Tucked away in the Oxford Castle complex is the O3 gallery, whose new show of work by Rachel Ducker and Rachel Owen makes it a key Oxford art destination outside the walls of the Ashmolean. As its title suggests, this exhibition is preoccupied with ideas of change, and in particular with capturing the moment in which an object turns from one thing into another. The gallery even provides a little sheet explaining the rationale behind the title, giving a quotation from Ovid about the transformation of Daphne into a tree to escape Apollo’s advances.

This idea of a human/tree figure mid-transformation recurs in many of the wire sculptures, but Owen’s prints seem to relate to metamorphosis in other ways, making the comparison less relevant. Owen’s screenprints and monoprints seem concerned with the effect of crepuscular light on buildings and trees, questioning whether objects alter as the light falling on them gradually shifts to darkness. It is as if, in this liminal space between night and day, what we see becomes distorted and skewed out of visual proportion: a tower impossibly high, a tree horrendously monstrous and black, almost strangling the picture frame towards which its branches reach.
Owen’s prints are striking in their use of sharp contrasts, as well as shades of dark grey on grey. Owen draws clearly from the sights of Oxford: there are images of old stone steps leading up to an indefinite white space, the sharp shadows leading our eye up the angles of the stonework. One of the largest works on show, a montage of several views of a vaulted stone ceiling entitled ‘Magic Forest’, was a focal point of the exhibition and seemed to draw together the sharp lines of Owen’s prints with the magical, other-worldly spectacle of Ducker’s sculpture.

Ducker’s creatures are very much the product of an artistic imagination, and seem to become more striking the larger they get in scale: one life-size work of a figure seated on a chair deserved a more prominent position in the gallery space. With a work this large, the smooth curving silver wires seemed to turn into an expression of the flesh and sinews of a living body, interconnected in a smooth design. Ducker experiments with the applications of her materials in almost every piece: in ‘Reconstructed Tree’, sections of wood are bound up within a tightly-coiled metal wire framework in the shape of a tree, suggesting an intersection of nature and artifice.

The small space is packed with art: even between the closely-hung prints on the staircase you can spot the occasional wired figure suspended in the air, veiled in mesh or leaping through space. The curation within such a small commercial gallery is always going to be limited by extraneous factors: the grey pulpy stonework of the gallery walls detracted from the stark black and white contrasts particularly in Owen’s work, and amidst some of Ducker’s sculptures at the back of the gallery was an apparently unrelated cabinet of vintage button jewellery. There was also a series of screenprints of a young girl’s face, which perhaps represented metamorphosis from child to adult, but it was difficult to reconcile this tender subject matter with the more brutal, bleak landscape depicted in the rest of Owen’s work.

Nonetheless, this is an innovative and subtle body of work in a gallery which deserves more of our attention.

Paul Gauguin has tended to cultivate an image as a somewhat pervy ‘artist-tourist’, travelling to remote lands in French Polynesia painting vivid images of exotic naked women. Indeed, the carved wooden door panels around his native dwelling in the Marquesas Islands, displayed the home’s name ‘Maison du Jouir’, which translates as ‘House of Pleasure’ or ‘House of Orgasm’. This was probably a deliberate provocation to his neighbour, a Catholic bishop – (he resented the fact that in much of the South Seas, missionaries had successfully westernized the lands and stripped them of his romanticised preconceptions of primitivism living on here) – but in order to enter Gauguin’s studio, all visitors would have had to pass under this inscription and through his bedroom. Make of that what you will.

The Tate Modern’s latest blockbuster of an exhibition, doesn’t completely dispense with this image of Gauguin, but it does give the viewer a chance to explore the greater depths to his work, focussing on Gauguin as a storyteller and creator of imaginative, mythical and stylized visions, over Gauguin as simple perv. Instead of the exhibition being arranged chronologically, Gauguin: Maker of Myth is arranged thematically, with each gallery emphasizing the common motifs and ideas that pervaded his work, at various points throughout his career, and at various points across the globe. Themes include Gauguin’s engagement with the familiar and everyday in his still lifes, rural landscapes, and the sacred and religious.

