I have to be honest, when I first heard of this show – a musical plucked from the study of Jonathon Larson, composer of RENT; collated, edited and produced posthumously; telling the story (his own life story) of the life of a struggling Broadway composer – I was sceptical. After all, it sounds un-relatable: raise your hand if you’re a struggling Broadway composer… exactly. But from the start of this production it is clear that here is a story that is human and real. Jon is a normal guy, trying to live his dream against all odds, in spite of his fears. The problem is that you’re only young for so long, and Jon can feel the time ticking.

Powerfully taking the lead in this show is Hansel Tan. Larson has provided a demanding rock score, and Tan is more than up to the challenge vocally. His talent as an actor also means that the single monologue concept which the show employs makes the audience feel like a trusted confident; truly part of the lives of the characters.

The other cast members of this three header are equally brilliant, and it is rare to be treated to such talent (this is a professional cast). Edward Blagrove gives a fantastic performance as John’s best friend Michael. His characterisation struck me with realism and he had me crying with laughter during ‘No More’, a song demonstrating Michael’s new found pleasure with the finer things in life. Tan and Bonnie Hurst (Susan) provided additional comedy in the accurately observed ‘Therapy’ , a tense phone conversation portraying their strained relationship. Hurst deserves special mention in her own right for a beautiful performance, again bringing both sincerity and comedy to the show and skilfully handling all her character changes.

In summary this is a show with something for everyone to enjoy. If you love musical theatre, you will not be disappointed. If I had to make a criticism I would say that some of the songs are a little weak on the compositional side, but the strength of the cast and production meant I hardly noticed. The rock musical score makes it feel relevant to real life, and there are some beautifully subtle Sondheim references (and some not so subtle). I can safely say that this is the best show I’ve seen in Oxford- which means that if Musical Theatre isn’t necessarily your thing, the onstage talent, professional band, catchy tunes, and sensitive direction will make this a thoroughly enjoyable night out.
I shall be going to see tick, tick… BOOM! again. I’ll see you there.

five stars out of five

OFS STUDIO, 2-6 June, 7.30pm

A prolific writer of young adult fiction, and author of His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman has become one of Britain’s best-known novelists, as well as being an essential part of the Oxford literary landscape. We drifted from P.G. Wodehouse to gambling and drinking – hardly what I expected from the unassuming man sat before me – when I caught up with him the other day.

You’ve talked about how writers are motivated less by issues and more by fascination with a particular technical problem. What would you say are the technical problems which have motivated your writing?

The main one is what is has always been: the one expressed by David Mamet’s question that he says every film director has to decide, namely “Where do I put the camera?” it’s a very difficult one to solve, because there are a hundred different answers, and half a dozen good ones, and one perfect one, probably. One thing I’ve learned is that (to continue with the film analogy) if the audience notices what the camera is doing, it shouldn’t be doing that.

Past articles often note influences like Milton (HDM) or Victorian melodrama (Sally Lockhart). But since your work is generally classified under Young Adult fiction, have you been influenced by any other Young Adult authors such as Diana Wynne Jones, Susan Cooper, etc.?

Not much. Leon Garfield at an early stage, but I don’t think he was really a Young Adult author anyway. My influences are … Well, probably not easy for me to see, but certainly the great fairy tales, and latterly the Scottish ballads. Not that you’d notice.

You’ve criticised ‘adult’ literature for not tackling the larger questions like life, love, death, morality, and so on. Do you think literature needs to tackle these questions to have any worth?

No: look at Wodehouse, who said that there were two ways of writing fiction (and I paraphrase): one way was to go right down deep into the great questions of life, love, death, and so on, and the other was to do what he did, which was to write a sort of musical comedy without the music. And if anyone can do that as well as Wodehouse, wonderful. The sort of fiction I was criticising was the sort that did neither.

Why do you think Young Adult fiction tends to tackle early adolescence rather than the late teens?

Perhaps because it’s a more interesting stage: you’re encountering hormones and existentialism for the first time.

Do you think you’ll try branch out further into identifiably ‘adult’ literature, or realistic fiction, or even work more as an illustrator?

I hope so. It would be nice to spend time drawing pictures and getting paid for it; I can imagine few things more pleasant. As for the writing, yes: I’d like to do that. In fact I’m already working on something that seems to expect most of its readers to be grown up.

What advice would you give to us Oxford undergrads to get the best out of life here, and especially to any budding writers?

