From Elizabeth Taylor’s screeching Kate to Cole Porter’s campy musical number ‘I Hate Men’ to Heath Ledger’s paintballing Petruchio, The Taming of the Shrew often falls victim to the impetus to produce a new, never-before-seen take on Shakespeare’s classic comedy. But the Thelma Holt/OUDS Summer Tour production of The Taming of the Shrew has successfully resisted the pitfalls of anachronistic, postmodern interpretation and gives us a refreshingly faithful rendition of Katherine’s cursedness, Bianca’s sweetness, Lucentio’s lovelorness, and Petruchio’s capriciousness.

Let me be direct: director Alice Hamilton’s production is good. Very good. Her ensemble betrays no weak links and each of the players handled their lines with the grace and deftness that this battle of wills and wits requires. They also prove to be quite adept singers, with the choral interludes between scenes complementing the action and the tone of the piece. Ed Peace’s Katherine is not merely a perversely ‘cursed wench’; she gives bonny Kate the psychological depth she deserves, seeking her father’s love through negative attention with her hair-pulling antics. Petruchio, played by Jacob Taee, evokes in his audience the same love and play with language that the character exhibits. Most refreshing, however, is the production’s the treatment of Katherine’s speech in the final scene. It inevitably sounds a bit misogynistic to our postmodern, post-feminist ears; I braced myself for Pearce to play against the lines and somehow try to twist the text into the discourse of a prenatal suffragette. But the lines themselves won out and in all their anachronistic glory proved a testament to the strength of the relationship between Petruchio and Katherine that the text works so hard to engineer.

The lone shortcoming of this Taming? The sporadic appearance of modern clothes that jarred, probably intentionally, against the otherwise period dress. The producer kindly explained to me their role in gesturing towards the meta-theatricality of the text with the all but forgettable pre-beat in Shakespeare’s original setting up the familiar play-within-a-play trope. While I appreciate the sentiment, having Tranio turn up in a denim jacket and 80’s sunglasses, or Petruchio appearing in less than shocking wedding apparel (just a rather nice pair of red trousers and argyle vest), did not read as gesturing to anything other than perhaps a budget shortcoming. Combined with a confusing Brechtian pre-beat which features the actors wandering around staging mumbling their lines, this production only struggled when it strayed from its greatest strengths: its commitment to the play as it was originally staged in all its 16th century glory. But aside from these minor distractions, this Taming of the Shrew succeeds where most versions fail and delivers a truly enjoyable experience in the lovely Magdalen College Gardens. It can only garner the response of Petruchio himself after his tamed Kate’s final speech: ‘Is not this well?’

The show will be playing in Magdalen College Gardens July 21 through July 24 before commencing its tour of Stratford, London and Japan. Ticket details can be found on the website: www.tamingoftheshrew2010.co.uk.

In May this year, the controversial geneticist Craig Venter oversaw the creation of the first ever synthetic life form, created entirely in a laboratory. It seemed that, for once, real life was one step ahead of Hollywood. Not for long though. With Splice, writer-director Vincenzo Natali has taken the idea and run with it, though perhaps not in the direction you might expect. The result is a horror movie that begins by dwelling on modern ethical dilemmas in science, yet disappointingly this contemporary relevance is not sustained. Natali creates moments of genuine shock and even grotesque beauty, but these are lost all too often in the dull predictability of this modern Frankenstein tale.

The plot focuses on two scientists and lovers, Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley), who begin a secret project of ‘splicing’ human DNA with their previous hybrid creations under the self-delusion their efforts will ultimately cure diseases. They name their creation Dren, and its rapid growth and learning abilities ensure that it soon becomes a surrogate child to the couple, though this warped family unit ceases to remain harmonious. The casting here is fairly left-field, particularly in the case of Brody. Though he acts with confidence, it is fairly baffling to see the Oscar winner involved in what is essentially a big budget B movie and his considerable talents do seem wasted. Sarah Polley is equally solid, though her face is highly distracting – she seems to be some kind of illegitimate lovechild between Julianne Moore and Uma Thurman. Perhaps genetic splicing is to blame. Disappointingly, the characters here are fairly one dimensional (a flaw which the cinematic con known as 3D would do nothing to rectify), as Natali foolishly refuses to pursue the common feature of all great horror movies: the patient build up of characters and tension. The film is far less compelling, or even frightening, as a result.

