When I first pitched to co-produce A Dream Play eight months ago, I could not have imagined that the project would bring together such a large team – 70 creative minds, and counting. With just three weeks to go before we move in to Oxford Playhouse, preparations are accelerating rapidly as more and more people flock to join the ‘Dream Team’.

Last term, Emma Reay, who was chosen from more than a dozen applicants, wrote a beautiful new adaption of Strindberg’s script which the cast of 21 actors and dancers have been rehearsing intensively since -1st week. One of the many special aspects of this play is the way in which so many of the performing arts are brought to bear to create a fantastic dreamscape. 1st week has seen nine actors being put through their paces in an intensive waltz workshop where flat-footed and bendy elbowed awkwardness were transformed into confident travel lines and determined crotch-to-crotch contact in a mere two hours.

Cast and crew members alike have come to terms with seeing themselves on screen this week as our two ‘making of’ trailers have been broadcast to our website (http://www.adreamplay.com/trailers). Filming for our third trailer begins this week, for which all manner of storyboards will be deployed. And our Composer and Musical Director, Oxford alumnus David Allen (Murder in the Cathedral), is putting the final touches to his original score for the production which promises to bewitch the Playhouse auditorium from the depths of its orchestra pit.

In case you thought that producing a Playhouse show is all work and no play, then take note of our two launch events: A Dream Play does Sunday Roast in fourth week and a night in association with Poptarts at Babylove in fifth. It’ll be the night of your dreams.

The Thin Red Line is a title that most associate with Terrence Malick’s lyrical adaptation of James Jones’ novel in 1999. However, there is certainly something to be said for Andrew Marton’s gritty version (1964), released from the archives after over fifty years.

Set amid the Allied invasion of Guadalcanal in the pacific theatre of WWII, it takes an unusually bleak view of the conflict for its time. When compared with other WWII movies of the era, such as The Longest Day – parts of which were also directed by Marton – The Thin Red Line is far more psychologically sophisticated. It goes beyond a simple veneration of valour to explore the issues of insanity behind it, and daringly implies an unnerving connection between lust and bloodlust within its hero.

In terms of realism, what this independent war movie cannot achieve in its crude and dated action sequences, it makes up for in its mental honesty. Flawed, but of value, its nihilism seems to reflect not only upon the past conflict it is ostensibly portraying but also the Vietnam War which was contemporary to the film.

Optimum Classic, DVD released January 31st 2011.

It is very human to have moments where the past simultaneously merges with the present, each flashback bringing with it raptures of pleasure or pain, sometimes both – crystallising moments of passion, love, failure, anger, guilt… However, in Håkon Gundersen’s “Betrayal” these flashbacks somehow manage to seamlessly merge the gratuitous with the meretricious. This World War II film recounts true life events during the Nazi occupation of Norway through the eyes of double agent and cabaret singer Eva Karlsen, who has managed to escape and who finally decides to tell her granddaughter how she came to arrive in America about forty years after the event.

What should be an informative and thought-provoking piece about Nazi-collaborators in Norway during the Second World War quickly turns into a missed opportunity. We are told of Tor Lindblom, owner of Club Havana, who profiteers from supplying the Nazis with everything ranging from alcohol and cigarettes to cement and steel. He is in love with Eva, the aforementioned British double agent, and singer in the nightclub, who also works part-time for the Gestapo. The film tries to focus on some important issues regarding Norway’s biggest industrial company making aluminium at Herøya, and the threat of its bombing by the Allies, but this is confused and difficult to engage with. We are shown the London skyline, accompanied by a superfluous voiceover, and then thrown back into the depths of the seedy squalor of Club Havana.

Furthermore and devastatingly so, we are not allowed to form any kind of emotional attachment to these characters, no real connection with their motivations, and no investment into their personal projects – this is a piece where apathy triumphs. That choking, sickening feeling of being betrayed is merely hinted at, leaving us neither sympathetic nor outraged.

Released this month on DVD.

