The first rule of theatre is never to work with children or animals, and Call of the Wild proves that there’s no need to if you can play them, quite possibly better than they could play themselves. It looks like the cast has spent a lot of time lying on the casting couch, getting in touch with their canine side. All this work has certainly paid off; at every moment, the dogs bristle with a tense, fluttering energy which makes them captivating to watch. And despite their identical, minimalist costumes, each actor succeeds in developing a distinct identity, be it tail-chasing nervousness, nuzzling sycophancy, or strutting monomania, before they’ve spoken a word. These individual characters unite effectively into a powerful ensemble. Every corner of the Playhouse stage ripples with ferocious life with the arrival of the dog pack, whose suppressed, jittery movements leave us glancing nervously from side to side.

The pack treads an effective line between humanness and dogginess. They speak with a poignant eloquence that goes ignored by their human masters, and stand up to look each other in the eye whenever those masters leave them alone. But at key dramatic moments, the emotion-fuelled script escalates into animalistic barks and howls that leave nothing else to be said, and conflict is resolved by brutal, throat-tearing violence from dogs and humans alike. Such is the clarity of unspoken expression that we’re left with the feeling that the script would have been no less effective if it had forgone words completely.

The play doesn’t quite escape one problem of the original; its patchwork plot, where Buck is the only constant stage presence. The other actors, helped by some impressively swift costume changes and prop placement, form an assembly line of characters and scenarios for Buck to get carried down. This means that we don’t get to see as much of the dog pack as we’d like, which is a pity, given the time and effort that the cast has evidently gone to deliver a unique and gripping portrayal of life on all fours.

There is also a tendency for the action to lapse into playing out various human affairs that we (by now) consider to be laughably trivial. As the human characters are, for the most part, ships passing in the night of Buck’s story, it’s hard to find the time to care about any of them (and harder to know whether we’re supposed to). Having said that, the human scenes are well-crafted sketches featuring several hilarious performances; snapshots of human life which bring out its tyranny, greed, and violence in a more light-hearted way. They are engaging enough to distract you from their irrelevance and justify their inclusion.

In fact, I’d be lying if I said my critical eye was able to pick out any weaknesses during the show itself. The unbridled strength and power of the performances are more than enough to dig its fangs into you and refuse to let go.

Damian Lewis is making me a cup of tea. Dressed in Ugg boots, a checked shirt and a stylish knit cardigan, he’s every inch the metrosexual, cool guy about town: down with the kids in more ways than one, he has to head off after the interview to read his children a bedtime story.

Famously flame-headed and Eton-educated, Lewis rose to prominence back in 2001 for his portrayal of Major Richard Winters in the hit TV series Band of Brothers, and since then has been most known for his TV and film work, including the series Life and The Forsyte Saga. But Hollywood was not always his dream.

‘At drama school, all my influences were in the theatre, not in film and TV. I remember standing on the prow of a ship one year heading over to Amsterdam with one of my best friends, and talking about how we were going to be the next generation of theatre actors.

‘It was all very romantic – all we wanted was to be at the National, the Donmar, The Royal Court. And romantically theatre still holds a place in my affections, but after Band of Brothers I got invited into this world I knew very little about, and that went on for the next ten years. And the roles I was being offered and the people I was being asked to work with were so exciting that I continued to take work in film and TV, and I look back and wish there’d been more time for theatre.’

Yet Lewis has only regret: ‘foolishly’ turning down a role in Love’s Labour’s Lost to do press for a film (‘not even to do a job!’). He fondly recalls fulfilling his dream of working at the National, ‘bicycling over Westminster Bridge in the dying light, St Paul’s one way, Big Ben the other. But Hollywood bedazzles you, and has its own extraordinary tradition. Some of my biggest heroes are Jack Lennon, Laurel and Hardy, Carey Grant… I’m equally proud of being part of that tradition, but it’s not in me in the same way.’

Having spent a great part of his working life in America, Lewis is well-placed to comment on the differences between the two cultures. ‘There’s been a healthy cross-pollination between US and UK TV, borrowing ideas, recasting and retelling stories with different cultural references.’ He has played an American so often that he has his own American persona. ‘I stay American all day when I’m playing one, I don’t feel comfortable switching accents. When I was living in LA, sometimes I’d wake up and find myself talking American to people subliminally.’ The persona goes beyond the accent too: ‘It affects the way you move, and your response to things.’ I wonder if this ability to sustain multiple personalities is somehow connected to living a life dedicated to acting, a notion the practical Lewis dispels with an infectious laugh: ‘Not in a deep psychological way – I still want to watch “soccer” and get the cricket scores!’

