An unrelenting reflection of the tensions, trials and tussles of a group of junior school students, Laurence Cantet’s The Class combines a measured account of the social dynamics of the inner-city classroom with a startling loyalty to the reality of the school system.

Set in what the production notes describe as a ‘multi-cultural Parisian school’ (read ‘deprived, with the wider racial tensions of French society imposed on a miniature scale), The Class succeeds, where so many ‘inspirational’ American tales fail, because the students are real students, the parents real parents, even the teacher, played by Francois Begaudeau, is a real teacher (the film having been based on his bestselling auto-biographical novel Entre les Murs). Individuals are not manipulated into plot points; they instead afford the film an unswerving sense of honesty.

In a similar vein, our gaze never veers outside of the school grounds. The only glimpse of the outside world comes when Souleymane, a disruptive pupil whose frustration at school soon takes a turn for the worse, exhibits pictures of his family and friends in front of the class, or when Wei, a Chinese student who finds it difficult to interact with his classmates, reads out his ‘self-portrait.

This is not to say that The Class avoids the social issues that dog any ‘multi-cultural school’, quite the opposite. It expertly forces the audience into an awareness of the socio-political climate that shape the lives of these students, working to distil so much context into a manageable frame without simply reducing any characters into ciphers, or even worse, caricatures. The result is a film that genuinely questions our assumptions about the role of the school in a ‘liberal democracy’, offering a vision of the modern system of education that is, to say the very least, unsettling.

On its release in 1995 the French cabinet commissioned a special screening of La Haine to give them some idea of the crisis that had led to the rioting in the banlieues; likewise, in 2003, immediately after the occupation of Iraq, the Pentagon offered a screening of The Battle of Algiers to any personnel interested in the problem of guerrilla insurgency and ideological conflict. It is this reviewer’s opinion that Ed Balls would do well to take an hour or two out of his busy schedule to watch The Class, it is essential viewing.

5 stars

Two stars

In the last half-hour of Buried Child, the audience gets to see a ‘symbolic rape’, a character metamorphosing into an ancestor, a man taunted by having his wooden leg stolen, a description of a murder and the exhumation of a decaying corpse, the buried child of the title-all that in about half an hour. As that’s only a third of the play, watching that costs you about £1.67. Surely this can’t fail?
It does. Let’s start with the script of this 1978 play by Sam Shepard, set in a decaying farm in Illinois. It’s certainly visceral, the feeling of an isolated, nerve-prodding family is there in spades, but as dialogue it’s boring: knarled, pretentious, sub-Pinterian prose-poetry. Next, the plot is full of heavy-handed, vaguely ritualistic and alarmingly humourless symbolism, none of which really means anything: a man walks into a yard and finds corn where none has grown in years with whose leves he then covers his sleeping father, his brother loves shaving people against their will, and so on. Strangely, for all the stuff that happens (there’s some incest in there as well), it’s actually quite boring, and chaotically structured: a large chunk of the first act is a dull expository monologue about a character who died years before, who nobody ever really mentions again. So why have the monologue? To spend several minutes telling us that old farmer’s wives in the middle of nowhere can be racist, that some sons are more clever than others, and that some people die young surprisingly and it’s rather sad, it seems. This must be the commentary about the American Dream the Wikipedia article for the play talks about.
The staging is better than the play deserves: Tom Palmer was still reading his lines off a script in the press preview but his and Sam Kennedy’s performances had the right level of constrained anger and good American accents; Anna Popplewell made the best of by far the worst-written part. Sean O’Reilly tried to match his performance to the actors playing his brother and father but an uneven accent hampered his performance. Harriet Madeley as Shelly, an outsider from California entering the tense family home, slyly tailored her acting in a part with dialogue that felt like it came from a different play to feel very different to the other actors.
In short, if you like this play, or think you’d respond to the style of writing, the staging is perfectly competent and it’s certainly not forgettable. Otherwise, think twice.

