In 2004, Green Day redefined what it meant to be a band with a furious and tangible agenda, capitalising on widespread anger at the catastrophic Bush administration in releasing the sublime American Idiot six weeks before his narrow election to a second term in office. Although it failed to bring about a change in government, the six million records the album sold testify to the mass backing the band was able to garner from a public eager for change.

The album was still more impressive coming from a band who were thought to be in a downward spiral after less-than-impressed reactions to 2000 release Warning, with its rock-opera style reinventing both the band and conventional thoughts as to how an album should be structured.

Adopting an ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ approach, then, Green Day have attempted to go above and beyond in putting out a 18-song epic, and for the most part they more than live up to the hype of an album that has been nearly half a decade in the making. Their usual stock of hooks and melodies that you just can’t get out of your head are present in opener ‘21st Century Breakdown’ and ‘Before The Lobotomy’, while ’21 Guns’ makes ‘Wake Me Up When September Ends’ sound like nothing more than a first draft of what has now been achieved five years on.

Some critics will deride this, make no mistake. Many songs (‘Last of the American Girls’ and first single ‘Know Your Enemy’) take a noticeably poppier slant, even further away from the vicious, unbridled punk of Dookie (1994), and the decision to release ‘21st Century Breakdown’ in conjunction with Rupert Murdoch’s notoriously right-wing News International corporation endeared them to no one. But anyone listening to this should remember that some bands are born hyped (Arctic Monkeys), some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them (Beth Ditto).

Green Day have very much achieved their status as genuine legends of the last 20 years in punk rock music on their own, and their fearlessness in throwing wide the doors constraining how music should be arranged and presented deserves enormous praise. ‘21st Century Breakdown’ is a hell of an album, and even sceptics will find something to get their teeth into here.

Four out of five stars

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.