The underground world of the fleet-street archive – or ‘library’ as they call it in the business – has long been extinct, pushed aside by the files and folders, cutting and pasting, of modern day interactive interfacing. First premièred in 1975, Alphabetical Order by ex-Guardian and Observer journalist Michael Frayn offers us a touch of nostalgia with a glimpse into the bygone era of snipping and filing.
Frayn says that the library depicted is a compendium of the various other libraries he got to know during his time in the journalistic world, and the excellent stage design captures the chaos of such an environment. A maze of filing cabinets, cardboard boxes, upturned chairs, and scattered pieces of paper, desks chairs and coat hooks fills the entire space so that over the course of the two acts making up the play, you see characters run off to find corporal punishment quotes or council bi-election results, not hearing from them for large amounts of time yet still aware of their buried presence amongst clippings and containers.
The characters on stage mirror in their assorted zaniness the haphazardness of the visual setup. Lucy, played by established stage and television actress Imogen Stubbs, is an excellent and suitably dotty librarian, whose flirtatiousness and vulnerability are juggled well. The variety in character types is appropriately wide – like a newspaper with its news, culture, comment and sports sections – and characters such as the Oxford graduate commitment-phobic John (“All Saint’s College, or sum’in”) and the adorably enigmatic Arnold are brilliant to watch.
With such strong and diverse characters, the temptation to descend into caricature is ever present. And it is to the credit of the writing and the cast that this is avoided. Nestled in the comedy are poignant moments, centred on the nature of perception and performance. And through the visual spectacle of many characters on stage at one time, we are always aware of the different things going on. So, while Wally and Nora joke about the latter’s overbearing crush on “poor old Arnold”, Lucy in the corner reads out the figures of sexual assaults and murder victims. Life goes on as it has to in the office, and gradually we see the onset of cracks in the characters, cracks in the smiles as people become more and more disillusioned with this mole-like existence. 
It is a shame that after the quick witted visual feast that is the opening, the play slows down somewhat in the second act; though it is true that the huge surprise waiting for you after the interval, which earned a round of applause from last night’s audience, certainly leaves a lasting impact. The humour can be hit and miss, sometimes relying rather too much on tired and clichéd jokes about pubs and marriage and other such ‘nice’ things. Yet Frayn admits himself to having written parodies of successful plays of his day, constantly mocking the theatre and its conventions, so it is hard to know whether such flatness in Alphabetical Order is disappointing writing or conceals an artistic agenda.

four stars out of five

Alphabetical Order is on at the Oxford Playhouse until Saturday 23rd May.

Plays about milk addiction are often rather dull. But this one is excellent. It opens with Gerald (Matthew Monaghan) acting out an infatuated dalliance with a carton of milk. He moves convincingly, his maniacal face absorbs and disgusts us, and the audience are hysterical.
His role is in some ways easiest from then on: after the family meet for breakfast he comes back and has nearly lost control of his language. As the play progresses he completely loses speech. However, in the opening he has fully presented his talent.
The play is one of dark absurdity, bordering on the surreal. They seem to eat nothing but cucumbers. It examines the way Gerald’s small-minded parents, Leslie (Richard Holland) and Margaret (Ed Pearce) attempt to deal with the irregularity of their son. Fully embedded in the Homeric code, they obsess about the ‘shame’.
The humour is based around a pastiche of the parochial and around the trope of the controlling family. Leslie and Margaret’s daughter Susan (Amelia Peterson) brilliantly acts the resigned and obedient foil to the, effectively, teenage rebel Gerald. The greatest reductio ad absurdam is the structured family meeting (with minutes) which is truly funny and shows how the parents care for only order and discipline, all empathy left for their daughter.
However, while the stock of wit is large, Oliver Rowse has perhaps only spotted a small body of customs and human idiosyncrasies to satirise. Jokes often hit at the same theme: the parish mentality – ‘we’d never be allowed to the village fete’, ‘no one will buy my chutney’; the fact that Leslie, just like his son, hasn’t grown up – ‘trains are a lifetime commitment’; or occasionally simple invective – ‘they’re as plain as your sister’.
This shouldn’t worry us too much. No doubt the jokes are really hitting at huge social flaws – a society which demands that a milk addict should be trampled with cows has probably gone a little wrong. Maybe I should have been looking for parallels with our own society.
But I think the best thing about this play is the ‘types’ that it generates and the brilliant way in which the actors present them. Richard Holland plays an understated patriarch, often holding his menacing words back from the brink of full anger, which would be far too histrionic. Instead of being suddenly awed, the audience becomes more and more convinced by his character continuum. Ed Pearce has imported her well-meaning Edwardian disapproval from some of her previous plays, but allows it to mutate, and thus she is, as always,  convincing and engaging. The Doctor (Max Schofield) parodies that profession well, especially in his extended medical speech; Sergeant Napper (Ed Charlton-Jones) in turn offers a high-quality satire of his profession.
And both show that they have bought into this cow-trampling society. At least Leslie and Margaret haven’t done that.

