Many words can be used to describe Glyn Maxwell, poet, novelist, writer. As it usually the case with eclectic artists, defining their career seems impossible. He studied English at Oxford, and poetry in Boston under the supervision of Nobel prize Derek Walcott. He has proved to be a most versatile and prolific writer, moving from poetry to radio plays to libretti. As his new creation After Troy is staged at the Oxford playhouse, we took a chance to ask him a few questions.

Glyn Maxwell has written a lot for theatre, usually in verse (pentameters). Why such a choice? ‘Theatre feels like the place I was always heading, being more interested in making up character and figuring out how he/she speaks, acts in the face of others than I am in figuring out who I am. And if you introduce a constant – say, people speak lines in pentameters, Shakespeare’s constant – you suddenly have this further resource. The lines go by like the world turning, at a steady pace, so you can make the sound of characters who can’t think fast enough for that, or some who love their own thoughts too much, or some who speak merely to shore up sound against the terror of silence– you introduce one constant and all these things become possible. I’m not saying there aren’t terrific prose plays around, but you need to be a real master of voices to make it work.  And I’m aware that ‘verse drama’ barely exists now beyond myself and a couple of other eccentrics, and has a unique burden to bear – the weight of the great ones and the almost total failure of everyone since… All I can do is keep trying to show that verse on stage can make the sound we make now on the street, in the pub, in the bedroom, in Parliament. Ancient Greeks didn’t talk in hexameters but if you master the line you can make anyone talk like it’s today.’

There is an eclectic selection of themes ranging from classical to contemporary and different genres, how does he match theme to genre? ‘Switching between genres just seems to be the nature of the engine. It’s how it rejuvenates. I can’t go straight from writing a play to writing another play, but with a couple of days off I could be ready to do some libretto work. I suppose they are neighbouring chambers of the brain.’

Given that in the plays the verse has a core importance, I asked whether prose had no hope for authority.The reply was that prose can wield immense authority, but it can never fly free. ‘The great prose works survive at least partially because of the matter in hand, the sense of a great truth being passed down. What the best verse has over that is a relationship with time itself. The forms of the best verse, the one which survive whole ages – are mortal responses to time. That’s what all those pentameters are doing – I breathe, I walk, I think, in spite of time. The sonnet – I love, I hope, I sigh, in spite of time. That’s the power that free verse writers don’t think they have a use for. If you subject yourself to the pressures of form, you are incorporating the presence of an Other. Now that might be God for one, or an absent lover, what matters is there’s something to remind the self it isn’t free. Cells age, oxygen sucks in and out, day ends, love fades – not much is free about you, what on earth can be free about poetry? To wrestle with the language for a rhyme, this is to be in the presence of the language’s history. Any poet should be humbled almost to silence by that encounter.’

Talking about themes such as Troy, or Lily Jones’s Birthday (based on Aristophanes’ Lysistrata), the inspiration often begins with the classics. Is this always the case?

‘What I want to talk about in After Troy is the a very strong theme of parents and children, the difference between oral and written cultures, the strangeness of divine beliefs. These ideas may be implicit in the old story, but every writer discovers his or her own passions within it. I don’t read any ancient languages, and I use the translations only to learn the story. I love the story but I don’t see why I should tell it like a Greek from several millennia back: men in masks, choruses…To be blunt, we English had some fairly storming theatre since then, we learned how to interrupt each other and have four people on stage at once.’

We wonder if classical themes are still relevant nowadays? Maxwell replies that ‘any story that has reached us, whether it’s biblical, classical, folklore, dwarfs the age we live in, simply by the marvel of its longevity.’

A poet’s work is to tell ‘how ordinary people bury stories and move on, as if those stories won’t erupt out of the ground again –  as poetry does, as Troy did, six times after the Greeks destroyed it’. We remain enchanted by the pure magic of poetry as the words still ring in our heads.