Lewis decided he wanted to be an actor aged 16, when he and friends started a theatre company at school. ‘I’d sort of stopped working by that point and decided I didn’t want to go to university, I was doing lots of sport and acting instead’.

After graduating from drama school he played an extraordinary variety of prestigious roles, including Hamlet in Regent’s Park aged just 23, a job which he claims he was given because he was the only one the director could hear properly.

I’m not surprised – across the table Lewis’ voice booms out as if his kitchen were a theatre. For a man with numerous fansites dedicated to him, Lewis is remarkably relaxed and chatty, quizzing me about Cherwell as he heats up his own mug of tea in the microwave, a twinkle in his piercing eyes. Yet none of this might have happened, had his big break not come out of the blue.

‘I was just another pale Englishman doing lots of auditions in a damp basement in Soho, when I got called back (for Band of Brothers) four or five times, and then finally I got a call from the producer saying “I want to take you to LA to meet Stephen (Spielberg). Do you have your passport?” And I was like “no, I don’t carry my passport to auditions!” It was a very Hollywood moment.’ He was flown out first class and put up in a fancy hotel before being introduced to Spielberg and Tom Hanks, who he describes as ‘absolutely delightful’.

‘Stephen just wanted to talk about football, and we played around with the script and acted out a few things with me as Dick Winters and Tom Hanks playing everyone else, it was great fun.’ That night, thinking the dream had been fantastic while it lasted, Lewis went out and got blind drunk, getting back at 4am before receiving a call at 8am: ‘Stephen would like to see you.’

‘I went in there shaking with sweaty palms, desperately trying to sober up with three showers and umpteen coffees – but he gave me the job.’ And the rest? ‘Is history’. He laughs. Lewis is confident and self-assured, but there’s not a drop of arrogance in him; he speaks of his successes with an earnest sense of wonder which is very endearing.

Band of Brothers had, as Lewis points out, an inauspicious start, as it was only in its second week of airing when 9/11 struck. ‘That really dented viewing figures: people just didn’t want to see that sort of thing happening on TV when it had just happened in real life.’ Yet they persevered, and the most expensive TV series ever made, with a budget of $125 million, went on to win six Emmys and a Golden Globe. Lewis ascribes its continual success to its immediacy and relevance to people’s lives. ‘It’s very authentic, dripping in sincerity, there’s nothing sensational about it. It had a docu-drama feel to it which people responded to. And they were able to tell intimate stories in an epic arena.’

Before filming Lewis went to meet Dick Winters, the soldier who died earlier this year, on his farm in Hershey, Pennsylvania. He describes the real Winters as ‘quite a difficult man to get to know, withdrawn, not given to long exuberant anecdotes about the war. A brilliant soldier with an extraordinary gift of leadership, and his men loved him’.

After Band of Brothers Lewis received critical acclaim for his performance as Soames Forsyte in The Forsyte Saga series, a role already made famous by Eric Porter.

‘I didn’t spend too much time looking at the original. I knew it was ground breaking, but I thought we had something so good and so different that it never felt like a remake, but just another pass at a classic. I was quite ready for people to say “he wasn’t as good as Eric Porter”, but I hoped I’d find a way of winning people over’. In 2007 he did another mini-series, Life: ‘I like long-form drama, you can risk being a bit more subversive and intellectually provocative, telling a story over 12 hours instead of two. You get the script about a week in advance, so it’s a bit like reading a novel, which you’re inside’.

I wonder how he chooses his parts, given that after his Band of Brothers success he found himself Hollywood’s flavour of the month and the offers must have come rolling in. ‘It’s just an instinctive feeling about how I think the film will end up looking. There have been films where I’ve known there’s very little hope of its having a longer commercial life, but… art for art’s sake.’

A case in point is his little-known 2004 arthouse film Keane, in which he played a mentally disturbed man trying to come to terms with the abduction of his daughter. ‘Small films are more intimate experiences, you get involved earlier and they’re much more collaborative. I’m frustrated by how difficult it is to get intelligent material made, but success in Hollywood is measured by the dollar, and so many films are aimed at the 15-24 demographic who’ll go and see them multiple times. We put ourselves in a position where we don’t believe there’s an intelligent film-going public.’

