Hell is other people.

An ordinary room; three sofas; three people who know they are in hell. They are doomed to suffer for eternity, and doomed to suffer consciously in every moment of Sartre’s extended one-act drama.

In a play where your companions are your torturers the focus is more than ever on the characters, and a more unseemly trio would be hard to find. Garcin is an intense and unacknowledged hypocrite, a pacifist without the corresponding morally substantive actions, whilst Estelle is a petulant, man-hungry socialite, guilty of murderous actions that seem incongruous with her polite exterior. Louisa Hollway plays a hauntingly disarming yet vicious Inez, driving those around her to suicide through jealousy and frightening bitterness.

Attempts to interact with one another vacillate from sexual advances, to intimidation, to empathy, but they are never predictable and never successful. The three constantly compete for an unattainable power where, ultimately, what is left unsaid and unexplained looms as the greatest power of all. This is reflected in the bare and unforgiving set, and surely yet further pronounced in the small, claustrophobic space of Frewin undercroft.

Will Bland’s production skillfully simulates the force of these painful interactions between characters. The emotional distance and cross-purpose is frustratingly maintained even within the intensity of their characters’ situation, for those who find torment, not solace, located in one another.

Can we be completely honest here? Aside from a surprising amount of singing, Ridley Scott’s latest, Robin Hood, didn’t astonish me in any way. Sure, I saw the preview, the medley of wild savages in the deep dark woods, the twangs of bowstrings as they release their arrows, the primal yowls of battle cries and blood being spilt. But was it wrong of me to expect more? I think not. See that preview and you’ve seen it all, and so I spent most of the movie trying desperately to figure out which one was the lion, or the snake (oh, Hiss) from the 1973 Disney version.

I watched this film with high hopes-instead of relying on the age-old story of Robin Hood that has been played by everyone from Errol Flyn to, most regrettably, Kevin Costner, this Robin Hood is an origins story. Robin Longstride (Russell Crowe) is but a common archer, returning home after one of Richard the Lionheart’s crusades. However, when Richard is killed in action, an opportunity presents itself for Robin to assume the identity of a knight, and he does so, returning to Nottinghamshire to his fake father, the Earl William Marshall (William Hurt) and his pretend wife, the lovely Maid Marion (Cate Blanchett). Things are just starting to get cozy and domestic when Robin realizes that there is some do-gooding to be done-the evil Sir Godfrey (Mark Strong) is plotting to betray the English crown to the dastardly French. It is only King John’s (Oscar Isaac) promise of liberty and justice for all through the Magna Carta that Robin can bind together the disgruntled masses against the French once and for all.

If this plot sounds a little bit crazy, that’s because it is. Robin Hood is a fictional character, and while the effort to add some historical verity to the legend might be applause-worthy, it is decidedly less so when the plot is so confusing. The social activism twist seems just a bit too convenient and forced-did Robin try picketing before pick-pocketing? Even the acting is predictable-though Crowe’s charming assortment of accents is admittedly insane, and at times, a bit distracting, he does well playing his typical gruff character. And Cate Blanchett is also inevitably fine playing a feisty, intelligent version of Maid Marion that is no shrinking violet or damsel in distress. Mark Strong is excellent as the scarred villain, while Oscar Isaac plays King John with a whiny arrogance that left me wondering which rival was the lesser of two evils.

The one stand-out scene is the final battle against the French, as nothing riles the British blood more than a bunch of sissies trying to conquer our sacred land with their wheels of brie. This part involved 1500 people in the making, and it shows-it’s a clash of the titans as swords are swung and showers of arrows rain down into the sand.

Maybe this is just a story that has been told one time too many, but don’t blame me for feeling hoodwinked and wanting something more from one of history’s favorite heroes.

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Saturday – Ready for revision in the RadCam – Wojtek Syzmczak

Friday – Behind the scenes of the next Cherwell Fashion Shoot – Ollie Ford

Thursday – Sunset over the river – Lauri Saksa

Wednesday – Memorabilia sales after Oxford United are promoted – Wojtek Syzmczak

Tuesday – 47 Rectory Road Gardens – Ollie Ford

Monday – Punter – Ursa Mali

Sunday – What will Cherwell’s issue 5 center spread be? – Ollie Ford

        The 1930s is widely dismissed as a rather dour, floundering period in British history. The Gordon Brown of twentieth century decades you might say. A decade bookended by The Great Depression and the Second World War, W H Auden judged it a ‘low, deceitful decade’ from a New York barstool in 1939. Juliet Gardiner, in her epic history, is here to make sure that we do not leave the thirties at that. She has painstakingly trawled local record offices for the unheard voices. The result is a recovery of the myriad experiences of the time and, as ever in history, a reappraisal of what we think we know,

She brings to light the hope and prosperity that could be found in varying sections of society. Beyond the hunger marches and employment, visible to the attentive eye is also the boom of suburban building, the deluge of new Baby Austin cars, a golden age of cinema and the advent of what we know today as ‘high street shopping’. Her arguments are brought to life by the details: a working class man hiding from the means-testing man in the pantry, the vicar’s wife reading trashy novels, the rain-soaked Silver Jubilee celebrations which infuriate British Communists, who point out that ‘the children need food not bunting’, the disgraced clergyman making a living walking on hot coals in Blackpool.

