Marcus Foster hasn’t released an album yet, but the amount of success he has achieved makes this fact almost irrelevant. Best friends with Twilight star Robert Pattinson, one of his songs, Let Me Sign, features in the films, which spiralled him to instant fame. Charles Saatchi once bought one of his sculptures, and he has toured with Mumford and Sons, one of whose members’ record label he is on. With his long-awaited first EP just out and the album expected in June, the crowd in Hoxton was full of wild fans who whooped at his every move.

But does his music live up to the hype? This gig would indicate that it probably does. It encompasses a wide range of styles, the predominant one being rock’n’roll, complete with plenty of headbanging and anguished screaming over heavy guitar and frantic drumrolls. Rushes and Reeds demonstrates some blues influence, while jazz and folk are discernable elsewhere. This intensity was sustained throughout most of the gig, with even songs that started off quietly, such as I Don’t Mind, turning rocky and epic at first opportunity. This was turned to his advantage particularly in Shadows of the City, where the slow and moody start gave way to big beats very powerfully. At one point he broke off into acoustic, and whenever we were allowed to hear them over the intensity of sound, many very beautiful harmonies revealed themselves, such as in Tumble Down, the title track of the EP. Catchy guitar riffs prevent the songs from risking all sounding the same. On its own his voice is uplifting and flexible, sounding as if it belongs to someone much older than 24.

Provided that his album retains the vigour of the live show, into which you could tell he was putting heart and soul, it will definitely be one to watch out for. A first sight of a rising talent; we haven’t heard the last from Marcus Foster.

It’s the early hours of the morning and I’ve just got back to my room. However I haven’t had the usual Friday night out in Oxford, I’ve been at the Ashmolean (or should I say LAshmolean). The underground cafe was, for one night only (unfortunately), transformed into a club. The two live acts Trophy Wife and Kyla La Grange were both very good but the night ws completely stolen by the final DJ set. Black Discs – Eliot ‘Coco’ Sumner and Age Salajoe – trod the line between genius and insanity to perfection. 

However, there were preludes to this finale which are going to be repeated this weekend and well worth a look in. Pots and Plays is the result of collaboration between The Onassis Programme, Oxford Playhouse and Ashmolean and being billed as ‘A festival of theatre, opera, dance and drama’. It’s a free festival – Oxford students don’t even have to pay to go into the exhibition Heracles to Alexander the Great – and therefore immensely good value even though each of the three offerings is only about ten minutes long. The two operas are Thamyras by Glyn Maxwell and Time for Earthenware by Colin Teevan. Maxwell of course brought After Troy to the Playhouse last March and is no stranger to ressurecting and adapting the woks of Greek Tragedians. But neither is Colin Teevan who has previously written Iph…, an adaptation of Euripides and Alcmaeon In Corinth, a reimagining of a lost play. Opera isn’t such a bad way of considering ancient Greek tragedy and particularly works for the chorus. 

As well as the live performances you can obtain an ipod on which there are six audio plays designed to be heard around the galleries. These can also be downloaded here so even if you don’t make it down to the museum you can still take part in the event. My favourite was Vessel by Lydia Prior who reveals the essential ‘ruse’ of museums where you should listen and not look. She whispers that ‘museums are places to keep things you see, secrets’. 

However, Pots and Plays is not something which keeps secrets nor should be kept secret. It proclaims itself throughout the usually hushed museum. 

Leaving the Call of the Wild press preview, it was difficult to retain the connection between the kind of children’s story I had expected and the raw and riveting scenes I had just watched. How had this childhood tale of survival and loyalty been so utterly transformed? Perhaps I misremember, but in the hierarchy of literary dogs isn’t Buck – the play’s hero – right between Lassie and Toto, one of those cuddly archetypes of unwavering canine loyalty which we’d all like to pet? But I do a disservice to Jack London’s 1903 novel. Buck’s tale is one of undeniable tragedy and pathos. Following his trials as he is snatched up from his mundane life of domestication in California to pull a sled in the Alaskan wilds, London’s novel has a lot to tell about the casualties of civilisation and greed.     

Playing fast and loose with the novel, Barney Norris’ adaptation preserves the tone and mood of the story without resulting to a slavish, and ultimately boring, adaptation-by-numbers approach. There is much to admire in Norris’ scripting and he exposes a rich vein of dramatic tension in the novel’s narrative. Despite their shaggy coats, Norris’ writing endows the pack with more than just an animal brutality – artfully calling to prominence the parallels between man and beast, and bringing a primal intensity to both his human and canine characters.

The cast is uniformly accomplished and a striking set of performances are given from this small ensemble. Ollo Clark’s Buck is, at first, the still center around which these characters play off each other. Yet Clark’s restrained and engaging performance in these early scenes pleasingly reflects the dullness one is sometimes aware of in the eyes of the domesticated animal.