This weekend I went home. This is not surprising really; the end of fourth week always rekindles memories of half-terms spent lazing around, when “fifth week blues”, “collections” and “essay crisis” were still a universe away. Whilst there I went to see a school play, and despite my bias, due to this school being my alma mater, and the main part being played by my sister, I must say that the formidable acting talent on offer from a bunch of 11 to 16 year olds in my generic northern comp far outshone anything I witnessed in Confusions.
As the name perhaps suggests, this is not a conventional five-acter. It is more like five separate plays, with intertwining stories and characters and multiple parts played by the same actors. The venue is the rather odd choice of the St. Hugh’s bar, which admittedly provides the intimacy needed for a play so focussed on the familiar discourse and the comically domestic situations portrayed, yet may struggle in attracting those not thrilled about the trek.
My advice would be, that unless they are your friends, don’t bother. Of the two scenes I was shown, there is little to shout about. A smidgeon of poignancy here, a chuckle every now and then, but otherwise dullness: overarching, joy-sucking dullness. This is the fault of the actors, who deliver lines haphazardly and lazily. In one scene, the anticipation of an affair being revealed and the comedy of lovers trying to hide their tracks dissolve in air polluted by grey monotonous dialogue; I felt I could have been watching Beckett, so hopelessly empty were the silences. And even in the merciful moments when the incessant soullessness of their speaking ceased, clumsy acting still filled the room like a bad smell. One scenario requires abrupt switches between voiced and mimed conversation, and it always made me laugh how previously docile hands and arms would suddenly spring to life, waving emphatically, as if people talking intimately in a restaurant would seriously communicate like air traffic controllers.
The sad thing is that this play by acclaimed playwright Alan Ayckbourne could have achieved so much more. The script is innovative and the direction is not at all bad, with good use of props and space. Yet, as it is, bad acting wins the day, leaving that standing ovation and rapturous school hall merely a warm and distant memory.

(Two stars)

The ironic thing about the deification of Shakespeare is that those who first lauded him to the skies as a genius hated to see his work as he wrote it. Samuel Johnson may have praised him, but he said of the ending to King Lear, ‘ The public has decided. Cordelia, from the time of Tate [1681], has always retired with victory and felicity. And, if my sensations could add anything to the general suffrage, I might relate that I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor.’ So he accepted the tradition, which began after the Restoration and lasted until the nineteenth century, of presenting King Lear and Romeo and Juliet with happy endings.

In 1660, Sir William Davenant, Shakespeare’s godson and the son of the mayor of Oxford, obtained the monopoly right to put on many of Shakespeare’s plays, giving him the right to make all necessary changes. Some were to make the plays shorter, some were to add more dances, songs and music to show off the orchestras theatres now had, and some were to fit in new effects, such as explosions, wave machines and thunder, but the general aim was to make Shakespeare’s writing more classical. Out went vulgar comic juxtapositions, such as the porter at the gate in Macbeth or the Fool in Lear, and in came ‘regularised’ dialogue. Each metaphor and simile was chosen to signal clearly how Macbeth was doomed by his ambition in his unnatural plan to steal the kingship, as were new scenes for the Macduffs discussing the ethics of removing a tyrant.  A version of The Tempest  by Dryden added a new character: Hippolito, man who had never seen a woman, to complement Miranda. 

These versions were soon forgotten, but happy endings and new scenes were longer-lasting: until the nineteenth century actors as a routing added new scenes and changed the endings. The reason?  Partly to give their characters dramatic soliloquies, partly because, simply, actors and audiences could not cope with the despair of Lear’s ending. In 1812 one writer wondered if it, ‘as originally penned by Shakespeare, could be borne by a modern audience.’ For them, it was unnatural to see goodness go unrewarded on stage: that was poetic justice, nothing else made sense of life.

