The bright lights of Broadway and the hallowed boards of the West End beckon actors from all over the world. The past years have seen a resurgence in the number and variety of plays performed by all-star casts with widespread popular appeal. Musicals have enjoyed a particular rediscovery. In these increasingly uncertain financial times however, what will become of these many shows? Will they be jettisoned as now-unaffordable, frivolous pleasures? Or does theatre actually have a wider role which will enable them to maintain and perhaps even strengthen their positions as a premier form of entertainment?
Just as sales of cinema tickets rose during the Great Depression, it seems logical that theatre will weather the economic storm. Although the price difference between cinema and theatre tickets is large, it is decreasing. With theatres such as the Old Vic and the National Theatre continuing to offer hugely-reduced tickets to Under-25s, and with a variety of appealing offers from many other theatres, what better way to treat oneself? Theatre provides enjoyment in a way that few other media can. The massive success of a variety of musicals of all kinds over the past few years is simply one indication of theatre’s popular appeal to a variety of demographics. A night at the theatre can be one of adrenalin rushes and laughter-there can be few people who have seen ‘Hairspray’ and not laughed at Michael Ball’s turn as Edna Turnblad, or who did not laugh in recognition at some point during ‘The History Boys.’ As the French actress Marie Trintignant said, “Theatre fulfils.” It awakens our emotions and takes us on whirlwind journeys. Its stories pull us in because they are unfolding before our eyes. That is theatre’s purpose-plays are written to be performed.
This last point hints at a deeper level to the role of theatre. Theatre is meant to be performed, and we, the audience, are meant to be part of it. Theatre can make us happy, but also sad, angry, hopeful. It speaks to us and has always done so. Shakespeare loaded his plays with visual imagery so that his illiterate audiences would still be able to appreciate his beautiful language, and people flocked to see his plays. Theatre offers an opportunity for escape into another world, be it far removed from or a mirror image of our own.
Most plays are, in some way and sometimes unwittingly, a form of social commentary. The hugely successful revival of Aaron Sorkin’s ‘A Few Good Men’ in 2006 found new relevancy in a post-9/11 world. Whilst the cuckolding theme of ‘The Country Wife’ is perhaps less relevant today than in Wycherley’s time, it still makes us question and explore relationships. Last month, ‘Complicit’ opened at the Old Vic, attacking the debate concerning journalistic ethics, a debate which resonates in a world still coming to terms with the aftermath of the Valerie Plame scandal.
In the words of the great humanist Erasmus, life is “a sort of comedy, in which the various actors, disguised by various costumes and masks, walk on and play each one his part, until the manager waves them off the stage.” Theatre provides us with a mirror to our own lives and the lives of those around us. It shows us the lives we would like to lead and the lives we would hate. It pulls us in and involves us in the action. The audience feels emotionally connected to those on stage. Theatre has a universal appeal and speaks to us all on different levels. Through a variety of ways it continues to pull in new fans. Theatre has, and hopefully will continue to have, a wide role within our society, a fact which we should all celebrate.
Watching ourselves
Are You Sitting Comfortably?
Four stars
Within five minutes of arriving at the press preview for the Oxford Imps latest production, all I can ask myself is how I can have been oblivious to this troupe of comic genius for so long. The second thing is, can they really be improvising this? The seamless ensemble performance is hugely impressive, and absolutely hilarious.
“Are you sitting comfortably?” involves five actors, a musician and announcer (who is also in charge of hilarious sound effects) improvising a fifties radio play for one hour in the Burton Taylor Studio. Inspired by 1950s classics such as ‘Dick Barton: Special Agent!’, the actors create an offering of comedy, romance and mystery based solely on audience suggestions. In fact, audience members can even bring along their own props which will be incorporated into the production as sound effects. Trivial and off-beat dialogue is transformed by the use of keyboardist improvising alongside the actors, while a foley artist sloshes water from glass to glass, tinkles wind chimes and flaps an umbrella around in order to create the necessary background noise, often catapulting props into the audience. If you have ever listened to ‘The Archers’ and wondered how they create their sound effects, all will be revealed by the Imps.
The joy of watching a radio show being performed is the immense amusement which aspects such as these provide. Perhaps the downside is the distraction of watching the actors onstage, rather than listening to their dialogue. With a tendency to laugh at their own comic creations, moments of the performance are deflated by having the actors’ reactions right before the audience. However, this is probably the only criticism I have. The outstanding teamwork of the Imps carries the script to outrageous extremes which somehow work. There is, of course, no assurance that each performance at the BT will be to an equally high standard as no two shows will be the same. No doubt there will always be the audience members determined to make the job of the actors as difficult as possible. But if this was anything to go by, this highly talented group of actors can make pretty much anything a laughing success.
