Oxford celebrated the sunniest day of the year so far by welcoming Cuba to Middle England. The 12-piece Orquesta Buena Vista that took to the New Theatre’s stage featured three of the original performers from 1996’s Buena Vista Social Club – the Grammy award winning, world music word-of-mouth record-breaker. Joining them was the album’s original leading lady, Omara Portuondo, a true veteran of Cuba’s musical golden age of the 1950s and now 80 years old.

Last in Oxford in 2008, the collective currently touring under the Orquesta banner are a mix of old and new and together radiate a class and Latin cool that demands respect. Not one, not two, but three percussionists kept the rhythms coming, with bongos, congas and timbales, and Jesus ‘Aguaje’ Ramos seamlessly slipped between the roles of trombonist, singer and dancer, whilst also conducting the entire band. Omara Portuodo, wearing a full length pink ensemble and matching head piece, danced across the stage, repeatedly flirted with the audience (“Mas?” she’d ask, lifting her hem above her ankles) and cajoled the entire theatre into taking to its feet. And when ordered to by the world’s most energetic octogenarian, it’s hard to say no.

In an evening of virtuoso performances, it was Rolando Luna’s incredible piano playing that was the most impressive. Expertly blending classical, jazz and Latin influences, it was presumably him that led to the band somewhat perplexingly blending ‘As Time Goes By’ with ‘Beethoven’s Fifth’. Amongst Buena Vista staples like ‘El Cuarto De Tula’, ‘Chan Chan’ and ‘El Carretero’, there was also room for a jazz piano-led exploration of ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes’. However, the highlight of the night turned out to be a duet between Ramos and 77 year-old trumpet legend Manuel ‘Guajiro’ Mirabal. A small, portly man, Mirabal spent most of the evening swaying slightly out of time with the other trumpeters, but when given the floor he showed that blasting out spectacular top-note solos has no age limit. Between them, Ramos and Mirabal’s trombone-and-trumpet rendition of ‘Autumn Leaves’ reached a breathtaking peak of melodic cool, tinged with a sadness and quiet nostalgia that was beautiful.

As the night drew to a close, Omara Portuondo, who’d been resting on a chair, got up again to lead the audience in singing the original Cuban version of ‘Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps’, a task only slightly hindered by the audience’s struggle to repeatedly pronounce ‘Quizás! Quizás! Quizás!’ correctly. Luis Alemany, an elderly trumpeter in an excellent white cap, danced around the stage flourishing a yellow handkerchief, and at the end of the show my friend wondered whether the NHS couldn’t get the Orquesta Buena Vista to take charge of the nation’s geriatric care.

The biggest problem I had with DEM Productions’ Oresteia was the patronising tone of the adaptation. Both those wanting to enjoy an evening of theatre and Classicists wishing to see a slightly abridged version of ancient Greek tragedy’s only surviving trilogy will be sorely disappointed. What we have instead is the Orestes myth – according to director/adaptor/actor Ramin Sabi anyway – the way Aeschylus should have written it, or perhaps the only way we can understand it.

The choruses of the trilogy (elders in Agamemnon, women in Libation Bearers and Furies in the Eumenides) are conflated into a non-specific body whose primary function seems to be to spell out anything that might have a whiff of subtlety; ‘Agamemnon’s body was just like this’ one chorus member tells us as Clytemnestra’s corpse is revealed, ‘people could make their own decisions’ posits another in response to the idea of divine determination. The chorus also contributes to the play’s most irritating quality – its laboured and unnecessary metatheatricality. We are told we are watching a play in the opening lines, one chorus member demands to play Helen of Troy, who does not feature in Aeschylus’ trilogy, at another point someone objects: ‘No, that’s Euripides’ version!’. By the time Clytemnestra announced ‘I was playing a part’ my heart was sinking slightly, with less than a third of the production gone.

