This absorbing drama written by Jesus College student Matthew Parvin had its first outing in the Turl Street Arts Festival last term and is now coming to the Burton Taylor with an all new cast. I say ‘cast’: there are only two actors in this intimate hour long play, but thankfully their performances are sufficiently strong and distinctive to propel the play forward with panache.

Jeremy Neumark Jones shows great range and explosive energy whilst Sam Smith gives an understated and nuanced performance. They bounce off each other to make the drama compellingly unpredictable. The play explores some rather ‘big ideas’, some rather ‘dark thoughts’, some rather enormous ‘human condition’-shaped elephants in the room, but what else would you expect from a night of student drama at the Burton Taylor? I would be quite taken aback to see a play there that does not toy with suicide, highlight the futility of our banal existence and reference both cancer and the other ‘c-word’.

The play revolves solely around the interaction between vicar/therapist Regis (Sam Smith) and troubled student Jeremy (Jeremy Neumark Jones). There are five short acts, each corresponding to a session between these two intriguing characters as their quite fractious and combustible relationship continues to develop. Whilst the premise and the plot could seem a bit arch and over-engineered, the quality of the dialogue and the intensity of the performances more than compensate for this and the result is authentic and watchable. At times, Jeremy comes out with such perfectly formulated lines and intelligently voiced ideas that the dialogue risks becoming a little over-written or contrived and the otherwise ultra-realistic tone of the play comes under threat, but the overall quality of both the writing and the acting wins over and the play proves convincing, engaging and thought-provoking.

3.5 STARS  

What do we do when we speak? Are the words that we use faithful ambassadors to our mysterious inner world? What is the point of theatre, a dimension constructed primarily of words, at all? As Nietzsche once said, Art is discovering the mystery within us and this mystery can unfolds in different ways. Act before you Speak certainly uses a very different way to unlocking the mystery. The play, inspired by Shakespeare’s Hamlet, exploits the power of nonverbal communication: what would it feel like to have to tell a story without words? Through silence and the projection of some excerpts from the original text, the actors unveil their own mystery and catapult the audience into an unexpected world of introspection. Silence becomes the only means of expression for the two actresses who physically interact and live through different scenes, alternately pushing and pulling towards each other, maintaining a palpable tension on stage. The well known scenes go by, the two character’s bodies moving. 

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One may remember the image of the Shakespearian character wearing his famous white shirt while the ghostly figure, who plays the violin, accompanies the stories but it is not the story itself that I wish to relate, as it is well known and all stories have a habit of eventually blurring into the universal. It is the attempt to live the story that matters here; it is the strong impression of the actors’ bodies breathing before the spectators like open doors to a world of unspeakable feelings. As they move around the space, their open hands and eyes are ready to pull you back to your own emotion. Therefore there is no simple explanation for this play, and putting a word before it would be as reductive as labelling silence. In fact, words can get so heavy, narration turns into meaningless signs; the only solution is to erase it all. Try to unlearn the generally expected premise of theatre, try for once not to understand, but get into the raw intimacy of your feelings. Finally you will sunbathe in silence, swim through it, thanks to the bodies of those actors who enact the visceral experience of fulfilment and emptiness which in many ways is more true, more lifelike, more integral to the human experience. 

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This is a type of theatre that makes a strong statement and whether you wish to respond to it or not is up to you. The actors go through what could nearly be seen as immolation, a religious act towards the audience, each movement is as precise and meaningful as the lifting of a finger from an Indian traditional dancer.  In his book Towards a poor Theatre, published in 1968, Jerzy Grotowsky, a famous Polish theorist and playwright, questioned theatre and what made it an art exquisitely superior to other medias such as television and film. The answer seems as simple as every great truth is and is entirely contained in this play: there is a power in human exchange that only the concrete presence of an actor’s body on stage can bring to the public. It is a journey through life’s emotions, from madness to revenge, from suffering to the beauty and scent of a lavender bouquet. Entering the world of Act before you Speak you should be ready to experience an intense simplicity of a feeling.  Nothing that you have experienced in the Oxford-based theatre life will come close to this new piece of writing by Alexandra Zelman-Doring written in collaboration with Ada. Break the walls of words, forget about tiresome narrations, mute all those sounds that relentlessly surround us, plunge into the incredibly meaningful sound of silence.

