For some strange reason, Hollywood movies often seem to come in pairs: Volcano and Dante’s Peak in 1997, Armageddon and Deep Impact in 1998, The Truman Show and Ed TV in 1998, to name a few. Now, in 2009, the Coen Brothers’ most recent project, A Serious Man, seems to be competing with Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, NY for preeminence in the more highbrow category of existential horror.

The films are strangely similar given that they were made and written independently of each other. Both are stories about timid and cerebral men who struggle helplessly as their lives unravel in the most excruciatingly depressing ways. It feels as though either story might have begun with the protagonist awaking in his bed to find himself transformed into a gigantic insect, as each film seems dedicated to little more than the goal of watching its subject squirm beneath capricious and overpowering forces in the world around him.

The protagonist (‘victim’ is perhaps a better description) of Kaufman’s script is Caden Cotard, a local theatre director in Schenectady, NY, who has little passion left for his work or for life and whose wife – who coyly admits that she sometimes fantasises about Caden being dead – absconds to Berlin with his daughter to become an enormously successful artist. Caden soon learns that he has been awarded a MacArthur ‘genius’ grant, but his efforts to produce a play that will stand as his lasting mark cause him to become disconnected from the world outside his mind, and his life takes a bleak turn for the surreal.

In A Serious Man, The Coen Brothers choose to sacrifice Larry Gopnick, a physics professor at a quiet Midwestern university who’s about to come up for tenure and who is happy with the way his life is going. Until, that is, Larry’s wife Judith announces that she plans to leave him for Sy Abelman, his unctuous and more successful colleague in the physics department. Passive like Caden, Larry lets Sy and Judith coax him into moving out of his own house and into the local motel, accepting their rationale that it would be better for the sake of Larry’s children. But Larry’s situation continues to deteriorate as he discovers that his children have been stealing money from his wallet, that his brother is slowly going insane, and that the university’s tenure committee is receiving anonymous letters attacking his character. Larry desperately seeks the advice of the spiritual leaders of his Jewish community, who offer him only indifference, clichés and irrelevant digressions.

It’s hard to shake the feeling with either film that there’s something mean-spirited about the manner in which the filmmakers slowly and painfully dismember characters whose only sin is meekness. Watching either film, I found myself with the uncomfortable choice of having to disdain the characters for shortcomings that I regard as excusable, or subject myself along with them to the film’s assault through my identification with them. Like two of the Coen brothers’ previous works, Fargo and No Country for Old Men, A Serious Man left me feeling duped with the frustrating sense that attempting to understand the film would somehow be construed by the filmmakers as indulging the same kinds of illusions of meaning that contribute to the characters’ downfalls.

I was left with the question: Why make a movie like this? Neither one, it seems, is intended primarily as satire or social commentary, as both films seem to be above passing any sort of judgment on the world that victimises their characters. Perhaps even the Coen brothers themselves would ask of us: Why see a movie like this? A former physics major myself who one day hopes to enter academia, I can’t help but wonder if I should be afraid of ending up like Larry. And then I return to the words of a wise man who once said, ‘No, Donny, these men are nihilists. There’s nothing to be afraid of.’

A Serious Man is released on November 20th.

The Steampunk exhibition at the History of Science Museum has been running for a few weeks now, and we’ve seen glowing reviews emerge left and right. It’s true, the exhibition’s combination of shiny brass-and-neon sculptures with their fascinating real-world inspirations is really very interesting. It could just be quite a bit better.

Don’t get me wrong – every single one of you people reading this article should go see this exhibition as soon as possible. It’s free and it’s short, so it won’t be a drain on either your wallet or your timetable. What it does, it does very well. It just doesn’t do enough, giving only a brief albeit fascinating glimpse into the steampunk aesthetic movement.

Let’s start with the name ‘Steampunk’. It’s an odd word, and whenever I enthuse about it to my uninitiated friends, I get odd looks. The ‘Steam’ part is easy enough to explain. The distinctive steampunk aesthetic is one of modern devices animated by antique technological systems. Gears, clockwork and the steam engine replace electric motors and fibre optics. Brass and cast iron replace plastic and aluminium. Think Jules Verne and HG Wells, without the dense prose and dubious characterisation. This part is what the exhibition does very well. Art Donovan’s ‘Electro-Futurist’ clockwork-encased neon lamps are worth the trip on their own. Kris Kuksi’s terrifying cathedral-tank (yes, really) appealed tremendously to my inner military geek. I was also deeply and pleasantly unsettled by Molly Friedrich’s ‘Complete Mechanical Womb’, which, all things considered, has a remarkably self-explanatory name. It’s a womb including baby.

