Max Payne, a New York City cop whose life is torn by tragedy, plunging him into a world of vengeance and reckless bravado. Beginning life as a shoot ‘em up action game in 2001, this gritty story of corruption and vendetta is the latest of its kind to undergo transition to the silver screen. While these may sound like promising beginnings for the development of an action thriller, the end result does not necessarily live up to the hype.

One of the inherent problems with the development from game to cinema is that the production team must often begin with either an absurdly convoluted or a completely absent plot structure. The adaptation of Doom, for example, as most viewers quickly realised, struggled to extract even ten minutes of narrative from the original game, which was specifically designed as a monster-smashing shooter. Similarly, Tomb Raider failed to really achieve any integrity as a stand-alone cinematic creation. Cynics might argue that what success Tomb Raider achieved was carried largely on the chest of Angelina Jolie.

In the case of Max Payne, however, there are unusually rich pickings to be made from the original in constructing a narrative for the cinema format. Clearly the total content of the original would have proven too unwieldy to transfer into a cinema adaptation. Nevertheless, there are some worthy attempts made to re-organise the plot and introduce new explanatory devices – perhaps most notably the demonic visions associated with use of the drug Valkyr. Drawing on the style of films like Sin City, Moore recreates much of the brooding atmosphere of the original. Even so, its visual appeal is not complemented by any rich character development, hence robbing the film of the edgy tension it might otherwise have achieved.

Devotees of the original game may appreciate the numerous references to familiar characters and locations that John Moore places throughout the film, perhaps being able to retain greater interest in the story’s development. Nevertheless, the fact remains that Max the movie is altogether more disjointed than its game noir counterpart. There is perhaps not enough attempt made to string together the narrative chunks extracted from the original material, and while some parts may understood by the knowledgeable viewer, the plot may at times seem too much like an ill-fitting jigsaw for the uninitiated to follow.

These flaws aside, the film should have had enough basic grit and style to succeed as a reasonable blockbuster, if only it had been blessed with a compelling lead player. All of the game’s original appeal lay in the dark character of anti-hero himself, Max Payne. Wahlberg produces a fairly steady, but altogether too flat performance, never really conveying the desperate deterioration of the central character’s state. Rather than reaching a cathartic crescendo, the film simply peters out, with the viewer left wondering whether they ever really cared about the protagonist’s fate. This criticism reflects the wider problems of the film, which largely squandered the great potential to be found in the original.

Two stars

‘The audience wear masks?’ I was assured this was correct by the producer as she smiled knowingly to herself. This was the first of many surprises. The next came when I had put on said mask and was exchanging sheepish glances with other, similarly masked, figures in the semi-darkness of the antechamber; unsure whether we were about to witness a play or embark on some strange rite of initiation. From behind us came the sound of raised voices and before I could grab my notebook I found myself shunted, rather unceremoniously, through a door by a surly Lord Montague. One glance at his enraged face convinced me it was probably best to cut my losses and leave pen and paper behind- along with many of my assumptions about what constitutes theatre.

The rest of that strange, wonderful, intoxicating performance is a little hazy. On reflection I feel like Alice returned from her tumble down the rabbit hole into the daylight of the everyday world. Those of you familiar with Shakespeare’s original, compulsory if you’re going to enjoy this production, will have already noticed that my coverage does not begin with those immortal lines, ‘Two households both alike in dignity’. This is not because of editorial cutting but instead a process that can best be described as a brutal savaging, in the most positive sense, of the canonical text. The aftermath of Tybalt’s death is presented before the fatal duel, the masque where Romeo and Juliet first cross paths degenerates into the rowdy fight between the two households on the streets of Verona. Narrative time and space are subverted into a whirling ballet that enthrals and bewilders the audience in equal measure. The overwhelming sense is one of a chaotic dance between the borders of brilliance and madness, literally as well as figuratively when I saw a fellow audience member seized and forced to join in with the dancers at the Capulet ball.

However the well known lines give the listener something to hang on to and prevent the performance drifting into incoherence. This is something worth stressing. The production will not be an evening of light entertainment; you should come prepared to have to work to get something out of it and also prepared to participate. Most of the time there are at least two scenes being acted out simultaneously in different parts of the room; it is the exception rather than the rule for the audience’s attention to be focused on one point.

This usually occurs during particularly climactic scenes and lead to some excellent exploitation of light and colour to emphasise the shift of focus. The masks grant members of the audience a feeling of anonymity which is reinforced by the constant interaction with the cast who will frequently look quizzically at you or speak their lines over your head. The actual role we were meant to be playing seemed ambiguous: sometimes stage props, other times shadowy apparitions visible to one character and not to others. Personally I was quite pleased with my performance. I managed to hold the steely gaze of Tybalt for a few seconds and smile encouragingly at Benvolio who winked back during one of the comic scenes. But to move on to the real actors all of the cast put in a solid performance with special mention going to Brian McMahon who produced a dark yet comic take on Mercutio and Lindsay Dukes for her poignant and compelling Juliet. I would strongly recommend this experience to anyone who is looking for something different in the Oxford Drama scene.

Keble O’Reilly
Tuesday – Saturday 6th Week

4 Stars

For a book that weighs in at around 500, 000 words, Norman has little new material to add to the already over-blown legend of John Lennon (or should that be the tragedy of John Lennon?).
The juiciest revelation is that of Lennon’s supposedly Oedipal fantasies. According to a tape recording made not long before his death, Lennon recalls his mother as being the object of his hormonally charged teenage frustration.

