Indian Cinema is redolent of colour, life, energy, predictable plots, simple characters and cliched endings. The mainstream commercial movies nearly always sit comfortably within a long-established paradigm. Dance sequences, romances and happy endings are rarely replaced by something more challenging. However, behind the first glimpse of midriff-flaunting heroines and hunky heroes lies the dark and enchanting world of Indian alternative cinema.

For many, India is a world of harm and pain. In a country of such glaring poverty and suffering, it is remarkable how easily mainstream cinema ignores social problems, indulging in pure escapism. The alternative cinema, however, points the camera away from the ideal lives and perfect bodies of the Bollywood scene and chases something more profound. Unsurprisingly it started in Bengal. This state, on the eastern shoulder of India, is known for its intellect. Many of the philosophical pathbreakers of independence came from here and Bengalis take up more than their fair share of seats in India’s prestigious universities. Here, India’s version of the New Wave was born.

The paterfamilias of this genre is Satyajit Ray. A child of Bengali intellectualism, his grandfather was a known philosopher and founding member of the influential cultural movement known as the Brahmo Samaj. Satyajit Ray’s career was all set to be typical Bollywood until Jean Renoir, The Bicycle Thieves and Italian Neorealism hit him while on a trip to London.

In a brilliant inter-cultural sleight-of-Hind Ray took the New Wave of European Cinema and gave it a local twist. In a kind of reverse-colonisation he took a western form and made it Indian, giving birth to a whole genre in the process. His sparse and moving Panther Panchali is a tour-de-force of independent film making. It was filmed over three years in fits and starts, as and when funding became available. He maintained his integrity at all costs – refusing funding from anyone that required an alteration of the script or demanded the imposition of a producer. The resulting film is a stark and moving portrayal of the desperation of poverty. Its searing portrayal of human weakness fills it with an almost Tolstoyan spirit.

Ray was a filmmaker able to use the magic of cinema, formerly mostly used for entertainment, to help a nation realise itself and come to terms with its own (often forgotten) realities. Many followed him and the Indian Art Cinema represented a kind of renaissance as the artists of this most modern form re-discovered the power of traditional Indian literature and folklore and created something sublime. From Ritwik Ghatak’s portrayal of homeless and rootless refugees in Calcutta to the startling representation of modern Gandhianism in Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mar to the frank defence of Nehruvian socialism in Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zamin, there have been many superb films produced in this genre that address a vast number of issues and ideas, populated with diverse and unique characters and all driving home a powerful and dissenting message.

There is a permanent struggle between the commercial and the artistic throughout the world of cinema. In India it looks like the commercial side is winning. The financial untenability of many art films, the rapacity of film financiers (including the Mumbai underworld) and the limitless demand for run-of-the-mill movies in India has threatened independent film. One can only hope that some of the millions of rupees that float around Bollywood find their way to a modern-day Satyajit Ray. India is a land with a billion stories to tell and it a shame that Bollywood keeps retelling the same one.

Sholay (1975) is the magnum opus of Bollywood cinema. Epic in length and themes, it tells the story of two petty criminals that are roped by a local politician into helping capture a local dacoit (bandit). Directed by Ramesh Sippy, the film helped propel actor Amitabh Bacchan’s career to stratospheric heights. It is the highest grossing film in all Indian cinema ($160 million) and it ran in some cinemas for up to fifty weeks. In one particular Mumbai cinema it played for nearly five years on an uninterrupted run. The awards it won were impressive, but, most notably, it was described by Filmfare Magazine as the best film for fifty years.

In the film, Thakur, a local politician is desperate to capture Gabbar, a local bandit known for his vicious cruelty against his victims, and for demanding protection money from the helpless villagers of Ramgarh. He decides that the particular talents of two petty criminals – Jai and Veeru – would be useful in apprehending the terror of Ramgarh. What follows is a series of tragicomic misadventures, shoot-outs, dance scenes, sacrifices and romances that culminate in a final epic battle between good and bad.