Winners is the first part of the two-act play, Lovers (the second is Lovers: Losers), by Northern Irish playwright, Brian Friel. Those who studied A Level English may be familiar with other works by Friel, perhaps Translations or Dancing at Lughnasa, and you can expect more of Friel’s interweaving of light and dark in this earlier play, first performed in 1967 to international acclaim.

In Winners, we meet Joe and Mag as they loll on a picnic blanket, revising for their exams like so many 17-year-olds, in school and in love. But Mag, we soon discover, is distracted by her pregnancy and the excitement of future family life with Joe. The couple discuss, distract, ignore and bicker between a sinister pair of narrators, who flesh out the story and shroud the picnic scene with a sense of foreboding. It is like watching a relationship in utero, as it probes and develops, unconscious of what lies further afield.This is the kind of play that works well as a student production, as we can focus on a few finely-honed performances, and the outdoor setting perfectly fits this garden show format. The performances are feisty and strong between the lovers, dark and controlled by the narrating chorus of two and the whole is inevitably permeated by a sense of Greek tragedy, as Friel’s script solicits.

Hannah Bowers deserves special mention for her portrayal of Mag, dominating the space with the desperate command of someone marooned on an island and clutching at the promise of her future marriage with a ferocious yet heart-breaking enthusiasm. Opposite her, Joe (Stephen Greatley) does well to counter-balance this performance; his is the tricky task of bringing in some emotional nuance to ward off a sense of theatrical bipolarity, and offset his fiancée’s extravagant outbursts. The cool, lofty narrators (Alice Fraser and Yaroslav Sky Walker) perform their choral duties with the clinical authority of a coroner’s report, yet somehow maintain a playful arch in their eyebrows, occasionally meddling with bodies and props between scenes, hinting at the humour that skirts in the periphery of Lovers. 

Simplicity, surprisingly, is not always easy to pull off, and under Jessica Campbell’s direction, this is a triumph in dramatic performance. 

4 STARS

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Sarah Kane’s 4:48 Psychosis makes for one of the most daunting directorial challenges in modern British playwriting.  Wholly flouting theatrical conventions – there are no characters, no plot, no setting or even stage directions – Kane’s work leaves a director with the freedom to arrange the action as they will, but creates the almost insurmountable task of creating meaning and coherence when there is so little in the text.  The last of Kane’s plays before her death in 1999, it is difficult not to approach 4:48 Psychosis as an extended suicide note, given that it is likely that Kane knew that the work would only ever be performed posthumously. Dealing as it does with clinical depression – a condition Kane battled throughout her adult life – and self-destruction, the shadow of Kane’s autobiography hangs heavy over the work. A strong directorial vision is essential to making this play work dramatically – a play that is more structurally akin to a poem or monologue. Unfortunately, this production lacks just that. Dramatic artistry and risk taking are hardly apparent in this rather underwhelming production. 

Minimalism is so often the stock mode of student drama that I cannot help but think that in choosing to stage the play in this way, Marchella Ward’s production is simply taking the easy way out of presenting a play that could be rich in imagery and iconoclasm. Kane herself spoke of her continual attraction to the stage in just these terms: ‘I keep coming back in the hope that someone, in a darkened room somewhere, will show me an image which burns itself into my mind.’ The decision to split the central ego of the work, a voice that has been closely aligned with that of the playwright herself, into the logical and irrational aspects of a psyche also seems dramatically unimaginative. To steal a phrase from a fellow reviewer, the play had more than a strong feel of ‘GCSE Drama’: a sentiment which I feel is strongly borne out by the play’s blocking, which sometimes felt like a check list of ways in which a group of actors could stand still on a stage.

