If Catullus was ever out of fashion, he is back with a foulmouthed vengeance. Ever since Ariane Gordji was left ‘shocked and confused’ after reading ‘pedicabo vos, et irrumabo vos’ in an email from hedge fund manager Mark Lowe – whether she was more appalled by his bad language or by his bad Latin is unclear – Catullus has been reveling in the limelight. An apologia from Mary Beard, typical ‘shockedandappalled’ anti-elitism from the Daily Mail (‘the literary equivalent of glassing in a pub-fight’) and fumbling nostalgic Classicism from the Telegraph: all grist to the poet’s mill.

But what does he mean when he writes ‘I will bugger you and fuck you in the face’, and why do we care? Because, and there is no getting around it, that is what the Latin says. There are three answers to this question, each corresponding to a different Catullus; and the answer the twenty-first century chooses may come to define it as a poetic era.

The first Catullus is a kind of Young British Artist: a poet of the toilet door, master of the obscene, a writer who farts at literary champagne receptions and savours the odour like a brandy connoisseur. This man is just downright rude: he uses vulgarity, as he tells us, ‘to arouse what tickles, and I don’t mean in little boys, but in those hairy men who can scarce stir their hard limbs.’

James Methven, however, would have us take a more sympathetic view. His Catullus – our second Catullus – is a man of tender passions, of mordant wit, and above all of satirical playfulness. He uses obscenity to give his poetry vigour and charm; and Oriel don Methven’s first volume of poetry Precious Asses, winner of the 2009 Purple Moose Prize, breathes with this spirit. The poems in this book play coquettish games with the Latin originals, all roaming hands and fumbling kisses, resulting in something that is not quite translation and not quite original verse. What it is is fun. Lots of fun. Methven picks up Catullus and bounces along with him, until the famous line about sphincters and mouths comes out: ‘As I said. Arse. Then Mouth. Both of you. Enjoy.’

These poems are (mostly) quite readable without a copy of Catullus to hand; so independent is the poet’s soul. Playing with poem 15, where Catullus brings down dire imprecations upon his friend’s head should he fail to look after a pretty boy, we have ‘For Your Eyes Only’, a poem that could have been born in a room over Oriel’s main quad:

‘…should the two of you pop out
To the pool, say, or for some food, or – wince – a club, keep him safe,
Watch out for the lads who strut the High, the Broad, Carfax and the Turl…’

Methven banters away in this vein for a few more lines, then, in a very Catullan sea-change, raves:

‘…Now,
Should your cock-crazed sphincter-sick bum-sex-obsessed mentality
Goad you to pull off the greatest crime of all – betrayal –
Here’s my warning fairly given: I’ll stake you in the quad, for all to see
Face-down, arms bound, and legs stretched wide wide wide apart
It’ll be time for your arse-hole to say, ‘Hello!’ to Mr Radish and Mr Mullet-Fin.’

A reader familiar with the Latin will see that Methven’s instinct is to expand and vivify the most striking nuance of the verse, often at the expense of the more poetic and formal registers. It is not that Methven-Catullus becomes monotonous – on the contrary, he shows himself sensitive and tender in adapting Catullus’ adaptation of Sappho in the excellent Obsession – but rather that he does not hit all the spots that the Roman Catullus does. His avatar of the poet sings the blues beautifully – This Year’s Crop of Kisses, inspired by poem 48, belongs in a smoky New Orleans bar – but rarely follows the Latin into its loftier reaches. Methven’s Catullus sounds like nothing quite so much as Nick Cave.

Another obvious aspect of the poetry lost in this translation is its metre. This is more understandable: it is a long, long time since experiments like Tennyson’s ‘Oh you chorus of indolent reviewers’ were fashionable. Yet where Tennyson and a hundred versifiers like him missed the rampant fun of Catullus, Methven misses his ingenuity and refinement. ‘Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo’ is, like so many of Catullus’ shorter poems, written in a tremendously tricky metre called the hendecasyllable, and this is important: the poet is squeezing visceral invective into an intellectually demanding verse form. The raw feeling is broken up and polished, and then reassembled into lines that skim like stones over the surface of water. John Donne – recently voted the nation’s second favourite poet in a BBC poll – describes the process of writing in verse in these words:

‘I thought, if I could draw my pains
Through rhyme’s vexation, I should them allay.
Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce,
For he tames it, that fetters it in verse.’ [from The Triple Fool]

This third Catullus is a poet of supreme control, handling thought and emotion with the delicate tools of lyric metre, linguistic registers and literary allusion. And it is this focus, this intensity, this mastery, that could make Catullus relevant and interesting to the twenty-first century, and in turn make our generation relevant and interesting to the future.