10th-14th March at 21:30
Price £4 for students
S1l3nce
(5 stars)
S1L3NC3 is a mysterious gentleman whose art is strikingly difficult to describe. He is insistent that it is not magic, and does not claim any psychic abilities, yet the series of tricks and effects in his performance can only be described as some sort of mind-reading or psychological manipulation. The closest and perhaps only comparison is to Derren Brown, with added darkness. It’s easy to be cynical of such talents, but rest assured that this production will astonish even the most sceptical of viewers.
Obviously the exact nature of the tricks cannot be revealed here, but this reviewer can guarantee that S1L3NC3 will amaze. The tuxedoed performer seems not only able to read minds but also to predict the behaviour of audience participants with uncanny accuracy.
Understated displays of frankly astonishing ‘psychology’ like this are interspersed with set pieces that will have the audience on the edge of their seats: a game of Russian roulette with heavy duty staple guns, for example, not to mention one which involves swallowing razor blades. The faint-hearted among us should perhaps give it a miss.
It is the masterful and non-patronising portrayal of the tricks which gives this show such a great impact. From the outset we are assured that everything will be conducted “as transparently as possible”, and a random selection process is used to prove that viewers chosen to actively participate have not been pre-selected.
The design is similarly kept simple and effective: a smart red and black colour scheme with no fancy props or staging to distract from the action. Carefully selected music, remixed especially for the show, keeps the tension running high at key moments and adds to the very contemporary feel of the performance.
Stories and discussion are elegantly used to link the tricks together into a single coherent show, and the concepts of communication, ‘underground art’ and of course silence are the overarching themes. Look out for the spectacular finale which incorporates these ideas and which will not fail to astound. It is because of the logistical complexity of this last spectacle that the show is unfortunately limited to one night only.
Refreshingly different and ultimately mind-boggling, S1L3NC3 has to be seen to be believed. It comes highly recommended.
9th March, Monday 8th week
O’Reilly Theatre Keble
Tickets available from [email protected]
Let Fred Goodwin keep his money
Sir Fred Goodwin, the man who was in charge of the bank that made the biggest loss in UK corporate history, is not a popular man. Fair enough – we shouldn’t exactly be showering someone with praise when they lose £24bn and burden the taxpayer with exposure to risk on hundreds of billions in ‘toxic assets’.
Moreover, it does seem strikingly unfair that he is ‘rewarded’ for this failure with a pension package amounting to £12,000 a week for the rest of his life on some estimates. On all accounts, Sir Fred fucked up. He lost RBS £24bn, cost the taxpayers potentially far more, and has been rewarded with early retirement and a hefty pension package.
It wouldn’t be too ridiculous for the public to demand that the government does something to stop situations like this from occurring. But what is ridiculous, is the notion that we should abandon all our democratic principles to satisfy a temporary, transient, furore in public opinion.
We must not attempt to ‘claw back’ Sir Fred’s pension, and here is why:
Firstly, attempts to do so are completely ignoring the wider problem. Even if we chuck Freddy out on the street and regain all £16m of his pension pot, we are still up shit creek without a paddle. Look at the numbers, people! The loss this year at RBS was £24bn, the exposure to toxic assets taxpayers face is in the hundreds of billions of pounds. Sir Fred’s pension pales into insignificance in comparison. Government time is better spent on other things.
Some might say that it is the principle of the thing that matters – that it is an unfairness, and thus the fact that correcting it won’t solve our wider problems is irrelevant. But, as I’m about to point out, we have a lot of important and varied principles that we like to act in accordance with, such as the rule of law. If we’re really going to act ‘on principle’, then Sir Fred should be allowed to keep his money.
Something Harriet Harman said recently on this matter brings this into sharp focus:
“It might be enforceable in a court of law, this [pension] contract, but it is not enforceable in the court of public opinion and that is where the government steps in.”
I almost choked when I read this – I mean, is she kidding? What she is saying amounts to a statement that the law is irrelevant in the face of momentary shifts in public opinion. It is an utterly shocking view, completely contrary to the rule of law, a founding tenet of any democracy. The law must apply equally to all citizens. You can’t make an exception because you think someone is a bit of a tosser. Sir Fred did not break any law, as far as we know, and his pension is (at least now) a contractual obligation. It might be regrettable that he got it, but should the government intervene now it will be acting arbitrarily and in contravention of some of our most basic democratic principles. Perhaps it will find some loophole and manage to get some of the money back in a legal manner, but this still doesn’t change the nature of what they are doing, which is attempting to make exceptions to the law in response to public opinion.