The dogged commitment this production has to maintaining a tone of overwrought anger also seems misguided. Within Kane’s writing there is humour and tragedy, depression and hysteria, confusion and clear-sighted sanity, all which seem to be flattened out into a state of bubbling agitation by this production, which more than anything else quickly gets tedious to watch. Yet I can see the logic of this consistent tone, as according to friend and playwright David Greig the title of the play refers to the minute at which Kane frequently awoke in her confusion and anxiety. Therefore the play has the feel of a series of continual agitated present moments, but I would have liked a little more nuance in the emotional atmosphere of the play.

The play manages however to preserve the poetry and honesty of Kane’s writing. Thanks mostly to Fran Denny’s empathetic central performance – half a star is hers alone – it is difficult not to identify with the playwright’s portrayal of a psychotic mind. However, the doctors that attend to her give lacklustre performances and I would have liked a stronger sense of the antagonism that the play holds towards the medical profession to have more fully developed.

Kane’s play is a generous gift to any audience, whether we view it in the light of autobiography or not – it speaks achingly of depression, love and loneliness with an urgency that belies its status as art. It’s a shame that this production doesn’t take more imaginative risks or exploit the autonomy that Kane’s text gives to the director, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth seeing. Above all, Sarah Kane’s writing speaks for itself.

2.5 STARS

Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin premiered to critical acclaim this week at Cannes. Yet for all the accolades which will surely come Ramsay’s way, she cannot claim to have conceived the film’s dark premise. That honour falls upon Lionel Shriver, from whose 2003 novel the screenplay was adapted. This is nothing new of course, Mario Puzo’s name is synonymous not with his unremarkable pulp writing but rather his 1972 best adapted screenplay Oscar for The Godfather; Kubrick rarely shied from an adaptation; Hitchcock, Scorsese, virtually every great director has, at some point, translated from page to screen. But the question remains, what are the secrets behind turning a book into a great film?

The quality of the original is patently not one. The correlation between great books and great films is extraordinarily weak. While Rebecca and The Leopard can reasonably claim to have crossed the mediums intact, one would be hard pressed to find another faithful adaptation of a definitively great novel. The Kite Runner demonstrates some of the problems; what passes in the novel as elegant prose becomes a tepid story, devoid of tension and monotonously paced.

Hitchcock, interviewed by Truffaut, claimed, “to convey [a great novel] in cinematic terms, substituting the language of the camera for the written word, one would have to make a six to 10-hour film. Otherwise, it won’t be any good.” Indeed Truffaut could himself have taken benefited from some of this advice given the disparity in quality between Fahrenheit 451 and Vertigo. Thus it is perhaps unsurprising that some of the best adaptations of recent years have been loose, to say the least. Brokeback Mountain expanded Annie Proulx’s short story to a sweeping epic, The Social Network’s frenetically brilliant dialogue stems not from its source material but the pen of Aaron Sorkin and 127 Hours strips out almost all biography to create a film of almost unpleasant intensity.

Herein lies the crucial point when adapting source material; whilst a book may provide the basis for the film, the creative vision must be original. Hitchcock claimed that he never read Psycho, the idea was enough to make the film. Whilst this may be a little extreme, the point remains; Conrad may not have even recognised Heart of Darkness in Apocalypse Now, and we have Coppola to thank for that. Rather than seeking to methodically recreate a great novel on screen, the best adaptations draw from their source for ideas yet respect the differences between a verbal and a fundamentally visual medium.

There’s no better way to celebrate the end of yet another week of term than by going on a blind gig. And by that I mean going to a gig without knowing what any of the music will sound like. Luckily for me the Comma Club’s Sunflower Gig held at my favourite pub, the Jericho Tavern, actually had quite a few decent acts performing, with The Asbhies, aka The Great Hereafter wowing the whole crowd with their 60s inflected songs – but more about them later. For now I have to confess that arriving fashionably late to the gig I missed the first act, Government Man. Sadly this band made up of Oxford students don’t have any music online yet, but judging by the photo on their facebook page, these guys could be pretty rocking. Anyone with a photo of Jimi Hendrix is a man/woman/band after my own heart. 