four stars out of five

The doors open and the pro-Vice Chancellor sweeps in, flanked by a swishy mass of black-robed proctors. With impressive co-ordination for a bunch of academics, the procession crosses the floor of the Divinity School and sets up court at the far end. The procession is silent. The audience is silent. This is Convocation.

Only two elections merit holding Convocation: that of the Chancellor and the Professor of Poetry. Every detail has to be just right. Half-way through his first syllable, one of the proctors stops; he’s forgotten to tip his hat. Once the giggles fade he reads out the vote count, and in all of thirty seconds weeks of campaigning come to an end.

Ruth Padel is swarmed by a smiling, congratulatory buzz. When I finally catch up with her at the after-party in Holywell Manor, she looks more relieved than jubilant. ‘The last week has been a barrage of stuff, it’s been difficult to hold myself together,’ she admits, sipping a glass of red.

The controversy of the past week aside, I ask her if she already has plans for her lectures. ‘I will be thinking about science a lot. Coleridge described words in a poem as hooked atoms, and I would like to do something about words and atoms in a poem and how poems work,’ she says, a little uncertainly. ‘Those are the lectures. I don’t know yet.’

If it sounds a bit vague, that’s only to be expected: it was only after Derek Walcott dropped out of the race that Padel could be reasonably confident of winning. She has much clearer ideas of what she wants to do ‘on the ground’ though, and gets increasingly animated as she talks about them.  

‘I’ve got plans to work, for instance, with Wild CRU. It’s part of the zoology department here. Professor David McDonald is a really wonderful conservationist—he’s got a lot of ideas about involving science and arts, literature and conservation, and I’d really like to go down that path too.’

It’s partly this interdisciplinary enthusiasm which earned her such strong support during the nominations, but isn’t she worried that it’ll alienate people who prefer a more traditional approach to poetry? ‘What does traditional mean?’ she retorts. ‘Tradition is a big subject. We’re all using tradition. We’re all in tradition. And you actually take the tradition forward by going away from it.’

‘The good poems that are written now are the poems about our lives and what matters to us now. You don’t want poetry that’s in a museum—it’s got to be done in the language of now, with the ideas of now, but using all the things that’ve come before.’

Unlike the professors who’ve come before, however, Padel will be the first woman on the job. In this she has something in common with Carol Ann Duffy, the nation’s new and first female Poet Laureate. Unlike Duffy though, Padel had ruled herself out from ever being nominated for the laureateship, calling it a ‘terrible job’ under constant national security.

‘Carol Ann will be fine,’ she says with a firm smile, though she admits that she personally would be afraid of not writing poems. But the professorship, she feels, is different. ‘I hope I would keep private enough. And you’re not asked to write any poems for this job.’