However, if you’re looking for impressive animal mimicry, Call of the Wild isn’t the show to see. Ostensibly a tale about a dog and his pack, Call of the Wild is a nuanced human drama of power and instinct – but with added bite. Amongst the cast, John-Mark Philo’s Spitz, Buck’s fearsome antagonist, adds just the right touch of charisma to make his psychotic performance believable. Alex Jeffrey brings the weary acquiescence of someone resigned to their place in the system in his portrayal of the long-suffering Dave, providing a pleasant foil to Buck’s vigour.

Whilst these actors may be playing dogs, they bring the emotional complexity of a much richer kind to their performances. Plans for set design look impressive. Whirling snow, constructive lighting and shifting sets are all part of the spectacle that Call of the Wild promises to bring to the Oxford Playhouse’s stage       

Cassie Barraclough and Joe Murphy’s production is serious, taut and aggressive. And perhaps that is my only criticism of the short scenes I watched at the press preview last Sunday – Call of the Wild leaves little space for light relief and even the funnier moments are tinged with a sense of gallows humour. Yet the intensity of what I did watch has persuaded me to return to the stalls for opening night. I, at least, will be answering the call of the wild.

Four stars 

Earlier this week I went to the opening of The Cult of Beauty; The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900 at the V&A.  The bowl of scattered flowers and pale green figs, sliced open to reveal wound like slits of luscious ruby flesh, and a tall branch of pale pink blossom on the reception desk, announced the tenor of the exhibition. Walking into a crowd of people sipping champagne I reached the exhibition; a vision of amethyst, turquoise, and amber lights, with peacock feathered shapes projected onto the walls.

In the face of the materialism, ugliness, and debasement heralded by the Victorian era, a new kind of beauty was sought.  This was found by the Aesthetic Movement in the new form of Art for Art’s Sake; an art that was devoid of moral codes and didactic narratives. This gave birth to objects of pure beauty, offerings of visual delectation, tactile pleasure and sensual delight. The walls of the V&A exhibition are dripping with paintings of languid classical nudes, caressed by billowing diaphanous drapery, rendered in sumptuous jewel like colours.

One example is Leighton’s The Bath of Psyche (1890); female beauty here is objectified and conflated with the beauty of painting resulting in idealising depictions of women, not as themselves, but as objects of beauty. As well as a cacophony of paintings of beautiful woman, beauty was also found in the tables, chairs, sculpture and cabinets that constituted the new ‘Art Furniture’ that the Aesthetic Movement spawned. Innovation in design allowed for new furniture to be both functional and aesthetically pleasing.

In The Search for a New Beauty 1860s room, the fixation with woman as the epitome of beauty is felt in the obsessive repetition of female faces such as Leighton’s Pavonia (1858) in which a seated woman turns back towards the viewer, her gaze abstracted, wistful even. Her ebony hair contrasts dramatically with her milky skin, which is tinted with yellow, writing a sense of exoticism onto her face. Her lips are a glossy pink, directing our gaze to her soft cheek, also flushed with pink, and ending up at the pink corner of her eye. As we scan her face we consume her beauty. Framed by a fan of peacock feathers, the symbol of pride and beauty, she is removed from the realm of the individual and transformed into the personification of beauty.

This fetishisation of the female face is also seen in Rossetti’s Bocca bacciata (1859). The title of the painting ‘the mouth that has been kissed’ abstracts the female from her real body, presenting her mouth as the object of desire, a gash of rich scarlet paint – a sign of her female sexuality in its evocation of her genitals. At first for the male viewer she incites a sense of anxiety, a threat to male sexuality in her female potency, and yet this explicit image of female sexuality is managed and contained by the paint in which she is rendered. 

We are presented with a fragment of the female body, her face, as opposed to her whole figure, denying her agency. This repression is further emphasised by the fact that she is imprisoned within the shallow space of the canvas, tantalisingly pressed up against the picture plane. The fact that she is shown head-on, trapped behind the parapet and thus objectified at a distance, framed almost as if she were a painting herself, facilitates the viewer’s visual dominance and voyeuristic consumption of her beauty. Her gaze is lost; she is the epitome of melancholy and the embodiment of beauty, objectified therefore as an object of desire specifically for the male viewer’s visual pleasure.

This obsession with beauty and the female form that pervaded painting, sculpture, interior design and architecture by the poetic, melancholic artists of the Aesthetic Movement was also subject to ridicule in Beardsley’s satirical cartoons of pretentious, effeminate men and idealised women dripping in peacock feathers. This injection of humour into the exhibition softens the otherwise elitist, inaccessible, class specific insistence on beauty and taste of the Aesthetic Movement, whilst providing a greater insight into the social and historical climate of the time.

The evening came to a close at 9 o’clock and people came spilling out of the V & A. One man ran out with a handful of figs from the reception desk showing it to all his friends, whilst others languorously sat on the steps, intoxicated on champagne, their visual appetite for the beautiful satiated.

‘The Cult of Beauty; The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900′ is showing at the V&A until July.