A wise man never told me: ‘Make ‘em laugh, son. Make ‘em laugh.’ Whether it’s the opposite sex, victims or audience members you’re trying to attract, dangling the possibility of laughter before their eyes is a sure-fire way to reel ‘em in. So the team behind this production of Uncle Vanya have played a crafty card in declaring their comedic intentions from the outset.

But they’re also running a bit of a risk. It’s one thing to say your play is funny, another to deliver to the giggling masses, and late 19th Century Russia doesn’t immediately bring a smile to your face.

That said, I reckon there’s plenty of occasion for a guffaw in the script, and I certainly commend the principle of their approach. The preview had some smirkful moments, too, but generally the cast need an extra dollop of comedic confidence to properly bring it home.

This Chekov fella ain’t no Spike Milligan, so it was all going to be in the acting. And turning to more serious waters, the emotive force of the script is heavily dependent on the actors’ taking quite highbrow writing and making it personal. So the pressure’s on.
In general the acting is pretty strong, but I would hope that in the week running up to opening night they start to have a bit more fun with it, to get into the roles they clearly know well, and thus give the audience something to write home about.

Lizzie Hunter in the unflattering role of Sonia (‘Why am I so plain?’) has really got to grips with her character, and gives a strong performance which pays off in the later, more tragic, scenes, though she could take it up a notch before they hit the garden proper. The enviably-bearded Calum Mitchell was also pretty convincing and Tim Smith-Laing brought his less noteworthy facial hair to the title role well, though it remains to be seen how he’ll carry off what is clearly a very demanding part.

The vodka-swilling character of Astrov – played by the scandalously clean-shaven but fantastically named Bevil Luck – provides several opportunities for humour, but unfortunately (pun carefully avoided) a couple of them were missed in the preview, and I craved more drunken variation in his performance. When Sonia uses the old ‘what-if-my-imaginary-friend-fancied-you’ line, for example, Luck’s dismissive response was skated over, dampening what clearly could have been a gagtastic moment.

Maybe it was the combination of sun and aphids flying into my eye (both of which I’m sure will be absent from the real thing), but I felt that Chekov’s humour was still yet to be caught. Hopefully it will be well and truly nabbed by 7th week, as there’s real potential here. With a bit of fine tuning and more gusto from the actors, this production could give its audience that half-grin which makes the more tragic theme of ‘wasted life’ all the more penetrating.

All in all, this is worth a watch. You’re unlikely to get many chances to see such a classic play for such a price and in such a lovely location (the action takes place among three conveniently placed trees in Merton gardens).
Not yet at the standard it could be, but such is the peril of the press preview, and the finished product could well offer up a nice slice of… whatever people eat in Russia.

If Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be working for HBO. We often think of our nation’s greatest poet as a lyricist of genius above all, but two plays staged in Oxford this seventh week show him for what he really was: the noblest hack-writer who ever lived.

Titus Andronicus, the Pulp Fiction of Elizabethan drama, is the earliest and by far the most unrelentingly gruesome of Shakespeare’s tragedies. The young playwright gets his teenage kicks, punches and rapine in a script following a vendetta between Tamora, Queen of the Goths, and the title character, a distinguished Roman general. If a tragedy’s quality were measured by its bodycount, this would be a very straightforward review to write.

As it is, Helen Slaney’s cast make the reviewer’s job very difficult. Bits of their production are awful, bits of it are serviceable, and bits of it magisterial. Let’s get the worst of it out of the way first. Titus Andronicus, the bastion of the Roman empire in her dying days, is cast as a woman. ‘A kind of wronged mother-figure.’ This is utterly gratuitous and deprives Andronicus of his air of wild danger. He is a man fighting the insidious tentacles of a woman’s conspiracy, and this dynamic is central to the play.

Some of the acting, moreover, is really not very good at all. There is a lot of greenwood in this cast, and inexperience leads some of the characters to an overstated and mawkish awkwardness. The Emperor Saturninus in particular sounds like a voice actor in World of Warcraft. Tamora’s sons Demetrius and Chiron are gormless. Other actors do a better job: Tamora herself may not have the air of glacial command you’d expect, but she is convincingly nasty, while Andronicus’ brother Marcus is played with great flair by Naomi Setchell. The laurels, however, go to David Cochrane as Aaron the Moor, who enjoys himself immensely as the Tamora’s cheerfully brutish lover.
The play’s strongest point is its physical theatre. The cast use the space with imagination and verve to create a Rome full of reeking culverts the colour of old blood and sharp-cast shadows. The endless body-parts are supplied by rags soaked in red-dyed water, while Slaney replaces Lavinia’s hacked-off tongue and hands with strips of fabric. There are times when the scenes have an imperious authority that makes the viewer’s breath come shallow. When all things are weighed up, then, this play is more good than bad, and definitely worth an evening of your time.
The Victorians scorned Titus Andronicus because of its unrestrained gore and its ranting incoherence, but it chimes very well with an age that could produce the TV series Rome. Perhaps we are more like the Elizabethans now than we were two hundred years ago. The popularity of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, on the other hand, is apparently indefatigable, and of course it makes a return to Oxford this Trinity.