There is a definite pattern to Girl Talk’s albums: each one is easier listening than the last. Considering that he started out making noisy, barely listenable collages of glitched-out pop, this is no bad thing. Until All Day, that is. Greg Gillis’ latest release is far from bad, but it is, well, boring. (/p)
Night Ripper and Feed The Animals – Girl Talk’s two previous releases – were manic, overflowing, relentless mash-ups of everything from classic gangsta rap to 70s pop to the latest radio hits. The results were unexpectedly brilliant, and compulsively danceable. Gillis’ newest album is different. All Day is slower, the pace is less frenetic and there are far fewer samples per song. This could be a good thing, but more often than not it means the tired mash-up cliché of a pop backing track plus rap vocals. So the album gets off to a clunky start with a full two minutes of Ludacris yelling over Black Sabbath, and mostly sticks to that formula. (/p)
Much of the appeal of Girl Talk’s earlier albums came from the bizarrely perfect juxtapositions he effected: songs that you would never think of together, but which sound as if they were made for each other. Yet in All Day we often get unhappy matches such as Rihanna singing over Fugazi, and (worst of all) Bun B rapping along to John Lennon’s “Imagine”. (/p)
It isn’t not all bad: there is the occasional moment of genius; take “This Is The Remix”, where Gillis puts together Fabolous, INXS and The Clash. Girl Talk is a skilled mash-up artist, and even though he is not on top form here, there can be no doubt that he is far above his hordes of imitators. The best parts of All Day are not frantic or hyper, but nostalgic and wistful. On the whole then, the album is not a bad listen, and, what is more, it will cost you nothing (it is available for free download on the Illegal Art website). It makes great party music – it’s just a shame it isn’t more than that. (/p)

Churchill described Russia as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. The same can rightfully be said, without any hint of exaggeration, about Bob Dylan. Nobody has or ever will understand him, and that’s the source of our fascination with him as a songwriter, performer, and era-defining legend. This man was completely elusive before No Direction Home, and by the end of its sprawling, three and a half hour account of his life in the early 60s, we are left only slightly the wiser. All the documentary does is predominantly to increase the intrigue tenfold, by showing us more than we could possibly wish for if we wanted to be anymore in awe of this man than we already were.

We learn some things. Through archive press footage, it becomes clear that after three years of soaking up the pressure of leadership from the folk scene at the age of around twenty, he simply became sick of being asked what the meaning was of things like the rain in ‘A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall.’ He’s constantly asked a question throughout along the lines of whether he should be the leader of ‘singers with a message,’ and the pretentiousness and presumption that he’s interested in all things political ultimately drives him towards senility. Going electric, turning to rock and roll, becoming ‘Judas,’ – however you want to put it – was clearly the ultimate transition from acoustic guitar-twanging tunes about war and peace (however incredible `Blowin’ In The Wind’ was), through the dreamy lyrics of `Mr. Tambourine Man’, to a type of music in which he was free to write and sound however he liked, and the products were Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde – two colossal achievements, which changed music forever and were released in the space of merely one year.

It is quite incredible. A lot of what we see is warfare – not of the Vietnamese sort he sung about for so long, but between himself and British crowds, as he toured England for months on end, playing loud, angry music to disheartened but devoted fans who derided him as a fake and either walked out, or stayed around to boo him off at the end. There is nothing like this which we can nowadays draw parallels to – if musicians are no longer popular, they disappear. To imagine fans buying tickets to concerts merely to voice their dissent is to imagine a world which no longer exists, because we don’t have anyone that achieves levels of audience commitment quite like Dylan did.

What’s left unexplained, probably because it is inherently inexplicable, is what made this incredible mind. Dylan came from a bog-standard tiny town in rural Minnesota, spent his school years listening to the likes of Odetta and Woody Guthrie on the radio, and soon headed to New York’s Greenwich Village where he made a name for himself. From the outside, it’s that simple, and there’s nothing more we can observe. We listen to his first girlfriend – Suze Rotolo, from the Freewheelin’ cover – tell us what he was like, along with dozens of memories and stories retold by the Beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg, fellow folk ‘leader’ Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, producer Bob Johnston and many, many others. Even Dylan himself seems uncharacteristically straightforward in his old age, as he recalls what his younger self, in what might as well be a past life, was like. But ultimately Scorsese can only finish with footage of Dylan telling his band to ‘play it fuckin’ loud,’ leaving us in the knowledge of how much we owe to his man, who made sure music was never the same again.