I did however manage to catch Clarissa Pabi reading some of her sexually explicit poetry – off her phone – accompanied by some arpeggiated guitar. She moulds language into odd distorted shapes which get a few laughs and appreciative sounds from the crowd but her voice mostly gets buried in the audience’s chitchatter. Her heavily rhythmic poetry has its own flow but it gets entangled with the guitarist who seems to be playing to a different rhythm. Still its nice to know that poetry is being brought out of its stuffy cupboard and out into an interactive setting.

Wooden Chairs and Arthur Sawbridge – who plays around with violin and loop pedal – provide soothing tones to prep the audience for the standout act, The Ashbies, who I am still convinced should have been headlining. These guys perform a seamlessly tight set and their Beatles-esque songs have the whole crowd swinging their hips like it’s 1969. Their harmonies are smooth enough to rival Grizzly Bear’s and their amazing drummer makes the performance even more epic. Although I was quite disappointed to find out that lead singer and guitarist, Will Taylor, was not in fact Paul McCartney’s son – someone’s idea of a sick joke – his mesmerising voice that has a Nick Drake-esque quality is essentially the cherry on top of this musical delight. It’s gems like these that make blind-gigging so worth it. Not wishing to bore you too much with my sickly sweet rant, I offer you the interview with the Ashbies that I only wish I’d been brave enough to ask for.

Finally, Babeshadow and then Spector – the headline act – bring the night to a nice indie-fuelled close but I still wish that Ashbies had had the last word. If the prospect of seeing a load of indie bands isn’t enough to coax you to the next event then how about the fact that the whole cast of ‘I love my life as a dickhead’ were there? By no means am I trying to deter you from going to any Comma Club events as the night was a definite success, I just feel that the disproportionate amount of undercut hairstyles in the room needs to be rectified. So get off your ass and head over to their next show to help free the Comma Club of their reputation of shameless pretentiousness.

This self-proclaimed ramshackle production of the legendary Wilde farce hardly needed any introduction. Which was a lucky break, since had I not picked through this week’s OUDS newsletter with a fine-toothed comb, I might never have known that The Importance of Being Earnest was even on. Yet the promise of a sunny afternoon, a dose of Wilde and lashings of Pimm’s were more than enough to drag me and seemingly every English student in Oxford down to St Benet’s Gardens for this garden play.

The setting is stunning, set behind the college’s Georgian premises in their intimate garden, which harboured an appropriate set of deckchairs and a garden table set for tea. My initial trepidations following the first scene, that I might be in for something unprepared and somewhat apathetic, were quelled after about ten minutes when the entrance of Jack Lambert as a cross-dressing, hallooing and utterly droll Lady Bracknell made the intentions of this production quite clear.

The finely pointed upper class accents adopted by the cast could have been used to create a more profound production of the play, but it worked superbly with a commitment instead to light-heartedness, hilarity and buffoonery, as well as moments of genuine off-script amusement among the cast which engendered a sense of warm familiarity.

Bobby Leigh-Pemberton was excellent as John Worthing, working well against Daniel Draper, as a superb Algernon Moncrieff. They could have driven the comedy further by milking the parallelism between the two Earnests a little more, and I never found myself wholly convinced by the relationship between John Worthing and Gwendolen Fairfax, but the pace was kept up through the comedy of the continual failure of Worthing to cover up his deception, and the humour of the unlikely relationship between Algernon and Gwendolen Fairfax, who had all the required sweetness from Iona McLaren.

All in all, The Importance of Being Earnest was characterised by a light hearted yet strong performance, a production both unswervingly comical and altogether enjoyable.