The cast of The Dream, however, refuse to let Shakespeare do their work for them. Chelsea Walker has ripped out the first and fifth acts and stripped down the complex machinery for the late slot at the BT. The result is brilliant. The cuts raise the play’s intensity while keeping its essence, and Walker’s direction and staging adds a genuine hint of menace to the script.

The real joy, however, is the cast. The majority of the actors are reunited from The Odyssey, and they bring the intimacy and chemistry from that project, with none of its overblown camp. Puck is king in this production, and Ollo Clark is more than up to the task. Richard Williams’ Oberon is elegant and distrait, like an aristocrat sotted with laudanum, and he waltzes around Titania as though this were more ballet than theatre. The husky Ruby Thomas, meanwhile, turns in her best performance of the term as Helena.

This production is genuinely, warmly funny, in spite of the odd bit of slapstick clowning. The cast have tapped a rich vein of Shakespeare, and it is a pleasure to watch it gush forth. The exchange of slapsies between Helena and Hermia – ‘how low am I, thou painted maypole?’ – is, for all its poetry, the stuff of chick-flick, and the characters are straight out of a romantic comedy. This is adroit and squarely in your face: everything, in fact, The Odyssey should have been. Shakespeare is as much a screenwriter as he is a poet, and if you animate the drama beneath the words, you have pure and brilliant modern theatre.

In Praise of Older Women’, eh? Where do I start? Well, I’d like to mention that Stephen Vizinczey’s, erm, modern classic was self-published in 1965 but has been out of print in Britain for the past twenty years. That’s a good thing. It’s also just been reissued by Penguin. That’s a bad thing. The, ahem, tastefully erotic lady on the cover, nipple suitably erect, is not so much a bad thing as a straightforward cringe, as is the horrendously self-obsessed, ridiculously generalised and quite frankly outdated prose contained within said cover.
I mean, I spent the best part of the book wondering what exactly it was meant to be. A novel? A memoir? A treatise? The blurb says ‘novel’, so we’ll go with that, but in reality it reads much more like a tedious old man writing an academic paper, at great length, about Werthers Originals. (Yes, despite the best efforts of the erotic lady, that’s how sexy it actually all is.) It wants to be Graham Greene circa The End of the Affair, all melancholy and profundity, but the unmistakeable scent of writerly pedantry and the all-pervasive obsessive self-interest are actually really, really boring.

You’re probably wondering about the actual subject matter. It won’t take long to sum it up: essentially, Stephen Vizinczey – whoops, sorry, I mean Andras Vajda, the main character – likes women. Especially Mummy’s friends. Under the tutelage of sexy women, boy thus grows into an irresistibly sexy man who has a string of OH GOD, NEVER-ENDING affairs with older women in a number of different countries. It’s like a Carry-On set in war-torn Europe: all the women are caricatured and furry (in all senses) and Andras Vajda never fails to get it up. Ever.

More frustrating than any of this, though, is Vizinczey’s ridiculous attitude towards the very women he supposedly venerates and idealises – at many points, it seems as if he, well, just doesn’t get it. ‘If deep down you hate [women], if you dream of humiliating them, if you enjoy ordering them around, then you are likely to be paid back in kind.’ Yes indeed! Thank you for pointing this difficult concept out. I’d also like to mention that if you kick your dog, it may bite you. Speaking of dogs, did you know that women can be trained? ‘I can neither respect nor trust senior cadets, generals, party leaders, millionaires, executives, nor any of their enterprises. Incidentally, this attitude seems to fascinate most women,’ writes Vizinczey, without a shred of irony.

And I’m not even going to mention the similarly irony-less poem which appears suddenly in the middle of the book, ‘Sermon to a Meeting of Onanists Anonymous’. Oh actually, go on then: ‘As a man’s cock rises so we rise above/our indifference to strangers/we learn to tolerate to care to love.’ Cor! Powerful stuff.