To get the best out of life here …Good grief. There’s plenty of it about, so indulge. Give yourself some thing to remember. Fall in love. Fall out of love. Gamble. Get drunk. See how long you can stay awake. Go for long walks at night. Discover what you’re afraid of doing, and then do it.

And finally, anything you can tell us about the Book of Dust? Will we be seeing it soon?

Not soon. The appropriate adverb would be ‘eventually’. It’s growing, but I’m encountering complexities that seem to be making it longer than I thought it would be.

Genital sweets, tit-sucking, cross-dressing, and nun orgies – I’d expect no less from Oriel’s 24 hour play. Writing and performing a play in 24 hours is not any easy task for a group of fourteen actors, especially when you are basing your play on the day’s newspaper titles.

Because this year was the 5th anniversary, the headlines were replaced by whatever material was contained in papers delivered that day at the international psychology conference in San Francisco. For those of you who mistakenly think the play lasts 24 hours, it is the creative process which actually takes 24 hours. Beginning from scratch, we write and perform The Annals of Tathituth.

Research papers with titles such as Beyond Orgasm: Males’ Exposure to Pornography provided the basis and the inspiration. We start working on the script at 5 pm the evening before, splitting off into small groups and then sharing our findings. The suggestion of an Alice in Wonderland-style reworking of the Madeleine McCann story (complete with Portuguese tapas saying ‘Eat Me’ and ‘Drink Me’) is suitably abandoned in the name of decency. Instead, within the next couple of hours, a play starts to take shape set in an alternative universe governed by Sir Alana, in which touching is forbidden, and hands must be removed if touching occurs, by a series of orgiastically-inclined nuns.

The actors and writers work alternately on writing and rehearsing the different parts of the plot. This process finishes at midnight on Friday. A 7am start fuelled by inordinate amounts of coffee, and Sainsbury’s Basics biscuits prompt the next day’s work, where rehearsals take place until the 5pm performance, which takes place on the lawns.

The end performance of The Annals of Tathituth is a surreal storyline revolving around an Apprentice-style dictatorship governed by Sir Alana. Sir Alana has forbidden touching, and the opening scene involves a nun chopping the hand off of a prisoner, Tathituth. An alternative plot involving a crazed menopausal mother and her son, who is trying to advertise his new brand of genital sweets ‘Fruity Fruity Cunty Chebs’, provides an even more surreal sub-plot. The menopausal mother spends most of the play suckling a sheep’s head to her (his) breast and swathed in bloody rags and cheap lipstick, while performing a series of inexplicable monologues about Italian prostitutes or her homosexual son.

Along the way, a threesome involving three nuns provides another highlight. Music, a gin-drinking, Sex and the City-obsessed jailor called Betty Swallow (she swallows!), and several minor dance sequences add to the evening’s entertainment. Having to suckle John-Mark Philo’s blood-coated titty was my personal highlight, as I played the Lolita-esque lover of Tathituth. The play ends to a rather grim sing-along of Mamma Mia (I say grim because most of the cast is covered in red soap or bananas). Putting on a play in 24 hours really is challenging, but the process and the end performance is such fun.

Terminator Salvation has all you would expect from an action film. A plot concerning the end of humanity as we know it. Special effects that drip endlessly from the screen. And swathes of self important American heroes growling one-liners, exploding things and generally saving the world. The film’s complete lack of ambition to deviate from set formulae makes for a deliriously dull experience.

It is 2018 and humanity is yet again on the verge of extinction. John Connor is leading the human resistance against Skynet (the robots). His leadership, however, is affected by the ambiguous appearance of a half-human, half-machine Marcus Wright. After initial suspicions and distrust, the duo will embark on a journey to uncover the terrible secrets of Skynet…

The weakest aspect of Terminator is its script. The plot is predictable, written more to cater the endless array of CGI-effects rather than to convey a meaningful story. The characters speak in cliches-‘Come with me if you want to live’-and fail to evoke any sympathy. The survivors could as well have been the machines.

The script limits any opportunity for the actors to elaborate on their roles. For example, John Connor’s wife is a medic and is pregnant-but her lines are limited to mechanically analysing patients. The audience is never given a chance to empathise with her circumstances or feelings. The only delight that comes from spending two hours in the cinema is the strong and moving cameo Helena Bohnam Carter has at the beginning of the film.

Terminator: Salvation fails to strike a balance between the special effects and the core plot of the movie. We are bombarded with loud noises, brash graphics and long fighting sequences. Although indeed, impressive, this has all been done before and Terminator fails to breathe any excitement into the war between Skynet and humanity, and is anything but a worthy follow-up on the Terminator franchise.