This must be made clear – the Government is acting in a totally self interested manner. If Gordo et al really cared about this kind of unfairness, they would be legislating to prevent it happening in general – but that wouldn’t help them much with Sir Fred, because the new law presumably couldn’t apply retroactively. What they are really trying to do is score points with the media. It’s cheap, it’s nasty, and it devalues our democracy.
BBC probes Oxford’s University Challenge win
The BBC is “taking seriously” claims that the Oxford team which won University Challenge was not eligble to take part in the contest, it was reported today.
The Corpus Christi team was led to victory by their captain, Gail Trimble, whose performance attracted a wave of media attention during the final weeks of the competition.
However, a series of newspaper reports have since suggested that one of Trimble’s team-mates, Sam Kay, had left Corpus Christi in June last year after he was denied funding for his PhD. Kay was reported to have been working as an accountant at Pricewaterhouse Coopers.
PWC has now confirmed to the BBC that Sam Kay was employed at their firm as a graduate accountant in 2008.
In a statement, the BBC has said, “We understand the allegations made and are taking this issue seriously. However, we don’t have time to investigate fully so will do so and report our findings early next week.”
The rules of the programme state that all contestants must be current students of the institution which they are representing while the programme is being recorded.
Re-match?
A member of the Manchester University team, who were rivals to Corpus in the final, was believed to have raised the issue and demanded a re-match. However, the Manchester team has now released an official statement saying they have “no desire” for a re-match.
Corpus Christi celebrated their success on the long-running TV show just last week, after beating Manchester by 275 points to 190.
It was the second time Corpus Christi had tasted victory on University Challenge, after claiming the title in 2005.
A message from the OSPL Board of Directors
This week, a spoof of Cherwell has been released into the public domain. This document was not produced by Oxford Student Publications Ltd; we deplore its contents and condemn it in the strongest possible terms.
We have held the Editors of Cherwell accountable for this document and they deeply regret any offence caused. In light of these developments, we have asked for and received their resignation.
We wish to reaffirm that OSPL in no way condones discrimination in any form. We remain committed to providing an opportunity for all students to practice journalism in a professional and inclusive environment.
Board of Directors
OSPL
New face for Broad Street
The front of the New Bodleian will be transformed into a outdoor café and Broad Street barred to traffic under plans to change the face of the road.
The University confirmed that they planned to open a café in the New Bodleian. Oana Romocea, Bodleian communications officer said, “The idea is to open up the front of the library.” The University also expressed support for ideas to pave over the east end of the street, suggested by a committee made up of Oxford Council, the University and local groups.
A spokeswoman for Oxford Preservation Trust (OPT), a group involved in the decision, said, “before, never in our wildest dreams could we have imagined a council who would pedestrianise the city centre.”
Designs for the transformation had stalled after an urban designer made the suggestions in 2004. She said, “now, politically, there’s a lot of goodwill towards change.”
Many students voiced support for the plans. One Somerville student said he thought the ideas were “interesting”, and that it would be “a good idea to make Broad Street look a bit more busy.”
“At the moment Cornmarket is sort of the main street in Oxford,” he said. “It should be Broad Street really because its more iconic.”
He added, however, that he feared the paving of the street’s east end “might make cycling difficult, which would be a shame because that’s one of the great things about Oxford as it is.”
A St Anne’s second year agreed, saying she felt that the current semi-pedestrianised situation on Broad Street was confusing. “It’d be nice if it was completely pedestrianised. At the moment you’re just walking along down the road and then a van goes by.”
She also said she hoped that the paved square would encourage cafes and pubs to invest in more outdoor seating.
Oxford Council’s transport chief, Ian Hudspeth, has expressed strong support for pedestrianising parts of the city. During the heated debate following the announcement at a council meeting, he pointed to a picture of buses congesting a street and asked his audience, “is that really what we want from a world-class city? Is that what Oxford is really all about?”
An earlier study commissioned by OPT said that other parts of the plan included reopening the street’s western end to traffic, planting trees around the street and removing intrusive signs and placards.
The spokeswoman for the group explained that she believed that “the new ideas could actually be much more exciting” than the original ideas drafted in 2004. OPT said, “it was always crucial that something happened to enliven the street.”
