‘But, if Ye wish her gratefu prayer,
Gie her a Haggis!’

Last weekend a whole series of events took place across Oxford, celebrating the life and works of Scottish poet Robbie Burns.

Here we bring you photos of festivities at Balliol, taken by Cherwell photographer Wojtek Szymczak.

Balliol Burns Night Dinner: the piper leads the procession of the haggis to the High Table.

‘Gie her a haggis!’
‘To the haggis’ by Burns read out by Scottish Balliolite, Chris Miller.

Burns Night in Balliol: Scottish reeling in the Balliol MCR.

The bagpipes!

Procession past the Sheldonian.

Parading along Broad Street.

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The Ashmolean’s first artist-in-residence has recorded its redevelopment, from the beginning of expansion in 2006 to its completion and opening last year. While it’s not always clear if the medium suits the content, He’s work is striking for its human sympathy within scenes of mechanical mess.

The first thing you see is a wall mural, which manages to convey the noisy, dusty chaos of a construction site within a carefully balanced composition. Bits of brickwork, wooden planks and workers carrying objects to and fro make the image bustle with activity wherever you look, but each area includes just enough white space for it to remain legible. I wanted to stand up close to the mural, but unfortunately the curators have a placed an odd batch of laminated extra drawings all along the floor in front of it. These obstruct both the mural and one of the best mounted ink drawings, on the wall to the left: its sharp tonal contrasts, unique in the exhibition, create a sense of the new building’s vast depth.

He seems to have made himself a quiet observer of daily life during the redevelopment, and much of the work on show here – not originally planned, one suspects – comprises portraits of construction workers and museum staff. The exhibition information is keen to reconcile He’s ancient Chinese ink and paper techniques with his images of a contemporary and Western world, but this didn’t entirely seem to work. Particularly in the portraits, the use of traditional ink to depict people in crumpled suits in front of laptops drew attention to its own anomaly in a distracting way. However, the ancient world of the Ashmolean’s concern is frequently suggested too: one of the portraits shows a museum conservationist retouching a large vase which sits on her office desk, in charming contradiction.

The most striking works are the woodblock prints, which exploit the hard, opaque lines to emphasize the rigidity of construction scaffolding. The scaffolding itself often acts a compositional grid laid over each picture, contrasting with the fluid expressiveness of the workers’ bodies as they twist, bend, reach and loll about.

Indeed, He manages always to highlight the humanity of his subjects in their industrial surroundings. His images are intricate, and nearly always rendered in stark black on white. Yet there is something in the loose smudginess of the lines, and the slightly cartoon-like workers’ bodies, which conveys the friendly camaraderie between everyone involved. The overwhelming sensation is of human warmth, underlined by the myriad further portrait drawings included in the catalogue: one depicts a pregnant woman sitting quietly, another a man with Star Wars toys all over his office desk. The tone is softly humorous, and He seems to genuinely love the people he draws.

(four stars)

Image: Ashmolean Builders VI, woodcut printed with oil based ink, Weimin He

On the west side of Naples is a steep little park with winding paths. Near the spot where Vergil is supposedly buried is a botanical garden at the bottom of the hill: if you bend down to peer at the labels, you will see that every plant in this garden has been plucked from the poetry of Vergil, together with a couple of lines of Latin. It was here, among the rain-jewelled tamarisks and clumps of rosemary, that I finally got the brilliance of Vergil’s descriptions of the Italian landscape. To see, to scent, physically to grasp the object of a thought or feeling: this is the way we truly learn and understand.

Orhan Pamuk has chosen this mode of experience as the theme for a new novel stunning in its simplicity. Kemal has it all: a sinecure in his father’s company, a smart set of friends and beautiful, cultured fiancee. When he wakens to the impossibly good looks of his distant relative Füsun and makes her his mistress, he thinks his life is complete. Everything, of course, falls apart, Füsun leaves him, and he collapses into a pit of despair. Wracked by emotional and physical agony, he can soothe himself only by the touch and smell of objects that remind him of his lover. He snitches earrings, postcards, fragments of wallpaper, anything, until he becomes a connoisseur of memory, and assembles his hoard into a museum dedicated to his love. The painfully honest narrative is told as a kind of guide to this museum. ‘The ancient Chinese thought that things had souls,’ the narrator says, but it would be more exact to say that he gives little shards of his own soul to his exhibition. Each item recalls a host of memories, and so we are told the life-story of a love affair through cigarette butts and smashed cars.

