I’m more accustomed to seeing Kevin Spacey’s figure whirling across a cinema screen than standing nervously beside a lectern, but I gradually get used to this odd displacement of film star in an antiquated Oxford setting. Well, not that antiquated; his lecture took place in St Catz.

Spacey has taken the position of Cameron Mackintosh Visiting Professor of Contemporary Theatre, a role previously played by thesps such as Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen and Thelma Holt. It’s a professorship which is associated with the innovation and excellence which Oxford drama, and indeed Oxford University, prizes itself. A lot rests on his performance this year. Indeed, a lot rests on his entrance.

As I take my seat, the dulcet tones of three nasal American girls drift into my ears. They are trying to track the professor’s progress up to the lectern. The clamouring whine rises in pitch as their goggle-eyed expressions fix enviously on a group of students who have occupied the centre column of seating. They resemble over-eager meerkats – with digital cameras.

The audience is a diverse bunch. Walking through St Catz on the way in, you could be forgiven for thinking there was a high-profile charity event on, so large are the hordes of suited and booted city sorts piling towards the theatre.

An elderly gentleman examining his paper is seated next to an elegantly dressed young woman, while, in the row behind, a collection of dons hold a quiet discussion. There’s a horde of photographers seated in front of me, and an eager-looking chap murmuring something into a dictaphone across the aisle.

Spacey is clearly in demand. He is introduced by the Master of St. Catherine’s as a ‘towering figure, a Goliath in the world of drama’. It is hyperbole of the grandest sort, which, despite appealing to my poetic imagination, is superfluous.

Spacey is uncomfortable. He half-listens to his own credentials, turns and smiles at the Catz students seated to his right. Later he tells us, ‘I would so prefer to have been out of the room while he did all that’, and requests to be called not ‘Professor’, but ‘plain Kevin’.

His credentials imply that he is far from just ‘plain Kevin’. Having pursued an illustrious career in theatre and film for over 20 years, he took the post of Artistic Director at the Old Vic in 2003. Since then he has pioneered a series of projects including the Old Vic New Voices scheme, which aims to encourage theatrical involvement amongst young people.

He is humble. Stressing how ‘I hope that by the end of my tenure here, I will be worthy of the title of professor’, he repeatedly stresses the primacy of the students’ views and ideas, deflecting questions about his own intentions with the response that they will discuss it and work out exactly what it is that they want out of the programme.

To the cynical in the audience, this may seem like a lack of conviction, a lack of direction. To me, it seems like the thoughts of a man who is not here for the fame or publicity, but for the young people his role is designed to aid: ‘It’s not about me anymore’. His lecture is interesting and amusing.

Focused primarily upon development of his own career and what it has taught him, he praises ‘people who took a chance on me’, such as Jack Lemon and Joseph Pap, and emphasises his desire to give the same back, to honour and preserve a ‘cultural landscape’ which seems increasingly threatened by the current economic climate. There are the odd few clichés. I particularly enjoyed the ‘endless mystery of the Mona Lisa’s smile’. It’s clearly a speech from prompt notes.

A little reticent, he shuffles. But, with the accidental destruction of the microphone, laughter, and the unprompted, ‘Note to self: don’t lean on the lectern’, he warms up. In the question time at the end, he is exuberant, when, without script or prompts, he is free to express his delight in the ‘great, humanising force’ of drama, and the ‘new work of today which will become the classics of tomorrow’.

I originally intended to rail against the fame complex with which the appointment to this position seems to be associated. Why Stewart and Spacey? Why not any one of the equally qualified thesps without the famous name? But Spacey, with his remarkable gentleness, the honesty of his manner, and his clear love for what he does, will, I have no doubt, prove to be a wonderful professor.

Personally, I liked him best for dressing down the Master of St. Catz. Getting the name of his first Shakespearean play wrong (it was Henry IV, and not Henry VI), the Master was caught out by Spacey’s quip that ‘You can’t trust everything you find on the Internet’. He’ll be a fresh force in Oxford, to be sure.

Mia Matsumiya builds robots. They do cool things for 30, 40 seconds; they twitch, malfunction; then they die. She calls them ‘tragibots’.