Still, her ambitions for the role sound taxing – rather than limiting herself to lectures, Padel is determined to ‘bring poetry’ to all the colleges in whatever way she can. ‘Part of what I do, whether it’s in university or outside, is making people realise that poetry as it is written now—and poetry in the past —is for them, whether they study English or study, I don’t know, astrophysics.’

‘Every college is different. Would they like to talk about their own poems? Would they like me to give examples of the variety of modern poetry now and how to read it? How it matters to their lives , how you can find poetry in the subject you’re reading. I would probably work through some people in each college. Maybe it would be a poetry society, maybe it would be a drinking club,’ she laughs.

‘Poetry is something that brings together, like Orpheus. Orpheus with his lyre brought stones and animals and mountains and things to him. And it should be fun.’

There’s something infectious about her enthusiasm. Padel has a warm, crackling charm, a sort of  Pratchett-esque witchiness. Of course, not everyone’s thrilled by her appointment; some are still sore about the Walcott affair. But Oxford’s new Professor of Poetry is clearly determined to reach out. It only remains to be seen how the students respond.

Children and childhood have long been a source of artistic inspiration: their straightforward attitudes and way of seeing the world, uncluttered by the complicated thoughts and ideas that adulthood brings. It is this gentle simplicity that pervades the current exhibits at the Sarah Wiseman Gallery, a small art gallery in Summertown, geared more towards selling than exhibition, although it certainly doesn’t fail to showcase the works to their best.

      On display here until the end of May can be found the sculpted wooden toys of Ian McKay and the silkscreen paintings of Catherine Rayner’s Creatures series. Both maintain a childlike frankness that charms and intrigues.

      McKay’s wooden toys, well-crafted and mechanical (usually with handles that turn to animate the figures), are most definitely toys that are art, rather than the other way around. They often feature old-fashioned dolls or figurines at play, subverting their topics, such as The Three Graces Eating Candy Floss. It is in his work with driftwood, however, that Ian McKay’s skills as a sculptor and an artist really shine. The set is made up of small wooden ships, moved by handle, set in and around pieces of driftwood of varying size, the largest measuring some metre and a half in length and containing over twenty ships that move in sequence. The driftwood backdrops that form the structure lend them an element of desolate poignancy that contrasts nicely with the brightly coloured, childish boats.

      Sarah Rayner’s silkscreen paintings, collectively titled Creatures, deal mainly with those that may be found in a rural garden, focusing on hares, rabbits and hedgehogs. At times her artistic style tends a little bit towards the static, becoming reminiscent of Beatrix Potter illustrations, but in her best works there is an energy and vitality to her creations that lend them real power. In Eva, for instance, the hare is slightly abstracted in form, but the impressionistic nature of it captures an animalistic sense of the creature.

      The only letdown of the exhibition is how similar a lot of the works are. Driftwood toys are certainly interesting and strangely affecting, but the variations are mainly in size and minor details, rather than in overall appearance; two pieces may be identical save that one has a small model yacht and the other a small model liner. The same is largely true of Rayner, who sticks to much the same subjects throughout the series. Overall, it is interesting and strangely beautiful, but it’s hard to avoid the feeling that one gains as much from the window display as one does the entire exhibition.

As the name suggests, Awaydays centres on football hooliganism. Those looking for unadulterated violent entertainment in a similar vein to Football Factory should look elsewhere. In fact, those looking for any entertainment at all should probably avoid this completely. This film is not fun; it is miserable. More miserable than marriage, miscarriage and Morrissey ground together in a pot of genocide.

The setting for this film is Merseyside, naturally. In the grim early years of Thatcher, The Pack travel from town to town to engage in mindless fisticuffs with fellow football fans.