Yet this is also a story about Istanbul. Pamuk’s deep affection for his home city suffuses all of his work, and it is not much of an exaggeration to say that he has done for Istanbul what Dickens did for London and Hugo for Paris – he has made her a living icon. In part of his memoirs of Istanbul, he sets out to describe what the Turks call hüzun, the city-wide melancholy compounded of nostalgia and unrequited longing that settles in the streets from time to time like a sea-fog. Istanbul may be European Capital of Culture this year, but the seventies were dark days of extremism on right and left. Kemal’s desperate passion for Füsun comes to symbolise this tragic love affair between the city and her ideals. Every object he cleaves to in his hunger for memory speaks as much of his city as of his emotions.

Pamuk’s delicate portrait of obsessive love has drawn inevitable comparisons with Proust, but his style is less subtle and anaemic, less slumbrous and cumbersome. When he describes hüzun in Istanbul, he reaches not for Proust but for the livelier wisdom of Montaigne, and that same spirited frankness is found in The Museum of Innocence. Kemal bares everything. It is such an immediate book that any reader could fall into it on the spot. Maureen Freely’s translation is limpid and simple, larded with the occasional homely Turkism: people of integrity, for instance, are called ‘straight arrows,’ and a woman is said to hate another woman so much that she ‘would drown her in a spoonful of water’.

A lingering, sweet melancholy drifts through the story’s veins; as Kemal wastes away with love, the old, old city about him is fraying at the edges. The streets are full of running battles, the televisions full of military coups, the beautiful chalets of the Ottoman nobility are crumbling in the sunset on the shores of the Bosporus. The sense of loss and the passage of time sometimes threatens to overwhelm the reader, but there are always slender moments of hope and humour to soften the darkness. The final thirty pages describing the composition of the museum are as sure of life to come as they are tragic, and the novel’s end is possibly the best passage of new writing I have seen this century.

This book is not perfect. I remain to be convinced that Pamuk can conceive real, living women in his books who are more than just the bearers of ideas; perhaps, too, the story dwells too lovingly on some feelings and moments. Yet Pamuk has written a book for anyone and everyone: a book that teaches us the thick magic that gathers like dust about china dogs and matchboxes, the little things we touch and love and forget that mark out the course of our lives.

Director Anna Hextall has put together an ambitious, effective and imaginative production of Peter Shaffer’s Equus, which will open at the OFS studio next week. Joe Murphy deals well with the complexities of playing the horse-blinding Alan Strang and Edward Fortes (as child psychiatrist Martin Dysart) is more than enough to match him, even if one or two of his mannerisms (such as running his hands through his hair at every stressful moment or keeping his hands on his hips when addressing the audience) could be toned down without losing any of the drama.

Helen Slaney and Tim Kiely worked well together as Alan’s parents – especially in the flashback ‘television’ scene. Slaney’s vocal range was particularly impressive, as she made a sudden yet believable transformation from mousy housewife to religious zealot.

Kiely’s performance was also strong but a habit of closing his eyes on certain words while speaking was a little distracting. Elizabeth Bichard (as magistrate Hester Saloman) gave a very strong facial and vocal performance, but at times the very stationary staging of her scenes with Dysart was a little restrictive.

Cuppers Best Actress Ruby Thomas plays stable girl Jill Mason and was strong in her opening scene (although, due to the shortened length of the press preview, we were given little clue as to how her character would develop). The scene involving the ‘horse’ chorus was atmospheric, even without the lighting which should add a lot to the whole performance.

Rachel Beaconsfield Press’s ‘horse head’ constructions gave the play a much-needed visual interest. Combined with the eerie humming of the ‘horse’ chorus they looked quite otherworldly and added a lot to the sinister atmosphere.

But what stood out most about the preview was the success of the piece’s direction – scene changes were fluid, staging was well thought-out. A challenging play was well executed. From the acting to the marketing this is a student play with the attributes of a professional endeavour and I am looking forward to seeing it in full next week in a setting that will do the production justice.

four stars

Equus is at the OFS studion, 2-6 February, 19.30 

CORRECTION: In today’s newspaper, an additional paragraph was included in this article suggesting that Anna Hextall’s production would feature no nudity. This was factually incorrect, and we can assure you that there will indeed be nudity in the play. Cherwell apologises to its readers and to those involved in the play for the confusion.