Clever verse, if written with strength and vigour, is anything but dry: its feelings and attitudes are tempered, refined, given new degrees of subtlety. James Methven rants and raves and cries and swears and teases as well as Catullus himself, but he is missing Catullus’ hypnotic intelligence: an intelligence that will never go out of style.

It’s not often that an ostensible children’s film receives as much attention from the critical community as has ‘Where The Wild Things Are’, but then the adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s beloved storybook is the kind of movie that only comes around once in a very long while: a family picture that is also a bona fide work of art, as essential viewing for adults as kids, yielding riches galore for every potential audience. Its narrative is deceptively simple, following troubled seven-year old Max as he escapes from the pains of his family life into a fantastical world populated by gigantic furry monsters who crown him their king, only to discover that this alternate existence is not protected from the same anxieties that confront Max back home. 

The signs were always auspicious that this project would produce something special, from the singular beauty of the source text to the creative talent hired to realise it onscreen. Employing Spike Jonze, a director most famous for his background in bizarre 90’s music videos and the superb ‘Being John Malkovich’, was a risky move, but it has paid dividends. With a story so slight in its original form, someone with an expansive imagination was obviously needed to fill in the narrative and visual gaps, and Jonze succeeds admirably on both accounts. His accomplishment is fully evident in the exquisite design of the film. Take the island where it plays out, an inspired mix of the familiar and the surreal, with shots of woodland canopies giving way to desert vistas home to a shaggy dog hundreds of feet tall. It is this combination of the everyday and the otherworldly that perfectly encapsulates the wide-eyed wonder of childhood, where the world is not yet wholly mundane, but still capable of being an alien and extraordinary place to an inquisitive young mind.

The wild things are even more impressive, brought to life through a seamless blend of animatronics, CGI and good old-fashioned men-in-suits waddling about, which gives the beastly co-stars a physical presence that enhances both their magic and their danger.

And make no mistake, there is a very pronounced element of darkness to both the creatures and the film as a whole that is pleasingly reminiscent of Terry Gilliam’s great children’s films from the eighties like ‘Time Bandits’ and ‘The Adventures of Baron Munchausen’. The script is to be applauded for being one of the most unsentimentally accurate depictions of the childhood psyche that this reviewer has seen. It evokes not only the joyful abandon of childhood games, but also the acute sensation of betrayal that can sour one’s family relationships at that age, and the horrified fascination with death and the inevitable end of everything that I can recall fretting about myself. ‘We’re big guys,’ one of the creatures answers Max when the boy asks him if he knows that the Sun will someday die, ‘we don’t have to worry about little things like the Sun.’ Yet it is said with so little conviction that we are made to recognise that this fantasy world doesn’t hold the solution to Max’s problems. That it cannot hide him from the threats posed by reality.

In fact, the overwhelming impression that I came away from the film with was that it is essentially, even surprisingly, sad. Indeed, at points I thought the melancholic tone was a little too overbearing, the bickering, weeping and existential crises of the wild things becoming so frequent that it is possible to imagine this film as being what Ingmar Bergman might have produced had he ever made a children’s film. But for much of its running time it is also utterly enchanting, balancing sequences of visceral energy such as a ground-shaking dirt clod fight with moments of heartbreaking poignancy. ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ might not prove to be to everyone’s taste, but its idiosyncratic personality and edgy subject matter ought to recommend it to those after an antidote to the bland family flicks usually offered up at this time of year.

4 stars               

A challenge to everything. That is my lasting impression of 101, the new professional show from Oxford alumna Asia Osborne, which challenges theatre convention, social norms – and review attempts.

The first offering from director Osborne’s devised theatre company ONEOHONE is not really a play. It’s a half-hour interactive experience that changes every night. The audience is just as involved as the cast, who prefer to remain anonymous to preserve the element of surprise.

We sent two reviewers. They saw two completely different shows. Adam Bouyamourn was at the opening performance:

The producer warns: ‘The experience is quite intense. If at any point in the performance you should feel uncomfortable, you are asked to remove this white sash.’

Eighteen people are in a room; nine of them know what to expect.