I digress. The ‘steam’ part of the steampunk exhibition is very well done.  What about the ‘punk’? Time for a history lesson perhaps.‘Steampunk’ isn’t just an aesthetic movement, it’s a literary genre. There’s a lot of debate about how far back the genre goes, and whether Jules Vernes et al are part of the genre or just inspirations, but steampunk literature in its modern form didn’t become popular until the publication of The Difference Engine in 1990 – a novel set in a dystopian London, part of an alternative history where Charles Babbage actually finished his giant steam-powered calculator and ushered in a clockwork digital age. The Difference Engine was written by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.  William Gibson, as the speculative fiction fans among you probably know, wrote another famous novel – Neuromancer.  Neuromancer kicked off the ‘cyberpunk’ genre, where amazing futuristic technology becomes a tool in the hands of oppressive, faceless corporations. The link isn’t hard to spot.  The ‘punk’ in cyberpunk comes from the rebellion and resistance of the protagonists, who refuse to submit to de-humanisation. The ‘punk’ in early steampunk was well, basically the same idea. Jules Verne, meet Charles Dickens.

Times change. Steampunk fiction has moved beyond its dark beginnings, and your heaving platter of clockwork goodness doesn’t have to come with a side order of grinding oppression anymore. It’s entirely possible to marvel at the cool brasswork without worrying about the destruction of individuality in the face of industrialisation. It would just be nice if the Steampunk exhibition mentioned any of this at all.  In the second room, where they keep the real-world inspirations, they actually have a big chunk of the actual Difference Engine itself – and no mention at all of the novel that makes it relevant to the exhibition. We steampunk fans may not have to be angsty haters of the establishment anymore, but I would have appreciated a little more context. So go and see the Steampunk Exhibition. Revel in the retro, but don’t forget – steampunk can go so much deeper than this.

Steampunk is at the Oxford Museum of Science until 21st February. Admission is free.

Douglas Adams’ dissatisfaction with his last published novel was well known. Mostly Harmless, the fifth and final part of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy ‘trilogy’ was, he said, ‘very bleak’, and he often spoke of his plans to amend the story with a further book. Alas, in 2001, Adams suffered a heart attack and died, leaving behind a grieving widow and millions of frustrated fans.

Eight years later, however, and those fans have been provided the opportunity to re-enter the Hitchhiker universe, in the form of And Another Thing… by children’s author Eoin Colfer. Well-known for his Artemis Fowl series – featuring a young criminal mastermind who battles and then befriends the high-tech

fairy society living beneath our feet – Colfer is no stranger to strangeness. An expert in combining the genres of fantasy, comedy and science fiction, he appears to be perfectly qualified to take the Hitchhiker baton and run with it.

Unfortunately, while Adams was content to stroll leisurely along with the story, Colfer tries to go too quickly, fumbles the changeover, drops the baton, and ends up tripping over his own shoelaces. Thanks to this increased pace, Colfer doesn’t really leave himself with much time to build up anything closely resembling a plot. This is despite And Another Thing… being more than twice the length of the first Hitchhiker novel.

He opts for an inexplicably odd tale featuring Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, as well as Thor, the Norse god of Thunder. A lot of time is also devoted to the Vogons – grotesque, foul-tempered aliens who continuously try to wipe the last remaining humans from the sky – as well as Ameglian Major cows, who literally ask to be cooked and eaten. None of these ever played more than passing roles in Adams’s books, yet for some reason Colfer decides to formulate a story around them. But there is only so much an author can get out of a suicidal bovine species, resulting in a lot of repetition and very little substance.

To try to hide this from the reader, he scatters wacky words and names with reckless abandon: some of them nod to the original series, but many of them are his own invention. But where Adams would seamlessly weave a few lines of relevant (or totally irrelevant) detail about the exotic species and characters into the story, Colfer either leaves them unexplained and undeveloped, or drops into our lap the occasional ‘guide note’, a stodgy block of facts that brings everything to a standstill.

And herein lies the problem. Colfer claims his intention was never to imitate Adams’s style, but it still feels like a fake Rolex, or a poor quality translation off Babel Fish (the website, not the actual creature from the Hitchhiker universe). There’s something cheap and tacky, and to be honest, slightly pitiful about the whole thing. The first five novels were characterised by Adams’s ability to mix flashes of comic genius with bizarre, baffling, colourful nonsense. Unfortunately, Colfer completely forgets to add the first ingredient and instead fills the book with a murky, gelatinous porridge of charmless oddities.

It truly is a shame – there was life left in the Hitchhiker series. Now, I fear, it has been killed off for good.