Sabi’s radical rewriting of the plays is not merely a question of time restraints (there are multiple scenes not taken from the originals, including an onstage sacrifice of Iphigeneia). The adaptation is conceived as ‘mov[ing] subtly away from a classical preoccupation and foreground[ing] the distinctly human aspects that underlie the elevated status of tragic royalty’. While what a classical preoccupation might be and why it is directly opposed to the ‘human’ is still puzzling, what this focus seems to amount to in Sabi’s Oresteia is a degradation of the trilogy to the level of soap opera. Clytemnestra’s character suffers most in this: any interest in her previously powerful character is destroyed by the revelation that she is just a woman in love (‘You showed me care and compassion, he never did’, ‘I thought you loved me, Aegisthus. I love you, love you’). Just after his matricide, Orestes turns to his accomplice sister and says glibly ‘Thanks, Electra, I couldn’t have done it without you’ – a line certain to raise a snigger from any audience. Any sense of tragic dignity is repeatedly undercut and this is not always deliberate – Orestes’ onstage breakdown (the onset of the Furies) came across as designed to be alarming and provocative, but was almost embarrassing to watch.

What saves the production in parts is the admirable efforts of the cast – acting is generally strong and the ensemble nature of the piece dealt with well. The Furies (Hannah Gliksten, Isabella Wilson and Lauren Stephens) are very impressive in their physicality, with Gliksten standing out elsewhere in choral sections and as Electra. Abigail Rees (Clytemnestra) also has moments of real strength – it felt like the script was doing her a real disservice in diminishing Clytemnestra’s role. Bobby Leigh-Pemberton (Agamemnon) and Olivia Barber (Chorus Leader) also worked well with the lines they had, although Barber’s part in particular was quite two dimensional and predictable.

This Oresteia, then, is a somewhat frustrating affair for any theatregoer – Sabi has made a fundamental error in underestimating his audience; the chorus leader quips that even a five year old should know the story of Troy, yet this is the level at which we are spoken to throughout. Motivations are crystallised at every point, our responses directed and our attention drawn to the obvious. This is Aeschylus minus the Aeschylus or The Oresteia ‘according to sparknotes‘ and not even the efforts of a good cast can save it.

Open air theatre can be a scarring experience. Typically, the sound gets lost and so the actors over-perform to compensate – all to an audience too busy wishing they’d brought coats to notice. Not so for DNA. Louisa Hollway and her cast stride as far from ‘typical’ as you can get both in terms of open air theatre and student drama itself.

The plot demands a creative approach as it juxtaposes a traditional bullying hierarchy with an almost unthinkable outcome. Their victim, Adam (Matt Gavan), disappears. He leaves a void behind him. The rest of the gang feel they must fill it with an explanation for his death in order to exonerate themselves, while individually struggling to normalize the terror which bubbles under the surface of every conversation.

The energy is constantly high. Sitting on blankets in the centre of the action, the audience swivel as the scenes change and the characters bombard them from different angles. The cast function as an excellent team, working together to maintain the fraught atmosphere and the lack of adult reserve, but manage to do so without eclipsing their individual performances.

DNA continuously pairs the mundane with the morbid. The archetypal gum-chewer Cathy, (Rachel Atkins) shows flashes of sadism, while the taciturn snacker, Phil (Jeremy Neumark-Jones) propels the action with his occasional lines. These take the form of psychopathically-delivered instructions for the framing of an imaginary ‘postman with bad teeth’, and become increasingly sinister when Cathy overenthusiastically follows her instructions a little too closely, turning their untruths into a nightmarish situation.

Until the ending, this allows the teenagers to enter a limbo, coping in various darkly amusing ways. Leah (Lauren Hyatt) particularly so, showcasing a hamster which she’s stabbed with a screwdriver in a bid to understand death in that emblem of packed lunches, the Tupperware container. Her monologues addressing Phil are a particular comic highlight, as much for her elastic facial expressions as for her refusal to be perturbed by his unresponsiveness.

I’ve never seen a production so suited to its site. Aeroplanes and intrusive ducks were incorporated, and thus contributed to an impressive blurring of theatre and reality. Technical devices were neither used nor needed. Hollway’s production earns its five stars exclusively for the basics: uniformly fantastic acting and directing. As such, it is a great rarity within student drama. Don’t miss it.

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He has won the Booker Prize, been named one of the Times’ 50 Greatest British Authors since 1945, and seen two of his six novels become high-profile films: The Remains of The Day, starring Anthony Hopkins, and recently Never Let Me Go.

