The Frewin Undercroft, a vaulted crypt-like performance space which belongs to Brasenose, makes an unexpectedly fitting venue for the Oxford’s latest production of Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit. It’s hot and dark inside; the seating is cramped, the set austere. Everything contributes to the audience absorbing the same feeling of being hemmed in that afflicts the play’s characters.

In a venue like this, there’s absolutely nothing for the actors to hide behind: no ensemble dance numbers, no stagey delivery to an audience ten feet away. Instead they must face the test of delivering the text realistically to people just inches in front of them. And in general, No Exit succeeded. All four actors listened well and supported one another. The casting was spot on, from the moment Jamie Randall opened the play with a short but well-acted appearance as the most insubordinate valet ever until the end.

Louisa Holloway was spiky and powerful in the role of Inez: she shows a great understanding of the character, and manages to be rather unnerving. Peter Drivas plays a sweaty, passionate Garcin and has some particularly good moments when revealing the dark side of his past. Olivia Charlton-Jones plays Estelle with great sensitivity to her character’s vulnerable side, and thickens the air with sexual tension.

The story was well told by the ensemble, and held the attention without any boring patches; at best, the performance was engaging and hilarious. However, I felt that sometimes actors spoke too loudly in what is rather a small space. I did occasionally come close to switching off due to excessive volume, but at least we could hear – and in fairness it could be argued that all the shouting was motivated by the dramatic need of angry arguments in a play where ‘hell is other people’.

Will Bland directed the play with great attention to clarifying the intentions of the characters. This was further enhanced by the movement, which was outstanding by the standards of student productions, as every move had a clear and illuminating purpose.

The set was simple but not bare: three leather armchairs, a table and a Buddha. It worked, although when the characters were sitting down it was sometimes difficult to see their faces. So try and get there in time for a front row seat. If you do, it’ll be worth it – this is a very thorough and entertaining take on a great modern play.

‘The theatre,’ writes the poet Christopher Reid, ‘is a big, ramshackle, blindly trundling machine. / with bits falling off it, it clatters through the generations, / more wasteful of lives than a losing army. / You fed it your love, and it gave you too little in return.’

It is a brave man who writes new comedy for the Oxford stage. First, you have to make sure that your audience will actually laugh. Then, even when they do laugh, you have to make sure that they don’t feel guilty about it. You have to entertain them and stimulate them. If you don’t, all your loving care and painstaking attention to detail will be summarily dismissed. There are few trades crueller than student theatre, and hundreds of hours of tender labour are crushed beneath its wheels. You feed it your love, and all too often it gives you too little in return.

Kudos, then, to Tom Garton for taking the beast head on. His new play Fourtissimo purports to be a comic ‘laboratory-culture examination of what it is to be a modern man.’ Into the Petri dish go a Roman Catholic priest in love with stripper, a politician with hidden sexual depths, a lawyer in a dangerously-long-term relationship and a maniacal journalist who thinks he may be Byron, or at least Don Juan. They all live in the priest’s flat, and discuss their trials and antics with the opposite sex in four scenes.

This has all the ingredients of a sitcom – even the Beautiful South soundtrack. And it is, to all intents and purposes, a sitcom. Garton is forthright: he wants to entertain his audience. Will he? Quite possibly. The four actors play their subverted stereotypes well enough, and the script definitely has its moments, even if both performance and writing are short on panache. The sardonic David, played by Alex Jeffery, gets teed up for all the best lines, but the hero of the piece is Rhys Bevan’s Jacob, the shy priest groping blindly for faith and nipple tassels. I did not see enough of journo John – ‘half demented sex-pest, half romantic poet’ – to form a useful impression, and his unknown quantity will be central to the play’s success or smarting failure.

But Fourtissimo is also meant to be thought-provoking when the laughter stops. All four characters do jobs that would have guaranteed them success and influence in another time and another place, but they are all in their various ways pathetic failures. Especially in their relationships with the other half of humanity. Women come to symbolise everything these four men do not have but wish they did have. In the end, though, Fourtissimo does not seem to cast a piercing light on the soul of the twenty-first century man. It has its thoughtful moments, but they are usually defused within seconds by Garton’s pervasive irony. This is philosophy of the Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps school. Fourtissimo should provide a good evening’s amusement, though, and Garton will write better scripts in years to come.

Verdict: My Oxford Family

Fourtissimo is on at the Burton Taylor from Tuesday to Saturday of 6th Week at 9.30pm.

It is exactly twenty-five years since Christopher Hampton first adapted Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses – then a little-known novel – for the stage. ‘It’ll never work,’ they said. ‘It’s a novel full of letters; they never meet each other.’ With the bloody-mindedness of genius, Hampton persisted. Alan Rickman played the Vicomte de Valmont, and Lindsay Duncan the Marquise de Merteuil, and the play’s success hurled it from the West End to Broadway.