Mephistopheles bounces on the heels of his All Stars, all impatient energy, and prowls over the top of the Ethical Philosophy section, crushing Locke and Williams underfoot. Be honest. You’ve always wanted to do it yourself. With all its thousands of yards of shelves of pomposity and expensive obscurity, the Norrington Room in Blackwells cries out to be used as a jungle gym, and the Creation Theatre company have finally brought every undergraduate’s daydream to life.

But when the novelty of the staging wears off – as it is bound to do at some point in the course of the three and a half hours of Dr Faustus – what is left? Behind the glaring smokescreen of sound and colour and light, what actual substance is there? Quite a lot, it turns out. This production is full of youthful exuberance, and a small cast of five brings off Marlowe’s sprawling and often scholastic script with jubilance and panache. On the whole.

By far the strongest aspect of this play is the company’s trademark physical theatre. Crashing, dashing and smashing books around like Greeks tossing plates at a wedding, Creation Theatre veer between sublime ensemble pieces and what can only be described as telekinetic ninja rape. At worst, it is comical, and at best it is jaw-dropping. Marlowe offset the high tragic seriousness of his main character’s descent into damnation with a great deal of clowning and son et lumiere to keep the cheap seats amused, and this cast do exultant justice to the scope for special effects.

The specially commissioned soundtrack mixes Trent Reznor-y industrial sludge with what sounds like the background music to Silent Witness. Add a fully destructible set, four banks of lighting and a series of gymnastic dance interludes, and you could be forgiven for thinking you were at a Nine Inch Nails gig. But Dr Faustus is no Avatar: the visual candy floss is complemented by some very credible acting. Gwynfor Jones steals the show as a Mephistopheles steeped in sarcasm and congenital arrogance, and he is backed by a versatile ensemble team playing everything from theological scholars to devils.

Yet now, Faustus, needst thou must be damned. All the company’s hard work is almost undone by Gus Gallagher’s unsympathetic Dr Faustus. Gallagher is not exactly hammy; ‘gammony’ might be a better way to put it. It is a performance full of saturated fat and unhealthy additives. He does not enter into the character’s rich intellectual angst, and so the dramatic axis of the play – the scholar’s compulsive hunger not just for real power, but for real recognition, the yearning to see learning and subtlety and flair translated into worldly happiness and satisfaction – comes across as a boring sub-plot. Gallagher simply doesn’t enjoy the script, playing Faustus as though he were Young Werther. It takes a lot to spoil a line like ‘Sweet Analytics, ‘tis thou has ravish’d me,’ but he manages it without even trying; and the final rhetorical climax of the play is without soul or heart. Nevertheless, he does not quite succeed in spoiling what is otherwise an engaging and worthwhile production.

I’m going to make a little breach of Cherwell Stage etiquette here. Ordinarily it’s considered good manners to review the script and the production of a play as an organic whole, with good reason. Student stage criticism has a half-life of a week at most, after all, so to all intents and purposes the particular production happening right now is the play.

With new writing, however – and especially with new writing that might get resurrected on a different stage one day – it seems wiser to pare the soul away from the body once in a while, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do with Back to Back.

The Writing: You walk into your Oxford entrance examination, and turn over your paper. On the reverse side there are only six words: Love. Discuss. You have 20 minutes. Shit. Where you do even begin? Brotherly love? Agape? Platonic love? Book-burning, sheet-staining, rain-kissing romance?

Neuss’ play is the best response to this question you could possibly hope for. It opens with a mother (called Mother) sending her daughter (called Child) to find love. This she does, in the shape of young lovers LOVEr and beLOVEd, who rush into one another’s arms in a shower of amatory cliche (“two become one, it’s unnatural, like cell division going backwards”), lie down and wake up to find everything they hate about one another tattooed on their backs.

What follows is a thoughtful and thought-provoking dramatisation of love and resentment as two flipsides of the same phenomenon: “My darlings, don’t you know how harmonies are born? I can weave together dissonances, make us all sing together.” Neuss’ language is teasingly, deliberately enigmatic, more poem than play. She presents the script as a kind of puzzle-box, with the essence of love locked away in its heart under a lattice of paradoxes and riddles.