Academic warns of Facebook mental damage
An Oxford academic has told the House of Lords that electronic entertainment and social networking sites like Facebook could harm users mentally.
Baroness Susan Greenfield, Professor of Synaptic Pharmacology at Lincoln College, said social networking websites could “infantilize” the human brain and cause users to lose their sense of identity.
She told the Lords that communications via websites such as Facebook “are devoid of cohesive narrative and long-term significance. As a consequence, the mid-21st century mind might almost be infantilized, characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathize and a shaky sense of identity.”
“It is hard to see how living this way on a daily basis will not result in brains, or rather minds, different from those of previous generations,” she added.
Greenfield argued that social sites, along with computer games, might contribute to a rise in cases of Attention Deficit Disorder.
“If the young brain is exposed from the outset to a world of fast action and reaction, of instant new screen images flashing up with the press of a key, such rapid interchange might accustom the brain to operate over such timescales. Perhaps when in the real world such responses are not immediately forthcoming, we will see such behaviours and call them attention-deficit disorder.”
“It might be helpful to investigate whether the near total submersion of our culture in screen technologies over the last decade might in some way be linked to the threefold increase over this period in prescriptions for methylphenidate, the drug prescribed for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.”
Greenfield went further to suggest that a reliance on interacting and communicating with others via a computer could lead to a loss of empathy and responsibility.
However, students who use social networking websites frequently expressed skepticism over Greenfield’s remarks. One second-year English student said, “I think she’s going a bit over the top. All of us use Facebook – it’s just a convenient way of staying in touch. It promotes communication, rather than hinders it.”
“People who live in a bizarre Facebook world are probably the sort of people who would never socialise normally anyway. Physicists, and so on,” he added.
Professor Greenfield is currently in South Africa, and was unable to comment on whether she felt Oxford students were at risk by their use of social networking sites.
Rad Cam to be made into a cake
The Radcliffe Camera is to be reproduced in cake form, the covered market’s famous cake shop announced this week.
Shop owner Sally Davis said that the replica would be as detailed as possible, with every feature, down to the number of bars on the windows, duplicated in icing.
“Attention to detail is everything”, Ms. Davis explained. Her staff photographed and made sketches of the building before beginning work on the project. The scale model will take over 80 hours to complete and is being made as a special commission.
Keble announces new campus plans
Keble College has unveiled a £45 million building project to create a new campus between Banbury and Woodstock roads.
The development will provide housing for 250 students, a library, teaching rooms as well as a multi-disciplinary research facility.
Plans include a sunken garden, five-storey sandstone brick buildings and a quad with a water feature flowing on one side.
The project will be constructed on the site of Acland Hospital, opposite the Radcliffe Infirmary Site. This site is being redeveloped for £500 million by Oxford University. Keble college purchased their grounds for £10.75 million.
The college currently accommodates only 70% of its 641 students. Keble college bursar Roger Bowden commented, “our aim is to be able to house 90 per cent of our students in college accommodation.”
“We now have many young academics who say they cannot afford to buy homes in Oxford. They need to have college accommodation. It is crucial that we continue to attract the best academics.”
The college will cover the cost of the building project from fundraising. Part of cost is also covered through sales of college-owned houses in North Oxford.
College officials revealed, “We are about to embark on a £50m fundraising campaign focussed on our 150th anniversary in 2020: two-thirds of this money will be directed towards the funding of additional student accommodation.”
Keble’s JCR President Zain F. Talyarkhan commented, “the redevelopment of the Acland site is the most audacious project that the College has undertaken since its founding. As such, it is a major part of the long-term plan for the future of Keble.”
Lydia Monnington, 3rd year student at Keble college also expressed her praise.
She said, “They’ve been using Acland site for 1.5 years but it still looks like hospital. It’s a site for graduates. It’s a really good place and it’s quite close to the college – I think that’s really nice. My only worry is the cost. How will they raise all that money?”
A spokesperson for Oxford City Council confirmed Keble College’s plans. She said, “We have spoken to Keble to inform them that we haven’t formally validated their planning application yet.”
She also explained, “There will be the standard 21 day consultation and it will go to Area Committee for comment and then Strategic Development Control Committee will determine the application.”
The project ties into Oxford’s Local Plan, whereby no more than 3000 full-time students should live out of college.
The work on the Acland site is set to start in August 2012 at the earliest. It is anticipated that the construction period will last two years.