Ever since my mid-adolescence, when I first began to amass the kind of catalogued mental system of popular music knowledge which aroused the distaste of a good many of my peers and probably no small number of the featured artists, I have been irked by a disturbing trend. It is not one unique to our generation, but it is one which has taken root in the popular consciousness to a greater degree than ever before. I am talking about the despicable crimes of ‘nice’ music.

Turn on a TV advertisement, browse Myspace, rip the iPod ‘phones from the ears of anyone around you; the result will be the same. Even a cursory delve into the confused jumble of present-day ‘alternative’ music yields a hefty proportion of ukulele jingle-jangle, fey little harmonies and incessant, nagging lyrical babble about nothing very much at all.

‘Nice’ music is music that does not strive, does not persuade or lament or rejoice but simply ‘is’; it is music that is content, and which teaches its listeners persistent contentment. Allow me, in good tutorial style, to demonstrate with examples. The worst offender as far as genre is concerned is the rather stagnant little country backwater that is ‘Nu(new? noo?)-Folk’. This movement has been kicking around in various incarnations for almost a decade now, and I won’t dismiss it outright. It has given us Sufjan Stevens and, on this side of the pond, the earlier (and better) work of Patrick Wolf. However, its down-home, acoustic aesthetic provides a perfect vehicle for a lot of worthless ‘nice’ music, which is broadly characterised by two things.

The first, a warm and fuzzy sense of mediocre satisfaction, is epitomised by Noah and the Whale’s Five Years’ Time. What kind of pop artist ‘no longer feels they have to be James Dean’? It’s wanting to be James Dean (metaphorically speaking) that keeps us away from jobs in Human Resources. Thank God he broke up with Laura Marling so he can get on with writing real music for people who don’t mind wearing synthetic fibres. This kind of stuff drawls ‘hey, fella, it’s okay to be what you are’. Try convincing Iggy Pop of that and then see if he can still produce The Idiot.

The second, a comfortable, mushy meaninglessness, can be found prominently in the work of arch-hippie bollocks-monger Devendra Banhart. There’s nothing profound in croaking away about yellow spiders and little monkeys, especially not when you sound like you lent your vocal chords to Tom Waits and he dropped them on their head.

Don’t think that this is the only genre where lots of ‘nice’ music is to be found; ‘nice’ music is found anywhere where music promotes the status quo or quiet self-satisfaction. Particularly guilty are the dumber varieties of electronic music where ‘vibe’ very often replaces artistic vision, and a gentle, friendly ‘anything goes’ mentality can often stifle creative tension.

I have no quarrel, also, with ‘pop’ in the strictest sense of the word, or with ‘happy’ music: the forces of conflict in music don’t have to be avant-garde, or political, or even particularly pronounced. Indeed, true bubblegum pop is where much of the great aspirational music is to be found; the post-feminist search for fulfilment epitomised in Shakira’s excellent ‘She Wolf’, for instance. All I am claiming is that pop music is an artistic medium of struggle; it is the search for happiness, or empowerment, or some kind of satisfying self-expression, never the culmination of that search.

While I’d be perfectly happy with a world where all music sounded like the Fall, this isn’t what I’m driving at. I simply ask that we require a little more from our music, and ourselves: that we fight the atrophying force that is contentment and take the risk of a little discomfort. At the very least, we’d never have to listen to Kate Nash’s grating interview screech again. Now, isn’t that something we can all work together for?

Translating any Greek tragedy is a brave undertaking, but this is especially true of one as complex and forceful as Euripides’ Medea. Edmund Stewart’s attempt is refreshingly enjoyable, with fast-paced, rhythmic dialogue coupled with some intriguing theatrical decisions.

His language is unapologetically archaic, and we are treated to “smitten” and “stricken” within the first speech of the play. Although this can at times be jarring, with Aegeus grandly asserting, “I am not without the yoke of marriage,” the dialogue on the whole is brisk and appropriate.

Stewart’s tour de force is the messenger’s vivid, visual recounting of Creon’s daughter’s poisoning. The description of her frothing mouth and contracted pupils, and final, haunting image of her skin peeling from the every bone does full justice to Euripides’ evocative original.

The stage decisions taken are also well thought out and successful. The play will be performed “in the round,” and although this was not possible to convey at the preview, the attempt to recreate a traditional Greek amphitheatre is an intriguing one.

The costume will be ancient, to match the language, and gradually dimming lighting will be used to reflect Medea’s gradual decline, culminating in an impressive-sounding death scene with strobe and sound effects.

Stewart has done his part in melding a unique translation with careful theatricality, but plays, and translations in particular, can only be as good as their cast, and how that cast deals with the subtleties of the script. Jason was unfortunately lacking from the preview, but Medea is unashamedly about its eponymous heroine, and Arabella Lawson is superb in the role.

