Police are appealing for information about an Oxford student
who was mugged at knifepoint on Friday 26 March. The attack took place after the student had spent a night out
in the city. She was sitting with a friend on a wall in St Giles
when the incident occurred. The hooded male crouched down in
front of her and demanded, “give me your bag and what you
have if you don’t want to get hurt.” He then grabbed
hold of the student’s handbag before running down Woodstock
Road. Chasing the offender, the student shouted that she had been
robbed to members of the public. A man in his fifties with short
curly grey hair joined the chase, and continued to pursue the
mugger after the robbed student had fallen. He finally returned
to the student having been threatened with the knife. The police have decided not to reveal the identity of the
student. They wish to hear from the four members of the public
that the student passed while chasing the mugger. They are also
particularly eager to contact the good samaritan, or anyone who
may know the identity of this man. It is believed that his
evidence could be vital in bringing the offender to justice. Anyone with information should contact the police on 0845 8
505 505.ARCHIVE: 5th week TT 2004 

A man has been stabbed outside the Marks and Spencer store on
Banbury Road, Summertown. The man was standing outside the store with his bike when a
car with three men pulled up alongside him. The attacker got out
of the car and immediately stabbed the victim in the leg, before
returning to the vehicle and driving off. The car set off towards the city centre. The incident occurred
between 9 and 9:30 pm, Monday 24 May. The victim suffered a deep
stab wound which required several stitches. A 36 year old man,
Ian McFayden, from Cowley, has been charged in connection with
the incident.ARCHIVE: 5th week TT 2004 

Saudi Arabia was left reeling this week after Islamist
militants stormed a smart residential compound and an oil company
headquarters in Khobar, taking more than 50 people hostage. 22
people, including nine of the hostages, were killed before Saudi
troops stormed the compound where they were being held. This incident raises new concerns about the Saudi
government’s ability to combat Islamic terrorism, and the
security of foreign workers in the country. The militants, who
are thought to have Al-Qaeda links, were said to be specifically
targeting foreigners. They were reported to have asked people in
the compound, “Are you Muslim or Christian? We don’t
want to kill Muslims.” The Oasis residential compound, one
of the most luxurious in the city, is home to many oil company
executives. Fears over the safety of its citizens have led the US
to request that all its nationals leave the country immediately
and the UK to issue travel advisory warnings. The recent attacks have had an adverse effect on the price of
oil with investors fearing that it is part of a sustained attempt
to disrupt oil supplies from the world’s largest exporter.
The recent events in Khobar follow gun attacks at a petrochemical
plant in Yanbu which killed five foreigners, and a suicide bomb
attack on a residential compound in November last year in Riyadh
which left 17 dead.ARCHIVE: 5th week TT 2004 

A 14-year-old boy has appeared in court, charged with plotting
his own murder. John, 14, used multiple personalities on the internet to
convince Mark, 16, to stab him when they met up in Greater
Manchester last June. The boys’ real names have not been
disclosed to the press. John used a number of different
characters on the internet and became friends with Mark after
meeting him in chat rooms. One of John’s false personas
– a 42 year-old woman claiming to work for MI5 – told
Mark he had to murder his friend. He was told to say, “I
love you bro” as he carried out the attack and was promised
sexual favours and money if he was successful. After the stabbing
John was left critically ill in hospital, although he has now
recovered. He is said to have been having difficulties in school
and was unsure about his sexuality. Both boys have been put under
supervision orders.ARCHIVE: 5th week TT 2004 

