Just Two People is a piece of new writing by Catherine Higgins which focuses on a domestic drama about the separation of a couple (Jack and Anna), apparently as a result of a sexual assault against Anna, committed by Jack’s adopted brother, Logan.

There is plenty about Just Two People which gives it the potential to be a perfectly enjoyable piece of new writing. The set (three sides of the round) draws us into the domestic drama, and the incessant noise of the traffic outside will force the audience to live the characters’ lives, surrounded by the big, bad, New York City. The acting, although varied, is never poor and Marcel Miller as Logan is wonderfully intimidating. He never fails to convince and is able to blend soft tones with an aggressive edge that is chilling when the audience forced to sit so close to it. The plot too, although hardly the most original work, is still intriguing and, as the director Ellie Piddock hoped, I did leave ‘feeling unsure who, if anyone, to side with’.

The problems of the play therefore, aren’t really the fault of the acting or the general concept but in the fact that the dialogue of the script isn’t convincing for the naturalist characterisation which seems to have been the goal. The sequence I was shown with Anna and her therapist was far too aggressive for a therapy session. When Dr Ober asks, ‘Do you think punching strangers is the right way?’, the line is too harshly delivered and the session turns more into a Mexican stand-off of sorts. When Anna concludes the scene with the line ‘I just don’t know’, I could not help but be reminded of GCSE devised piece performances and that want to convey something serious, without really knowing how to go about it. Krittika Bhattacharjee does try to get to grips with Dr Ober and her monologue about the woes of being a counselor, though pretty standard, still shows a desire to find more depth to the lines given.

Both Jack Haynes and Tim Kiely (as Jack, and his friend Sam, respectively) also put in good efforts, and their scenes together were the most convincing: Kiely’s awkwardness in not knowing what to say to help Jack will ring true with every male member of the audience. Haynes’ nostalgia drawn from looking at a picture of him and Anna in happier times is touching, and his ability to defocus his eyes and glaze over in memory works powerfully in this small space.

There are moments when the script does work well, and I particularly liked the detail of some of Jack’s memories (offering Anna a ‘little red cloth with a snowman on it’ to clean her dress when they first met) but more work would have to be done on the writing to release the potential of the acting. This will no doubt be a perfectly adequate piece of theatre, with some exciting moments (I think the ending, in particular, has the prospect of being very powerful) but compared with other new writing in Oxford, such as the innovative Not For The Faint Hearted last week, it unfortunately doesn’t stand up to the mark.

So I was just…’ The pause stretches away into eternity. ‘…standing there.’ She sits and stares into space. ‘And they were calling me things…like…like…you murderer, you murdering bitch…we’re gonna kill you, you murdering bitch.’

This is Louisa Holloway, and she is electrifying. You’ve no idea who she is or what she’s done – yet – but she’s electrifying. And so this play goes. Character after character comes onto the stage without warning and without explanation, exposes the bare flesh of their conscience, and leaves.

First comes Holloway’s character Donna, vacant and harrowing. She is in prison, you work out gradually, convicted of the murder of her young son and daughter. An ordinary mother, trapped in an insane Dantean panopticon of cameras and judging eyes, clinging desperately to her innocence.

Then we meet Lynn, the carefully enunciating local politician, played with a note of girlishness by Vanessa Carr. Lynn was a Labour loyalist, but split from the party over a matter of conscience, and is running as an independent. She has suffered some unspecified tragedy. Eventually, you realise she is Donna’s mother.

Next a tweed-jacketed flappy-tied academic bounds onto the stage. Charles MacRae’s Dr Millard, in all his flamboyant brilliance, pontificates about the human brain. About its perfect biological aptitude for lying. We are conditioned by lies. ‘The only reason you have all that brainpower,’ he drawls, ‘is to work out what the other fucker is thinking.’

Slowly – painfully slowly – you piece the plot and the ideas of Taking Care of Baby together. Its complex apparatus of family and the media and tragedies personal and public all hinges on a single question: did Donna kill her children? The play becomes a raging cyclone of untruth and hypocrisy, with the young mother at its centre.