Carty (Nicky Bell) longs for acceptance into the group. He finds a means of entry through Elvis (Stephen Graham) – a bohemian amongst apes – who befriends him on the basis of their mutual appreciation of good music, and the opportunity to make an emotional connection with someone of intelligence. Despite mutual artistic leanings, both have divergent interests: Carty wants nothing more than primal release through sex and violence, whilst Elvis yearns to escape that very same vacuum.

To understand these characters, the director wants you to relate to the boredom and drudgery of their environment. In this respect he succeeds, only perhaps a bit too well. The scenery is awash with dull browns and greys and the plot moves at a snail’s pace, never managing to muster up much momentum. The film stretches your patience to its maximum, to the point where the prospect of mindless violence is screamed for. But the payoff never delivers.

The fight scenes are clumsily shot, never yielding the visceral impact that is demanded. The film itself is schizophrenic in its endeavours. On the one hand it wants to drag the audience through grit and grime, but at the same time it strives desperately for stylish cult-chic.

Slow-motion moments, pensive, wide-angled river shots and trippy drug montages are used liberally and superfluously. All of which detract from what is genuinely interesting­-the characters. The young leads play their roles superbly, creating wonderful chemistry and managing to portray the contradictions within themselves with complete plausibility.

The supporting cast fare just as well; Stephen Graham as the leader of The Pack dominates the screen in every scene he’s in, and Holliday Grainger as Carty’s sister plays her vulnerable character perfectly.

Despite strong performances all round, perhaps the most disappointing area of the film is the lack of understanding of the characters’ situations and their consequent behavioural patterns.

Carty for example leads a humdrum life working in administration, his intelligence and artistic talents in danger of rotting away; but he never shows any contempt for his lifestyle. He seems perfectly happy with his underachievement: he taps plentiful ass; has a sister who idolises him; and holds no financial worries. As such, his dogmatic passion to beat the shit out of strangers never sits comfortably with the audience.

By the end of the film this irritates heavily, clouding whatever message is meant to be delivered. Some scenes are deeply poignant and yet others boring and drawn out. Interesting setups fail to be mined fully for their potential.

The film gets top marks for effort, but below average for execution. It is noble in its attempts to require patience from the viewer and avoid simple gratifying conclusions. In this respect it might warrant a viewing; any semi-decent British output should be commended.

Though if you do choose to watch it, expect to want to punch it in the face afterwards.

Two Stars out of Five

I apologise. ‘Comedy’ is far too broad for me to put my favourites down here and not to have whimpering twats droning in my ear about how Caddyshack is ‘seminal’. (It’s not. You are just a twat.)

But, onward. Anyone under the misconception that comedy is only funny when it is somehow relevant to them only has to look at Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator for renewed faith in early comedies’ power to tickle.

This wonderful pastiche of Nazism includes the subtly (and wonderfully) named dictator Adenoid Hynkel performing a lovely bit of ballet with a big inflatable globe. Absolute genius.

This and the films of Chaplin contemporary Buster Keaton form the basis for almost all physical comedy produced today.

Despite the seeming dearth of genuine comedy talent in mainstream cinema in recent years, some gems have nevertheless emerged, foremost among them Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy.

Without a doubt, it contains some of the greatest hammed-up lines in modern cinema, whilst the romantic sub plot even (kind of) works.

And just last year, Martin McDonagh’s move from stage to screen produced the hysterically funny In Bruges, thereby proving that there is room for sharp and biting dialogue in amongst the temptation of star power to carry a film.

Doing comedy a little bit differently often helps too, and Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap exploits the director’s incredible (albeit anal) attention to detail, to ensure that the film gets every bit of the documentary style spot on.

The result? The viewer is immediately and intensely transported into the sordid world of Nigel Tufnel and co.

Choosing my absolute personal favourite, though, required a painstaking effort to decide which comedy classic to pick from the bastion of bloody funny that is the complete Monty Python oeuvre. In the end, The Meaning of Life won out with just the right combination of witty dialogue and absurdity.

I know everyone will disagree with me, so I say this to the whimpering twats-bring it on.