The film is painfully American in style, with an overt celebration of the badly-developed protagonist. If you last more than an hour of this unsalvageable, cliched movie; take satisfaction in your abnormally high tolerance for bad writing.

One Star

Oscar Wilde pops up in Trinity as surely as Garden parties and Summer Eights. Yet despite this predictability there is always something cheering and enjoyable about it. So long as it is carried out with a good degree of enthusiasm and buoyancy, we lap it up like a good glass of Pimm’s.

Becky Threlfall’s Lady Windermere’s Fan, showing at the Keble O’Reilly in 7th week, meets these requirements with aplomb. From the opening scene we are plunged into a world wallowing in plummy accents and posh frocks; it’s hard to go wrong. Lady Windermere’s (Alexandra Hedges) veneer of class seeps with the anxiety of her crisis. Jamie Coreth’s Lord Darlington weaves through his treacly compliments and glides over Wilde’s aphorisms (which may sound jilted in less competent hands). ‘I can resist everything except temptation’ he smarms. Phoebe Thompson, as the Duchess of Berwick, raises the bar with terrific authority as she wryly stirs up rumour and scandal. All in everyone’s best interests of course.

The play is one of Wilde’s better creations, seething with dramatic irony. The value of truth takes a fair hammering as he sets up copious deceptions reaching towards an unpredictable and ultimately unresolved comic climax. Christine Taylor has no trouble in portraying the sultriness of the impossibly callous Mrs. Erlynne. Jaroslav Fowkes (Lord
Windermere) manages well the awkwardness of his hopeless situation bound by the competing obligations of kindliness, honesty and family.

The show falls shy of brilliance as some of the performances are uneven (though never distractingly so) and with a week or so to go there are some barely mentionable hiccoughs in the delivery of certain lines. But even so, as this likeable cast relax into their four day stint, this should become a smooth and effective rendition. If you can afford or need to unwind as term draws to its close, I think this should do the trick.

As the Mother of a Brown Boy explores the life and early death of Mischa Niering, killed in a crash whilst fleeing the scene of a failed robbery at Tiffany’s. As the title suggests, the play is unashamedly polemical in its support of Mischa, unsurprisingly given that he was a member of its acting company Chickenshed and his mother, Karen Niering, was heavily involved in the production. Nonetheless, it attempts to get to the root of the choices that ultimately led to Mischa’s death and at the same time act as a meditation on society, identity and race more widely.

The production makes heavy use of physical and musical theatre, with dance, video and song all making an appearance. For the most part this worked well, in particular by drawing a contrast between the impersonal bureaucracy of the coroner’s court (shown only in video) and the Mischa’s human relationships, expressed through dance and song. Also effective was the use of set: fifteen white boxes, which the cast climbed and danced over under around and through. As the boxes increasingly came to physically constrain Mischa, the implication was that they represented the less tangible but equally real boxes he was put in by society, but the suggestion never felt heavy-handed, even when they were finally used to signify his coffin. The only unsuccessful element was the use of rap, which felt jarring and forced. In particular, the skit on The Declaration of Human Rights, clearly intended to express righteous anger, was unintentionally hilarious, sounding like an overenthusiastic politics teacher trying to connect with the ‘yoof’.

The main weakness of the production, though, is the script, which often rings false. Whilst Mischa’s dances with his mother seemed an utterly natural expression of love, her monologue was sometimes extremely clunky. Phrases like ‘you needed your black father in order to identify yourself’ or ‘when did the colour of his skin become an issue’ read more like statements from a governmental think-tank on race than the heartfelt soul-searching of a grieving mother. The burning questions for the audience are what drove Mischa to crime, and why society allowed him to fall through the cracks, but we are neither offered any real reasons for his involvement in gang activity, nor given a searing indictment of police or societal oppression, and the result is a flat production, which undermines the energy of the powerful true story with the rehashing of old clichés.

Having said that, it would be impossible to deny that As the Mother of a Brown Boy remains emotionally powerful. At the conclusion of the play, we are shown a series of photographs of the real Mischa, a reminder, if any were necessary, that the events of the drama had an all too strong basis in reality. It was a laudable effort by Chickenshed to commemorate of one of their own, and the more beautiful moments of dance and song came across as joyous celebration of Mischa’s life. However, in falling back on platitudes and clichés, they fail to really explore his individual identity, and thus fail to do complete justice to his memory.

three stars out of five