Chloe Orrock and Liz Gilbert’s direction brings out the instability of truth beautifully. Two of the actors play dual characters of totally opposed temperaments: Andrew McCormack basically gets to play himself as Jim, Lynn’s expansive husband, and then is utterly transformed into a sweet-talking Machiavellian bastard of a Tory politician. Meanwhile Alex Sheppard is utterly brilliant as Donna’s anguished husband and then just as good as his nemesis, the laddish and caddish journalist trying to sell the story. ‘Don’t make me out to be a total cunt,’ he says as he leaves the stage.

This is Burton Taylor drama at its best. There is humour here, as well as brutal tragedy and the ever-present questions: how honest is anybody? What the hell is going on here? What is integrity? What is hypocrisy? Are you complicit? And, finally, did she do it? You decide.

Not that many people will have noticed, but the legendary horror studio Hammer has been resurrected quite suddenly for the first time in 25 years, determined to reign supreme over horror once more. Yet if anyone is expecting heaving bosoms, creepy castles and Christopher Lee, prepare for disappointment. Instead, Hammer have chosen to concentrate on some decidedly un-camp vampires with Let Me In, signalling their newfound desire to be taken seriously. Unfortunately for them, the film is a remake of a Swedish original – Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In – that just so happens to be one of the greatest movies of the decade, and as a result, no matter how good the intentions of its makers, it is a film inevitably inferior to its foreign parent.

It tells the story of Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a lonely 12 year old boy living with his mother in New Mexico. Frequently bullied by his classmates, his isolation is ended with the arrival to the apartment building of an old man accompanied by a young girl, Abby (Chloe Moretz). The two children gradually become close, but in the process, it becomes clear that Abby may be slightly less innocent than she appears.

Writer/director Matt Reeves has announced publicly how much he loves the original, so it seems a curious decision to try and re-do a film so lacking in flaws. Still, his fidelity and enthusiasm show throughout as he sticks fairly closely to Alfredson’s film in both pacing and tone; indeed, it is somewhat frustrating to see Reeves so reluctant to give his film a more distinctive, individual feel, and at certain points, it begins to feel like little more than a pointlessly loyal translation. Yet while there are certain interesting additions, the only major change Reeves makes in his adaptation is for the worse, as he systematically excises the mysteries and ambiguities that made Let the Right One In so successful.

This essential, fatal flaw totally hobbles Let Me In; it is full of unnecessary simplifications showing an insulting lack of respect for the audience. The most glaring is the decision to tell us exactly why Abby lives with an old man. This move is utterly typical of the film’s timid and infuriating tendency to spoon-feed its audience with answers, and the result is a hollow, un-scary and thoroughly forgettable experience. Seek out the original on DVD instead.

Silence is highly underrated, and Mike Leigh knows it. In his newest film, Another Year, he shows certain characters constantly competing to fill gaps in conversations with words, no matter how ill-thought out or banal they might be, and any solitary, silent contemplation comes as a welcome relief. At times, it makes for an uncomfortably realistic watch, and is made even more so by the semi-improvised script that is Leigh’s trademark. Yet though Another Year lacks any rigid or strict plotting – aside from the distinctly seasonal four act structure – this is a film brimming with ideas as well as emotions, offering profound and melancholic meditations on life, death and loneliness.

The film follows Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen) – they have learned to live with the joke – a happy couple approaching retirement, whose only regular pastime is to tend to their allotment. Around their contented existence orbit several, usually lonely, souls, including their perpetually single son, Joe (Oliver Maltman), an old alcoholic friend, Ken (Peter Wight), and, most importantly, Mary (Lesley Manville). Hers is a heartbreaking character, as Manville expertly communicates her intense isolation and desperate need to find someone, both in her frantic, fill-the-silence monologues and her quieter moments, staring into space. She is a character desperate for acceptance, and could easily become irritating, but Manville’s beautifully judged performance prevents this, and instead, with her enormous eyes perpetually threatening to spill over with tears, she is the film’s greatest strength.