Never Let Me Go is beautifully written, yet relies on a gradual build-up of information filling in the history and setting the scene for weighty revelations, making it perhaps not an obvious choice for film adaptation.

Speaking at the Oxford Literary Festival in conversation with Sunday Times Literary Editor Peter Kemp, Ishiguro admits that when writing Never Let Me Go, he ‘didn’t want it to be a film. When I started writing, fiction was in a vulnerable position – novels had to offer something one couldn’t get from the TV or cinema. I wanted to do something that couldn’t be done in any other medium – I was trying to write an unfilmable book’.

Yet filmed it was, and 300 pages of novel were made into an 80 page screenplay. When good books are filmed it is the natural instinct to lament the inevitable cuts and condensation of the flowing prose, but Ishiguro claims not to see it this way. ‘We’re not comfortable with film adaptations, we don’t look at them cleanly, as if they’re films. We demand fidelity to the source, but perhaps this is naïve, inappropriate.’

Instead Ishiguro sees the film as complementary to the book. ‘You have to extract the essence of the book for the screenplay. I didn’t want a translation; I wanted the film-makers to take the idea further. I feel like a songwriter who hopes that talented musicians will take his basic material further – I want them to be inspired, I want to discover things when I hear their interpretation. The book is safe inside its covers.’

Perhaps a reason Ishiguro dislikes the comparisons between film and book is that they are such different media. ‘In a book, you can have a universe in someone’s mind – it’s very difficult to do that in a film, as it’s a very third person medium. The physical setting is very obvious. A novel can be set in a hinterland between the mind and the real world, and the world outside might not be very realistic, but this is hard when you’re doing a film.’

He moves on to talk about the book itself. The title comes from the poignancy of asking for the impossible, as in the book Kathy and Tommy come to realise that given their situation, hoping for more time on earth to enjoy being in love is a request that cannot be granted. While the book’s premise has affinities with science fiction, it reads much more as a coming-of-age novel with a sinister and tragic twist. ‘Some have called it a fable about mortality, others a dystopian book about what might happen if we do things with science. The importance of the project is in trying to find a metaphor for the fact that we have bodies that age. We can’t live forever – what do we do with that knowledge? I wanted to look at the way people face that inevitability as they move from childhood to adulthood. It’s a metaphor for mortality, raising questions: What’s important to us once we are aware that our time is limited?’

He is asked whether he intended the book as in any way allegorical for the condition of exploited underclasses. Reared as clones, the world has turned its back on children like Kathy, Tommy and Ruth, preferring to forget that they exist. ‘I often go for things but the metaphor doesn’t quite fit, and before I know it I’ve got a secondary set of themes on board. The exploited class theme was like that. There are rich and poor parts of the world, and the exploited are out of sight for us.’

A question many have raised about the book is why the clones accept their fates without struggle. We never see any attempt to run away, or even any real questioning of why they are in their situation, but rather a passive acceptance. ‘In life, most don’t have the perspective to try to escape. Instead we try to dignify our lives, to find meaning in our situation. It’s fascinating the extent to which people don’t rebel. Most of us just know the world we’re born into and it’s hard to see beyond that. But there is a sense that if we make things remarkable enough, we might escape.’

Ishiguro moved from Japan to England aged 5 and has always worked here. He seems to have a slightly tense relationship with his Japanese connections. ‘I started off setting novels in Japan, but I think readers are very literal minded about settings, people thought there was a journalistic element and that what I was writing about only pertained to Japan. So The Remains of the Day is deliberately a very English book. We want people to take universal themes and truths. It’s frustrating that we must set novels somewhere.’ He tells an amusing story about how an early version of the film was shown in America, and people asked if this cloning for organ donations actually happened in England. This is a novel in which failure to suspend one’s disbelief can have disastrous consequences.

Already one of our most successful writers, Ishiguro’s wisdom and gentle tone suggest that success couldn’t have come to a nicer man. Never Let Me Go is certainly a must-read, especially for those who have not seen the film and for whom the suspense as the dark truths are painfully gradually revealed can really be experienced.