The exhibition characterises Gauguin’s relation with the female form as nuanced and complex. He sought to explain women and their relationship with the landscape, and of his time in Martinique, he wrote ‘what I find so bewitching are the figures and everyday here there is a continued coming and going of black women decked out in all their colourful fiery with their endless variety of graceful movements’. With his female nudes, he intended to suggest a ‘savage luxuriousness of a bygone age’ and so the female form came to embody part of his imaginations of pre-modern existences. In the tropical settings of Martinique and Tahiti, he could present women as timeless figures, their narrative part of enduring myth and folklore.
Gauguin is notable for breaking away from the Impressionist tradition of his time. Lush vegetation, and the warmer climes found at his many travel destinations licensed him to use bolder, more sensuous colours and shift away from the naturalistic conventions that were prevailing in other European art. What’s really captivating about his paintings is that he flattens his composition, and in place of the strong dynamics of perspective, he injects vivid swathes of colour imbued with dream-like intensity. Although he preferred to allow his imagination to guide his paintings in a studio, direct observation still remained important for him, especially given his travels, and his drawings are stripped of redundant analytic detail, and instead emphasize contour, providing highly simplified foundations from which to construct colourful visions for his paintings.

Overall it is difficult to not be enchanted by this display of Gauguin’s paintings. When it’s cold outside, and winter gloom has reduced whatever one can see through the mist to figures from a sombre grey palette, it’s refreshing to be transported to the warmth and comfort of the Tate’s gallery spaces. Also, if you need a further reason to visit the Tate this Christmas vac, Ai Weiwei’s collection of 100 million individually handcrafted porcelain seeds in the Turbine Hall is staggeringly impressive. Tremendously thought provoking, it asks questions about the meaning of the individual within the wider community, and questions about the cultural, economic and political aspects of the ‘Made in China’ phenomenon.

BEST ACTOR

The Nominees

Jordan Waller – Peer Gynt

Joe Eyre – Cyrano de Bergerac

James Corrigan – Streetcar

…but the winner is…

JEREMY NEUMARK JONES

– The Graduate

BEST ACTRESS

The Nominees

Ruby Thomas – Streetcar

Sarah Perry- Love and Money

Erica Conway- The Graduate

…but the winner is…

LOUISA HOLLOWAY

– New Electric Ballroom/Taking Care of Baby

BEST PRODUCTION

The Nominees

Taking Care of Baby

Not for the Faint Hearted

The Graduate

…but the winner is…

A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE

BEST DESIGN

The Nominees

Tamlane

A Streetcar Named Desire

Peter Pan

…but the winner is…

THE ROYAL HUNT OF THE SUN

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

The Nominees

Rachel Dedman – Judas Escariot

Etiene Ekpo-Utip – Love and Money

Charles Macrae –

Taking Care of Baby

…but the winner is…

BELLA HAMMOND – Dinner

TUMBLEWEED MOMENT

The Nominees

The drama-cringe ‘ushering in the audeince’ – Not For the Faint Hearted

The ‘crazy scene’ – The Enemies

Soldier 3 holding a gold wheel – ‘I found the sun’ in terrible Yorkshire accent – Royal Hunt

…but the winner is…

CLIMBING THE ANDES – Royal Hunt

THE VERY WORST HACK

The Nominees

Julia Mclaren (Royal Hunt) – Nominated Royal Hunt for Best Production
Annie Hollister (Producer of Royal Hunt) -nominated “Charlotte Baynon for Best Director based on her work on Royal Hunt, and Royal Hunt for Best Production

…but the winner is…

HEIDI STANCLIFFE – nominated Best Production: Royal Hunt, Best Design: Royal Hunt, Best Actor: Jake Taee (Royal Hunt), Best Director: Charlotte Beynon (Royal Hunt)

Would you please turn me off?’ Michael Boyd, Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, is commanding an RSC techie to turn off his lapel microphone at the opening of the RSC’s brand new theatre in Stratford. Boyd needs his mic turned off so he can turn his back to the audience and whisper towards the backstage, all to illustrate that this brand new theatre has acoustics that allow his whisper to be heard by every single seat in the 1,000 seat house. You would expect such a display of theatrical wonder at the unveiling of the world renowned theatre nestled in Shakespeare’s birthplace.

But the real moment of awe comes not from Boyd’s audible whisper but rather from a suited architect who stands up in the audience to explain why there is no carpet on the theatre floors under the newly renovated, and comfortable, theatre seats. ‘These wooden floors acoustically allow the audience to be aware of their own noise. Not in a negative way, not in a rustle of sweets wrappers way—but it means that when a laugh starts in a corner of the theatre, the sound will run across the entire house. When the audience gasps, they will hear their own gasp. Every gasp and laugh is audible.’