Four stars

Directing a production at The Oxford Playhouse is no easy undertaking. The subtleties of character which can be conveyed in a studio theatre are easily lost on a large stage. This is perhaps the main fault of Helen McCabe’s production of George Farquhar’s Restoration comedy, The Recruiting Officer. However, the fault simultaneously lies with the play itself, which calls for stock characters to play out this comedy of errors. Despite moments of weakness, Helen McCabe is certainly successful in drawing the audience into the eighteenth century landscape of Farquhar’s Shrewsbury and fulfilling the main function of the play: to entertain the audience.
The Recruiting Officer contains all of the usual features of Restoration comedy – concealed identity, bawdy jokes and a revelation scene which leads to a happy ending. The most popular play of the eighteenth century, Farquhar’s witty dialogue maintains the audience’s attention throughout the plot twists, which is of particular value in a play of this length. At the centre of the story is Captain Plume (Tim Pleydell-Bouverie) who has recently arrived back in Shrewsbury and is attempting to court Silvia (Harriet Tolkein), causing her angry cousin Melinda to intervene, resulting in Silvia’s being removed to the country by her father, Justice Balance (Guy Westwood). In the meantime, Captain Brazen (Rory Fazan) and Mr Worthy (Maximus Marenbon) vie for Melinda’s affections, while Silvia returns to Shrewsbusy in disguise as ‘Jack Wilful’ and Sergeant Kite (Edwin Thomas) disguises himself as a German fortune-teller in order to encourage men to enlist.
Tim Pleydell-Bouverie gives a charismatic and, at certain moments, delightfully camp portrayal of the womanising Captain Plume. Although rather caricatured, his strength of performance helps to carry the play and generate plenty of laughter. Both Sylvia and Melinda are strong characters, although they appear rather affected at times. More could have been made of their quarrels if they had been toned down slightly, introducing a comic disjunction between the polite language in which they address one another, and the antagonistic feelings which lie behind their speeches. The problem for all three actors is that the demand of performing in such a large space means that lines become rather ‘vamped up’ by the need to project, and lose the differentiation of tone which makes a character more believable. However, all three prove themselves worthy of performing in a leading role at the Playhouse. But perhaps the real stars of the show are Edwin Thomas and Guy Westwood, who put in convincing and highly comic performances which help the intricacies of the plot to flow and keep the audience well-entertained.
A well-designed set and use of period costume situates the play in eighteenth century England, and the set allows flexible movement between outdoor scenes in the market place, and the more intimate indoor scenes. The relatively large cast allows McCabe to make strong use of the space of the Playhouse stage, and her crowd scenes are well-choreographed. Thus, the audience certainly finds themselves immersed in the society being portrayed. The public/private dichotomy which is explored is central to the underlying moral of the play, which considers the importance of honesty in a loving relationship. At times, the actors fail to capture the true nature of their character behind the social façade. But even without this subtlety of portrayal, the production is strong enough to engage the audience’s attention, and, what’s more, have them laughing out loud.

Chelsea Walker’s adaptation of the dual construct that is A Clockwork Orange, being half a morality tale by Anthony Burgess and half a film by Stanley Kubrick, is one that has set itself a very difficult task. On the one hand it has engage with Burgess’s profound meditation on the nature of free will and the weakness of the human condition; how, if given the chance, we may well choose ‘lashings of the ultraviolent’ or ‘the old in-out’; how desperately we need authority and yet how it will ultimately destroy us, ‘when a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.’ The novel questions whether morality is a restricting of our brutish desires by the fear of punishment by the state or whether it can be something more profound: located elsewhere. On the other hand it must engage with one of the most visually stunning, or perhaps shocking, pieces of cinema of the twentieth century. It must either play with Kubrick’s imagery, offering a new interpretation of his aestheticization of violence or seek to establish its own aesthetic standards and assert them against the expectations of the audience. The production that could manage all of this would be remarkable indeed; the student production that could manage it all the more so, unfortunately this attempt is hardly remarkable.

I do not mean to say that the play is bad; merely that it takes too much upon itself. There are signs that an attempt has been made to re-imagine the work of Burgess/Kubrick in the creative use of height and space- the scene where the prison Chaplain exhorts the prisoners to reform from atop a block while they alternatively abuse him and abase themselves before him is particularly effective. However the portrayal of the violent aspects of the plot seems awkwardly caught between the stylized ‘ultraviolence’ of Kubrick and the moral shabbiness suggested by Burgess. The rapes and beatings are set to classical music but lack any sense of choreography or suggestive imagery (such as Kubrick’s decision to have Alex beat an artist to death with her own phallic sculpture: his assertion of the art of violence over the art of sculpture) and instead seem to emphasise merely fumbling barbarity. Jacob Taee’s portrayal of the protagonist, Alex, is strikingly good throughout, both sensitive and gleefully evil. However the rest of the cast is somewhat patchy; perhaps partly because they are mostly required to play multiple roles and partly because the subject matter is almost entirely concerned with Alex.

Overall, I would say, a valiant effort at a difficult task but anyone familiar with the film and/or the book will leave disappointed; anyone unfamiliar with either may well enjoy this production but would get more out of the originals.