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.

This brooding selection of Shostakovich’s chamber music reveals much of the introspection and fine attention to detail with which the Florestan Piano Trio, one of the most exciting ensembles on the British classical music scene, approaches its performance. Shostakovich’s first piano trio sets the tone here, with typical dramatic extremity pushed from every bar, looking towards the bleaker soundscape created in the second piano trio.
This work, composed during the Second World War, repeatedly declares its time with constant evocations of mortality. The Florestan Trio responds sensitively, particularly in the third movement, with violinist Anthony Marwood and cellist Richard Lester demonstrating their astonishing potential for timbre as they push the music into moments of tired serenity. The ‘dance of death’ folk motif running through the final movement is carefully set out, never stepping into the overly passionate. Despite the relentless speed maintained by the Florestan Trio, pianist Susan Tomes still allows for a calculating palette. It is with this control that the music is reigned back in by the very end, leaving an unresolved numbness.
These two trios are complemented by Shostakovich’s settings of seven poems by Alexander Blok for soprano and piano trio. Susan Gritton’s voice catches the menacing yet soaring quality of the melodic lines, under which Tomes works to produce lines of shaded intensity. In the final song, ‘Muzïka’, all four performers unite to produce music of an insular yet displaced character with immaculate focus on the minutiae of the score.
This is not an easy record; it is difficult music, often straddling the psychological, approached with much finesse. With the Florestan players announcing their final season, their last recording for Hyperion makes for compelling listening.

TUnE-yArDs is the solo project of singer-songwriter Merrill Garbus. Blessed with a versatile, unpredictable, intriguingly androgynous voice, Garbus is capable of everything from aggressive whimsicality (‘My Country’), soulful syncopation (‘You Yes You’), to surprisingly sincere tenderness (‘Wooly Wolly Gong’). Backing her bold lyricism are lush and ambitious sound collages, profuse blends of impossibly diverse rhythm and texture. Such was the approach on lo-fi debut BiRd-BrAiNs, and the formula is perfected on w h o k i l l, fleshed out with a definite improvement in recording fidelity and studio production.

Snippets of sound dart in and out of the mix, their frenetic speed defying any attempts at identification or classification. The sonic potpourri is certainly jarring at first listen, but the hooks are irresistible, and the complexity invites repeated, devoted listening. Much of the rhythmic underpinning of w h o k i l l is indebted to African influence; this is by no means an original source of inspiration, especially in recent years, but Garbus is extremely effective in her appropriation.

On opener ‘My Country’, she chants over an infectious mix of vocal overlays, tom-tom beats, and piercing synths. tUnE-yArDs excels in the art of tumultuous synthesis, and no track demonstrates this better than album single ‘Bizness’, an incomparable infusion of exuberant sound that contrasts with anguished lyrics (‘I say, I’ll bleed if you ask me, I’ll bleed if you ask me, that’s when, that’s when, he said no’).

The chaotic amalgamations of sound can at times verge on the obnoxious, as in the distorted-ambulance-siren-meets-the-brass-section cacophony of ‘Gangsta’. Such excess makes the touching minimalism of ‘Wooly Wolly Gong’ an all the more welcome respite. The uncompromising idiosyncrasy of w h o k i l l is sure to put some cynics off, but it’s also undoubtedly its greatest asset.

If anyone’s written off Peter Doherty, it’s not his fans. The atmosphere in the packed O2 Academy even before Doherty came on stage was electric. He emerged to rapturous cheers, ending the shouts of ‘We want Pete’ which had commenced a quarter of an hour before he was even due to appear. He’d teased the crowd by appearing at the stage door, topless with his trademark trilby perched on his head, to watch the first support act, who must have been bemused at the sudden roars. It was a relief to know that he was in the house, notorious as he is for non-appearances and showing up hours late for gigs, but this was the first sign that Peter Doherty means business.