She also makes music. The creation is a similarly painstaking process, interweaving neoclassical form with structural rigidity and melodic freedom, then casting it all in terms of the guitars and vocals more familiar to doom or sludgemetal connoisseurs. We call it ‘postmetal’.

This is a genre which, though rooted amongst hardcore and metal musicians looking to express themselves beyond the verse-chorus-verse straitjacket, is now just as much home to jazz, psychedelic and even classically-trained artists. They simply want to turn up the amps and scream a bit. For each band tagged with the name, a distinct musical heritage is apparent.

There are raw, fire-and-brimstone blues behind Oxbow’s The Narcotic Story, while Isis… well, Isis seem to have rather a penchant for bears. Enraged ones, specifically. All of which might sound horribly pretentious, an accusation sometimes difficult to dismiss.

Red Sparowes’ At the Soundless Dawn, an instrumental concept album about the Maoist Great Leap Forward featuring 208 words of track title, probably deserves to be so branded. But to focus on the self-indulgence is to get caught up on the ‘post-‘; and forget that the music is still very much metal.

Oxbow’s ‘Eugene Robinson’ can turn a room of lethargic, undernourished indie geeks into a convincing reinterpretation of a Hieronymous Bosch image with nothing more than his tortuous howling, while thrusting his bemuscled form at the audience.

He often adds to the aura by involving the mic stand in illicit, aggressive and possibly quite painful relations. There are more accessible styles; 15-minute orchestral-rock compositions are never going to make good football chants. This is music that demands, seizes and finally rewards, your complete attention.

The juxtaposition of power chords and piccolos might seem a perplexing one, but if you can stomach that thought and open up your mind a little bit, you will find that the music is immensely rewarding. Who, after all, doesn’t want to live the dream, and one day relish the prospect of having a tormented soul thrust his grief, and his groin, in your face, to an accompaniment of violins?

Every few years another Oasis album comes out and people
fall over. Some hit the ground in disgust: ‘Oasis? Oafs in parkas fixated on an imaginary Sixties with a frontman whose first love is fighting German gangsters! Rubbish!’. Others crumple to their knees in tribal admiration, worshipping any sweatsozzled stage worthy of the Gallagher
loafers.

The core question for both these camps is: ‘what is Oasis for?’ Flatterers know that, at a gig in one of the enormo-domes the band are wont to play in these days, they can lunge a beer-spattered, check-patterned forearm round their best mate’s neck, probably known as Craig or Darren, and go ‘mad fer it’ over ‘Champagne Supernova’ and ‘Wonderwall’.

Slightly more reserved fans see in them the replication of a great tradition in popular music: appropriation. The Beatles have always been Oasis’ target of choice. Noel rarely manages not to mention them in interviews, and Liam went around for some years actually thinking he was the resurrected spirit of John Lennon.

He’s not. But what Oasis have always managed to do is create a product that people want. They release an album and it sells, and there is no doubt that what they do is much more in the spirit of the tradition of guitar-based popular music than timid noodling by dance-fixated nerds on Moog synthesizers having to stop every five seconds to scrape their floppy fringe away from their eyes without disturbing their manscara.

To blast away these waifs with real rock and roll, Oasis storm back with their seventh studio album Dig Out Your Soul, a warm embrace of the tradition of appropriation. Here The Beatles become more than an affectionate albatross around the necks of Noel and Liam – they become a kind of daemon, supporting, bolstering, encouraging, but always leaving important decisions to the demands of 2008.

In earlier albums it seemed as if Noel in particular was afraid of innovation in the envelope-cauterising manner of his heroes. The attempts on 2001’s Standing on the Shoulders of Giants ended in critical contempt, although moments on that album, like the paranoid swirl of ‘Gas Panic!’, were worthy of minor Lennon/McCartney achievements. Noel got around the charge of backwardness by merely aping the Fab Four’s developments and assuming that would suffice for critics who wanted progression.

Let’s be clear; there is little real innovation as such on this album, unless you count quirky-ish beats and using a vocoder. Oasis would have no point if they tried to innovate in a spectacular manner.

Would we really want from this band a Radioheadstyle self-consciousness that spirals quickly into humourless defensiveness? A Kid A trajectory that shows a band so disconnected from their fans that they refuse to play ‘Creep’? Oasis continue to respect the taste of their fans, however banal that taste may seem to some high-brow critics.

