, not only for nostalgic value (we are, after all, the generation brought up on ‘Noughts and Crosses’ and ‘Pig Heart Boy’), but because it boldly addresses inequality: the omnipresent elephant in Oxford’s room.

2.5 STARS

How do you go about creating a new literary genre? First you need to write something that cannot be confined to an existing genre, then you need a name. Something mental, something bizarre-sounding. Something like ‘Bizarro’.

‘Bizarro Fiction’ claims to be a mix of absurdism, satire, pop-surrealism and the grotesque. The introduction to the Bizarro Starter Kit, published by Eraserhead Press, this new genre is ‘literature’s equivalent to the cult section of the video store’, and produces works that are valued primarily for their ‘weirdness’. I spoke with Tony Rauch, author of the short story collection eyeballs growing all over me… again and member of the Bizarro movement, to find out just how weird he’s prepared to be in order to mark out a new literary field.

For Rauch, Bizarro is ‘a lot of different things mashed together – strange fairy tale adventures in strange lands, or strange parables in everyday settings. It’s speculative fiction of the strange or unusual – alternative things happening in alternative settings.’ I ask what he means by ‘alternative’: is this jackets-with-holes-in-smoking-rollies alternative? Or three-and-a-half-nipples alternative? He says he doesn’t care – ‘everyone and anyone’ can read his stuff, the more ‘adventurous’ the better. But his readers can’t just  reject the mainstream: they must embrace ‘an absurd love triangle between dinosaurs’, they must see a ‘cat pawing through a space in a picket fence’ and then invent ‘the cotton gin’; they must fill their ‘sister’s bedroom to the ceiling with yoghurt’. eyeballs growing all over me… again contains stories about a girl who has transplant surgery to swap heads with a goat, a robotic wing-man who goes rogue and steals the girl, and a giant invisible chicken. It is a collection of whimsical nightmares that can be placed on a scale with a bad child’s fantasy at one end and a mushroom-induced freak-out at the other.

Rauch does succeed in writing stories that are hard to categorise. If playing on a Nintendo could be translated into a literary experience, it would feel similar to reading Rauch. The printed format, however, lends a gravity to the stories that even Super Mario 2 cannot match – ‘people keep drifting away lately’ reads like a rather moving extended metaphor for disconnected modern communities. I ask Rauch if Bizarro fiction is a symbolic copy of the real and therefore a vehicle for social commentary. He replies, ‘I see the world as an absurd place, life as an absurd exercise. Absurdists can offer a spectacular view on the familiar; it’s just a different vantage point, another perspective.’ Although some pieces, he insists, are ‘anti-meaning’, which I have to agree with, I can’t see how waking up with eyeballs growing on your forearms sheds light on the human experience, at least as I know it.  Bizarro fiction explores common anxieties and everyday social problems, but, for Rauch, the alienation of fathers from their families always involves aliens, and only breaking the time-space continuum can cure a broken heart. 

If I had to compare Rauch with another author, I would draw parallels between his imaginative scope and my ten year old sister’s (author of The Giant Rabbit and How He Crushed Your World and the crime thriller The House that Nobody Ever Went In To). Rauch’s stories are free, fresh and strangely cheerful – well worth a read if you wear checked shirts and spend your Thursday evenings not enjoying yourself at The Cellar, or if you’re keen to try something very, very different.