There are two types of travellers: ‘seers’ and
‘doers’. ‘Doers’ travel because they love
adventure, they are drawn to a backpack and the outback or
anywhere else in the world where they can get down and dirty and
experience life in other countries and cultures.
‘Seers’ just love seeing beautiful things. They will
travel to the farthest reaches of the globe to view the Taj
Mahal, the Grand Canyon, the Great Barrier Reef. I’m
definitely a seer. Unfortunately I have the budget of a doer.
Thus I found myself hitchhiking up the West Coast, picked up and
stranded in the forests of Portland, Oregon. The rain was coming
down hard and no one was stopping. I was stuck in the rain, walking up the I–5 towards
Portland. The city was fifty miles down the road and would have
taken me days to reach on foot. I decided to sit down on the side
of the road and wait for some kind soul to come to my rescue.
Eventually a jeep pulled alongside me and slid down its window. “Hey y’all, I’m heading for Portland if ya
wanna ride,” a dimlooking but friendly fifty-something
cowboy called out to me. “Sure,” I said.
“That’d be great.” I was sitting in his car before
he could change his mind. I was not five minutes closer to my
destination before the cowboy pulled out something and suggested
that I might like to touch it. Recoiling at this offering, I
opened the door and was out of that car before it had even come
to a halt. Unfortunately while hitchhiking is gloriously free, it is not
without its drawbacks. You run into your fair share of flashers,
born-again Christian Evangelists and general crazed lunatics.
I’ve been shown a variety of penises, told I’ll be
enjoying an eternity burning in the fires of hell and once was
forced to vacate a vehicle when the driver offered me a
peanut–butter sandwich and a marriage proposal. Every now and again one has a travelling experience for which
they are truly grateful. So cold and despondent was I at this
point that when a multi-coloured van nearly ran me down I almost
wept with gratitude and relief. I jumped aboard and stepped back
into the seventies. Inside the van were painted psychedelic
patterns, swirled rugs and several spaced out hippies reclined on
a makeshift sofa. I was introduced to Jim, Daisy and Wood-Nymph
by Phoenix, the driver. “Where’re you searching for?” Phoenix drawled.
“Portland,” I replied prosaically. “Cool,
we’re finding ourselves there soon; we’ll be there by
sundown.” “Sundown?” I said. “But the
sun’s already set.” “Tomorrow,” Phoenix said
slowly. “Oh,” I said, starting to worry a little.
“So where will you be until then?” Phoenix turned back
to the road, losing interest in me and deciding it needed his
attention. Then Wood-Nymph stirred from her beanbag. “The
Hot Springs,” she said. “Where else?”
“I’m a visitor.” I apologised for my total lack of
local knowledge. “I’m from England.” Normally this statement induced enthusiastic enquiries from
Anglophile Americans. The hippies, however, weren’t
interested. Wood-Nymph turned back to Daisy who started
absent-mindedly fondling her breast. “Oh,” I said to myself and stared rigidly out of the
window for the next hour or so until we came to a halt. The
hippies bundled out of the van. “Hey! Where are we
going?” I called after the hippies who were rapidly
disappearing into the night. The hippies had become silent on
this matter and I was forced to follow them in silence. To my
dismay this entailed slipping down a wet, muddy cliffside and
through a forest of fallen trees, boulders and roots all of which
were entirely invisible under the midnight sky. Finally we came to a clearing and, to my absolute horror, the
hippies stopped and immediately started to disrobe. “What the hell are you doing?” Daisy looked at me like I was more stoned than she was.
“Going to the Hot Springs.” “We’re going into the Hot Springs?” Apparently
this question was so stupid it didn’t warrant a response.