These wooden floors that reflect gasps and laughs are a perfect microcosm of the vision behind the RSC’s new space: that vision is audience engagement. From the deep thrust stage that is now the standard across all three RSC theatres in Stratford to the perfect sightlines from every seat, the audience was possibly more in mind than the actors when creating this new theatrical space.

Of course, such renovations, or should I say total demolition and reconstruction, were the perfect opportunity to fix a few recurrent problems for staging plays at the RSC. For instance, the troublesome fact that two of the theatres shared the same back wall which meant you could hear the canons in Richard III in the background to As You Like It in the theatre next door. Then there was the shared backstage space, which meant a more than one actor getting confused and making their valiant entrance into the wrong play altogether.

All these problems have been field. But the bigger problem that Michael Boyd and the development engine behind the RSC are trying to address is that of the audience. The unspoken question behind the opening of the new space is how can theatre compete in a contemporary society dominated by phenomena like reality TV, YouTube and digital media? Answering this question, Michael Boyd is standing up, rushing about the shiny new thrust stage, gesturing widely: ‘We’re not good at social gatherings. But that’s what the theatre is—its democratic, it speaks to how we can love and live together. That’s what this space is about: the audience and actors together realizing that they have a different view and looking into each other’s faces. It’s about being a place for community.’ This sentiment is aimed not only at current theatre-goers (more often than not silver-haired retirees) but at the next generation. The new RSC space has no ‘ghetto-ized seats’ reserved for school trips. Each seat has a perfect view. Why? Because, as Michael Boyd says, the theatre needs to ‘reinvent itself for the next generation’.

Reinventing the architecture and acoustics of a 1,000 seat theatre wouldn’t seem to be the kind of work that best recruits a new generation of theatre-goers. But Boyd seems convinced that if the theatre is not only to survive but thrive, it has to offer something unique. That uniqueness is in the wooden floors of the new Royal Shakespeare Theatre itself; it is ready and waiting to echo back to us the laughter and gasps that can only happen in a community of people sitting together to share something together. Something like a play.

If we are to take Pitchfork’s sage advice, James Blake is the newest representative of something called ‘post-dub’. Thankfully, judging from this track, the term isn’t another way of summarizing the laddish inanity of dubstep’s ‘bow-bow-DROPPPPPP-duh-duh-dujj’ format; it refers to a new, smart subgenre.

The name ‘CMYK’ implies a boring minimalism, but in Blake’s deception lies his genius. Blake slots a manically sped-up sample from Kelis’s ‘Caught Out There’ into the negative space of Aaliyah’s ‘Are You That Somebody?’, creating a sonic whirlwind of opposition.
While Kelis cusses her boy for betraying her (‘Look I found her red coat/Look I found her’), Aaliyah and Timbaland engage in a breathy back-and-forth, setting the stage for seduction. Blake has a sense of humour – he transforms Aaliyah’s relatively low voice into a pipsqueak and Timbaland’s into a Barry White baritone – but he also knows how to structure a song. He uses the highly gendered vocal spectrum he creates with the Aaliyah sample as the underlying anchor of the track, to which he interjects the Kelis’s anger and sense of empowerment.

Blake fuses the highs and lows of love, betrayal, and hate to construct a modern narrative about a timeless relationship. Not only has the producer made 90s RnB cool again, he’s created his own unique brand of electronica. It doesn’t really matter what you call it, for just as ‘CMYK’ transcends its disparate parts, Blake transcends categorization.

Welcome to our press-preview of The Crucible’ it says on my neatly stapled, colour printed Press Preview Pack from the director, handed to me with a handshake and a warm smile. ‘Would you like a tea or a coffee? There’s already a glass of water on the table for you.’

The cast are there in full costume looking composed: they must have already done their warm-up so as not to keep the reviewer waiting. How considerate. This term will be the touchstone for St. Hilda’s drama society as they put on Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.

Superbly directed by Alicia Luba, powerfully acted by a cast of 24 and also staged in the Jacqueline Du Pre auditorium, a hidden gem, this production has everything going for it and more. They have nearly two weeks left of rehearsals, and they’re doing a full costume press preview with confidence and vigour.