As usual, most of the album is penned by Noel, with three offerings from Liam and one each from Gem Archer and Andy Bell respectively. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the latter two are the most forgettable. Liam builds on his earlier promise with an elegant (for Oasis) turn on ‘I’m Outta Time’ and the psych-rock rave-up ‘Ain’t Got Nothin’. Noel remains the furthest from the Beatlesburden. This may seem contradictory, but what he’s managed to do is to make his songs sound just like… his other songs, and not like his musical idols.

The pulse of ‘Waiting for the Rapture’ and rocket-blast of lead single ‘The Shock of the Lightning’ anchor the first half of the album firmly in Noel’s classicist Oasis vein. There’s still the wide-eyed, embracing melody, the rather silly lyrics (‘I got my heebie-jeebies in a little bag’) but it all bubbles underneath what is actually very murky music for Oasis.

The album’s dense and multilayered arrangements mean that the aural world that the album creates is perhaps the most consistent, atmospheric and enticing since 1994’s breakthrough Definitely Maybe. So, what is the point? Well, Oasis are a fallback, a steady hand on the throttle, a cup of tea, a shag pile carpet.

They present no real difficulty, no need for anxious concentration for the listener, although on this work such attention would be rewarded. Their real purpose lies in the recreation of origins from the vantage point of retrospective appropriation. On this new album they’re exciting, energetic.

Liam is still probably the best rock and roll singer of the last twenty years and these songs point to a future that gestures to journalistic questions of musical purpose with a two-fingered salute.

Four stars

Since their last appearance in Oxford two years ago, Enter Shikari have burst onto the music scene with the release last March of debut album Take to the Skies. Now the St. Albans-based quartet’s chaotic blend of trance and hardcore has become more than just an underground fad.

Enter Shikari take this opportunity to showcase material from their newly recorded album, with five previously unreleased songs, even at the expense of first single ‘Anything Can Happen in the Next Half Hour’, and fan favourite ‘Jonny Sniper’.

The new songs reveal some interesting additions to the mix; ‘The Jester’ opens with a flute melody over a swinging jazz beat, before descending into a screaming, guitar heavy midsection, which seamlessly segues into a happy hardcore crescendo.

The band are slow to get into their stride – the frequency of new material early on in the set-list seems to slow down the night. Enter Shikari are at their best when they have the whole room singing, screaming or shouting the words back at them.

When they get going though, they really get going – ‘Labyrinth’ sees frontman Rou Reynolds careering across the stage, whipping the crowd into vicious circle pits. There are more melodic moments too: ‘Return to Energiser’ ends with a slow sing-a-long, the audience waving glow-sticks.

Their fusion of hardcore screams, trance sections and singable choruses may sound like a bad idea on paper, and like a bit of a mess to the untrained ear, but playing live is where Enter Shikari really shine – their live show is an exhilarating experience.

‘This is probably the worst fucking work I’ve done in my whole life – although there has been some real bullshit’. The scene doesn’t seem to be going well. Despite the precision of the actors, despite their sheer willingness to listen and be directed, Walcott isn’t happy.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, Walcott has been feted since his emergence onto the poetry scene more than fifty years ago. Hailing from St. Lucia, Walcott is at the forefront of the Caribbean’s cultural identity, and is a world-respected artist in his own right.

Wandering back and forth from his chair to the acting space, his large frame seems weighed down with age. His white trainers squeak across the parquet flooring.

Far from revelling in his fame and extraordinary success he shrinks from talking to us. While his actors chat and joke with us, he remains silent. Until, unprompted, he says ‘You’re from Oxford? There’s a university there as well?’ A wide grin stretches across his wrinkled face, before he recedes to his chair.

The room is grand, but battered. This is not the sandy beaches of Walcott’s epic Omeros, nor the Thebes of Sophocles’ Antigone. It is Woolwich Town Hall, and we are at a rehearsal of Derek Walcott and Peter Manning’s current operatic production of Heaney’s The Burial at Thebes.