The half-hour play proceeds like a Masonic ritual. We, the audience, face the cast in a small underground room. There is a courtly dance, and we pair with cast members, singing some old, broken hymn. We are alerted to the presence of a Usurper. He fights and defeats the King, who is reduced to a snarling heap; we kiss hands with the play’s new monarch. The King – now a blindfolded Machiavellian Gollum – contrives to wrest control from the Usurper. There are four possible outcomes. What happens depends on the audience.

This is what it is like to be a cultist. Your immediate what-the-fuck reaction sublimates into demure obedience. The ceremony evokes a strong emotional response that is heightened by your participation. You find yourself as a character in a familiar but unspecific power game. It is only on reflection that you understand how the actors, Zimbardo-like, procured your obedience.

Your entrance and your exit are suggested as the door is opened and the cast, frozen in tableau, glance urgently towards it. No explanation is forthcoming, but the images are profoundly symbolic. You leave almost entirely unable to express what you saw.

101 is scintillating experimental theatre – it’s a strange, elegant, almost numinous intellectualization

of an interaction between nine people and nine other people. It is an exercise in challenging what theatre is – specifically, what it is to be an audience member.

Usually one sits, reaches for a snack, drifts off, shares a wry observation with a neighbour, even grunts appreciatively – but here, we are dragged, lifted, escorted, danced with, hugged. It is an audience member who, at the King’s whispered suggestion, asphyxiates a member of the cast; an audience member who defeats the Usurper; it is the audience who legitimises each monarch with the words: ‘They are loves I give to you.’

There is no stage, there are no seats: there are just eighteen people in a room.

We were intrigued. Who came up with the idea? Had anything like this been done before? And why, of all places, choose Oxford, a bastion of conservatism? Before sending our second reviewer we asked 101 producer Chris Thursten some questions.

Where does the name ONEOHONE come from?

The company name came from the name of the show – 101 – which is our
signature piece. The name denotes simplicity and the importance of fundamental principles.

Who are the people behind ONEOHONE?

ONEOHONE was founded by [Oxford students and alumni] Asia Osborne, Christopher Thursten, Elle Rushton, Ellie Tranter and Harry Creelman in September 2009.

Why did you found ONEOHONE?

The purpose of the company is to explore new, democratic approaches to theatre. The techniques developed in small-scale, intimate performances like 101 will feed directly into our larger, scripted productions.

What does the future hold for ONEOHONE?

101 will continue to be performed in Oxford and London on an ongoing basis while we develop the first in a series of full-scale productions. We’re looking to expand the company and are auditioning in January. Contact information on the website.

What are your main influences?

We admire the work of companies like Punchdrunk and Complicite.

Our curiosity was piqued, but not satisfied. Punchdrunk, the company cited by ONEOHONE as an influence, is famous for its interactive adaptations of classical texts from Shakespeare or Sophocles. 101, however, is the completely original product of its company, and has no single script, but several distinct storylines. Could the cast cope with the challenge of putting on a different show every night? Tara Isabella Burton reviewed the following evening’s scenario:

It is difficult to give a grade to 101. After all, for much of the show’s 45 minutes the roles were reversed.

Blindfolded, this audience member was first appraised, then adopted, then trained as a kind of bipedal puppy by one cast member who played the role of my master.

While in traditional theatre one expects to see the actors transforming on stage, undergoing psychological pressures that fundamentally change them, in this production it is the audience that is asked to do the same.

It’s a surprisingly effective transformation at that. At first eager to be a helpful part of the production, I gladly came forward, rolled over, turned around, and pawed at my master’s hands on command. Rewarded by a scratch on the head or a chime of ‘Good Boy,’ I began to take pride in my actions and try even harder to perform them as they grew in difficulty.

Things grew more sinister, however. My master was snatched away and I was left to fend for myself amid the sounds of violence and snarling. While I could not see, I could hear far less kind masters berating their audience-pets.

I was decidedly unnerved by one actor’s brutal commands – his poor ‘dog’, I fear, far more so. Although the pace grew somewhat monotonous after twenty minutes, this should not be attributed to the cast’s consummate skill, but to the energy of that particular audience.

As an exercise in forced transformation, 101 succeeded admirably. The concept was an interesting one, and the initial energy striking. The performance may well vary depending on their enthusiasm, but I imagine 101 can work its magic on even the most reticent of audiences.

four stars out of five

So far, the spell holds. 101 continues in London until 13th December; more performances from this company are expected in Oxford in the spring.

Reviews – Adam Bouyamourn and Tara Isabella Burton
Text – Maximus Marenbon