Lewis has produced some films of his own, and there’s a sense that the film industry would do well with him in charge: the vestiges of his education shine through as he speaks with measured intelligence, screwing up one side of his face in careful thought.

‘It’s a problem about not having students of film in positions of power – instead there are businessmen who haven’t had a lifelong passion for their industry. Execs in LA come out of business school and say (American accent) “I’d like to be in the movie industry, that’ll be groovy” – and there’s not much more thought gone into it than that.’

Speaking of badly written films, it seems almost too smooth a lead to bring up his latest film, Your Highness, which critic Andrew O’Hehir called ‘the worst film ever made’. I try to disguise it but Lewis acknowledges the natural connection with a pained grimace. ‘Your Highness is a film that on the page was engaging and funny, but they adopted an improvisational approach on set which I think lessened the script. It was a lot of fun to make and there were interesting people involved – but there’s a disparity between what’s fun to do and what’s a worthwhile project when it’s finished. I think it will find its audience.’

The tea has been drunk and the children want their stories. The Ugg boots lead me up the stairs and show me out, and Lewis heads off, leaving the kitchen-stage for the new theatre of the children’s bedroom, where another rapturous audience awaits him. They won’t be disappointed.

Isn’t it terrible when the only adjective you can think of is ‘lovely’? ‘Nice’ seems such faint praise as to be damning, so you go with ‘lovely’ and find yourself stuck. But, meeting your girlfriend’s parents for the first time, ‘lovely’ is what you’re hoping for and probably the best you’ll get. Unfortunately ‘lovely’ is not what Evan is dealing with when he encounters his girlfriend Claire’s parents, despite his inability to think of any other words. He certainly isn’t dealing with ‘nice’.

The premise of The Courting of Claire is so simple, yet it still manages to surprise at every turn, transforming all the awkward tension expressed in Evan’s first parental encounter into something very much more sinister. There are expertly crafted moments of relief and humour throughout, offering escape as Evan’s position deteriorates in the face of a mother’s love and obsession for her daughter, a primal intention not to be replaced. It is this ability to be both nurturing and destructive which gives Mary Flanigan’s portrayal of ‘Mum’ – as her character is called – a presence equivalent to a force of nature. She can delicately spread toast and then ruthlessly forcefeed the ‘Boy’ water. The household is ruled by a psychotic matriarch and all male presences have faded into the realm of the memory and supernatural – where is Claire’s father and what happened to ‘The Previous One’, the boyfriend who they aren’t ‘allowed’ to talk about?

This all begs the question: is student playwright Matt Fuller that frightened of women? He explicitly denies that the play is based on true events and wants us to know that his own girlfriend’s parents are ‘lovely’. It came from his desire to write something very different after his New Writing Festival success Lemonworld. The third offering he is now working on will presumably be just as different again.

Is this a ‘gritty kitchen-sink drama’, a comedy of manners, a rom-com, a horror? Somewhere in between them all is probably the correct answer, showing that once again Matt finds himself unconfined by a single genre. He states that Evan is the ‘everyman’ caught up in events beyond his control. Well, I certainly hope that he isn’t every man. I hope that no man endures what he does. The climactic scene features a visceral speech by ‘Mum’ which elicits pure terror. Both writer and director (Michaela Scotting) have collaborated throughout the rehearsal process to produce something chilling. And they both seemed so ‘nice’!

Forget Meet the Parents, this is so much more excruciating. The logical extension of all those mother-in-law jokes, The Courting of Claire presents true demonisation.

