The moment you could tell it was going to be fantastic came early in the first act. The lights went down and the blare of jazz trumpets subsided into silence; the January rain lashing the outside of the theatre was forgotten and the darkness took on the hot, claustrophobic quality of an Italian night, the air thick with passion and threat. Into all of this strode the Capulets and the Montagues: sharply dressed, quick with their wits and even quicker to lose their tempers. The first scene was played with a distinctly light touch; every pun fully exploited the delicious humour of the language but also sought to bring out the bravado of men always watching their backs. These moments of laughter gave the audience breathing space but never allowed for genuine relaxation, even while they joked the Capulets fingered their knives longingly and there was always the sense that violence would surely break out at any moment. The play added to this building tension by cutting down on scenery in favour of rapid scene changes- often allowing one scene to spill into the next. The incessant motion was only broken when a knife was drawn accompanied by the lights suddenly dropping and a spotlight being focused on the blade. Playing both on the public’s awareness of knife crime and the mafia street gang mood, the knives in this production have a truly threatening quality, seeming to be loved and feared by the male characters in equal measure. The director (Neil Bartlett) is keen to bring out the brutality of violence, the contrast between the elegant rituals of behaviour and dress serve to bring out, even more clearly, the bestial nature of street violence. There is nothing honourable or gallant about Tybalt’s confrontation with Mercutio- Bartlett emphasises its essential pettiness and the squalid, yet intoxicating, appeal of violence to young men; how in a culture that values knives and machismo, pride will inevitably get the upper hand over good sense and bloody violence will, ‘disturb the quiet of our streets.’

The title characters stood in firm contrast to the rest of the cast. While the other women were calm and dignified, Juliet (Anneika Rose) was a wilful teenager who seemed like a bright spark trapped in the grim world of Verona. Compared to his violent contemporise Romeo (David Dawson) was carefree, almost foppish, in his words and motion. The key to any production of Romeo and Juliet lies in its ability to show the transcendent quality of love compared to the other emotions at work in society and this version made that conclusion inescapable.

Four stars

Running until the 24th of January, Courtyard Theatre, 7:15pm
Student tickets, £5.00
Running time 3 hours 15 mins

Auditions are bad. Waiting for them is worse. If acting was not already fiercely competitive enough it doesn’t help to be placed in a tiny space, often a staircase but sometimes some kind of underground holding chamber, and made to sit and stare out everyone else who is auditioning. Often people arrive ridiculously early, in the hope that the director will simply see you waiting patiently for the audition, and send everyone else home, recruiting you without needing to see anything. However, it’s worthless to fight. You will inevitably arrive late, breathless, oozing with sweat and garble a pathetic excuse like “sorry I’m late, I had a lecture in the Rad-Cam and my books were on fire”. Gathering your thoughts and realising that you have just spouted some nonsense worthy of Edward Lear; you spot the poor person whose audition you have interrupted, giving what you fear might be the best performance of the closing Faustus speech you have ever seen. Any initial feeling of embarrassment is rapidly replaced with a sense of malicious glee that you may have thrown the audition of your new arch-rival. However, before you can glory in your triumph, you are immediately ushered from the room by a disgruntled producer, informing you that your lateness has led them to give your spot to someone else. Now you’ll have to wait.
After an inane conversation with another actor who is far more attractive and almost definitely more talented than you are, you have a very brief glance at the forty line monologue you’re supposed to have memorised. But it’s not long before you have to ask the bearded grad opposite if he could possibly stop muttering his lines aloud as it’s impossible to concentrate through his babbling. After a staring contest which stretches on for what seems like an age he opens his mouth to reply. But before he can speak, the producer calls your name with what sounds like a mixture of dread and boredom. Now you shuffle awkwardly into the JCR kitchen where the auditions are taking place.
You make your way into the centre of the room and in front of the panel of creative genii who have set themselves up as the X-Factor judges, begin your speech. After changing your accent about five times in your first struggle, you’re stopped by the director who asks: “Would you mind doing that again, except this time a little more… bigger. You know what I mean?” Despite having no clue what he means, you nod enthusiastically. So you take up your position in the centre of the room, with your legs wide apart and your shoulders as broad as you can make them, in a vain attempt to satisfy their inscrutable criteria.
Finally, with the director’s “we’ll be in touch” still ringing in your ears you hurry out of the room as quickly as possible. If you’re unlucky you’ll spend an excruciating ten seconds pushing against the immovable exit door, before an exasperated voice calls from behind, “it’s pull.”

Exhibitions about writers are difficult to pull off, but when they do work, they tend to work very well. Barcelona recently hosted a brilliant exploration of the life and mind of J.G. Ballard, the Shanghai-born British sci-fi author—through a mixture of audio, video and photography, the exhibition’s designers managed to create an environment entirely in-keeping with dystopian spirit of Ballard’s novels and stories, which owe more than a little to the influence of William S. Burroughs. ‘Burroughs Live’ at the Royal Academy is, by all accounts, rather less successful—I don’t intend to visit and find out.

