‘Edgy’ is the adjective upon the audience’s lips as they enter the Burton Taylor Studio. And as much as this can be a pejorative term, Milja Fenger’s original play She Was Yellow is edgy – but in the best sense of the world. Experimental, unsettling and provoking She Was Yellow is some of the best new writing I’ve seen whilst at Oxford.

There is such sweetness and pleasure in the opening scenes of the play, and humour too, that I could easily have watched Alashiya Gordes as Aurelie and Sarah Perry as Ilona for a few acts as they move from hesitant friendship to established passion, such is the ease and joy they communicate. But unfortunately, the business of the play must continue and we zip dizzyingly through their courtship until Aurelie must deal with the implications of two diagnoses; pregnancy and a particularly aggressive form of breast cancer. From here on out, the play delves into a much darker and sadder place; gone is the pleasing accompaniment of bouncy Jack-Johnson style guitar, and a particularly evocative strain of Gershwin-esque saxophone haunts the latter half of the production.

The set is minimal with Gordes and Perry creating the backdrop as the play progresses. The final image they create bringing together the themes of reproduction and perpetuation in a very satisfying climax and I applaud this innovative directorial touch. Most of all however, I enjoy the way in which the play is able to sustain an emotional intensity – I hear more than one person speak of trying not to cry as we leave the theatre – and I think this has a lot to do with Sarah Perry’s endearing portrayal of emotional strength.    

Milja Fenger’s script does something rather special: educating and celebrating scientific knowledge without conspicuously forcing facts down our throats. At its core is a celebration of both story-telling and science, something Aurelie knows and which it takes Ilona and us the rest of the play to find out. A play constructed around intimate dialogues rather than dramatic action it is often very funny. If it has a tendency to sound portentous then it is because the material calls for the characters to talk seriously and honestly to each other. She Was Yellow could perhaps do with a little more polish – there are a couple of moments when lines jar or timing is slightly off, but this did not hamper my enjoyment.

Experimental theatre may not fill the stalls but Fenger’s play deserves to. If you can get a ticket for the last couple of performances at the Burton Taylor I’d urge you to go, if not look out for what Fenger does next – I predict a colourful future. 

This reinterpretation of Beauty and the Beast, set in a high school scenario is presumably tooled to appeal to the ‘Twilight’ generation, and in many ways it hits the right notes. There’s a good-looking cast (aside from the obvious disfigurement that Alex Pettyfer’s character suffers), supernatural elements, a story of love triumphing over adversity, some funny moments and a central moral.

So how did it all go so wrong? Few would claim the Twilight films are great cinema – they’re reasonably entertaining and appeal to many people, but suffer from corny dialogue and plotting problems. Yet Beastly makes Twilight look like a magnum opus. In the opening sequence, in which Alex Pettyfer’s reprehensible narcissistic douche torments fellow classmates and struts around the hallways, the characters are so thinly drawn I’m surprised they show up on screen.

Pettyfer is the good-looking, arrogant, Big Man on Campus with Secret Hidden Pain, his love interest Vanessa Hudgens is a scholarship student from a poor background who knows the True Meaning Of Beauty, and so on. After the camembert opening, as Kevin (Pettyfer) actually puts his face on, the film picks up pace, and is much more watchable as a result, albeit with predictable consequences (SPOILER ALERT: He learns that looks aren’t everything, gets the girl and is cured).

Still, Pettyfer is so astonishingly wooden that unless he’s being intense, Kevin is hard to take seriously. Similarly, the usually reliable Hudgens (at least for tween films) falls flat, and other details such as the weirdly racist depiction of Kevin’s maid, and the lack of explanation for supernatural events in the film serve to jolt the audience out of any involvement in the story.

Much credit must go to Neil Patrick Harris (who should fire his agent), making the best of a bad script, delivering killer lines and characterization. He earns Beastly the star, but can’t save it.   

Opening like a tomb that has long been sealed, The Miners’ Hymns places a torch in your hand and sets your feet walking down into the darkness of the mysterious and unmapped tunnels of the labourers beneath the earth; a soundscape telling of secret, dangerous and beautiful places: historic great caverns that expand beyond the walls of your room. Jóhannsson has created something that you experience wholly; a master work, inspired by the miners of North East England.

Jóhannsson is Nordic, like many of the greatest currently-active musicians on the UK scene: Robyn, Miike Snow, The Caesars, The Tallest Man On Earth, Björk, to name but a few. But unlike the others, he’s not the type of artist that you would expect to release a chart topping single; more likely an avant-garde concept album, wonderfully crafted and sumptuously produced. The Miners’ Hymns delivers exactly that.

At some point during your relationship with Jóhannsson, you want to climb inside his head, and switch on some lights. Musicians not aiming for the easy-sell hit single have a small niche in the industry and it’s a shame. But he’s no fool – anything but. He’s given lectures across Europe in the creative use of sound in art and film, and co-founded Kitchen Motors to act as an artistic think tank, record label and promotion company, now renowned for initiating exciting new artistic collaborations, supporting experimentalism, and attempting to search for entirely new art forms. He’s a passionate artist with true integrity, and it certainly comes across.

The album concludes with the proud and heart raising march entitled ‘The Cause of Labour is the Hope of the World‘, the most prominent message of an album which exquisitely tells the tale of a world underground; a world that has shouldered much of the burden of the developing world, and a world that most of us know nothing of.

As the UK finds itself in significant trade union unrest, the Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson’s debut album for Fat Cat Records seems timely. Collaborating with the experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison, The Miners’ Hymns project marries footage of Durham’s coal-mining culture with Jóhannsson’s transcendental soundtrack. ‘We spent some time in the North East of England,’ explains Jóhannsson, ‘Bill doing research in film archives and me working with local musicians’.