Though attending a performance of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia would count as revision across the disciplines, it does not feel at all like work. Instead, this captivating drama challenges minds while still indulging in a bit of bawdy comedy. Stoppard, as per usual, weaves a dense web of connections with the highest dose of wit. He speculates upon order and disorder, the past and the present, creation and destruction. But even with such complexity of thought, Arcadia is not all brains. It holds heart at its centre.
The play moves between two time periods connected by one setting. In 1809, Septimus Hodge (Vyvyan Almond) teaches the child prodigy Thomasina (Chloe Cornish) on her family’s grand estate, whilst on the present day Derbyshire land academics investigate theories of literary scandal and scientific intrigue. Arcadia moves seamlessly between the two eras until the two eventually share the stage, perhaps brought together by the forces of attraction central to the play.
Admittedly the difficulty in this particular play is fusing the scientific, philosophical aspects with ‘the attraction that Newton left out’. It is integral to remember throughout that the mathematical proof of the movement toward doom holds a human tragedy within its numbers. In this production, there is a sense of that struggle to ground such difficult talk with that of the real people at the core.
At times, the actors stress the comedic element to an unnatural degree, seizing perhaps upon the easier task of a dialogue of sexual puns than discourse upon the future of the universe. But such a struggle does not detract exceedingly from great enjoyment of the work. Almond particularly excels as Hodge, his portrayal so compelling that his entrance onto the stage of an Oxford faculty lecture room would draw no disapproval.
In the end, just as Hodge demands Thomasina’s attention, Arcadia demands the same of the audience. It is a play that delivers a difficult pleasure. It requires the spectator to hold constant interest in its proceedings, without which one can become lost. But even in light of its challenging nature, it is not something any will undertake without eager anticipation. In its combination of the buzzing of brainwaves amidst the beating of the heart, Arcadia is the type of challenge that provides an uncommon thrill.

This was not quite how I envisioned my Saturday morning. In a small, darkened room in Harris Manchester College I was screaming at three strangers. Then I laughed to the point of hysterics with them. Next, I painted the walls. Milja Fenger, playwright and director, had invited me along to a rehearsal for her new play She was Yellow – a tale of the devastating impact that a cancer diagnosis has on the lives of Aurelie and her partner Ilona – and I had happily obliged, eager to observe the creative process of a play that was partially being devised in rehearsal with actors.
At first, I watched a scene between Alashiya Gordes, playing Aurelie, and Sarah Perry who plays her partner Ilona. There is a mesmerising quality to their performances and I am quickly drawn into the very personal register of the play.
As a critic, your ears are finely tuned for those phrases that retain the tang of the written word on them – those awkward utterances that may fit into a script but lose all their potency as soon as they leave an actor’s mouth. But one of the techniques we practised, ‘under-reading’ – being continually fed the lines and repeating them back – removes all need for the actors to recall lines and sharpens the dialogue until only the most natural phrasing emerges. I have a go, and am quickly immersed in the emotional landscape of the play, in a way that is almost frightening. Disconcertingly, it feels just as if someone is talking inside my head.
Next, I scream. But it is all part of an ‘Anger Run’, a technique in which we run through dialogue in different emotional states. Eyes closed, I quickly exhaust myself.
There  is an odd moment when the exercise has finished in which Milja turns to me and asks me what I feel and the only response I can articulate is ‘strange’. And it was strange, as I briefly lost that boundary between what I really did feel and what I was acting I felt. Even now, several days later, some of the lines echo back to me.
As Milja described the intervening scenes, an intimate portrait of the deterioration of human body emerges. Buoyed by delicate touches of beauty, She Was Yellow does not shy away from the raw, animal unsightliness of dying. Yet Milja Fenger’s play also embraces another kind of beauty. Influenced by her Human Sciences degree, she celebrates the beauty of mathematics and natural process in her art. Running from the 17th – 21st May at the Burton Taylor, She was Yellow looks set to move us all alike.

After an hour and a half, the lights went up in the Ultimate Picture Palace. A rather abrupt ending, but not a totally unwelcome one. Then, the word ‘intermission’ flashed up onscreen, and ten minutes later we were back in our seats for another hour. It would probably have been a better film if it had been condensed into the time that the first half took.
Les Petits Mouchoirs (Little White Lies) was the highest-grossing French film of recent times, but it’s not entirely clear why. A wonderful performance from favourite actress Marion Cotillard certainly helps. There are some scenes that are really joyful, but these are scattered amongst scenes that drag, played out by unsympathetic characters.
It starts off in a nightclub. Ludo is blind drunk, causing a nuisance of himself all over the place, before finally jumping on a motorbike to head home. Bad idea – he gets knocked over by a lorry and next we see of him he’s in hospital in a coma, surrounded by his friends who love him, but not quite enough to cancel their impending holiday. In a cottage by the seaside, tensions reach melting point as relationships disintegrate, people go mad, and there’s a growing sense that it’s the absent joker Ludo who binds this group together, brings out the best in them, and without him they’re significantly less than the sum of their parts.
The only really nice character is Vincent, who’s also pretty weird: he confesses his undying love to his best friend Max just days before the holiday. The ensuing awkwardness is at times very funny, but also very sad. Other characters just don’t have so much claim for our sympathy, such as Antoine, who spends the whole time obsessing over the wording of texts to his ex-girlfriend, while others are not drawn out enough, like Isabelle, Vincent’s long-suffering wife, who we see mysteriously staring at a porn website, but whose emotions are never given expression.
There’s little plot, rather a collection of scenes, some of which are delightful and funny, others which just aren’t so interesting. They smoke a lot, swear a lot and break things when they get angry. With a little more joie de vivre all round this film could have made more of a compelling situation.