The script is brilliant, chilling and amoral – no, immoral, for the central characters actively flout morality as the most unforgivably boorish of commonplaces. Valmont and Merteuil were once lovers, and now the world exists only as a chessboard for their skirmishes. Pride is paramount, but unflinching control comes a close second. Merteuil has been slighted by her recent conquest Monsieur de Gercourt, who has become engaged to a demure fifteen year-old still blinking in the sunlight after her convent education. She avenges herself by having Valmont seduce Gercourt’s naive fiancee, in exchange for a night in her own bed. Meanwhile Valmont has resolved to scale Mme de Tourvel, a married lady of the highest repute for virtue and beauty and a philanderer’s Mount Everest.

Rachel Bull’s cast do a very fair justice to this adaptation. Merteuil and Valmont drive the performance. Chloe Courtney must be a contender for actress of the term as she plays Merteuil with an assured economy and lightness of touch. Quiet, almost ethereal, she spikes her gentle demeanour with shards of jagged malice. Lines such as ‘a poor choice is less dangerous than an obvious choice’ suggest some commonplace Wildean termagant, but Courtney sidesteps the cliches neatly. She delivers Merteuil’s inexhaustible quiver of aphorisms with barbed menace and subtle poison. The French have a word for this kind of performance: sangfroid.

Alex Krasodomski-Jones, meanwhile, has torn up Alan Rickman’s textbook on Valmont and plumped for a much softer interpretation. Once again the obvious thing to do with Valmont would have been to play him as a swaggering rake burning testosterone like rocket fuel, the kind of man who would speak of ‘the real intoxication when you know she loves you, but you’re not quite certain of victory’ over a brandy-and-soda. There is none of this ostentatious manfulness in Krasodomski-Jones’ Valmont, though – he is fey, flimsy, a little sleepy. You might even go so far as to call him effeminate. This makes for a sensitive counterpoint to Courtney’s Merteuil, and the dynamic between the two is tense and compelling. Their ‘single combat’ is fenced out with chilled steel and icy flair.

The rest of the characters are not touched by the same stardust as the principals. Charlie Mulliner mars an otherwise convincing performance as de Tourvel with a bit too much bosom-heaving. Danceny – the fifteen year-old Cecile’s lover – and Mme de Rosemonde, Valmont’s aunt, are very credible, but some of the other actors look a little uncomfortable. It’s no big deal, though: it actually helps the play along if the characters duped by Merteuil and Valmont are somehow not quite real. My only concern for this play is that it might be a bit spoiled by the microphones and other paraphernalia of an open-air performance, when it would really benefit from the immediacy of a theatre like the BT.

Dangerous Liaisons is taut and poised. Watching this production, you feel that you are being treated to a ninety minute-long advert for some potent, high-class spirit. Absinthe, perhaps. Its cold-blooded depravity makes Dorian Gray look like the Little Prince. This is sexy, intelligent, elegant theatre, and if you only watch one garden play this term, make it this one.

Following the success of Bad Jazz and Stoning Mary earlier this year, St. John’s Mummers effortlessly bring their usual vitality and dynamism to Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost.

The deft abridgement of the original script’s obscurity contemporises the play, and is enhanced by the 1920s costume, uncluttered set and simple use of props. This sunny romantic comedy encapsulates the Trinity Term experience: four young scholars attempt to devote themselves to their studies, but are soon tempted by the promise of summery shenanigans with the opposite sex.

Director Philip Bartlett nurtures excellent performances from the seventeen-strong St. John’s cast of varying acting experience, led by Joel Phillimore who delivers a likeably playful and engaging performance as Berowne. The Mummers’ interpretation is refreshingly bright: the ‘ooh er, missus’ humour of the piece is brought to the fore of the sparkling dialogue through confident, though never patronising, delivery. The pudding of Shakespearean wit is by no means over-egged by nudge nudge, wink wink performances, but accentuated by quickfire dialogue and the evident enjoyment of the cast onstage. It is a delight, for English students  in particular to genuinely enjoy an Elizabethan comedy for being funny! Moth’s (Tess Ellison) and Armado’s (Fiona Guest) fast-paced interchanges are a highlight, although every scene, and set change, is as elegantly brisk as Shakespeare intended.

If Pinter’s pauses aren’t your cup of tea, the twinkling script of Love’s Labour’s Lost should have you packing your picnic basket instead. The production, staged in the beautiful gardens of St. John’s, has adopted a BYOB (bring your own blanket) policy, and runs from Monday to Wednesday of Fifth Week at 6.30pm.

Verdict: A Royal Treat

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Saturday – Pembroke W1 Blades – Ollie Ford

Friday – Bumped! Summer VIIIs 2010 – Rachel Chew

Thursday – Hugh’s Cat – Will Granger

Wednesday – Building Bonfires – Sophie Wells

Tuesday – ‘No Exit’, Frewin Undercroft – Ollie Ford

Monday – Time on hands – Ursa Mali

Sunday – Oxford university engineering science robot – Jeremy Wynne

Ever wanted to see a Japanese woman lay an egg? Do you occasionally wonder how a human corpse would look cooked, seasoned, and served with carrots? If so, head to the Magdalen auditorium this weekend. The college’s film society will be showing Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses (1976) on Sunday, and Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover (1989) on Monday. Although they are not being presented as a double bill, the two films have points in common: both centre on the explicit depiction of carnal love, both end with one of the principal characters losing his penis, and both were partly financed by France.