“He recalls,” writes Norman, “his 14-year-old self, lying beside Julia on her bed as she took a siesta.” When accidentally touching her breast, Lennon “wonders if he should have tried to go further and whether Julia would have allowed it.”

Rather than elucidating the life-long emotional torture of his subject, a man who suffered abandonment and domestic upheaval, Norman’s cod psychology only serves to entangle and compound the many tabloid myths surrounding one of the most overanalyzed figures of the last century.

Norman seems to forget that Lennon was nothing if not a joker and a self-consciously pretentious one at that. It is impossible to read Norman’s account of this walking Freudian nightmare without recalling the opening of Mother – “Mother / You had me / But I never had you”. Cynics will undoubtedly come to the conclusion that Lennon had delusions of artistic genius and the psychological hang-ups that come with it.

Yet Lennon was more than aware of the sensationalist possibilities of his own myth. Maybe he believed it. Or maybe he wanted to toy with his biographers, branding his band of followers as the idol worshippers they are. Twenty eight years after his death, Lennon is still having the last laugh.

Yoko Ono makes a token contribution to Lennon’s relentless mythmaking. Apparently her husband had a thing for Brian Epstein, Stuart Sutcliffe and Paul McCartney. The latter is based on a claim that the staff at Apple would sometimes refer to McCartney as “John’s Princess”. Lennon also got into a fight with a Cavern club DJ who made fun out of the mysterious Spanish holiday Lennon enjoyed with Beatle’s manager Brian Epstein. He even worshipped his college friend Sutcliffe with a quasi-sexual intensity.

Again, these ‘revelations’ are nothing new, even to casual Lennon fans. It is no secret that Lennon enjoyed “playing it a bit faggy”. Even Norman admits that Lennon’s “gay tendency” was purely aesthetic and based upon the hippy-drippy assumption “that bohemians should try everything”. Lennon applied this naïve doctrine to everything from music and drugs to trepanning and primal scream therapy. These biographical details are more illuminating than Norman’s tabloid conjecture surrounding something as irrelevant as his subject’s sexuality.
The first third of Norman’s book is the most exciting, the early period of Lennon’s life before he turned into a self-pitying bisexual bore. Lennon was a bit of a hot-head apparently. At an art college bop, he once punched a student who asked Cynthia to dance. On another occasion, when Cynthia paired up with Stuart Sutcliffe at a ball, Lennon “hit her across the face so hard that her head struck a heating pipe on the wall, then walked off without a word”.

Norman’s accusations continue. As a student, Lennon would not only steal art supplies from college but would pocket money which he collected for charity.

Norman’s greatest failing is his inability to explain the series of events which lead to Lennon’s decline: from an angry young hedonist who sang A Hard Day’s Night to the soft-headed artiste who preached the immortal words Happy Xmas (War is Over), the most miserable Christmas song ever.

Perhaps the book’s shortcoming has something to do with Norman’s reticence to recognize the importance of Paul McCartney in the most fruitful period of Lennon’s life. Any one with ears will tell you that it is no secret the Beatles never managed to recreate their success as solo artists. This is where such an ambitious biography falls flat on its face. The personal life of Lennon makes no sense without that of McCartney.

Instead, Norman has managed to more than fulfill his original objective, to write a biography not of “a pop person, but of a major, towering presence in his century”. In other words: to write the biography of the icon rather than the pop star. The tentative cooperation of McCartney and Ono (who deemed the book “too mean” to Lennon’s memory) has helped to cement the tragic legend of Lennon in the collective consciousness for a little while longer.

Norman set out to map the origins of a myth, not the man. He has triumphed resoundingly.

24 Hours is the sound of beardy sixty-eight year-old love god Tom Jones attempting to ride the wave of mannered, self-consciously retro blue-eyed-soul that has recently taken Duffy to the top of the charts and Amy Winehouse to the brink of extinction. Moreover, it is unashamedly an attempted call for a critical rehabilitation and elevation of the ever-uncool Jones, in the fashion of Rick Rubin’s resuscitations of the careers of Johnny Cash and Neil Diamond, and practically begs to be described in such terms as ‘dignified statement’ and ‘back to his roots’.

Yet if this really is the sound of Carlton Banks’ hero going back to his roots, it only confirms that those roots are planted firmly in an enormous block of cheese. Glittery cheese, upon which willing young ladies writhe seductively. There’s a track here called ‘The Road’ which is a sober apology for a life of infidelity and an affirmation of love for a long-suffering wife. This all sounds lovely, ennobling and redeeming, until, on the very next track, Tom’s found perving over the ‘girls by the pool’. It all seems rather disingenuous.

Jones fails because he’s trying to show that he’s both in touch with his past and still ‘with it’; in trying to reach a pair of conflicting goals, he falls embarrassingly short of both. Every upbeat track wants to be uncompromising rhythm and blues but ends up being spangly, unwieldy disco; every slow number aims for heartfelt torch song territory only to come across as a power ballad sung by a human foghorn. Cash and Diamond needed Rubin to help them ditch their excesses and rediscover their essence; Tony Christie has just been revealed to be not a cruise ship crooner but an artist of depth and significance by Richard Hawley. Even Jones himself has been at his recent best with collaborative efforts. On 24 Hours he tries to show the world that he can still perform unaided, only to find, embarrassingly, that he can’t. Get this man some musical Viagra.

2 Stars