In conclusion, I suppose I have to acknowledge that it was 1965. Onanists Anonymous was a groundbreaking concept, I’m sure. And it may well be that we must excuse Vizinczey’s small-mindedness and self-obsession as being nothing more than a rather unfortunate product of its age. But then again, you know what they say about men with small minds…

Next to a photograph of a listening station in this exhibition is a quotation from the popular philosopher Alain de Botton. De Botton says ‘for thousands of years, it was nature – and its supposed creator – who had the monopoly on awe.’ This new show of photographs from the eponymous book seeks to challenge this premise and to argue that man-made objects deserve to be held in as high esteem as natural ones. Sadly, however, this interesting idea fails to find convincing expression in this exhibition.

De Botton is a charismatic fellow, and last year made an appearance at the Port Eliot LitFest to discuss his new book. He made it sound fascinating and fresh: a new approach to thinking about the workplace. De Botton argued the case for work as merely a job; he claimed that it is a modern misconception to think that our jobs have to provide us with meaningful satisfaction or that we have to define ourselves by what we do, rather than, say, our interests.

Although this exhibition shows leaves from De Botton’s book alongside the photographs by Richard Baker, without the conception of the work as a whole being evident, or without the charm of the author himself discussing it, these isolated pages seem to have no meaning, no wider significance. Without the context of the argument as a whole, they become merely fragmented thoughts.

Furthermore, the hypothesis that the show seeks to disprove – that only God can create anything beautiful – becomes truer and truer throughout the show, and is particularly emphasized in the final image, a medieval church cowering beneath a vast and bright red factory. The humbleness of the church, the simplicity of its design, and the fact that it was built purely for the act of worship and for no material gain, contrasts sharply with the monolithic factory. If God can inspire the construction of many of the most beautiful buildings in the world – Notre Dame in Paris, St. Mary’s Cathedral in Florence – then the inspiration behind the monstrosity of the factory seems diabolical. The loveliest part of all of the photographs is when nature is glimpsed; the most moving are those which juxtapose modern technology with the natural world. The standout image from the show is of dew glistening on a thorn in hazy morning sunlight, while behind is the fuzzy outline of pylon.

The photographs which are featured in the exhibition often fail to capture the human element of the work place, an important aspect of De Botton’s printed book. The photographs are of specialized industries such as aeronautics or biscuit-factories – how much more interesting it would be to see portraits of civil servants at work, or to show a series of images of desks complete with the personal memorabilia of their owners. Pictures, a child’s drawing, a half-drunk cup of tea: these, at least, would give us some insight into a life. But the space in the Museum of the History of Science is difficult to work with, and only a small fraction of the photographs taken for the project are shown. This may explain why the exhibition struggles to provoke a personal response. Compared to, say, Stuart Whipps – another young photographer working in this field – the images in this show are strangely lifeless and unmoving: when devoid of the human or natural element, I found that they failed to inspire.

And despite their depiction of solid, concrete structures, they seem oddly transient. De Botton reminds us that modern jobs can be unsatisfying because we do not feel they have any inherent worth: with the speed at which technology evolves, a machine can become out of date even before it has left the prototyping room. The Larkin truism that ‘what will survive of us is love’ comes to mind: love for God, as borne out in the photograph of the church; love for one another, demonstrated in memories. No one could love a burnt-out aeroplane or a crane. And without this driving force, these images – powerful though some of them may be – show none of the alleged pleasures of work, and instead remind us only of the sorrows.

Who would you rather, David Cameron or Nick Clegg? “Both together, at the same time. Assuming that I could manage, because I’m old enough to be their mum.”

Perhaps it’s no surprise that a discussion of the new coalition politics takes an unexpected turn with Edwina Currie. She is, after all, as famous for her outlandish and often ill-advised comments as she ever was for her politics; the defining moments of her career her affair with John Major (her revelation) and an infamous blunder about the level of Salmonella in British eggs (her political downfall).

Today, despite having been out of parliament since 1997, the fabulously bitchy streak that made her into a figure of media attention, and frequent fun, remains. I first meet her before she delivers a talk at the Oxford Union as part of the Society’s Women’s Initiative. In spite of the female focus of the event, as she enters the room she tells me she has no time for The Feminists, as she dismissively refers to them. “The Feminists are such miseries. You can quote me on that”. In the talk, and afterwards in the bar, she explains the point. The Feminists, she claims, constantly cast women as victims.