This little box is elegantly wrought, but when you finally get to the centre you may be a little disappointed: for at the centre there are only more questions. 20 minutes simply isn’t enough to arrive at any kind of answer to the question What is love?, and it is impressive that Neuss even achieves dramatic closure. In Back to Back’s breathless dash through the full course of a relationship, many things fall by the wayside and get left behind, unfinished: the central conceit of the tattoos, for instance, is not developed as far as it might be, and the characterisation is a little too sparse even for an allegory.

Nevertheless, this tantalising and carefully crafted piece would certainly have gotten its author into Oxford.

The Production: Directors Orrock and Gilbert put as little as possible in between the playwright’s vision and the audience. The staging is starkly simple – the action revolves around a double bed with two single blankets – and the ubiquitous nightwear creates a gentle wash of intimacy. There are one or two exquisite dramatic touches: the lovers reveal their naked backs to the audience before going to bed; and when they fight to read one another’s litanies of hate they wrestle as though playfighting.

The acting is good, if a little blunted by the allegorical nature of the script. Jenni MacKenzie is hauntingly fragile as Child, while Luke Gormley’s blend of tenderness and wiry aggression is compelling. The physical relationship between all three of the main characters is extremely strong. Overall, Neuss’ words have been sensitively brought to life, although the production does not quite contrive to add the flesh and blood that are missing from the script.

This ambitious production encompasses two Voltaire plays in a new English translation. Mahomet is an invented tale of the prophet Mahomet’s arrival in Mecca in the 7^th century, in which a young man is manipulated by a religious leader into carrying out an assassination, while Zaire is set in the 7^th century and tells the ill-fated love-story of a Muslim sultan and his Christian slave. The plays are united by themes of religious fanaticism (Muslims in the first play, Christians in the second), but they constantly contrast this with the good teachings of religion, showing both its positive and very damaging effect on human life, posing powerful and unsettling questions.

The setting of these plays in Mansfield Chapel was, according to director Jean-Patrick Vieu, an accident, but an inspired one, for it is its juxtaposition with the surroundings that gives this production much of its power. The horror of the otherwise slightly melodramatic murder scene is infinitely enhanced by the fact that it takes place at an actual altar, yet the chapel’s simple decoration means that its overtly religious nature does not intrude too much on the action. But the chapel is also a hindrance to the production in that its echoey acoustic

s made it difficult to hear the actors, especially when they inevitably had their backs to me or were at the other end of the aisle in which the play is being performed in traverse. Straining to make out every word of the rhyming couplets meant that it was sometimes hard to follow the plot, especially in the first play, where characters came, quarrelled and left with high speed.

The lack of set means that all attention is focused on the actors, which sometimes worked well, particularly in the emotional dialogue between Zaire (Franki Hackett) and her father during the second play, but sometimes during speeches the other actors looked rather static and awkward, and occasionally the acting buckled under the scrutiny. However, perhaps due to the more personal nature of the story, the characters in this second play proved easier to relate and warm to, and Zaire’s dilemma when faced with a choice between her dying father’s Christianity and her lover’s Islam is executed powerfully through the use of the necklace she and her father pass between them.

These plays present issues very relevant to our times, and do so in a refreshing and unselfconscious manner. It will be a shame if the glitches and logistical issues detract from what should be a raw and moving experience in a beautiful venue.

With theatre just as much as with any other encounter first impressions count, and here I liked the set. I assumed it was going to be set in an artist’s studio; there were crumpled shirts and fabrics strewn across the floor, stacks of old looking books and a few fruits lying on the table.</p>

What I wasn’t expecting however was that as much attention and care would have been paid to the detail of the characters in the play. A student production and a student writer yes, but an amateur production absolutely not.</p>

The whole premise of the play revolves around improvisation and not a lot is spelled out for you, but despite it being a little cryptic at first it is a compellingly enticing watch. There are two characters, both of whom are actors, and they push each others’ skills to the limit by improvising together.</p>

An absurdly brilliant French accent and belligerent attitude is put on by Sonia (Alexandra Zelman-Doring) who improvises the part of the Impressionist artist Paul Cezanne to get her rather disjointed and unruly thoughts across to her actor-partner Alina.</p>

