"These things are hard to say. I’m not sure what’s true and what isn’t."

This is the opening of The Sabotage Café, Joshua Furst’s tale of a dysfunctional family relationship born of painful memories and mental illness. Welcome to Dinkytown, Minneapolis, scene of the 1980s punk rebellion from which Julia has escaped, and still home to an underground world of narcotics, anarchy and tempestuous youth.

Into this meleé runs Cheryl, Julia’s 16-year-old daughter, escaping the confines of suburbia and her mother’s oppressive presence. As we are drawn into Cheryl’s world of drugs, sex and squalor mixed with hashed-up ideals about the demise of ‘the establishment’, we also journey into Julia’s past, picking up the pieces of a life diverted and damaged. How much of her experience is real, and how much is imagined by the fearful and delusional Julia remains unclear, as Julia’s disturbed mind produces illusions which become increasingly difficult to distinguish from flashback and reality.

What Furst does brilliantly is portray through projected emotion and internalised argument the lonely struggle of each character to find meaning in their situation, or to deny it. The gung-ho bravado of the boys Cheryl ends up with is nothing more than a face for their insecurities, the outcome of youth burdened by their parents’ blunders as well as their own.

Furst’s blunt and epithetic manner  shocks rather than draws sympathy at first, but his open style creates the sense of hopelessness in which the book’s characters dwell, empty and needy, clawing into each other’s lives as if some solace can be found by living vicariously. His compassionate exploration of life in the grimy fallout of a failed revolution and the desire to obliterate the self is a first novel to be proud of, and one that provokes.

The theory of The Gift is a fascinating one. We have by now recognised that exchange is not always what it seems. Despite appearances, anything that passes from one to another will always have ‘strings attached’. As an anthropology student currently slaving over these theories, I half-skipped my way to the OVADA gallery, impatient to see how different artists had managed to find a way of visually representing these purely academic concepts.

They hadn’t. Most pieces had such a remote connection to gifts, exchange or relationships that one couldn’t help but feel that they were scraping the bottom of the barrel in trying to link them all to one theme. For example, apparently the light and shadow plays on random surfaces that George Mogg films present themselves so rarely that when they do its a gift that there’s something worth filming. I’m not sure about worth filming, but there was definitely nothing there worth watching!

Vicky Vergou’s film An Odyssey reminded me of why I tend to stay away from conceptual art – two videos run parallel to each other, one displaying blood and the other water. The former symbolises the artist’s long-term illness, the latter achievement. Attributing symbolic meaning to something is fair enough – we do it in every field of self-expression, whether art, drama or literature. But it has to have a purpose – either to communicate something or just be aesthetically pleasing. Vergou just created symbolism and let it hang. It wasn’t even a particularly pretty installation.

Ann Rapstoff’s video of a woman’s neon-pink coloured mouth uttering (in a supposedly inspirational but actually very scary) voice: ‘You are special. You are unique’ was sheer entertainment. She’s got a point – we should remember we are all worthy. But not in that way. Artists should stay away from anthropological theories if they don’t know how to do them justice. Personally, I am still awaiting some conceptual art that will not make me grimace.

Stephen Stelfox, a talent spotter for a major record label, is going very quickly insane. His job consists of picking which of the ‘one GCSE merchants’ (the artists) will have a hit record with the ‘animals’  (the public).

These decisions are almost always made drunk from an Eastern European brothel, and the hits are drying up. Stelfox’s recent attempts at success (including a German electro pop number called ‘Why Don’t You Smack My Ass?’) ended in disaster.

His mind is like ‘a Mission with no Control.’ As the title suggests, Stelfox’s insanity and rising bloodlust is going to end badly for his nearest and dearest.

John Niven’s debut novel draws on the writer’s own experience as an A&R man in the late nineties, and its this semi fictional memoir form that’s perhaps the most enjoyable aspect to Kill Your Friends. Britpop’s at its peak, Girl Power’s just kicked off, and New Labour’s election victory is only a few months away. Niven deftly uses ironic retrospection; the reader cannot help but be amused by Stelfox’s opinion that Be Here Now is Oasis’ masterpiece, that OK Computer will end Radiohead’s career, and the description of Tony Blair as ‘that Labour guy.’