Many artists would have found it hard to sustain an hour and a half of acoustic set, alone on stage, but not the confident Doherty, who had the crowd hanging off his every chord. With his only solo album to date, Grace/Wastelands, released in 2009, this gig formed more of a showcase of Doherty’s lifetime work – alongside his solo tunes the set was largely made up of old Babyshambles songs and Libertines classics, including amongst other hits a powerful ‘Don’t Look Back Into The Sun’, ‘Can’t Stand Me Now’ and ‘Music When The Lights Go Out’. A rendition of ‘What Katie Did’ was initiated by the crowd, who chanted the chorus while Doherty relaxed before finally joining in. He blended snippets of songs into each other, with plenty of instrumental jamming, eyes closed with a peaceful smile.

He was joined on stage rather incongruously by a pair of flamboyant ballerinas, turning the show into a visual as well as musical spectacle. He milked the crowd unabashedly, posing while one of the ballerinas fanned him with her paper fan, and disappeared for ten full minutes towards the end of the set.

Upon his return he was joined by the harmonica player from the support band, and together they managed to turn ‘Albion’ into a rendition of ‘Twist and Shout’. He disappeared once more, making the most of the crowd’s adulation, before returning and finally finishing with an epic ‘Fuck Forever’. Doherty knows how to give a crowd a good time, and if the flawed genius is focused now on indulging his genius rather than his flaws, then the future looks bright.

The hectic schedule of an Oxford student sometimes just doesn’t leave time for reading a novel.  If I dare try, I usually only get a few chapters in before I give up, frustrated with not being able to remember where I left off the week before – reading each night before bed having become a fanciful resolution. That’s where the short story comes in: you can pick one up and complete it within minutes, gaining the satisfaction that comes from escaping fleetingly into another world, without the stamina, or sleep-deprivation, often required from a novel.

My all-time favourite is Alice Munro, the Canadian writer who has in recent years has become the Mary Poppins of short stories – judges having described her latest collection, Too Much Happiness, as ‘practically perfect’. She has the ability to sketch out whole lives in just a few pages, not shying away from dark, dramatic events but ensuring through unsentimental prose and rich detail that it is her characters that drive the plot. Her stories are nearly all set in rural Ontario, but I feel I could read them again and again before I got bored.

If I did, though, I wouldn’t mind something by Helen Simpson, who has most recently published a collection called In-Flight Entertainment, but who I first got into after reading Lentils and Lilies: a story of an A level student on her way to a job interview at a garden centre who tries and fails to help a mother retrieve a lentil from her child’s nose. I’m not sure there’s a ‘point’ to her quirky tales of domestic life, but they’re so entertaining that I don’t really care.

For something a bit more serious, I might read Jhumpa Lahiri, whose Unaccustomed Earth sensitively depicts characters caught between their American lifestyle and Bengali heritage. Or Petina Gappah, whose widely acclaimed An Elegy for Easterly paints a refreshingly human picture of the hardship, hypocrisy and humour of life in Zimbabwe.

And if I’m feeling too lazy for conventional prose, I love Ali Smith’s experimental touch, demonstrated most recently in The First 
Person and Other Stories. I probably wouldn’t quite go as far as one of her characters and call the short story a ‘nimble goddess’ to the ‘flabby old whore’ of the novel, but she does show that short doesn’t have to mean boring.

There is a certain stigma attached to the short story. As Alice Munro puts it in one of her stories:  it can seem ‘to diminish the book’s authority, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside’. But she, and countless other writers prove this wrong: their short stories do not imply they could not have written a novel; they are not unsatisfying fragments but literary gems.

Stepping into the Southbank’s Hayward Gallery on the first sunny day of the year, I felt rather inspired and cosmopolitan. This was In the Days of the Comet, a new exhibition which proposes ‘alternative ways of thinking about the here and now’. I was going to see a lot of Important, Very Clever, Modern art. I had decided it would be intriguing and provocative and beautiful. So after encountering various works on the ground floor including a large mound of earth, a working rope bell and a room furnished like an Ikea shop, I was a bit dubious. 
One floor up, I almost trod on what appeared to be a large piece of kitchen foil in the middle of the floor. I said to the security man: ‘Excuse me. I think this might have come loose from something…?’ But he shook his head slowly. No, silly me, this bit of foil was the art piece. I looked at its position on the floor, its shape and viewed it from several different angles to see if I could spot anything significant. The idea that the point might be in the lack of any point seemed reductive and annoying. An indie-looking art student flocked to it in interest, studiously consulting the exhibition guide. I moved on.