Several hours after arriving, we are finally given the chance to talk to Walcott. He’s less than pleased. In fact he’s thoroughly annoyed. It is safe to say that all of our fantasies of inspirational, generous poetic genius are shattered.

A few minutes later, Walcott returns. Grumpy, certainly, but calmer, he asks whether he can eat his lunch during the interview. We, overly enthusiastic, offer to ‘wait until later, if it’s more convenient?’.

It isn’t. And so we begin. First he wants to know whether we are going ‘to ask a load of dumb questions’. We are, after all, from Oxford.

But the play, the play, we protest, what about the play? ‘Tyranny is an eternal thing’, he muses. Well. Fine then. It is the humanity of the Antigone, the terrible relevance of the play, which has captured him.

Originally written by Sophocles, it recounts the tale of the martyr Antigone, whose brother Polyneices is denied burial by the dictatorial Creon. Adapted by Seamus Heaney into an epic poem in 2004, Antigone has been transmuted into operatic form, by the highly acclaimed Dominique le Gendre, the first woman to compose for the Royal Opera House.

Combining the work of two Nobel Prize winners, the rising talent of le Gendre and the skill of conductor Peter Manning, this is a project of stunning proportions. Premièring at the Globe last weekend to awful reviews, it is clearly also a contentious project.

Walcott has decided to relocate the play from Grecian Thebes to a failing Latin American republic, avoiding what he terms the ‘cliché’ of the Middle East. He is painfully aware of the violence which has disfigured Latin America. This project, hailed as a triumph of cultural diversity by the national press, is not about difference but about universality and unity.

Latin America, he tells us, is ‘my choice, my interpretation’, but ‘if you put it in China, Africa, it’ll all work’. ‘The reality of it is that it is nothing to do with being Greek, or being Colombian. The ultimate thing is the horror which comes upon a family. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what context it is in.’

But the play, the poem, and now the opera, are not to do with aesthetics, or an enjoyable experience for the audience. ‘It’s a context of violence set against a background of considerable beauty’ he adds. The portrayal of violence is something which concerns him; because ‘the horrible thing is, sometimes, violence can become a cliché’.

His ideas for direction struggle against this truism, and he focuses upon the image of ‘a dead dog at the side of the street, or in the middle of the road. You don’t see dead dogs in the street in Europe, in England, in London’.

It is a picture intimately connected with the Latin American setting, and has a powerful and defamiliarising potency. ‘If you substitute a dead dog for Polyneices, that’s what he wanted Polyneices to be’. It’s about the visceral, the brutal and the putrescent.

‘That putrescence is central to the play, and that putrescence doesn’t really have anything to do with Greek columns, or Greek architecture…’ ‘The greatest literature happens when there is a crisis of faith in that society’, Walcott adds.

It is the faith of the audience which interests him. They cannot believe in Greek gods, in passionless acting and old bits of marble. So we must access ‘the reality not of the gods, but of a dead dog in the street, rotting; there’s been too much horror not to start there.’

Modern drama fails to confront that sense of tragedy, he feels. ‘Instead of poetry, you get neurosis… it’s not poetry, it’s a clinical, psychological thing.’ But ‘the classic is instant, the classic is now.’

We move on to questions about the operatic nature of the production. What, we ask, does the music bring to the play? Walcott shakes his head fiercely. ‘It’s not what it brings to it, you have to think of it simultaneously’. The music, he says, ‘should be simultaneous, it should be synonymous, with the text’. Peter Manning, conductor and musical director, emphasises this point further, and talks at length about the intimacy of the relationship between verse and music.

But, he stresses, it is the task of any sincere musician to fight against the cliché of ‘the poetry of music, rather than the poetic in music’. One of the major musicians and conductors of his age, Manning he is trying to ‘create a new structure’, through his company, Manning Camerata, and to act ‘to engage at a different level’. ‘That you have to create the poetic is the challenge for any performing artist’, he says.

A refreshed looking chorus have returned from their lunch break. The cast are winding up for an arduous afternoon, but they are laughing, and smiling. We gather our things, and go to leave.

‘How are we getting back to Oxford?’ Walcott enquires. ‘By coach’, we reply. ‘Coach? You have to drop such an archaic word…A coach, several horses…’ he laughs. And a smile finally slashes across his wrinkled face.