Daisy threw off the last of her attire and skipped off towards
the pools of steaming water nearby. I stood rooted to the spot and watched the naked hippies
frolicking in the water. Nothing on earth could induce me to
strip off at -10 degrees. Then it started to snow. Absolute humiliation or an icy death. I closed my eyes, flung
off my clothes and jumped into the water. And so it was that I
spent the night getting stoned under the stars sitting in a
natural hot-tub as the snow came down.ARCHIVE: 5th week TT 2004 

Just a twenty minute cycle ride away from central Oxford lies
a haven which lacks the bustle of Oxford life. It has been the
home of the dukes of Marlborough since 1704, when John Churchill,
the first Duke, won a great victory over the forces of Louis XIV,
and was given as a reward the Royal Manor of Woodstock and the
promise of a house. You will be astounded by the beauty of all that is around you,
whether you take in the house itself or just the grounds. The
more energetic amongst you can walk around the garden and visit
many hidden treasures: the outstanding feature of the huge park
is the man–made lake. The Grand Bridge is an awe-inspiring
focal point which leads up to the house, and the other side of
this is the Column of Victory, 40 metres high and in the Doric
style. Within the Palace’s precincts are formal gardens complete
with magnificent water terraces, an Italian Garden and the
Mermaid Fountain, all of which give the impression that you are
in one of the grands chateaux of France or Italy. Visitors can
buy (fairly expensive but tasty) ice creams and food here, and
sit on the terraces overlooking the lake. There is also the
fragrant Rose Garden, where Winston Churchill proposed to his
wife. If you have never been there, take the bus (Number 20) or
cycle out there to discover for yourselves this beautiful palace.
As you arrive you can feel yourself relaxing and the pain of that
last essay crisis subsiding, while you are absorbed into the
calming surroundings – it is almost as if you are
transported to a parallel world.ARCHIVE: 5th week TT 2004 

At twenty, stalking has become a past time of mine. Though it
started out as inadvertent; a mere raised eyebrow at seeing the
name, Mario Vargas Llosa, in the Edinburgh Literary Festival
guide, in the later stages there was no question that I was on a
more than casual mission to meet the man. It wasn’t only for
the sake of his illustrious bio-data: Vargas is an
internationally acclaimed author of more than nineteen books,
part of a Latin American ‘holy trinity’ of fiction
alongside Borges and Marquez. Neither was it just because of his
intriguing stand as a conservative candidate for the Peruvian
presidency in the 1990 elections (which he lost to Alberto
Fujimori). The reason was more personal. What drew me to Llosa was
certainly his talent, but also my memory. At an age when I could
hardly make out what the black characters on a page stood for, I
remember my father shaking The War of the End of the Worldat me
saying, ‘Read it! It’s the most powerful book
you’ll ever read’. When I did, a few years later, I
emerged dazed, from within a haze of elemental emotions –
power, violence and lust., hunger and idealism. I couldn’t
forget the Counselor, Llosa’s apocalyptic prophet: “The
man was tall and so thin he seemed to be always in profile. He
was dark-skinned and rawboned, and his eyes burned with perpetual
fire”. So a distant memory drove me to action. I bought a ticket to
hear Llosa read from his new book, The Feast of the Goatin
Edinburgh. And after witnessing the warmth and passion with which
he spoke, the combined charm of a neatly groomed shock of silver
and a thick Spanish accent embellishing carefully chosen words, I
decided that it might be interesting to talk to him at greater
length about the whole vocation of writing. What were his
motivations? What advice would he give to aspiring novelists? But
getting answers was difficult from an author who spent so much
time travelling. And so, like Mohammed, I waited for the
mountain. It came, more than six months later, in the form of the
Weidenfeld Chair of Comparative Literature. With this position,
as I found out, Llosa would be spending Trinity term in Oxford,
giving a series of eight lectures on Hugo’s Les Miserables.