The play deals with issues of betrayal, accusation and hysteria set in the Puritanical town of Salem during the time of the witch-hunts. Miller’s narrative is imbued with catharsis and the play is two and a half hours long – a difficult one to pull off – but Alice Fletcher’s performance as Elizabeth Proctor was as stirring as it was convincing and kept me engrossed throughout. Great British restraint was charmingly adopted by Charlie Trew, playing John Proctor, and by the end when the witch trials accuse this goodly and godly man of being one himself, Trew’s defiant downfall and courageous martyrdom is entirely moving.

The starlight is not all cast by the main actors, either. The Judge (Hannah Schneiders) is foreboding, menacing, someone who could be a baddy in Star Wars; Abigail Williams is a treacherous and flirtatious tart in pilgrim’s clothing, everything makes this production stand-out, and I wholly believe that with or without feedback from student paper reviewers these dramatists will be fantastic on their opening night.
There are those who wish to have press previews and those who don’t. But if there is one thing this press preview proved, it is that press previews can be done well. St. Hilda’s reminded this reviewer that the press preview surely was invented not to fuel reciprocal loathing between reviewers and performers but to provide the first look into the weeks, and often months, of effort that goes into every Oxford play.

The Hilda Players were ready to perform, to be judged, to be criticised, and good on them, I was grateful for the experience. The cherry on the top is that they also looked like they were enjoying it, which ultimately is the point of student theatre, no?

I was the only reviewer who came to Hilda’s impressive recital and they gave it their all and I was left humbled. Thanks for the preview, guys, and break a leg.

‘Uncle Boonmee’ is a completely impenetrable, utterly infuriating bitch of a film. I have seen many weird pieces of cinema in my time, from ‘Last Year In Marienbad’ to ‘Synecdoche, New York’, but nothing has alienated me quite like this managed to. It has to be asked, in all sincerity, who exactly sits on the Jury at Cannes that awarded this nonsense the Palme d’Or? It is films like ‘Uncle Boonmee’ that give arthouse cinema a bad name. Absolutely no amount of appreciation of Buddhist thought, Thai custom or understanding of avant-garde philosophy could prepare you for this ‘film’. The script can’t be much longer than ten pages, and the soundtrack and story are practically non-existent. It’s just absolutely insane, and for all the wrong reasons.

Other than this, there is little left to say. What can possibly be said about a film that gives you a family dinner turning into an encounter with a monkey spirit, who turns up casually claiming to be Boonmee’s son reincarnated – something he accepts with relative ease. How are you supposed to react to a scene showing a woman having underwater sex with a catfish in the middle of Thailand’s wilderness? (Yes, you read right). The film is just a series of balmy accounts of past lives, and not a single one of them comes anywhere close to being comprehensible or signalling any type of meaning.

Parisian critics were appalled despite the Cannes endorsement, and rightly so. Despite seeing ‘Uncle Boonmee’ at the London Film Festival, and thus watching the film at its British premiere, I wasn’t surprised in the slightest when the couple sitting in front of me walked out after an hour. Consider just for a second what this means, because it takes a particular kind of audience to pay £17.50 per ticket to see something this obscure at Leicester Square. And yet even then, there were people that couldn’t hack sitting through the whole thing.

Director Apichatpong, or Joe as he likes to be called over here, said before the film started that he had just flown over from Spain, and there they had considered his film to be a ‘rock and roll’ movie. I’m not quite sure what that means, but intuitively the description is pretty damn absurd. He’s got to be having a laugh here. I decided early on that if the audience clapped at the end – as it is apparently common to do at premiers – then I had been sitting amongst a bunch of phonies. Fortunately, they declined that expected nicety. The joke was on Cannes, but it looks like very few others are falling for it.

You would be forgiven for thinking that Anton Corbijn is comfortable in the world of Hollywood – before he came into Room 114 of the Soho hotel a sweet intern has poured him a cup of tea – but you would be wrong. Starting as a photographer and then going into music videos before he directed his critically acclaimed first film, ‘Contol’, Corbijn is not fully accustomed to the way the film industry works. So when we sit down to talk about his new film, ‘The American’, interviewing him does not feel like being in the presence of a legend, but more a man who is still trying to make a name for himself, though he’s still not quite sure what the name should be.

What are feature films and music videos like compared to photography, which is where you started?

‘Basically the big problem for both is as a photographer it is a single vision, just you and your camera, which is much easier to stay in control of. With anything that involves other people it is much harder not to lose your direction and the more people that get involved the harder it is. It is difficult because I can’t explain my ideas very well. I have them in my head, but the trick of course is to make them understood by others. I’ve learnt that bit now.’