Natali clearly knows his horror, however, and fills Splice with references to a huge variety of classics, including Alien, The Fly, and Rosemary’s Baby. Indeed, much of the film’s strength lies in its focus upon Elsa’s warped maternal instincts and the creation of a distorted and very Freudian family unit; it is in these moments that a pervading sense of creepiness infects the film to great effect, and it becomes an extremely skilful and intelligent horror movie, particularly in its surreal exploration of Carl Jung’s Electra Complex. Unfortunately, such moments are all too rare, and the film often seems utterly unsure of itself. Its biggest flaw is, ironically, a lack of horror – an element generally considered to be fairly crucial in the horror genre. Instead, much of the film is disappointingly bland, even banal. The script, directing, cinematography and score are all solid, but none of them exceptional. Natali might know his horror classics, but he fails to demonstrate the skill required to make one.

‘NEWMAN COLLEGE, founded 1892 in memory of the theologian John Henry Newman (1801-90). Located on the Woodstock Road between Somerville and Green Templeton Colleges on the former site of the John Radcliffe Infirmary, Newman is the smallest and perhaps the most appealing of Oxford’s Victorian colleges. The austere classical facade conceals a wealth of rococo gardens and a number of annexes whose gothic brickwork far outshines that of Keble and the Oxford Union. Newman has a well-deserved reputation as much for junior common room pranks – in one recent ‘rag’ the men’s eight bumped their great rivals Somerville in a banana boat – as for Norrington-table-topping academic endeavour.’
Excerpted from ‘Oxford: A Rough Guide’ (Dorling Kindersley, 1986)

Just in case you were wondering, I made everything in that last paragraph up. As anybody who has ventured further north than Husayn’s kebab van outside the Taylorian will know, there is no Newman College between Somerville and Green Templeton. There is, in fact, an attractive building which used to be a hospital and now backs out onto an enormous construction site. Rumour has it that the University is going to build its new Linguistics faculty there.

But it could so easily have been different. Theology may not grab many headlines today, but in a less secular age a hundred and fifty years ago it was as big as politics. Oxford was the site of a battle for the soul of the nation. The group of Anglican theologians who came to be called ‘the Oxford Movement’ were demolishing the individualist foundations of their Church. They saw salvation in the Via Media, a reconciliation with the teachings of the earliest years of Christianity. With Catholicism in its purest sense. They left an indelible mark on the University: John Keble had the great Legoland palace that is Keble College founded in his memory, while Edward Pusey had a PPH and a road.

Yet there is no evidence of the most brilliant of the Tractarians to be seen in Oxford, except a bronze bust in Trinity and a modest plaque outside St Aloysius, the city’s Catholic cathedral. John Henry Newman could have had it all. Newman College. The Newman Library. Hell, why not Newman Square down by OUSU and the Westgate? But in 1845 he overturned his life’s work – and jeopardised the credibility of the Movement – by converting to Roman Catholicism.

Never has there been such opprobrium since Anakin Skywalker went over to the Dark Side. Newman traded a reputation as one of the finest minds and certainly as the finest writer in the Church of his day in exchange for peace with his conscience. The deal worked out better than you might have expected, though: he received a Cardinal’s red hat in his own lifetime, and on September 19th of this year he will become the first Englishman to join the Communion of Saints since the seventeenth century.

It’s about time, then, for a new portrait of the man who did more than anybody else to bring Britain in line with Catholicism and the Church in line with modern science. Enter ‘Newman’s Unquiet Grave’ by John Cornwell. What this is not, in spite of its subtitle ‘The Reluctant Saint’, is a discussion of Newman’s beatification. What it is is a welcome attempt at a literary biography.

James Joyce may have thought of Newman’s ‘cloistral silverveined’ prose as the best ever written in English, but most modern readers will find even his more accessible works long-winded and oversubtle. Cornwell acts as a kind of oracle for Newman, decoding his major works into clear, simple English. It is a joy to watch him filleting important books like the ‘Apologia pro vita sua’ and the ‘Grammar of Assent,’ setting all the meat on the reader’s plate with none of the Victorian grease and gristle. He summarises Newman’s ideas beautifully, and yet he is always happy to let his subject speak for himself in moments where he is simply inimitable.

Cornwell is a vigorous writer in his own right; the front cover suggests a Channel 4 documentary (maybe Time Team), and he has the television presenter’s lightness of touch, leavening his intellectual account with a fair sprinkling of anecdotes. He is stylish, astute, and above all easy to read. Take his summary of the Apologia, for instance: ‘[it] becomes not just a history of his opinions, but a dramatised psychology of philosophy of mind, fraught with intellectual, historical and spiritual anxiety.’ His literary approach really comes into its own in sections on Newman’s presentation of himself and his influence on James Joyce.

