The fishing industry in Hull was once a competitive power. The docks were flourishing, the sea was teeming and Hull was holding its own against Iceland in the fearsome Cod Wars. ‘They’re run down now’ laments Dave Hemingway.
Hemingway was a drummer for The Housemartins, an integral component of the vocal duo (Hemingway and Paul Heaton) that defined the successful contemplative pop of The Beautiful South. He started playing drums at school, joined a band called The Gargoyles and found himself at the energetic Adelphi Club. There was a time, around 1983 when the Hull Docks were really alive. ‘Not so much now,’ Hemingway admits.

Even Paul Heaton, chief songsmith of The Beautiful South, felt the pull of that old scene. One of the most successful Housemartins albums was called ‘Hull 4 – London 0. His song, ‘Pretenders to the Throne’ compares ‘Paris with its bustling cafes’ to ‘Hull with its musical flair’. Maybe you had to be there, back in the early 80s, to understand what Heaton was really on about.

Hemingway describes the scene as if he’d never left it, a memory that success has never dulled. Even though the Greatest Hits of The Beautiful South sits in one quarter of British homes; even though, back in 1994, The Housemartins were supported by the likes of the little known Oasis; even though The South, Hemingway’s latest venture, sold out Hull arena at the start of their tour. He’s philosophical about his success: ‘some bands make it, some bands don’t, that’s the way it’s always been’.

Some of it seems pretty silly now. The Gargoyles wrote a spoken word song that has to be heard to be believed: ‘The Humber bridge is about a mile long / as it strides the mighty humber. And our foreign brothers across the sea / they just stare at it in wonder’. Chief Gargoyle Eddie Smith once performed a set naked on Hull Tower. ‘The Gargoyles were more obvious. Paul’s sense of humour was… wry, let’s put it that way’. Heaton’s celebrated humour shines through in ‘Liar’s Bar’, a popular Beautiful South track: ‘And the gravedigger’s smiling at his reflection in his spade … they’re singing whiskey, whiskey, so good they named it twice’ but it seems to develop rather than depart from the old Hull jokes.

Hemingway can’t stress enough that The Beautiful South were always ‘about the songs’, just shamelessly good pop. His latest project is a new incarnation renamed The South. They keep mainly to its back catalogue. But they’ve got a new bassist and fans of older music might not recognise Alison Wheeler’s voice, but she’s been with them for the last five years.

He remembers coming to Oxford. ‘Alison was at Cambridge, so we had a thing going with the crowd.’ This was in 2007, and there wasn’t a bad turn out: ‘it wasn’t embarrassing, let’s put it that way,’ Hemingway says straight up.

Something like that doesn’t come around often. ‘From the outside it must be quite hard to see’ he thinks, but at the time it was magic. The band piled into the back of a van, did the rounds of the North and the Midlands; they played the Rockgarden in London, and slept on floors. They’d take the names and addresses of their audience to build up a cult following. ‘Maybe something like this still goes on now, I don’t know’, he says. Actually, Hemingway’s fondness for sharing, for music, not just for making it big does seem different to us. They don’t seem spoilt. It might be that The Beautiful South have had their heyday. Like the docks, maybe they’ll never be quite the same again. But they weren’t about stardom. Listen to their songs instead: they’d always ‘Carry on Regardless’.

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.