X’ian Bar
197 Banbury Rd
(01865) 554239 Those of you who are connoisseurs of Chinese cuisine will
certainly know of the X’ian restaurant in Summertown since
it serves, without a doubt, the best Chinese food for several
counties. If you haven’t been tempted to trek up the Banbury
Road to sample its crispy duck and spring rolls you should
consider a visit to its bar. X’ian’s bar isn’t huge, it certainly isn’t
anthing like a bar in its own right, but perhaps it’s all
the more alluring for that fact. One can recline on the comfy
Chinese-print sofas while enjoying a Mai Tai and chatting to
one’s fellows without the blare of hideous house music
making meaningful conversation impossible. This bar is for the
more discerning visitor. Don’t turn up intending to get
plastered – you’ll get thrown out on your ear. But if
you’re after a quieter alcoholic evening then X’ian is
the perfect experience. As we come into the summer months X’ian has an extra
benefit: outdoor seating. Their license covers the al fresco
consumption of delicious alcoholic beverages, and drinking in
their sweet little garden under the pegoda front is a seriously
pleasurable experience. X’ian doesn’t have a dress code
but I recommend dressing up for your visit, it only adds to the
fun. Pretend, for one night, that you’re not a scruffy
student and become instead, in a Stars in Their Eyes type
transformation, a glamorous bohemien ready to indulge in the
finer things in life, good wine, witty, sparkling conversation.
And, this not being some slummy little bar, you’ll still be
sober enough by the end of the night to make it back into town
alive. And, if you’re bored of the regular cocktails offered by
all the other bars then ask the manager to serve you their
speciality – vodka spiked with scorpian tails. If that
doesn’t excite you then nothing will!ARCHIVE: 5th week TT 2004 

Gino’s Pizzeria
94 Gloucester Green
(01865) 794446 Italian food and Italian restaurants have taken Oxford by
storm over the last couple of years, bringing with them a
superior offering of pizza and pasta to that previously supplied
by the dismal doughy Pizza Hut. At the very pinnacle of Italian
eateries, sits Gino’s. For some reason, and I have yet to fathom why, this place
isn’t particularly well known. I think it’s in the
marketing. Gino’s serves the best pizza and pasta I’ve
ever had outside Italy and yet it’s very often empty. This
is a sad, sad thing. I’ve often chatted with the manager
about how he could better market the place but he seems more
interested in the quality of his sauces. The silly man should
learn the lesson from Pizza Hut that quality is apparently
irrelevant. And it’s not as if the punters are going for cost over
taste, Pizza Hut is hardly cheap and, of all the pizza
restaurants in Oxford, Gino’s is certainly the best value.
Two courses won’t cost you more than a tenner. The quality of pizza is all in the dough. Gino’s dough
actually tastes homemade. It’s soft and flavourful and not
smothered by the toppings. The pasta at Gino’s is actually
as good as that offered in the restaurants of Florence and Siena.
The Spaghetti Amatriciana is the best: chilli sauce (not too hot
so as to overwhelm the other ingredients) with bacon. A perfect three-course meal at Gino’s would start with
mussels (avoid the bruscetta, I have to admit it’s quite
poor and you can certainly get better at ASK or Pizza Hut), move
on to the Spaghetti Amatriciana and finish with the chocolate
fudge cake with cream – heaven on a plate. Perhaps the best feature of Gino’s is its atmosphere: a
tiny, cosy place with paintings of Italy on the ceiling and
walls, all tucked away next to Glouster Green bus station. Cheap,
cute and succulent – what more could you ask for?ARCHIVE: 5th week TT 2004 