Whether conveying fiery frenzy to Creon, pathetic pleading to Aegeus or sick satisfaction at hearing of the success of her poisoning, Lawson brought out the manic passion of the character throughout. She was also visually stunning, all in black, dreadlocked, bejewelled, and communicated both the masculine dominance and feminine deviousness that make Medea such an intriguing character.

Elsewhere David Cochrane was a strong and impressive Creon, a good foil for the frantic Medea, and Stefan Dimitiradis a calm and thoughtful Aegeus, but Lawson’s sensitivity to the language of the translation was not echoed so expertly in the rest of the cast. Her performance, as part of what is a courageous and captivating retelling of one of the great stories of Greek literature, mean that this Medea is, quite literally, bewitching.

four stars

Medea is on at the BT studio, 5th week, Tues-Sat, 7.30pm

Members of Oxford University Dramatic Society take on one of Shakespeare’s best loved comedies in this fresh production of As You Like It. With a magical stage design and full Elizabethan costume, it promises to be a sumptuous performance.

Cast members command the stage and stare earnestly into the audience as they deliver some of Shakespeare’s most memorable speeches. Jonnie McAloon, as the philosopher, libertine and would-be fool Jacques delivers his famous “all the world’s a stage” lines with wonderful nonchalance, reclining lazily upon the stage. McAloon shines throughout the performance, delivering lines with a punch that gives the play its enigmatically philosophical and humorous tones. There is good chemistry between all cast members and their sheer multi-talentedness shines through; Adam Bouyamourn takes his turn at Charles the wrestler, Amiens and Sir Oliver Martext, performing each role with gusto.

The love story of Orlando and Rosalind is beautifully done and Roseanna Frascona creates both the sexual chemistry and the sense of farce inherent in her ‘Ganymede’ costume, whilst retaining a sense of strong emotions lying beneath.

The director Maximus Marenbon has cleverly created a contrast between court life and the pastoral fantasy land of the Forest of Arden. The violence of Oliver’s torture at the hand of Duke Frederick contrasts with the peace and civility of Duke Senior’s meal in the Forest. The ‘mission statement’ of the play is to not neglect the dark, political undertones of the play, as well as encompassing the pastoral paradise of Arden and showing the collisions between the two with a brutal realism.

The production retains all the classic features of Shakespearean comedy; extravagant wordplay and innuendo run alongside cross dressing and music. It is a thought-provoking and funny performance which with the addition of lavish costume and a new score for voice and lute-style classical guitar promises to be hugely enjoyable whilst bringing new meaning to the themes of the play.

four stars

As you like it by William Shakespeare is at OFS, 5th week, Tues-Sat 7.30pm.

Richard Hurford’s new Play ‘Peach Boy’ takes the traditional Japanese folktale of Momotaro and adapts it for the stage in an excellent family performance of song, puppetry and action.

The only thing that let this production down was the singing. The use of song worked well within the script, bringing together ideas and characters in an ensemble of sound and movement. The use of the catchy refrain, the tone of which mirrored the tone of the action, also worked very well as an emotive and structural device. However, the quality of the singing itself did, sadly, jar. None of the cast had strong voices, rather their thin, reedy songs lacked diction and detracted from an otherwise superb production. 

The physical acting of the cast was excellent. Togo Igawa’s direction created a wonderful, stylised and somewhat surreal world evoking the original Japanese folktale. By using fabrics to extend and embellish movements, slow motion and physical caricature the surreal spectacle became delicious to watch. The exaggerated acting, especially of Elliott Quinn as Momotaro, brought the stage to life with an addictive energy.

The fusion of acting with transparent puppetry was a delight. There was no pretence to hide the puppeteers who created quirky, stylised and likeable characters which added a surreal and occasionally disturbingly dark twist to the action. The plays second half lost some of the jollity and slapstick light heartedness of the first, taking on a darker vein, most notably in the stand out scene of the production where swarms of fireflies engulf Momotaro.

The set, although simple, proved itself wonderfully versatile through the use of only a few props. With entrances coming from behind the audience the division between stage and audience was broken. The superb lighting and sound helped transform the simple space from inside to out. The costumes were vibrant, taking the traditional Japanese clothing and using traditional iconography to maintain the stylised scheme.     

This is definitely a production aimed at children. The characters speak to the level of children (an almost unspoken ‘boys and girls’ lingers unsaid at the end of the lines) the jokes are blatant, although funny judging by the reactions of the children there, and the interaction with the audience is excellent. One child felt so involved that she decided to warn Momotaro of an approaching monster by shouting, ‘He’s behind you!’ Yet, that was the only similarity to pantomime in this otherwise first-rate family production.