That said, Cornwell can fall away into obscurity at times, especially when he is describing one of his pet theories about Newman and the Romantic poets. ‘Newman’s Unquiet Grave’ is also spoiled by some chimpanzee-level editorial mistakes, ranging from the petty – Cornwell manages to misquote a line of the Aeneid in two different forms in the same paragraph – to the downright bizarre, as every reference in the book to Newman’s spiritual home at Littlemore (near Cowley) has been replaced with the word ‘littletons’ [sic]. But in doing what he sets out to do – to present Newman’s thought to a new world with fresh importance and fresh urgency – Cornwell succeeds brilliantly. Newman has serious questions to pose to the twenty-first century, and you will find them at their most forceful in this book.

Every band has to make sacrifices to make a career out of their music, but Kings of Leon’s story is perhaps more arduous than most. Living out of an ’88 Oldsmobile throughout a nomadic, itinerant youth; firing up a southern-rock group with your two brothers; pilfering your cousin from the very bosom of his Mississippi home and making him play bass, just to appease the stipulations of your record company. Fast-forward eleven years, and if your band, forged in such humble beginnings, was playing to sixty-five thousand revellers in London’s Hyde Park, what would your reaction be?

The final note of ‘Black Thumbnail’ has just rung out, and as his fellow band-members saunter off stage, Caleb Followill lingers behind, soaking up every last second of the scene before him. It’s just past ten, and a crimson sun is setting behind a rapt audience, his audience, every mouth screaming and every pair of hands clapping for his band.

The Kings played not only the headliner role, but also that of party organisers for their Hyde Park show. Yet despite a plethora of talented, upbeat sets from the likes of The Drums and The Black Keys, it was a relatively tepid atmosphere not in keeping with the stifling Wednesday heat which greeted the late afternoon warm-up acts.

Yet the semi-apathetic throng becomes a baying horde as KOL emerge from behind what appears to be a wall of crushed cars, before launching into the bass-laden ebb of ‘Crawl’. Caleb, sporting a Springsteen-esque light-blue denim jacket with an extravagant American flag on the back, then proceeds to creakily bleat out ‘Taper Jean Girl’ and ‘My Party’.

The Kings could perhaps be criticised for sticking to their most recognisable material, as a ravaging rendition of ‘Molly’s Chambers’ is followed by more tempered, slower performances of ‘Fans’ and ‘Milk’. Any slight disparagement I flirt with, however, is roundhouse-kicked to the floor by KOL treating us, in typical hot-headed fashion (and against the wishes of their management), to four new songs, ‘Immortals’, ‘Radioactive’, ‘Mary’ and ‘Southbound’, which seem akin to the arena-rock overtones of current album ‘Only By The Night’. The band also chooses to cover the Pixies track ‘Where Is My Mind?’

A pause, and then Matthew nonchalantly starts picking the instantly recognisable riff of ‘Sex On Fire’. There’s a rib-breaking surge forward, and a deafening, sixty-five thousand strong bellowing of the chorus. Jared pouts and swings his hips through ‘Notion’, sunglasses hanging from the neck of his T-shirt, and the Kings encore with a wailing recital of ‘Use Somebody’ and the ear-pounding ‘Black Thumbnail’, to rapturous appreciation.

Caleb flings his guitar picks into the audience, and stares disbelievingly at the legions of the Kings’ adoring subjects. A short while later, Nathan is updating his Twitter page. “London, you cheeky bastards,” he quips, “you just gave us the highlight of our career.” And the highlight of my summer, too.

Last weekend the General Synod of the Church of England met to discuss the issue of women’s eligibility as bishops. Last weekend, newspaper headlines featured the appointment of openly homosexual cleric Dr. Jeffrey John as a nominee for the position of Bishop of Southwark. Last weekend, Drew Pautz’s play Love the Sinner closed after its successful two month run at the National Theatre. The National’s timing could not have been more appropriate in featuring the world premiere of Pautz’s play on the conflict within the Anglican church, as its leaders internationally grapple with the Church’s stance on homosexuality.

The play opens at a conference in an unnamed African country, with African church leaders denouncing the liberal policies of the Western Church, American Anglicans championing the Church ‘evolving’ with the times and a bearded Englishman, obliquely referred to as ‘Your Grace’, refusing to take a side. The story unfolds with a member of the Church conference having a homosexual encounter with a young African man who then turns up in London demanding asylum from the persecution he faces in Africa due to his sexuality. The experience of seeing Pautz’s play at the National’s Cottesloe Theatre was both riveting and refreshingly sympathetic to all the distinct voices and opinions present in the questions of the Church’s role throughout the world.