Leigh is famous for his unique filmmaking process, which begins without a script and instead allows the film to take shape over a six-month rehearsal process with the actors. This commitment pays off dividends here, as every character is fully formed and utterly real, for which credit must go not only to the performances but also to Leigh’s subtle and skilful direction.

He knows exactly how long the camera should watch a face, and always finds the moment when the façade breaks down and we see the heartbreak or happiness underneath.

Thankfully, we are never forced to spend any time with a protagonist as irritating as Poppy, the perpetually, insufferably positive heroine of his last film, Happy-Go-Lucky. Instead, this is a film populated by very real, familiar characters devoid of gimmickry, and is all the more effective for it.

Leigh’s films regularly show fascination with the less glamorous, often banal sides of life, and even seem to celebrate it. This certainly true here, and despite the Vaughn Williams-esque soundtrack, Another Year is thankfully lacking in artificial emotion ready-made for audience consumption. Instead, Leigh allows his actors and their carefully crafted, uncomfortably familiar characters to communicate their most secret thoughts and feelings, often without ever saying a word. The film begins and ends with a heart-breaking close-up of a character wrestling with their own loneliness, and each moment is filled with far more emotional power than any swelling strings or tearful confessions could summon up. It is a phenomenally mature, understated film that simultaneously overflows with all the emotions of life, presenting joy and misery in equal measure, and shows that the sexagenarian Leigh still remains one of Britain’s greatest living directors.

In 1944 Lucien Carr stabbed David Kammerer to death in a park on the Hudson River in New York. These names may not be recognisable but it was a crucial moment in the formation of the so called Beat Generation, which influenced almost all music, art and literature which followed.
The beginnings of the Beat Generation can be traced back to Columbia University where the likes of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr and Hal Chase formed a tight-knit group of friends who enjoyed discussing philosophy and indulging in ‘actes gratuits’, actions with no conceivable reason nor point. Added to this group were two older men: William Burroughs, a Harvard graduate, who lived a life of leisure and narcotics and David Kammerer, a man who was obsessed with the young and brilliant Lucien Carr.

The death of Kammerer was the spur for both Kerouac and Burroughs to start writing properly. In the year after the incident they wrote together, providing alternate chapters for And the Hippos Were Boiled in their Tanks, a fictional account of the murder. They failed to have it published but the impact of the event is clear, especially as Kerouac returned to it in two further novels, The Town and the City and The Vanity of Duluoz.

When Carr was released from prison two years later, he, the original shining light of the group, withdrew to join United Press with whom he stayed for the rest of his life. The others remained, living a life of excess which fuelled their writing. Burroughs in particular was known for his drug taking and wild lifestyle. He became addicted to heroin, the substance which inspired his novels, Junky and Naked Lunch and wrestled with his sexuality. Although he knew that he was gay, he lived with a woman called Joan Vollmer, who he shot in a drunken game of William Tell at a party in 1951.

Many of the people and experiences of the Beat Generation can be found in Jack Kerouac’s seminal novel, On the Road. Written in an intense three week period in 1951 on a continuous, 120 foot scroll of tracing paper sheets that he taped together, it was to become one of the most important works of the 20th Century and is considered the essential Beat work.

The influence of the Beats can be seen everywhere, from the novels of Hunter S. Thompson and Bret Easton Ellis, to the music of Bob Dylan and Tom Waits. This article is just a taster of what they have to offer; I don’t have space to talk of Ginsberg and Corso, of Tangiers and Paris, of the San Francisco Renaissance and the later Beatniks. But I urge you to find out for yourself; it is one of the most fascinating and inspiring groups of people, full of murder and intrigue and most importantly, amazing writing.

There have been moments when the contradictions at the heart of the American dream have been too much to bear. These moments of political, social, and cultural crisis take different forms. Sometimes the discontent, like blood, spurts violently, and sometimes it oozes. It’s too early to tell where the Tea Party, and the new culture wars of this new century, will fit into the pattern. Maybe Philip Roth will write something to help us make sense of it all.

In three books – American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000) – Roth traced the agony of these contradictions through the second half of the last century. If the American dream says that through great struggle and hard work, each individual can transcend not only his own past but the whole society he lives in, and be free to make his own world for himself; Roth chronicles the tragic and inevitable failure of that ideal for each of his protagonists.