While leaving the cinema, with the credits to Joe Wright’s Hanna playing behind me, I had one overriding concern about the movie. There were a lot of things in it which I absolutely loved – from the thumping techno soundtrack by The Chemical Brothers to the mesmerizing screen presence of Saoirse Ronan, it was a film which had a lot of things going for it. It was a surprising turn for director Joe Wright, who  before had mainly stuck to period dramas like Pride and Prejudice and Atonement. It’s quite a leap from these types of films to the relentless action-y thrills of Hanna, and the fact that Wright pulled it all off so well is a testament to his ability as a director.
But, as I said, I had just one point of contention. And unfortunately, it was a pretty big one. I felt like I’d seen it all before.
It certainly wasn’t a clichéd film; not in the slightest. But it seemed to share a lot of plot with last year’s Kick-Ass, if you removed the titular green-clad wannabe superhero from the equation and focused on the film’s real star, Hit-Girl (Chloë Moretz). Both Ronan and Moretz play little girls who have been trained intensively in all forms of combat by their fathers, and who have been prevented from leading a normal life. Both of the girls’ mothers are dead, and both girls’ father-figures are training them in order to get revenge for a tragedy which befell their mother. Neither film seemed overly concerned with the moral implications of all this. And ultimately, both father-figures share similar fates. There are a number of other similarities I won’t get into, but suffice to say, the films’ endings aren’t too dissimilar either. Although Kick-Ass’s is, admittedly, rather more spectacular.
I’d like to stress that I’m not trying to say that either film plagiarised the other. Joe Wright has stated in interview that he didn’t even know about Kick-Ass until well after Hanna was already in production. And although it bothered me, it’s a petty complaint which shouldn’t detract from Hanna, which is an excellent film and which you should go and see.
The parallel between Kick-Ass and Hanna is the continuation of a strange tendency in Hollywood films – for films with very similar themes and ideas to come out very close to each other, often even in the same year. Take a look at Antz and A Bug’s Life – both came out in 1998 (I bet that makes you feel old) and both are computer-animated films about an ant colony. An ant colony. We managed to go without ant-based entertainment for almost a century of cinematic history, and then suddenly we couldn’t go a year without having two at once.
There are countless other examples. Repo! The Genetic Opera, Repossession Mambo and Repo Men came out in 2008, 2009 and 2010 respectively – and all are films about a dystopian future where ‘repo men’ come to repossess organs from those who haven’t been able to pay for them. In 2006 The Illusionist and The Prestige were released, two period films about magicians in the Victorian era which revolve around the intense rivalries between two central characters.
You get the picture. The similarities between these films would be weird enough on their own, but the fact that they’re released in or around the same year is what makes it really interesting. In most cases, it’s likely that market pressures are responsible. When a Hollywood exec observes the market and it seems that disaster movies are ‘in’ this year, it’s no wonder that both Deep Impact and Armageddon are made at the same time, to fill that gap. If this isn’t to blame, then it’s probably just simple coincidence – after all, hundreds of movies are made every year. It’s no wonder some end up the same.
Hanna and Kick-Ass were released just far enough apart that they might escape comparison by most, but in the end, their similarities are pure coincidence, and they’re continuing an honourable trend of Hollywood movies unconsciously mimicking each other. If their plots are similar, at least their tone, visual style and action sequences are so different that they can hardly be considered rivals. Maybe Hanna and Hit-Girl should team up sometime; they certainly have a lot in common.