In a period when theatre is rising to address the issues sensationalized daily by the media, with examples ranging from the London success and New York failure of Enron: the Musical to the mixed response to David Hare’s commissioned play The Power of Yes on the current financial crisis, it is increasingly rare to find a piece of politically and socially relevant theatre that treats all perspectives as respectfully and artistically as Drew Pautz’s work. While I am eagerly anticipating Pautz’s next piece, Love the Sinner succeeded for me most in presenting a model of theatre with a social function that can gain recognition in London and beyond, perhaps even in Oxford.

In a university setting dominated by endless reprisals of Shakespeare’s canon, Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus and Chekhov’s depressed families, I wonder if Oxford’s thesps can be inspired by the young Pautz to produce their own versions of socially relevant theatre. Yes, we’ve all applauded Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good and Churchill’s multiple dissections of gender roles, but Pautz’s play appears to have provided more than just another politicized approach to discussing the meta-theatricality of theatre and performance itself. Didn’t Ibsen, Shaw and even Shakespeare write their masterpieces on the pressing social, political and ethical challenges of their times? I would challenge Oxford playwrights to do the same: pick up a newspaper and write a play based on a headline.

An upcoming OUDS production is already leading the way: Frank McGuiness’ play Carthaginians is being staged 4^th week of Michaelmas in the O’Reilly Theatre and echoes The National’s timing with Love the Sinner with its retelling of the events of Bloody Sunday in the wake of the Saville report from this June. I hope we can see many more similiar departures from the standard fare of Oxford drama in the future.

Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) was a French composer, organist, teacher, ornithologist, and synaesthete. Although he has yet to enter the mainstream, among musicians his reputation soars higher than the upper register of his instrument. And a year-long festival of his music, held in 2008 in venues across London to mark the centenary of his birth, at last earned him some popular recognition.

Messiaen is the only major composer in history whose style has never been closely imitated. One reason for this is the curious tonality of his music. Like most of his avant-garde contemporaries, Messiaen generally did not compose in major and minor keys. Yet unlike them, he chose not to join Arnold Schoenberg’s then-fashionable school of atonal “serialism”. He instead devised his own “modes of limited transposition”: jarring, luminous scales that had no harmonic precedent in Western music, and which he all but trademarked.

These scales are one of the features behind the “colourfulness” of Messiaen’s music. As a synaesthete, Messiaen “experienced” colours (though he emphasised that he did not perceive them visually) upon hearing certain harmonies, and cited Mozart, Wagner and Stravinsky as particularly “colourful” composers. By associating each of his modes with a different hue, he effectively “painted” his music. And often on gigantic canvases. Just listen to the skyscraping opening theme of the Turangalîla-Symphonie (1948), or to La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ (1969), a piece scored for one hundred and eighteen instruments and a ten-part choir.

Though a devout Roman Catholic, Messiaen did not write conventional liturgical music. Instead, he studied Japanese gagaku, Indonesian gamelan, and Hindu and ancient Greek rhythms, and was inspired by the unusual colours and birdsongs of Bryce Canyon in Utah to compose his orchestral piece Des Canyons aux Étoiles (1974). Encouraged by his teacher (the composer Paul Dukas) to “listen to the birds”, Messiaen would embark on solitary nature walks, transcribing birdsong as he went. These strolls resulted in the Catalogue d’Oiseaux (1958) for solo piano, a collection of thirteen tone poems based on the songs of thirteen different birds. Even when writing religious music, he overlooked all the doom and gloom in the Christian tradition in favour of extolling with messianic joy the figure of Christ. Typical is the title of the organ piece Transports de Joie d’une Âme devant la Gloire du Christ qui est la Sienne (1933), which translates as “Ecstasies of a Soul before the Glory of Christ, which is its own Glory”.

One of Messiaen’s works stands apart from the others. Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps (1941), the “Quartet for the End of Time”, is remarkable for the circumstances of its composition. Working as a medic in the French army during World War II, Messiaen was captured by the Germans and imprisoned at the camp Stalag VIII-A. Among his fellow prisoners he found a clarinettist, a cellist and a violinist; with himself as pianist, he assembled an unconventional quartet and composed the Quatuor. The premiere was given on a freezing January day in 1941, before an audience of prisoners and guards, and the piano which Messiaen had received from the Nazis was out of tune and missing keys. The composer later recalled of the occasion, “Never was I listened to with such rapt attention and comprehension.”

Throughout his later career, Messiaen supplemented his composer’s income by teaching and serving as the organist at the church of La Trinité in Paris. Yet – drawing inspiration from his wife, the pianist Yvonne Loriod – he continued to compose. Of his late works, the oddly static Saint François d’Assise (1983) is notable for being his longest and calmest work as well as his only opera. It is a fitting coda to a totally unpredictable career, which ended in 1992 with Messiaen’s death by very old age.