The theme is one common to certain parts of India – bandits and gangsters often manage to exploit the corrupt police and political class to obtain sinister levels of power. The character of Gabbar was based on a real-life bandit who was famous for cutting the noses and ears of local policemen if they fell into his hands.
So what are the ingredients of the greatest Bollywood blockbuster? Heroism, comradeship, dance scenes, romance, cruelty, tragedy and, ultimately, justice. It’s actually a bit like an Indian spaghetti western (now known as a Curry Western) with rough-and-ready heroes taking on evil villains in a harsh, unforgiving landscape. The psychotic cruelty of Gabbar is contrasted with the light, bantering and almost reluctant heroism of Jai and Veeru. The chemistry between the main actors is almost irresistible and the cartoon-like violence doesn’t darken the movie to a point where it becomes unbearable.

Romance actually started to develop during the filming. During the (frequent) romantic scenes between actors Dharmendra and Hema Malini, Dharmendra would pay the lighting boys to spoil the shot – necessitating a retake and more intimacy between them. The tactic clearly worked and the two were married five years later. Amitabh Bacchan also married lead actresss Jaya Bhaduri four months after filming started – which caused complications for the movie when Bhaduri became pregnant with Bacchan’s daughter.
The film faced other complications – it was massively over-budget, being torn apart by the censor board and the editors were faced with reducing 300,000 feet of film to something usable. It opened to an initial lukewarm response and won few awards in its first year but slowly the film began to snowball into the largest commercial success Bollywood has ever seen. Its scenes, plot and characters have been referenced, lampooned and just plain stolen by Bollywood films ever since. When the film was first shown on the government television channel, the streets of Mumbai and Delhi were apparently deserted as the entire populace went indoors to watch. Sholay has become a benchmark for film-making and it may be a long time until Bollywood manages to crawl out from its shadow.

You won’t find it on any of the maps, but there’s a room full of treasure in the Ashmolean. Ask to see the Print Room at the information desk and they whisk you off to a staff-only wing of the museum, lined with paintings and curios off-limits to other visitors.
After ringing a bell to be let in and descending a flight of stairs, you enter a huge room lined with hundreds of drawers, each filled with watercolours, etchings and drawings by artists from the 15th century to today. There’s a leaflet listing just some of the many names collected here: Degas, Dürer, Piper, Poussin… even – and I still wonder if it can be this good – ‘Leonardo’.

I had asked to see something by Turner, and watched in awe as the curator set out box after box of his Italian travel sketches on a baize-topped table. She opened up the first one, revealing a neat pile of mounted watercolours, and with a grumpily obliging expression handed me a catalogue with descriptions of each. The best bit, though, was when she asked if I wanted to ‘handle the drawings’. I put on a pair of white gloves, slid out a flat surface from the desk for a prop, and suddenly I was leafing through beautiful paintings and ink-sketches of Venice.

I was the only visitor there, and it felt like if I’d wanted to I could have stayed all morning, gazing at these unframed jewels a few inches from my eyes. It’s not often you can count the brushstrokes that make up a boat against the horizon, or trace the finest of ink lines around the contours of a figure. Do go and see for yourself – anyone can and it’s completely free. Lastly, if you’re stuck for what to ask for, Turner’s ‘Grand Canal 1940’ is an amazing start.

The director of Peer Gynt, Radoslav Lolov, says in his notes to the preview that ‘it was the show’s alleged unstageability that first grabbed him.’

Unfortunately, as is so often the case with press previews, we have no real sense of whether he will succeed in overcoming the aforementioned unstageability. In 6th week a three-tiered scaffolding and – a full symphony orchestra will descend on the Keble O’Reilly and it is only then that we will see whether it all comes together. In the preview it was just the actors, with no costume, a table and chairs for scaffolding and tinny music from a computer in place of the orchestra.

Even so, it was clear what a difference the music could make. By far the most poignant moment was when Peer Gynt (Tim Kiely) took his mother, Aase (Margherita Philipp) in his arms, telling her stories as she slowly faded from life. Kiely’s delivery was transformed by the support of Grieg’s beautiful piece Aase’s Death and the final whispered lines of the scene had real emotive power.
There is, however, still more work to be done on the characterisation of these two actors. Both have a particularly difficult job; Kiely is expected to age by 40 years during the production and Philipp has to swap between the roles of the young bride and the aged mother. These changes and contrasts will be marked by costume but the characters themselves need to be much more delineated so that we get a real sense of movement throughout the play.