Next we spied a wispy pink bin bag hanging from the ceiling. My mum (a sculptor) knowledgeably suggested it might be interactive and proceeded to blow on it in order to find different or meaningful shapes. Mr Security Man again shook his head to stop her. The over-intellectual, yet supremely dull quality of the works so far on display made me feel close to hysteria. In a darkened room off of the main gallery, a red bucket full of greyish liquid was connected up to a fake head. By means of a pump, the artist could make the head ‘vomit’ and repeatedly did so for the benefit of onlookers. Needless to say, I felt a bit ill. On reflection, that was probably the ‘meta’ point. How could this be the pinnacle of British art? What on earth does that say about our ‘here and now’?  We are a plastic, static and vomiting culture, apparently.

I  was about ready to go home when we found the exhibition’s redemptive gem: ‘The Clock’ by Christian Marclay. A visual artist and composer, Marclay hails from New York. The piece stitches together thousands of scenes featuring a clock or watch to create a 24-hour film, matched up to our own clocks. Despite constant reminders, time seemed ironically suspended, perhaps because the narrative never resolved – Sean Penn’s alarm clock became Audrey Hepburn’s blind terror in Wait Until Dark, and flowed into the vivid naughtiness of Amelié, and so on. Marclay constantly toyed with our expectations about time duration, tension and cinematic narrative. It was beautiful, thrilling and extraordinarily intelligent.

Might we all do well to reconsider our career options and justify a roaring trade in ‘Dropped Pasta’ or ‘Bit of Loo-Roll’ in London’s best galleries? Yes, we should challenge the meaning of ‘art’ to ensure we don’t risk cultural stagnation, perpetually sighing and puzzling over the Mona Lisa. Yes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and some people may find these pieces stimulating, if not beautiful. But art strikes me as a medium for cultural elevation – we can aspire to be better, more intelligent, imaginative people because of it. The exhibition as a whole made me feel both supremely stupid and embarrassingly superior – not a very nice or winning combo. The vomit and the foil didn’t whet my appetite for much more modern art. Thankfully Christian Marclay provided us with a sweeter aftertaste.

Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own says that Aphra Behn earned for all women the right to speak; but scant detail about the life of Aphra herself leaves us with a tantalisingly incomplete portrait. Baptized in 1640 as ‘Eaffrey Johnson’, the daughter of a barber and a wet nurse, she grew up in the shadow cast by the Civil War. Her plays The Roundheads and The Rover are evidently topical, and although much of her work is imbued with the theme of Restoration, we cannot know quite how her experiences of the conflict affected her.

According to the earliest biography, published posthumously with her comedy The Younger Brother in 1696, she travelled to Surinam with her parents and siblings, probably in 1663. The family may have been encouraged to move there by Lord Willoughby’s Prospectus, which offered fifty acres per settler. But for Behn it was not the start of an idyllic new life. According to the biography, she suffered the ‘loss of her Relations and Friends there,’ which ‘oblig’d her to return to England.’ It is possible, though unproven, that she was in Surinam as the mistress of William Scot, the son of Cromwell’s Secretary of State for Intelligence, with whom she later undertook a spying mission in the Low Countries.  

Her time in Surinam provided inspiration and material for her short novel, Oroonoko, about the eponymous noble African and his beloved, Imoinda, who are ‘betrayed to slavery’ and brought to the sugar plantation in Surinam with tragic consequences. It is a remarkably ‘modern’ work, a stark and critical depiction of the slave trade and Christian hypocrisy. Oroonoko displays an integrity that the ‘devout’ captain of the slave-ship is sadly lacking. 