Currie says she did it for herself, making it in to parliament at a time when there only twenty-three other female MPs, without the need for all women shortlists (predictably, she’s not a fan), or New Labour equality measures. “Rather than get sidetracked with discussions about equality and how wrong everything was, I thought: they managed to do it, I’m going to do it the same way,” she says, and there’s the sense she has been crystallised at her ruthless, 80s Tory peak; from her individualistic attitudes down to her shoulder-padded pleather jacket. “A lot of women today say, ‘oh how hard it is to be a mother of a small child’, and how all the odds are stacked against them. Well, it wasn’t that difficult.”

In the bar after the talk, I tell her about the event at the University Conservative Association this week, when one female student was shouted down mid-speech with the chant of “kitchen, kitchen!” from a guest. How would she have reacted, as a vehement non-feminist? She leans towards me across the sofa, touches me firmly on the knee and says: “Yeah, I’ll see you in the kitchen. Later tonight. Under the table, waiting for you.” Gulp. “It would put him back in his place. That’s something Hilary Clinton could never do. Don’t be a victim. Have a sense of humour.” We talk about gender in the Union and in OUCA – she was Union Librarian in the 60s, and a picture of her committee still hangs in the corridor outside – and she tells me how she never found there was sexism in the Society back then. So what went wrong; how can Oxford have taken such a step back? It’s The Feminists’ fault, of course. “I think The Feminists have created an environment where a lot of young women see themselves as victims, where they want to be protected.”

But her anti-feminist stance doesn’t mean she’s not progressive. Not a bit of it, she says: “Whoever you are: whatever your gender, whatever your sexuality, whatever your ethnic background, whatever your colour, whatever your accent, you have something to contribute. And you should not expect special treatment, but you should figure out how to get to the same place that everybody else is at.” In her speech, she draws attention to her involvement in reducing the age of consent for male gay sex from twenty-one to eighteen, and claims she got a job at the BBC so soon after leaving parliament because “I had a lot of friends in the gay world”.

Judy Garland she ain’t, but an hour of catty comments later, it’s clear that it’s not just her campaigning for homosexual equality that has made her a friend of the gays. Iain Duncan Smith is “not worth mentioning” when we talk about former Tory leaders; Blair is “gone and best forgotten”; Julie Bindel, writer for “the bloody Guardian” is one of the “women writers who have never done anything in their lives apart from telling people their opinion”, while David Laws is “probably a bit screwed up”. Even her opinion of John Major, for whom she expressed undying love in her published diaries, is unforgiving. I tell her that I met and interviewed Major a couple of weeks ago on his own visit to the Union. “Oh yes,” she says, picturing him in Oxford, “he was always a bit scared of the great academe. I think he had a bit of a chip on his shoulder… He didn’t have the self confidence to surround himself with the very best, and that I think affected the quality of his regime.” When I say that he came across as a very different sort of politician from the ones dropped out of the Oxford mould, Currie is not convinced. “No, he would have loved to have been here. Whether he would have got in or not, that’s harder to tell.”

Though her public profile is maintained now through appearances as a commentator and on reality TV like Wife Swap and Hell’s Kitchen (“You have to earn a living”), she was still out on the campaign trail for last month’s general election, canvassing in person – I can’t quite work out how I’d feel if I opened my front door to find Currie waiting for me – and helping out other female parliamentary candidates. The Jewish mother side of her comes across in the stories she tells of her time on the campaign, rolling her eyes in recollection of some of the “posh” women candidates she was paired with. One she harangued for wearing a Labour-red scarf. Another she ticked off for using her Blackberry while out. “I said, ‘what are you doing?’ She said ‘I’m keeping up with my twitter’. I said, ‘The people on there can’t vote for you'”, and I get the feeling that she would have quite liked to have confiscated the phone altogether. When I tell her how terrified I would have been going out canvassing with her, she cackles gleefully. The persona clearly means a lot.

She’s got to get up to Huddersfield for a talk at a ladies’ lunch group, so the interview comes to an end, without so much as a mention of her egg-related blunder. Decades on, why should there be? But just as she’s about leave, a spectacled American tour guide wanders over to the table. “I used to love your radio show,” he says, and the two strike up a brief conversation about American politics. Then comes the rub: “Whenever I bring a group to the Union, I always show them your picture.” She smiles. “I always point you out and say, ‘That’s her. That’s the egg lady!'”

The smile tightens, and though she must have heard a thousand variations on Salmonella jokes, the steely determination that took her so close the top shows itself – and there is the barely perceptible impression that Currie wouldn’t mind scratching his eyes out.