Juliet Gardiner acknowledges that it was difficult to avoid filling the pages with the impending doom of the Second World War. Given that we clearly know what the future had in store, I wondered how much contemporary anxiety there was. She explains that some strategists may have had an inkling in terms of foreign policy, but it took ordinary people far longer to believe that it was really possible that they were entering a second conflict. Despair for them was instead principally linked to intractable unemployment. However, despite these problems, Gardiner also identifies a strong thread of optimism. As she puts it, ‘People really did feel that there was a key to all this. It was a time of planning, think tanks, discussion groups’.

In our own, less ideologically driven, age it can be easy to forget how polarised and tribal politics used to be. Apart from the shock value of seeing the emergence of Oswald Mosely, there was much other grassroots activity, like the popular New Left Books through which people would subscribe to socialist literature and form book groups for discussion. As Gardiner explains, ‘the twentieth century was a long slow process of coming to terms with democracy’. I ask her what she found most surprising in her research. To her the idea that Ramsay McDonald, a Labour Prime Minister, refused to see hunger marchers was deeply shocking. Overall, she believes that the key to understanding the decade is seeing how static it all was. ‘People did sometimes move house, but not far. They went abroad, but rarely’. Individuals were ‘so very insular’.

There are not many aspects of the 1930s that one would perhaps want replicated in our own time, but they did have some wonderful vocabulary. So which words would Gardiner bring back into usage? ‘Wizard, ripping and stupendous!’ – three upbeat words from a decade that we should remember was not so unrelentingly gloomy after all. Even Gordon Brown smiled sometimes.

The Thirties: An Intimate History
By Juliet Gardiner (HarperPress, £30)

Despite being engaged in an ever-changing industry, Iain R Webb is a nostalgic fashionista. I grew up spending hideous amounts on monthly fashion magazines, so I know Webb as Elle’s dynamic fashion director. He has now left to work freelance, most often for The Sunday Times, and to write fashion books. In these books that he indulges his passion for the 1960s. His latest describes the idiosyncrasies of Carnaby Street label Foale and Tuffin, who created quirky items that have now become a collector’s dream. In the popular imagination, fashion is an industry for back-stabbers, attention-seekers and primadonnas, but during our interview Webb could not be more kindly – not a glimpse of Anna Wintour froideur.

Webb is troubled by the current slickness, sterility even, of fashion. He describes his collection of photographs taken behind the scenes at various fashion weeks over the decades that ‘sum up the mess that is the international collections’. It’s the messiness and the spontaneity and the freedom of fashion that drives him. He goes on to lament the passing of ‘the olden days’ when pictures came from photographers all along the catwalk. Now one only ever sees that perfect photo of a dress from the end of the catwalk. There’s no movement, no awkward angles. It is this haphazard, creative boldness lost, that informs Webb’s disappointment with the present, and his nostalgia for the sixties.

Since the 1980s, Webb explains, youth culture has been dragging its feet. The 1960s saw a seismic change ‘from this very grey world into colour’. The 1970s glam movement was ‘really outrageous because it played around with sexualities’, then of course came punk. These days it has become ‘really difficult to rebel. I mean now everyone’s mum listens to Lily Allen’. He is relieved to still find people ‘who use fashion intuitively, subversively’. However, for the majority, the ‘mega-watt, loudspeaker message now is copying a celebrity, trying to live their life. There are fewer people trying to make statements – other than ‘I want a footballer to be my boyfriend’.

It makes sense therefore that Webb finds the trend for vintage worrying. Rather than innovating, the best people can do is ‘put it together in a different way. It’s that post-modern approach to everything. I feel the same about music.

Can’t they get any tunes of their own? It’s someone rapping over a song I danced to in the eighties. That’s culture now, just different ways of putting things together’.

Alongside this unhealthy lack of creative flair, he believes that there are too many designers finding success simply because they are ‘very good at packaging themselves. It’s that packaging that can now take you forward. I don’t know what is there with a lot of people. You can get a gimmick, do that for a few seasons, great success. Then you’re gone!’.

He identifies strongly with the insights provided by The September Issue, a documentary made to reveal the creative process of American Vogue, as Anna Wintour glowers and belittles her way through her editorship. He acknowledges that ‘ruthless editing’ is what makes Vogue so commercially successful but as a former creative director and presently a tutor at Central St Martin’s, he regrets that too many now ‘just see it as a job and want to go to this place for lunch or get that handbag’. By contrast, for Webb, fashion can be intensely moving. He loved the ‘powerful imagery’ of Alexander McQueen’s and John Galliano’s shows. ‘To me it’s the nearest thing to opera, the sense of it can just transport you somewhere else’.

Foale and Tuffin: The Sixties. A Decade in Fashion
By Iain R. Webb (ACC Editions, £25)