Part of the RA’s GSK Contemporary season, funded by GlaxoSmithKline (the people who brought you Dexedrine, Ventolin and NicoDerm), ‘Burroughs Live’ seems to consist largely of portraits: the press release mentions photographs by Annie Liebovitz, a painting by Hockney, a collage by Damien Hirst. For a writer whose inflated media image is by now more famous than anything he wrote, it’s an appropriate theme.

Author of Naked Lunch, perhaps the last great banned book, William S. Burroughs shifted in a matter of decades from drugged-up obscurity, through counter-cultural iconicity, to outmoded cliché—that he should become the object of an exhibition at this country’s most prestigious artistic institution, sponsored by a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical company, is only the logical extension of an assimilative process that began with his induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1983. Reviewing the RA exhibition on The Guardian’s art blog, Jonathan Jones refers to Burroughs as ‘[t]he most overrated cultural icon of the late 20^th century’ and is not far off the mark.

And yet, there’s a difference—a crucial one—between being an overrated cultural icon and an overrated writer. Jones disregards this, moving from a lazy comparison with Pynchon (junkie and paranoiac are far from interchangeable) to a general denunciation of Burroughs’s work, but the distinction needs to be maintained. ‘Burroughs is’, according to Jones’s sneering assessment, ‘the modern writer adored by people who don’t read enough modern writing’—an overcharged druggie stereotype, shooting smack and wives with equal abandon. A tendency to pop up in his own work certainly doesn’t help matters—as Will Self puts it, ‘there was never a writer like Bill Burroughs for self-mythologizing …’

But what Jones seems to forget is the sheer visceral texture of Burroughs’s junk-obsession. The whole point of his straight-dope grotesquerie is that it isn’t some glamourized image: ‘Since Naked Lunch treats this health problem [i.e. the problem of drug addiction], it is necessarily brutal, obscene and disgusting. Sickness is often repulsive details not for weak stomachs.’ Burroughs’s work points directly to a real critique of ‘the pyramid of junk’ which succumbs neither to government-sponsored anti-drug hysteria nor to the laminated heroin chic of the international catwalk. Years before postmodern theorists of destabilization and fragmentation appeared on the scene, Bill Burroughs was literally cutting up his manuscripts, splicing in newspaper clippings and extracts from his ‘Word Hoard’ in a deliberate blurring of text and context.

Like Hunter S. Thompson, that other great mythical figure, William S. Burroughs forgot to burn out until it was too late. But along with the trail of bad films and embarrassing portraits, he left some pretty excellent novels: just as persistent as his stupid media persona is a real and lasting influence on the American literary avant-garde. In fact, perhaps Jones’s comparison isn’t so bad after all: without Burroughs’s narcotized, class-A imagination—his junk-corroded voice and exponential proliferation of characters—we might never have had Pynchon. If that’s not reason enough to keep reading him, then I don’t know what is.

A Christmas Tale is exactly the sort of film to try the patience of any French cinéphile, and for those already prejudiced against Europe’s biggest film-making nation this would only confirm their suspicions that all the French can do with their films is explore the anxieties and foibles of the bourgeoisie at great length and with complete disregard for the world inhabited by the rest of us.

For two and a half hours Arnaud Depleschin examines the lives of a family haunted by a rare and degenerative blood condition that has seemingly doomed their matriarch, Catherine Deneuve.

Severe rifts that have torn the family apart for years have to be mended to get La Famille Marreau-Donneur together to swap DNA and see if death can be cheated and their Christmas pass without murder, adultery or getting food poisoning from the oysters.

A Christmas Tale appealed to half a million film goers in France, and on the back of its star studded cast that includes Catherine Deneuve, Mathieu Amalric (so effective in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly but completely toothless in Quantum of Solace), Melvil Poupaud and Emmanuelle Devos the film has been released overseas. But in the end, despite literary references from Joyce to Kafka (via Zola), and a furiously unconventional structure it is largely a shallow series of increasingly frantic vignettes with the odd pause for one of the characters to talk directly to camera to bring us up to date with who has done what to whom and how the family bloodline and blood tests are faring. Imagine Amelie with Asperger’s Syndrome.

It is a film that ticks the boxes: suicidal teenager, check; femme fatale, check; drunk uncle, check; frigid daughter, check; artistic type, check etc. With his film Comment je me suis disputé… (ma vie sexuelle) in 1996 Despleschin proved himself to be an adept manipulator of complicated themes and multi-character stories, but in that film he had something to say.  A Christmas Tale sadly takes its place in the long tradition of vacuous films about French families with fur coats and will be quickly forgotten and moth eaten at the back of the seventh grade’s arts wardrobe.