Alina (Ella Waldman) in response takes on the role of the rather aloof and stark Modernist German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who questions and pries Cezanne labouring at his easel; bizarre conversations are had, apples are eaten and boundaries are crossed. </p>

The play is absurd but it in no way spirals into a dearth of slapstick and meaningless monologues. Thank god. There is a sophisticated flair to the whole script and its direction by Jamie MacDonagh; moments of delightful pure comedy seem to crop up almost naturally as the actors interact, whether as themselves or as their archetypes.</p>

To Hold An Apple is one of a kind and I won’t hesitate to admit that I would happily watch it again, and maybe even one more time – mainly because I don’t quite get it. It is a pleasure to watch actors acting so beguilingly, and there is a sense that a hidden story runs counter to and underneath what is said between the florid-French-painter-Cezanne and the inquisitive-repressed-writer-Rilke.</p>

That may of course have just been the charm of the play rubbing off on me, but without a doubt Alexandra Zelman-Doring, who wrote and starred in the play, should be paid her dues sooner or later. There is a lot of talk about work or “travaille” and the flaring up of tempers and the dying down of conversations, but on the whole the piece is rather benign and unimposing, like a good work of art. Lasting only 45 minutes and uncertain whether it will ever be staged again all those who enjoy theatre are advised to go and have a look.

A sandcastle being built; someone swimming out into the sea and nearly drowning; a confrontation with incest and death. Ella Evans has not made it easy for the production team or the audience. The difficulties of staging are dealt with masterfully, with a film of the sea and shore forming the backdrop to the stark BT stage, and some ingenious touches to deal with the other problems. But the script is where the play occasionally lets itself down, with some beautiful images and writing tempered by some bits which just don’t quite work. 

It takes a while to warm up, a pretty long while in fact. Cassie sits at the kitchen table, drunk. Her sister Ellen discovers her and they have an overly drawn out and quite mundane conversation: “You’re drunk!” “No I’m not!” etc. Slowly more details emerge. They’re meant to be attending a funeral in two hours. They haven’t seen each other for ten years. Cassie can’t drink coffee without sugar. But in this kitchen scene we don’t really warm to either character, Cassie petulant and childish, Ellen motherly, prim and easily shocked. Their relationship will grow and yield some very touching moments, but not until Ellen has the bright, if slightly incongruous idea of going to the beach to get some fresh air.

Some of the best dialogue comes when it is most realistic, and Evans certainly has a talent for capturing the way people speak. Cassie’s drunk speech is spot-on and all the more humorous for it, and when she is at her most passionate and angry, shouting at Ellen through her tears, you could almost forget this is scripted and not a spontaneous outburst. But other speeches, which on the page would read more like poetry, do not work so well on stage. When Cassie turns to the audience for her first very poetic soliloquy, it jars a little in juxtaposition with the realism of the conversation up to this point, and it doesn’t help that we are distracted by the stream of images flashing up behind her.

But as the play goes on and the plot thickens, it does get exciting. A new and intriguing element is introduced quite late on in the play which drives much of the later action. We empathise more and more with the characters as they open up to each other and their past and feelings are revealed. While inevitably upstaged by her sister, some of Ellen’s careful speeches are particularly beautiful, and it is a shame that much of her speech is mundane and ineffectual responses to wild Cassie; it is when she lets her guard down that their relationship becomes interesting to watch develop, and the play is all the better for it. Both parts are very well acted by Ruby Thomas (Cassie) and Cicely Hadman (Ellen).

This play is certainly worth seeing; despite the slow start and occasionally unconvincing speeches it does draw one in powerfully, and the bombshell revelations that are dropped are worth the excruciating wait. There are funny moments, moving moments and dramatic moments; a combination of the very bright talents of writer, director and actors.