True confidence, surely, is the ability to dismiss half of
your own career as “parasitic” and “imposing”
– only an actor, director and playwright such as Steven
Berkoff could do such a thing without raising any eyebrows, and
this did indeed seem to be his agenda when he spoke at the
English faculty on 20 May. Berkoff laments the “castration
of the actor” by theatre directors, proclaiming the latter
to be expensive and excessive; have we met a professional theatre
practitioner with genuine humility, or is this a brilliantly
sophisticated placing of his own work above and outside of even
his own profession? Steven Berkoff studied drama in London and Paris and performed
modest roles with repertory companies before forming the London
Theatre Group in 1968. His first original play, East, was staged
in 1975 at the Edinburgh festival, followed by an array of varied
works including West, Decadence, Greek, Kvetch, Acapulco and
Brighton Beach Scumbags, all written in his indulgent,
aggressive, yet cerebral style . As a director, Berkoff has
toured tens of productions such as Kafka’s Metamorphosis,
The Trial, Agamemnon, Hamlet, Macbeth, Wilde’s Salome,
Richard II and Coriolanus. Several of these were international
tours, to Japan, Los Angeles and Germany to name but a few. As an
actor, his one-man show has toured Britain, the USA, South
Africa, Finland, Italy, Singapore and Australia. He has made
several dubious film appearances, including A Clockwork Orange,
Octopussy and Rambo, and he directed and costarred in a film
version of his play, Decadence. He has published a variety of
books such as, modestly, I Am Hamlet, Meditations on
Metamorphosis and his autobiography, Free Association. But despite an extensive biography, Berkoff’s popularity
is questionable. He has made several un-politically- correct
moves in his career including death threats towards critics and
breaking an actors’ union strike by working on a McDonalds
commercial. On the whole his ego seems to dominate his press; he
doesn’t seem able to keep it in check. This fact was evident
when he lectured, especially in his assaults on directors, set
designers and critics. Having said this, his skills as an actor
cannot be denied. His recent visit to the Oxford Playhouse with
his touring show, “Shakespeare’s Villains” was a
real treat, perhaps becauseof his unrestrained ego – there
is something riveting about watching a stage actor without a
shred of modesty deliver classic Shakespeare monologues
juxtaposed with his own character interpretations and method,
academically presented. Berkoff spoke extensively about acting in
his Fourth Week lecture too, heralding it as a “great
sacrifice;” as far as I could discern, a sacrifice of
one’s own self-consciousness. Deeply ironic, I thought,
coming from the most utterly self-indulgent of all thespians.
Nonetheless he continued on to propose some reasonable, and
rather beautiful, musings on acting, as “exposure to the
acid of audience observation” and “maintaining
childhood and playfulness” seemingly justifying his
participation in this aspect of theatre. On he ploughed, however, to paint a darker picture of the
director; an invention of the twentieth century, apparently,
which has cost the theatre the loss of the
“actor-manager” tradition of the Olivier era. According
to Berkoff, actors of the 1800s were “masters of the
theatre,” able to return to roles time and again and
“flower” into great artists. Today they are at the
mercy of the “caveman of theatre;” the director, who
paints a replica of reality onto the stage like primitive rock
art – his obsession with naturalism is deep-rooted and
constraining. Berkoff himself has not, it must be noted, been
directed for thirty years, through sheer obstinacy I believe. His
objection to directors as a category stems from their
youthfulness, since he claims that directing is a natural
progression from acting, and thus the great actors of his time
should now be becoming directors in a process resembling
evolution. Instead, he laments, the profession is overrun with young
directors, too weak to act themselves, yet preventing the rites
of passage of their seniors. The reasons for young people’s
interest in directing seem logical and unsurprising to me –
better wages, your n a m e stamped upon a p r o – d u c – tion in
the manner formerly enjoyed by actors, and very little
responsibility for negative criticism (which is invariably
targeted towards actors or playwrights). It is no surprise that
the profession is popular. As a director myself, I am very interested in Berkoff’s
writing. Despite hearing him slate the profession of directing, I
am preparing a production of his as we speak – Messiah :
Scenes from a Crucifixion (Old Fire Station Theatre, Eighth
Week). How can I defend the process, in the face of such ironic
egomaniacal insult? Firstly, it is no coincidence that Steven
Berkoff has been touring one-man shows for many years and has not
worked with a director for equally as long; he neglects to
mention the essential function of equalizationand balance which
only a directorial “outsideeye” can perform. Rehearsals
are periods of “mixing,” rather like the musicp r o d u
c t i o n sense of the term; actors need pushing and p u l l i n
g i n t o l i n e with each othersince they have, after all,
competing egos just like Berkoff’s. Whether this is
conscious or not differs from actor to actor. Once performance
level is reached, the discrepancies in experience and skill in
the company should be invisible. Secondly, it takes guts to use the level of poetic symbolism
Berkoff calls for in directing. Trusting the audience to
understand and appreciate the suggestive, the abstract, the
minimal, is a sacrifice just as significant as that of the actor,
for we are sacrificing the safety of offering our audience
something easy, something real. A director who sticks to
naturalism does so with good reason – it is expected of him,
in a dire self-fulfilling prophecy which is only aggravated by
the lamentations from famous names such as Berkoff. My production of Messiah is not, incidentally, one such
naturalistic production; it proposes an alternative hypothesis
for the story of Jesus, told with the premise that he is not a
superhero but an ordinary Jew with charisma, brains and a
penchant for spin-doctoring. His last days and his crucifixion
are distinctly non-naturalistic; I am attempting to make that
sacrifice of safety, and prove Berkoff wrong. I do not think I
am, as the director, “parasitic”, “imposing”
or “unnecessary” – my process is a consultative,
team-building and communally creative one. A director who abhors directing is rather like a chef who
refuses to use the electric oven; is it the ultimate
self-challenge, or rather an utterly unashamed superiority
complex? (“All other directors are parasitic / ineffectual /
dull – but I’m the example of how it should be
done”) – in Steven Berkoff’s case, the answer is
written all over his unfathomable (yet somehow endearing) ego.ARCHIVE: 5th week TT 2004 