As your background is not strictly feature films, did it seem easier this time, now that you had one film under your belt?

‘My first film [‘Control’] was an independent film that I basically financed myself outside of the film industry. This one was very much in the film industry, in Hollywood, so the way we made it was very different in terms of the way we had to discuss things, which was quite new to me. I made this film differently to ‘Control’ because I wanted to have new experiences that you learn from.’

You had quite a large break between ‘Control’ and ‘The American’ – what attracted you to this one over any others that you might have come across?

‘I had to think what my future would be after ‘Control’. I started to do photography again; I did something for U2, a little film, and then I started reading scripts. It took a year longer than I had wanted to, but saying that, when I made ‘Control’ I always thought it would be the one film I make in my life, because of what it did to me in terms of experience and also in recognition. I felt I should see if I could become a proper director and do another film, in fact another 2 films; this is what I have set myself now, as I want to find out if I can make films or if I want this kind of life. These are all questions you need to ask yourself before starting a project.’

What sort of project were you looking for?

‘I read many scripts that had to do with dark comedies, Westerns, thrillers, because these were the kind of films I wanted to see for myself and I think you should make a film you want to see yourself. I came across this story and I realized I could combine a Western with a suspense thriller, so I could put two genres together into one.’

Is it nerve wracking going into the second film after the massive critical success of ‘Control’, and are you worried about what people think of it or do you just make the film you want to make?

‘Well, if people hate the film I am sure for anyone that is hard to take because you work so long on the project, but I personally don’t think about it so much because ‘Control’ was such a one off, it came so out of the blue. But I have always tried things I don’t know a lot about and try to find my own voice in it. I know that I can’t top ‘Control’ in the critical sense, the recognition was so immense it is just something you can’t aim for. So you make a movie that you want to make and you have to let it go and see how people react.’

Which do you prefer to make, music videos or films?

‘Oh, films, definitely.’

Why is that?

‘I started music videos in ’83 so I have done a lot of them and I think that I have done what I like to do with music videos. Plus I don’t watch these channels anymore and I think it is very hard to make something for a medium that you are not involved or interested in anymore.’

In a way George Clooney is the face of modern American cinema. What made you decide to cast him as the American?

‘Well for starters ‘The American’ comes from an English book called ‘A Very Private Gentleman’, and I wanted the experience I had with this film to be very different from ‘Control’. ‘Control’ had all English actors apart from one who was German, so I decided to change the characters from English to European and American. I thought George would be the best for this role because he can say a lot with very little script. That was very important since there was no dialogue to speak of. Not many people can carry that and keep you interested, but his body language was really good.’

I was quite interested by the love scenes. They were very intense and down to earth which you don’t get much in modern cinema anymore, so what made you decide to show it in an unpretentious way?

‘Well, for start it is a very European film and goes right back to very traditional filmmaking. I felt it was important for the characters to have a sex scene because I wanted to show the aggression and then the change to love during the scene. So I filmed it in a way that you feel sexuality rather than seeing it, which I thought, was important because I know a lot of sex scenes usually don’t feel sexual. You see everything, but it is not sexual. By not showing that much, it will be more sexual; you will feel more what he did to her, which was the idea behind the scene. I am glad it worked well and that Violante is such an amazing actress that she can play that so naturally because it is not an easy role to play. I don’t think it was easy for George either because he never does that in films; you don’t see many love scenes of George Clooney and definitely not a scene like this.’

How does it feel to have one of your films being shown at the London Film Festival?

‘I don’t think I grew up with many expectations and I had no idea what Cannes really meant until I showed my films. I mean the biggest thing I took from Cannes was the realization that film is an industry. The money that goes in there and the people that push your film make it so different to photography. Photography feels like a hobby now, it is very individual, you make a picture and hope that someone will at some point see it. There is no industry there. This is my first experience with the London Film Festival, I have been to Toronto, but I have not London. Toronto I really liked because it had a lot of normal audiences and I think London is really similar to that. It has industry people and the normal audience, which I think is much nicer. Apparently there is a lot of attention to all the films being played which is great.’

You mentioned at the beginning of the interview that you wanted to do three films, and you have just finished your second one. Do you have any idea what you want your third one to be?

‘I am developing that at the moment, but it is too early to give anything away just yet.’