All three men follow similar arcs, from success to hubris to defeat. Swede Levov, in American Pastoral, had gone from high-school hero to successful businessman, a nice house in the country, marriage to a Miss New Jersey; ‘a shiksa. Dawn Dwyer. He’d done it.’ It is the war in Vietnam – in which young men and baseball stars are forced to fight for humanity’s right to be successful businessmen and marry beauty queens instead of living in a communist dictatorship – that brings ‘the Swede’ down. War as a social crisis, and a crisis of imperial confidence.
I Married a Communist deals with an earlier crisis, the McCarthyism of the 1950s. Ira Ringold, radio star, communist, destroys himself against the rocks of an American establishment. ‘Don’t let him fill you full of Communist ideas, kid. They’re all lies. Make money. Money’s not a lie. Money’s the democratic way to keep score.’ In other words, only a certain type of freedom is allowed, which is perhaps no freedom at all.
The Human Stain’s backdrop seems like an anticlimax in comparison to Vietnam and the Red Scare: it is Clinton and the Monica Lewinski scandal. But of course, the anticlimax of American development is partly Roth’s point. In this book the background of historical events is more muted, but deeper. It’s about race, and sex, and transcendence: from law, from decorum, from community, from past. It holds up the triumph of the individual, the stuff of the American dream, not just to scrutiny but to ridicule.

That same sense of the ridiculous has stalked the Tea Party since its creation. But, as in Roth’s stories, there is pathos too. The people who march for their freedom – freedom from state-funded healthcare, from the right to choose, from sexual equality, from welfare – have been trapped and duped by that powerful dream, that through hard work they can make their own worlds for themselves. The irony is that their collective action shows the opposite: we must make one world, all together, for each other.

World War 2 was over, and the American Dream was dead. So it goes. A generation of hard-eyed young men had arrived back in the States with crushing poverty, grim stubble and thousand-yard stares. Reality sucked, and these young men took refuge from it wherever they could find an escape route. Whiskey, the old favourite. The newly discovered Lysergic Acid Diethylamide – LSD-25. And, increasingly, science fiction.
You won’t find Kurt Vonnegut in any anthology of New Journalism, but Vonnegut was as fierce as any journalist in using a mixture of reporting and literature to attack the American malaise. ‘All this happened, more or less’ – the opening words of Slaughterhouse-Five – was the closest thing the New Journalism had to a motto.

Then New Journalism happened. Like differential calculus, it came to several people at once. Nobody really knows where it came from, but all of a sudden bored features writers started turning their interviews and law reports into short stories. Experimentation went viral, spreading through magazines and papers. Writers everywhere began using society pieces, sports reports, hell, brother, even news as springboards for their frustrated literary careers.

Esquire, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Gay Talese, Terry Southern, Tom Wolfe – all the big names were at it, trying to work out just how far they could push the boundaries of reporting before they pissed off their editors. Hunter S. Thompson took a giant leap forward with his masterpiece of deranged gonzo writing, The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved, satirising high society, the racing world and himself with trademark irony.

The American Dream might have died, but the American Hallucination was in full riotous swing. Next, the novel. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night. Gay Talese’s grossly underrated Honor Thy Father, which tells the true story of a mafia family in every detail except the crime.

The New Journalism was irresistible. Your life, your ordinary American life, turned into a novel. Who could refuse?

But sometime after 1980, the new journalism died a lingering and painless death. The literary techniques were gradually phased out, like morphine from a patient with some terminal illness. But its impact was to last, and no American novelist today is wholly free of its influence. All of this happened, more or less, all of this actually happened, brother – the idea has a force entirely its own, and who could rule out its return?

Like the small craft in the title, Brian Eno’s latest offering of tasteful ambient electronica spends most of its time drifting around aimlessly. In contrast to most of Eno’s albums, Small Craft On A Milk Sea consists not of a handful of extended suites, but of sixteen disparate miniatures. Earlier works like 1978’s Ambient 1: Music For Airports were unified by recurrent motifs, but this is more of a haphazard collage.