The stalking had come to an end. When I met him, Llosa seemed to fit in perfectly against a
backdrop of dreaming spires. He had the look of a college
professor and from the nature of the conversation, we could
almost have been in a tutorial. I asked him how he reconciled his
role in Oxford, that of the literary critic, with that of a
writer; did he see an opposition there? Critics are seen as the
bane of writers’ lives, torturing their intuitively wrought
texts by dissection with a sharp set of surgical knives. But
Llosa is more accommodating; he is quick to point out that the
kind of literary criticism he practices doesn’t pretend to
be ‘scientific, impersonal and objective’ but on the
contrary, he sees criticism as a point of departure, imbued with
imagination: “My purpose is not to describe or interpret but
to build something new…to use the work of others as raw
material”. He continues, “ I am very present in the critical work I
do. I use my own experience as a writer to try and understand the
work of others.” In his opinion, the opposition between a
creative and critical frame of mind comes in the sense that
“when you write, personality intervenes” and
“instincts, passions, emotions” take over from
rationality. But the critic and the writer are not two separate,
irreconcilable beings; he says, with a spark in his eye: “I
try not to influence my critics, only they can tell me
objectively, what I have done.” Llosa’s liberality doesn’t just extend to critics
but to writers who are engaging in the ‘globalization’
of literature. Like ‘Doctors without Borders’, a new
creed has been evolving of ‘Writers without Borders’. I
wondered how a person who had written consistently about Latin
America and its problems through out his career would react to
the break down of national borders – for example, to South
Asians writing in English about Europeans (as Michael Ondaatje
does in The English Patient). Should writers, for the sake of
authenticity, only write about what they know? Citing the
examples of Conrad, Beckett, Borges and Nabokov, all multilingual
authors, Llosa passionately disagrees: “literature is not
geography, not history, not an accurate description of a reality.
Because then it becomes a social science.” Would he write a novel that wasn’t based in Latin
America? “Not as a moral obligation, no…but maybe, if
it is stimulating to me at that point”. In fact, The Way to
Paradise, his most recent novel, is a step in that direction. The
novel depicts the lives of two stalwart figures in Peruvian
history – Flora Tristan, a feminist agitator for social
change in the nineteenth century and her grandson, the famous
artist Gauguin. The novel oscillates between France, Peru and
Tahiti. But the changing settings of the novel are not as important to
the story as the similarity between the characters of Gauguin and
his grand mother: “What I admire about them…is that
they pursued their utopias and sacrificed their lives to their
utopias.” Llosa said he was primarily drawn to Flora
Tristan, the idea of writing about Gauguin only struck later in
the process. The notion of writing about her accompanied him for
nearly 30 years. “I admired her courage, how she dared to
tell everything about her life in her memoirs, her ideals
especially, in a time where there were so many prejudices.”
Her zealous commitment to politics is clearly something that
Llosa sees as a special quality. Something that he chose to
emulate in his own life, perhaps? A knowing look comes into his eyes at this point. It’s
unavoidable, we cannot skirt past the topic of his presidential
campaign. It’s a topic that I’m confused about, unable
to reconcile the Llosa who drew sympathetic portraits of
revolutionaries (as in The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta) to
Llosa, the conservative presidential candidate who proposed a
kind of Andean Thatcherism for his country. Yet Llosa defends his
position by saying that at the end of the 80’s Peru was in
the process of disintegration – ‘democracy was close to
collapse’. There was hyperinflation. In those circumstances
it was necessary to get involved. Writer had to metamorphose into
politician. Had he ceased to believe in Shelley’s words that,
“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the
world”? Llosa shakes his head; it was simply a case where
more direct action was required. “My vocation is
literature”, he says, “I realised that you have to have
a real appetite to be a politician. An appetite for power which I
didn’t have”. His appetite for writing took over. Still, the experience of
political life was not wasted; it gave him enough material to
write a book, A Fish in the Water(1993), and subsequently
informed his descriptions of the world of the Dominican tyrant
Trujillo, in The Feast of the Goat.. I am tempted to ask a
beginner’s question at this point. Is it better for an
aspiring novelist to livefirst and then write? To add to a bank
of ‘meaningful experiences’ before taking up the pen in
order to say something truly profound or original? Llosa squashes
the idea in one fell sweep – “You always write from
experience, what else do you have? All that’s important is
the will to write, the discipline”. The centrepiece of his
theory about writing is simple. “Read; read all the classic
writers. You’ll learn much more from reading than listening
– from classes and lectures.” He grins wryly. Llosa advocates the world of visualization, rather than
knowledge. “I loved Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy,
Hemmingway…and Faulkner; I read Faulkner with a pen and
paper to explore all the possibilities of literary form he
provided.” Read and daydream and the rest will take care of
itself he seems to say. Is there a lot of day-dreaming in Oxford?