The main actors were ably supported by a strong chorus, who bring out the aspects of folk-lore which are so central to Ibsen’s work. Changing from trolls to monkeys to old women, they brought a real energy to the performance which will be even greater when allowed the freedom of the O’Reilly and the full extent of the scaffold. Jordan Waller also put in a fun cameo towards the end as two contrasting devils who tell Peer that he will neither go to heaven nor hell because he is too boringly mediocre and Jamie MacDonagh’s Mountain King watched the action unfolding beneath him with a chilling malevolence.

This should be a fantastic spectacle when it all comes together; the actors just need to strive to overcome the wonder of the music and set so that they are the standout feature of the show.

Take a look at the review below, if you haven’t already. It’s good, no? Jamie Randall turned up to a preview of an Icarianly ambitious Peer Gynt. They asked him to imagine the fully orchestrated epic on the basis of nothing more than the tinny sound issuing from their laptop speakers. He did. And he was impressed. Impressed enough to say that the real thing will be well worth attending.

There would be a similar preview of A Streetcar Named Desire in this box. Really, we would have loved to have sent our reviewer along to some obscure lecture theatre at the back end of Oriel to watch a vignette of not-quite-ready scenes. But the team behind Streetcar has decided that press previews are a waste of time. They’ve already sold nine out of every ten of their tickets, so why would they need the publicity? A press preview would only be an unnecessary hassle for the actors. They need to spend their valuable time on more important things, like dressing up in tight black t-shirts and denim dresses to pout at the OxStu fashion photographers.

Instead, the cast treated Cherwell Stage to an interview in which they revealed all sorts of things that would make our readers gasp. Apparently it’s quite difficult to learn to speak in a New Orleans accent, and they’ve already sold out their first three performances. Director Anna Hextall thinks her cast ‘have got to have the confidence to be fearless on stage.’ Lead actress Ruby Thomas is ‘really nervous’ about playing Blanche DuBois. Did they mention they’ve already sold out their first three performances? Then they performed an excerpt of the play that lasted a whole three minutes.

This is not an isolated incident. Something like one in three productions cannot be bothered to arrange a press preview. ‘It’s such a fag,’ says Generic Producer. ‘It causes such disruption to our rehearsal schedule, my love, and it’s just so stressful for the actors. Let’s just concentrate on making up an unprecedentedly absurd flavour of ice cream for G&Ds and send out daily Facebook messages with more kisses than words, shall we? Cranberry and Amaretto, do you think?’

So let’s face up to the big question: who needs press previews? Or, at the bottom of it all, who needs theatre critics? Well, productions do, for starters. Even the biggest ones.

The reason is feedback. A student critic from Cherwell or OxStu is obviously not going to be a professional. Sometimes, the performance they see will be little more than an ugly larva of the final play. But when you read a theatre preview in the student papers, you are reading the considered judgement of somebody who knows and cares a lot about the stage, somebody who is outside the closed circle of the cast. Somebody who, unlike the Oxford Theatre Review writer, has had more than a couple of hours to think about your play.

But the Cherwell and OxStu Stage sections are not your private army. We’re not here to gratify marketing managers, or ourselves. Well, occasionally ourselves. But mostly we’re here to tell readers about plays. It’s our job to make sure that Oxford theatre is accessible to anybody, and to prevent it from becoming one massive pretentious gaggle of hyenas cackling at OUDS in-jokes. Hopefully on the basis of Jamie Randall’s review people will go and watch Peer Gynt who would ordinarily never have considered going to see an opera.

So here’s our message to play producers who care about more than selling out in every sense of the phrase: give us previews. It doesn’t matter if the actors don’t know all the lines yet, or if the set falls over. Reviewers are there to see what your cast can do and to get a feel for the play, not to niggle over technical issues. If you want to get a feel for your audience and a measure of your production, trust us.

To everybody else, I can only quote my fellow gentleman of the stage press, Jonny Sims: ‘Oi! Wankers! Yank your gobs off each other’s phalluses…’