Knitting has enjoyed a revival over the past few years, as
stars like Julia Roberts, Cameron Diaz, Kate Moss and, curiously
enough, Russell Crowe have all started to knit one, purl one. It
seems that after a hard day’s night and a punch up down
under, Mr Crowe likes nothing better than to snuggle up with his
knitting. It’s a 1970s craze – knitters want free love and
happiness. At the Peace Rally in February 2003, ‘Cast
Off’, the ‘Ultimate Knitting Society for Boys and
Girls’, knitted a banner that read, “Drop stitches, not
bombs. Make jumpers, not war.” That’s right, if only
George Bush had knitted his dog, Barney, a little woolly
‘Peace’ waistcoat, then the war in Iraq may have been
avoided. What Crowe and knitters everywhere have discovered are the
meditative and fashionable benefits that can be gained from
weaving wool. Rachel Matthews, the founder of “Cast
Off”, the same woman who brought you that essential
contingent to your winter wardrobe, the “Willy Warmer”
(a bestseller in Japan), claims that “knitting is guaranteed
to boost your immune system and clear your head”. The
repetition of the activity helps a person focus, with many
benefits. One of the brightest stars to have emerged this year at London
Fashion Week was the young knitwear designer, Clare Tough, who
made an incredible collection of intricately knitted tops,
skirts, ponchos, and woollen stilettos. She is currently dealing with buyers in London, while the rest
of her fellow students from the Central St Martins fashion
department are crying over broken dreams; their future career as
a stylist for Kim Marsh and the Sugar Babes stretching before
them. Wool is back and the way to wear it is loosely, wrapped around
you, like an ethereal fairy. Keep it loose and wispy over dusty
coloured, patterned dresses and skirts, or soft worn-in jeans.
It’s a good way of wearing less at night, while keeping warm
and it also takes the edge off an enormous cleavage, or lack of
one. To avoid looking like Grandma Mildred, choose your colours
carefully; try baby pink and black mixed together or rainbow
coloured. The best way to get this look is to start knitting yourself
and create a one-off, original piece, that’s just your
colour. Knitting passes the time, it’s relaxing and helps
you think – go to KnitSoc, branch out, expand your interests
and make some new 100% woollen friends. Or, if you can face it, go to Unicorn, on Ship Street and sift
through the unbelievable wasteland of clothes it has to offer.
Genuine vintage shawls, ponchos and scarves start at around £10,
and can be found somewhere in a tangled heap in this slightly
Dickensian establishment. So start knitting, for all the therapeutic and stylish
opportunities it has to offer. This summer I say wrap yourself up
in wool and look lost in a garden. All we need is Woodstock 1969, a field of comatose,
drug-addled hippies and Hendrix playing on stage. Those of you
who managed to get tickets for Glastonbury this year, don’t
forget to wear a poncho for me and shake your head wildly.ARCHIVE: 5th week TT 2004