It is all too easy to bring up the Nordic cliché when talking about Icelandic music. Yet a Nordic idea is often pushed by these artists, most apparently with the post-rockers Sigur Rós whose frozen soundscapes have won them a mainstream love. The same thread seems to run through the grandiose panoramas that Jóhannsson constantly visits. He acknowledges his share in this Icelandic aesthetic: ‘We were all a part of a very vibrant scene around the turn of the millennium in Reykjavik’.

Yet Jóhannsson has always displayed a significantly philosophical bent. His electro-acoustic explorations have long been concerned with our relationship with technology. ‘I guess there is an implied critique of technology in some of my work’ Jóhannsson concedes. On 2006’s IBM 1401: A User’s Manual he used reel tape recordings of a 1960’s IBM mainframe, playing with the idea of obsolete technology. ‘When my father worked for IBM in the 60’s, there was an understanding that the job was there for life,’ muses Jóhannsson. ‘Now the focus is on growth and consumption, with little regard to the cost in natural resources or workers’ conditions’.

For Jóhannsson, the acoustic is everything. The Miners’ Hymns was originally presented in a live performance at Durham Cathedral. This acoustic manipulation is constantly brought to its extreme. ‘For me the space is as important a part of the sound as the instrument and the performer, so the building becomes a kind of giant resonating box, an instrument in itself’.
Morrison’s film culminates in the Miners’ Gala procession. ‘I recorded the piece with members of the NASUWT Riverside band, which was originally a colliery brass band.’ It is the music of the brass bands, their hymns in particular, which has so influenced Jóhannsson. ‘I knew I had found the way to approach this project when I heard ‘Gresford’, which is a beautiful wordless hymn written by a miner to commemorate the victims of a tragic mining disaster in the 30’s’.

Jóhannsson seems firm, ‘I don’t like to repeat myself’. And yet he reflects, ‘there are certain obsessions that I seem to keep going back to’.

Being put on as part of Catz Arts Week, Dennis Kelly’s DNA has great appeal for those who have escaped the brutal dynamics of the classroom. It follows a group of teenagers as they collectively try to escape the consequences of their actions and are forced to cooperate in order to prevent the truth from being exposed.

This is a play about secrets, a play about fear. It is brutal terror which characterises the entire script and which is demanded from the cast as they confront disturbing facts about society and human nature. These are expounded by the character of Leah, played by Lauren Hyett, during her scenes with Phil (Jeremy Neumark Jones), the silent presence who simply and efficiently orchestrates the group’s plans for survival. These ponderous monologues provide the backbone of the play, a steady ground between the fraught panics and sudden mood swings found in the group scenes where behind every word there is a struggle for power. In this way the desperation of the particular is subsumed into idealised generalisations of happiness, life and responsibility forcing the audience, like Phil, to reconsider their own views.

The acting is of a high standard across the cast with Neumark Jones and Hyett overcoming the obstacles of too few and too many lines respectively. Meanwhile the director’s choice to situate the action in the round showcases even the minor characters and prevents the largely immobile scenes from lacking interest. Together these elements, along with moments of comic brilliance, ensure that, despite the evident immorality of the group’s plans, as a member of the audience you are silently willing them to succeed.

This stimulating production which places the action in an outdoor setting evocative of the group’s woodland hideout, DNA even has the playwright Dennis Kelly hosting a post-show discussion on Thursday 26th May. Both exciting and thought-provoking in equal measure, this play explores the everyday violence of youth and the individual’s struggle to gain control of their own existence.

It was a pleasure to spend my Sunday evening being treated to three scenes from David Mamet’s enthralling study of competitive capitalism. The play depicts four men who are forced into a cut-throat sales contest to sell dud tracts of Florida land. Set over two days, the men engage in multiple unethical and illegal acts such as lies, bribery, threats and burglary. It was clear from the first scene I watched that it would be the complexity of the characters, not their lack of virtue, that would command my attention.

At first, I watched a scene between Lloyd Houston, playing Shelley Levene, and Ziad Samaha, who plays the office manager John Williamson. In the scene Shelley tries to convince John to give him the names and numbers of promising potential clients for expensive properties. Houston’s thoroughly gripping performance was emphasised by the still and convincing mannerisms of Samaha whilst the simplistic setting only helped to further the engaging quality of their performances. It was immediately obvious that this cast had been committed and determined to convey strong and convincing Chicago accents.

The next scene presented Dave Moss (Jordan Waller) in a bid to convince George Aaronow (Joe Bayley) to stage a burglary and steal all the prime leads. The chemistry between these two actors was unquestionable, feeding and working off each other exceptionally well as Dave’s ruthlessness when compared to George’s naivety managed to encapsulate the struggle between power and morality. Notably Waller’s performance and the atmosphere of intimidation he created would be enough to sway the mind of any man with strong fortitude.

Both the tone of voice and physicality employed by each actor created this convincing and intriguing relationship. It must be noted that Jamie Macdonagh’s direction is equally commendable for the success and intense feel of these two scenes. His ability to keep direction and movement to a minimum allows the actors a much needed freedom to explore and express the inevitable darkness of their characters.

The final scene centred on a monologue delivered by Will Hatcher, playing Ricky Roma, directed to the potential purchaser of real estate James Lingk. By pitching each actor at opposite sides of the stage palpable tension was created between the men as they waited for Lingk’s eventual movement towards Ricky. Hatcher’s stage presence is unmatched and his performance truly encapsulated Ricky’s inherent ability to craft a sales pitch that exploits the weaknesses of the client.