It’s a disappointment, then, that the rest of the novel is so derivative and, ultimately, boring. Niven’s stabs at postmodernism are clumsy and ineffectual, and the surreal, stream-of-consciousness dialogues begin to grate. Similarly, Stelfox’s casual racism, and not-so-casual sexism, don’t shock because they’re so contrived. It becomes obvious within about five lines of Kill Your Friends that Niven is hugely inspired by Bret Easton Ellis’ own bloody satire, American Psycho, and it is this debt that ultimately prevents the book from having an existence of its own. Mockney lads’ culture is not as interesting, or as fitting a target for satire as eighties Wall Street, and the novel’s progression from nostalgic memoir to murderous rampage is a mistake from which Kill Your Friends never fully recovers from.

2 stars out of 5 

The Audacity of Ideas is a new play written by Oxford student Gareth Russell and set on the brink of the French Revolution.

I must admit, going by the title, I was worried that this would be seriously dry drama. Writing a play about ideas and setting it over two hundred years ago seemed a bit like walking the plank voluntarily. I expected the play to be as patchy as a student’s essay written in the wee hours of the morning after too much ProPlus. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

This is a play about ideas, yes; but ideas tested out on the streets of Paris and enforced using the guillotine. Russell’s writing is far from perfect, but it does put extraordinary words in the mouths of his characters. The Bible is memorably described as ‘almost a waste of vellum’; revolutionaries are the ‘excrement of the nation’. The urgency of the impending Revolution is brilliantly portrayed and played out among the highest aristocrats at court: ‘there is no middle road between the throne and the scaffold’, Charles tells his brother King Louis.

The Audacity of Ideas follows the politics of the French court and displays the courtiers in all their arrogance and ignorance. Camped-up Charles, the King’s younger brother (played by Gareth Russell) is excellent as he bullies and seduces his way around aristocratic circles.

The play portrays the extravagance of the upper classes, as they witter on about parties on the very cusp of revolution, and still manages to pull off a discussion of the burning ideas of the time. Yet the characterization suffers from this extraordinarily ambitious task, and sometimes slips into caricature.

Russsell aimed to introduce the audience to the smaller players at court, but I certainly came away remembering the spoilt one, the gay one and the serious one, rather than any actual names. What’s more, the play borrows rather a lot from the intrigues and the mannerisms of Liaisons Dangereuses, staged last term at the Moser theatre in Oxford.

Although a little too earnest at times, this new piece of student writing is definitely worth watching. Centuries later, revolutionary spirit is still in the air – not least on the stages of Oxford student theatre.

4 stars out of 5

An existential crisis drives the plot of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. The two title characters are locked into the fate decided for them in Hamlet. While they will die, as they cannot alter what William Shakespeare created, they can debate on life, probability, and meaning- while attempting to remember their own names.

Tom Stoppard’s play takes the two characters, memorable only because they are completely non-distinguishable, and develops them into a play that focuses on their own identity crises, the action of Hamlet swirling around them.

This excellent production, directed by Krishna Omkar, places the characters on a giant chessboard, literally turning them into pawns of a higher will. Guildenstern, played by William Spray, exudes a cool severity as he slinks around the board. His tone remains composed and focused, even if his train of thought rarely makes sense. Rosencrantz, meanwhile, played by Liam Well, moves around the board with excited energy, and manages admirably to combine awe, interest, and confusion.

Finishing off the cast is a group of tragedians, led by Tom Carlisle, whose booming and confident voice makes him the ideal salesman of tragedy. The tragedians also double as the Danish court. This decision artfully meshes the two groups, since both are directing tragedies in their own right. The tragedians slide across the board like dancers, taking positions which mimic the great misfortunes of human existence that occur within Hamlet; murder, adultery, and deception.

Identity and existence are questions that the characters continually debate. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern do not connect with each other or even with their own selves, often forgetting where and who they are. The production emphasizes their confusion by placing the two under a white spot-light, while the other characters languish under dimmer lighting.

As the production progresses, the white light serves to highlight the changing movements of the title characters. Rosencrantz’s, with his bursts of fractured energy, begins to resemble a trapped animal, while Guildenstern has moments of stillness, standing locked within himself. Therein lies the strength behind the production’s minimalist set. While the action may take the characters to court or to a ship, their bodies remain attached to a game in which they cannot deter their fate.

4 stars out of 5