After her return from Suriname, she likely married a Mr Behn around 1665. Whoever he was, he slips off the record and may have died of the plague that same year. Aphra, with the code-name Astrea, then undertook some fairly well-documented work in Flanders, as a spy for the English government. Her letters to England frequently demand more money; indeed when she returned to London in 1666, she was in such debt that she risked being imprisoned. Luckily, her career as a writer took off. Thomas Killigrew, a colleague from her spying days, introduced her to Dryden and the King’s Company. Her first play, The Forc’d Marriage, was in fact produced in 1670 by the rival company, the Duke’s Men. 

In between plays, Behn’s movements are uncertain. Around 1673, she began a relationship with the bisexual John Hoyle, and perhaps went travelling again. Her return to the stage was heralded by the production of the tragedy Abdelazer in 1676. But it was The Rover, premiered the following year, which sealed her reputation as a dramatist. Nevertheless, she mysteriously sought to conceal her authorship, perhaps to avoid a charge of plagiarism raised by her old friend Killigrew. 

Aside from her dramatic output, Behn wrote both pastoral and political poetry, and translated or paraphrased works such as Aesop’s Fables and Ovid’s Oenone to Paris. Throughout her works, Behn contemplates what it means to be a woman with desires and aspirations living in a stifling patriarchy; she provides a voice for those whose individual worth has been overlooked or diminished. Influenced by imported libertine philosophy, she celebrates the authority of nature over religious superstition, praising physical pleasure enjoyed in the present time and encouraging people not to live bound by regulations which hinder their experience of the rich and enchanting world.

Goethe in Blackwell’s basement last term, Beckett on a boat this term, I expect to stumble upon some Ionesco in the Clarendon Centre any day now. Performing The Man with a Flower in his Mouth in Gloucester Green coffee shop Combibos seemed to be one in a long line of theatrical stunts playing themselves out in Oxford this year – just about anywhere except on stage. Yet rather than sullying this well-reckoned piece of modern theatre by distracting us from the true meaning of the text with cheap thrills and self-knowing quips, the gimmick really paid off and actually served to enhance the realism and intensity of the text.

The Playhouse Plays Out scheme aims to reach new audiences with affordable performances in unconventional venues: whilst most of the audience in Combibos seemed like they wouldn’t be too at sea in a real theatre and had probably stumped up a full-price Playhouse ticket fee countless times before, the nature of the performance did give it more of a low-key and accessible atmosphere, with the comforting hum of the coffee machines throughout. Seeing a play for £6 over a latte during a 45-minute essay break is a great way of fitting culture into a hectic student schedule.

At first, there was a palpable tension as the doors to the shop shut and the lead actor walked in: was he going to pull off this intimate play or was it going to be intensely embarrassing? Were the slightly nervous-looking people standing behind the counter the same baristas as earlier or had they swapped uniforms with trained actors? And was there going to be the eternally dreaded audience participation dimension, feared by all, enjoyed by none? Soon, however, the punters were able to relax as the lead actors quickly showed we were in capable hands, it became clear that the baristas were still baristas with coffee close at hand and audience participation was mercifully avoided.

The lead (and only) two actors were Samuel Collings, ‘The Man’, and Liana Weafer, ‘The Traveller’. Samuel Collings did a brilliant job of realistically playing the sort of man you wouldn’t be surprised to be approached by and hear all manner of ‘profound’ and ‘quirky’ things from in a station café. Whilst he did at first strike the tone of a fairly affected and self-satisfied ‘eccentric’, more and more sides to him began to emerge until he became tragically sympathetic and the audience was left visibly moved. Liana Weafer might have appeared to have less of a challenge on her hands: her main function appeared to be to operate as a comparatively normal eye-level and to react convincingly and engagingly. However, in such an intimate setting and such an intensely unusual play, this really was quite a feat and one which she executed with great flair. The director and adaptor, Poppy Burton-Morgan, also deserves a mention as her adaptation and staging helped to make the piece, which could have been quite static, exciting and hard-hitting.

4 Stars

The play was a Metta Theatre production as part of the Playhouse Plays Out series