The nature of the album’s genesis will therefore come as no surprise. Eno’s stated ambition was to make an album that resembles a film soundtrack in its ‘incompleteness’: each track is in effect a tableau that evokes a shifting cinematic landscape, to which the music is no more than an accompaniment. To achieve this, Eno built some of the tracks from his rejected soundtrack to Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones, others from randomly generated chords, and others yet through improvisation.
The result is inconsistent. Some of the tracks are as atmospheric as the ozone layer: best of all is ‘Written, Forgotten’, a Johnny Greenwood-esque arrangement of brooding strings set against barely audible whispers and animal cries. Others are dated experiments in electronic textures: opener ‘Emerald And Lime’, which sounds like the underwater music from Super Mario 64, is as glossy and lifeless as the name suggests.

Small Craft is Eno’s first release on Warp Records, a label that owes a lot to the artist’s pioneering electronic music of the seventies and eighties. The album certainly fits into the Warp catalogue: it sounds like early Eno refracted by Aphex Twin and Radiohead. As rough in conception as its production is polished, it is an imperfect but worthwhile update of the ambient Eno sound.

British music is on fire. There’s so much good stuff at the moment and it’s all in the charts’. Amen to that. 2010 has been something of a golden year for British music: the breakthrough of genres such as dubstep, bassline and funky into the mainstream has led to ‘a sound that you’d never hear anywhere else in the world – a sound which is distinctly British’, reckons Annie. ‘I like the fact that you can’t define the 2010 genre’. Indeed, the current music scene is arguably the edgiest it’s ever been – and Annie Mac is right at its centre.

Since taking over from Pete Tong’s prime-time 7-9pm Friday slot on Radio 1, the nation’s foremost music radio station, Annie Mac has established herself as the mistress of new music. Her mere two hours of needle time have catapulted her to fame and recognition: in 2009 she won ‘Best Female’ at the Drum and Bass awards for her promotion of the genre.

But it hasn’t all been plain sailing. ‘Not long ago I had three jobs, worked for loads of different stations, went to interview bands in my lunch break then came back and produced my own show’, Annie says. ‘I spent two years pounding on the doors of the Radio 1 offices: it’s a tough business to crack’. She finally got her break while working as assistant producer on Zane Lowe’s show – her demos and determination impressed her Radio 1 bosses, and she was given her own show.

Over the last few years, Annie has built a covetable reputation as a UK new music maverick. She is far from pigeon-holed: her innovative dance remixes, which receive nationwide acclaim, are influenced by jungle, dub, garage, rock and indie. Annie’s success as a DJ is mostly due to her unique and overwhelmingly popular sound.
It is the same eclecticism that Annie looks for when scouring the country for new talent. ‘Originality is the key’, she muses. ‘I’m always on the lookout for something fresh, something imaginative. Half of the music I play could be pop music if Radio 1 really pushed it’. Trailblazing DJs such as Annie are the reason why artists such as Oxford’s own up-an-coming producer Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs (T.E.E.D.), who is supporting her on her current tour, have become iPod essentials this year. ‘Local man T.E.E.D. is a really good producer and songwriter’, she enthuses. ‘His music is very exciting’.

Radio’s influence over the popular music scene is not a new phenomenon: it has always been a dominant tool in the industry. In the 1960s, entrepreneurs and music enthusiasts set up hundreds of pirate stations just off the British coastline, in order to meet the high demand for pop music not catered for by BBC Radio. The radio dictated its audience’s taste: if the presenters didn’t like a track, the country didn’t hear it. Pirate radio was outlawed before long, and in response to the ensuing public demand for legal pop stations, the BBC founded Radio 1.

The enduring power of radio is undeniable, and Radio 1 in particular continues to mould the charts. It is because of audacious DJs such as Annie that the mainstream has embraced something more experimental than regular doses of Derulo. Perhaps a definition of the ‘2010 genre’ can be found in this popularization of a wide range of genres. ‘I love this sound so much, I’m just going to keep playing and playing it’.