A scandal has recently erupted in the US involving the release of a made-for-television film, Amanda Knox: Murder on Trial in Italy. In this drama Heroes-star Hayden Panettiere plays student Amanda Knox, who has in real life been sentenced to 26 years in prison in Italy for her part in the murder and sexual assault of English student Meredith Kercher. The film was originally to contain a scene in which the victim, wearing jeans and a bra, was pinned down during the attack. This caused great controversy when the trailer aired. The parents of the victim of the still very recent murder did not want the film to be made and the father called the controversial scene ‘horrific’. Whilst star Hayden Panettiere insists upon the production being ‘fact-driven’ and ‘classy’, one cannot help but ask if the offence and upset that this dramatisation has caused are really justified and one could accuse the makers of the film of exploiting a recent tragedy for cheap thrills.

Dead bodies wheeled into laboratories for analysis and flashbacks to startling moments of violence have become so commonplace on the small and the big screen that it seems inevitable that real stories with such high dramatic value should be seized upon by those who want to shock and entertain. For, after all, whatever excuses people may use for watching such productions, it is not really for their educational value or out of some sense of obligation but simply for their entertainment. They are the hour-long equivalent of slowing down when passing a car crash on the motorway.

The Amanda Knox film is by no means the first of its kind. Many high-profile murder cases have had some sort of adaptation made in their wake: 2006 drama Longford, starring Jim Broadbent and written by Peter Morgan, screenwriter of The Queen, which focussed on the vain efforts of Lord Longford to secure the release of Moors-murderer Myra Hindley, and Truman Capote’s book In Cold Blood about the murder of a family by a pair of thieves was made into a 1967 film and then revisited in Philip Seymour-Hoffman film Capote (2005). Recently, ITV has stirred up controversy by hiring popular actor Dominic West (pictured) from The Wire to play infamous serial killer Fred West in a three-hour drama. Murders clearly capture the human imagination and sensational cases inevitably appeal to film and television-makers.

This raises a few questions: why would it be immoral to watch a programme about a murder that happens to be real if we consider it perfectly acceptable to watch a fictional thriller depicting an equally brutal murder? Does sensationalism become more deplorable when it is based upon true events? And when do real cases become fair game for the film and television industry? Is it more acceptable, for example, to create a film about Jack the Ripper such as From Hell (2001), which featured Johnny Depp and Heather Graham, than it is about a more recent case, such as the murder of Meredith Kercher, where Amanda Knox is still in the process of an appeal and the tragedy is still fresh in the minds of those who knew Meredith Kercher?

All that is clear is that the industry is becoming ever faster in translating real-life horror into on-screen thrillers, thus forcing us to reflect upon the use of murder in all screen dramas, fictional and real, historical and contemporary. It is left to each one of us, then, to decide whether the human fascination with murder is something which should be readily indulged with ever more blood-soaked dramas or an appetite which we should do our best to suppress as we switch over to The Sound of Music.

The 27th of February 2011, a date that will be remembered, above all, as marking the night when Anne Hathaway desperately tried to prove that she has a personality. On paper, the Hathaway appeared to have everything going for her: doe-like eyes, glossy hair and wholesome good looks that have a widespread appeal. Unfortunately, and rather worryingly for an actress, she never seemed capable of making the distinction between ‘vivacious’ and ‘vapid’. And yes, audiences do like to see a friendly, welcoming host with glittering eyes and smile, but anyone who presents the Oscars in future really ought to be warned that adopting the wide-eyed stare of Bambi’s mother in the moments before those fateful shots ring out is just going to traumatise the more sensitive members of the audience, myself included. Though she was undoubtedly drafted in to attract tweens who would have enjoyed seeing her in an array of undeniably beautiful dresses, I can’t help but feel that the only people she appeals to are Italian fraudsters who enjoy dressing up as cardinals (Google it).

To be fair to the hostess, her male counterpart was, if anything, even more irritating to watch. The problem with James Franco taking on an aloof, disinterested air is that it’s not all that different from the public persona he normally adopts. I realise that the some-time writer and full-time poster boy for edgy intellectual posing was intended to serve as a foil for Hathaway’s cheery enthusiasm, but, call me humourless if you will, I expect more from an Oscar-nominated actor than playing what is, if anything, a duller version of himself.