In the Realm of the Senses tells the true story of prostitute Abe Sada, who in the 1930s was caught wandering the streets of Tokyo, her lover’s testicles in hand. The film shows the relationship between the two, which ends in her arrest. We witness the couple making love again and again, in ever more sordid fashion, until the suffocating claustrophobia of the bedrooms is mirrored in their games of erotic asphyxiation. Oshima shoots everything in reds and yellows, and he gradually ups the saturation as the film progresses. In the final scene, Abe chokes her partner to death and robs him of his member; never was Japan’s patriarchal society more vividly emasculated onscreen.

The Cook… is another film about a woman asserting herself in a dominantly male environment. Albert (Michael Gambon) is a gangster and restaurateur, Georgina (Helen Mirren) his reluctant wife. While Albert holds court in his restaurant night after night, drunkenly abusing his staff and spitting at his guests, Georgina pursues a secret affair with a regular client, the gentle, bookish Michael. Albert soon finds out, and has Michael killed. In revenge, Georgina asks the restaurant’s chef to cook the corpse, which she then forces Albert to eat. The plot is bonkers, but played out in the confined space of the restaurant – where people are constantly consuming – it makes sense. As Georgina and Michael make love in the kitchen, the larder, anywhere they won’t be found, the link between food and flesh becomes plain to see.

So Oshima associates sex with death, and Greenaway with gastronomy (although he also plays Michael’s naked corpse for erotic effect). I hesitate to ascribe this to cultural differences, even if The Cook…‘s vision of greed and decadence is a caricature of Thatcherism. Ultimately, both films get carried away with smashing taboos, and as documents of sexual customs in their respective societies they are unreliable. Japan may have a history of truly out-there sex offenders, but Oshima doesn’t care why Abe loses her marbles, or whether she represents a genuine social malaise; by cutting the two protagonists off from the outside world and confining them to their bedrooms, he suggests that they are an isolated case.

Greenaway too is more interested in style than characterization. He hints at domestic violence in Albert’s and Georgina’s relationship, which he suggests may stem from Georgina’s inability to bear children, but instead of expanding this plotline he trots off into cannibalism territory. The best things about The Cook… are Michael Nyman’s stately score, Jean-Paul Gaultier’s costumes and the deliberately artificial set, which wobbles when struck. There is nothing realistic about the film’s environment or its characters. As with In The Realm of the Senses, it is a theatrical chamber piece, too bizarre for the outside world.

Werner Herzog is insane. Completely, utterly, bat-shit insane. From being shot in the stomach during an interview and calmly remarking, “We are being shot at. We should leave,” (worth tracking down on YouTube), to eating his own shoe for a bet (which he filmed and released under the fairly ambiguous title, Werner Herzog Eats His Own Shoe), Herzog has got several screws loose. It’s fortunate, then, that he also happens to be an inspired genius, whose intense love of filmmaking sees him churning out bizarre and stunning films on an annual basis. With Bad Lieutenant, Herzog has outdone himself, producing his best non-documentary directorial effort in over a decade.

Superficially, a simple plot synopsis gives no indication that this is anything other than a bog-standard thriller, as it follows a corrupt cop whose addiction to various drugs sees him pushed to the edge of insanity and way past the law. The tagline – “The only criminal he can’t catch… is himself” – is equally disheartening, as is the notion that this might be a remake of Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant. Thankfully, Herzog’s film is entirely original (borrowing only the title and a cop with a drug problem) and there’s no evidence here that he is in any danger of selling out. Under the guise of conventionality, he has directed a bewilderingly brilliant film.

Much of the credit should go to Nicholas Cage as Terrence McDonagh, the titular lieutenant, whose unhinged performance is eerily reminiscent of Herzog’s egomaniacal muse, the late Klaus Kinski. It’s the best thing Cage has done in years, as he discards his recent banal performances (National Treasure, Knowing and Bankok Dangerous, to name just a few) and emerges as the bug-eyed lunatic he once was. In 1989, Cage happily ate a live cockroach on camera for Vampire’s Kiss, and just over 20 years later, he’s finally unleashing that kind of crazy once more. Yet his drug-addled performance isn’t just mentally unstable – it’s also heartfelt. When he starves an elderly lady of her oxygen tube in order to pursue a lead, he inexplicably remains sympathetic. His insanity may be deliriously entertaining, but it’s also quietly tragic, as we can see his mental faculties gradually dribbling out of his ears.

The setting is also perfectly suited to Herzog’s sensibilities, as McDonagh travels around New Orleans in its post-Katrina squalor and decay. Weeds and moss seem to infect every street, while when an alligator lies on the road with its stomach burst open, none of the characters care to mention this fact. Indeed, reptiles are a recurring obsession in the film – McDonagh sees non-existent iguanas on his coffee table, and finds it mildly terrifying. This is nature as hostile and barely controlled, and William Finkelstein’s script completely aligns itself with Herzog’s view that the world contains only chaos, disharmony and murder.

Strange and unpredictable, Bad Lieutenant is the unfiltered hallucination of a 67-year-old Bavarian madman, and you won’t see a more thrillingly deranged film all year.