Still, as I’ve just demonstrated, it’s easy to criticise the hosts, especially when they’re that young, successful and attractive. Really, it’s the murky powers-that-be who decide on the direction that the awards will take each year, with 2011 appearing to have been selected as the year of the ‘knowing look’. There is, of course, a long tradition of industry in-jokes and spoofs of the year’s films at the Oscars. However, this time round you could barely go ten minutes without the autocue forcing the hosts to adopt a studied air of cynicism, with Franco complementing Hathaway on looking ‘so beautiful and hip’, and in turn being told that he himself is ‘very appealing to the younger demographic’. If we’ve learnt anything from the success of Hugh Jackman’s stint as an all-singing, all-dancing host in 2009, when viewing figures beat those of the previous year by an impressive 13%, it’s that the camper, tackier and more exuberant the Oscars are, the more appealing they become. Most viewers have come to terms with the fact that we are no longer living in the Golden Age of cinema, with stars who embody class and glamour as they did in the time of Greta Garbo and Grace Kelly.

The lure of the Oscars lies more in the sheer comic value of (often unintentionally) funny speeches, and in watching people dressed up to look like startled ostriches (I’m looking at you, Sharon Stone). Any attempt at self-irony seemed a little smug – really, it’s the job of the viewer to poke fun; take away this and there’s little role left for the audience in an awards ceremony that is already insular enough as it is.

This year’s best film, we are told, is The King’s Speech, which took away four of the top five Oscars (Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Original Screenplay) leaving the Award for Best Actress to Natalie Portman. And, for the most part, they seem to have got it about right.

Not that the Academy Awards are to be trusted. As Steven Spielberg aptly pointed out when he presented the Oscar for Best Picture: ‘In a moment one of these ten movies will join a list that includes On the Waterfront, Midnight Cowboy, The Godfather, and The Deer Hunter. The other nine will join a list that includes The Grapes of Wrath, Citizen Kane, The Graduate, and Raging Bull.’ And the list goes on.

There were, as always, some flagrant injustices. Roger Deakin, True Grit‘s director of photography, certainly merits the Award for cinematography (which went instead to Inception‘s Wally Pfister). His spectacular work on True Grit aside, the man regarded as one of the greatest living cinematographers has been nominated nine times in the past, for such monuments as The Shawshank Redemption, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and No Country for Old Men.

There has been some discussion as to whether Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech) deserved to win Best Director over David Fincher (The Social Network). The award for Best Director is probably the most difficult and least objective of them all, because the director’s role is to have a say in everyone else’s work and because as a result it is difficult to determine precisely what influence a director has on a film. Pehaps Hooper won because Fincher won the BAFTA and the Golden Globe. Perhaps he won because he started off as the underdog. Who knows?

Of course no awards ceremony can be completely objective and the Oscars are hardly an exception. The Academy Awards are voted for by the 6000-odd members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. These are industry professionals, who join by invitation only and sport an alleged average age of 57. Unsurprisingly, people tend to blame the Academy’s obstinate recalcitrance towards anthing other than a heart-warming drama on its members’ conservatism. Yet the explanation has probably more to do with the image and heritage of the Oscars. If festivals like Sundance and Cannes reward creativity and innovation, the Academy Awards honour mastery of craft. And there is a place for both.

The rest is rather less contentious. Colin Firth was always going to win (the shortest odds in the history of the Awards), as was Natalie Portman. The writers of The Social Network and of The King’s Speech (Aaron Sorkin and David Seidler, respectively) both received well-earned accolades, being conveniently nominated in different categories (Adapted Screenplay and Original Screenplay, respectively).

As for the evening itself, this year’s proceedings were on the whole rather tame. There were no Roberto Benigni-esque antics; none of Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin’s buffooneries; and, truth be told, not much in the way of entertainment at all.

And so, after offering our congratulations to the winners and commiserations to the losers, after indulging in dubious second-guessing trying to explain who won what and badmouthing the presenters, the awards season comes to an end.