Llosa pauses to consider. “There are all kinds of people
here, some curious and interesting, some who know a lot but they
haven’t seen the world too much.“ARCHIVE: 5th week TT 2004 

It’s something all of us seek to some extent, often
agonize about and usually want more of. No I’m not talking
about the first thing that may spring to mind, but something that
is often even trickier to define: confidence. Confidence is an
elusive quality which, like maths, seems to be something you are
born with, or something that you can develop with a struggle over
time, which would put most people (myself included) firmly into
the second category. Either way, it is intrinsically hard to
define. What, for example, characterizes the borders between
confidence and arrogance? When Oscar Wilde declared his genius on
arrival in America, was he telling the truth, exuding confidence,
or simply being arrogant? For those of us not confusing American customs officials
(which, it has to be said, it not the brightest idea in this day
and age) confidence is generally viewed as a means to an end. It
is the confidence behind interviewees that clinches their
interviews, boldness of ideas and style that upgrades essays and
it is relaxed confidence that attracts the opposite sex. But then
there is still the risk of tipping the borderline and straying
into the realms of arrogance, a complete turn off. If you’re
British you have added complications: you’ve probably spent
most of your life being taught how valuable modesty is, so how is
it possible for modesty and confidence to co-exist? Plus the fact
that achievement is often dodgy ground in school, thanks to the
stereotypes set up in ‘teen’ movies. Geeky,
unattractive people do well in exams, fit sporty people
don’t, but who cares – they’re popular. This
automatically casts a slur on doing well in exams. Geeky
ain’t cool, which in turn is a bit of a confidence knocker
in that many students are embarrassed about doing well. So bad
luck you lot. Guess we’re all confined to unattractiveness
and those dreadful 1950s thick rimmed spectacles that according
to stereotype all academically sound people wear. Bearing this in
mind, many are disadvantaged in that they come from a background
of under confidence on coming up to university. But is it always
confident people that are successful in life? It would seem that this is not always the case. Take a look at
the acting industry: a huge dichotomy exists behind most of the
people involved in it. Despite the fact that actors perform in
front of a huge variety of people, in many different venues, or
are willing to imprint their performances on film, they are often
shy and under-confident people. On the other hand, it is those
with the confidence to project themselves that often make up for
embarrassing lack of talent – I’m sure that I
wouldn’t be alone in putting nearly half of Hollywood in
this category. Shy retiring violets don’t do well in this
day and age. A weapon that if used in high enough proportions is guaranteed
to get rid of any shyness is often deadly: booze. Booze has to be
one of the key factors behind sudden confidence boosting; though
whether it achieves an entirely positive effect remains to be
seen. How many freshers, on coming up to uni for the first time
have discovered they are the proud possessor of two
personalities: the quiet sober and the raucous drunk? I’ve
lost count of the times I’ve happily zoomed through Oxford
on my bike in a skimpy school girl’s uniform after yet
another ‘Uniform’ bop, pissed as a proverbial, not
really caring how much of my legs (or come to that, my underwear)
is showing when I would have been more discerning when sober.
It’s incredible how alcohol can enhance body confidence. It
gives people the power to believe that they are Britney
Spears/Brad Pitt, that they do have flat stomachs and long legs,
and even if they don’t, it ceases to matter. It’s not
just body confidence that improves. How many drunken flirtations
have you had with complete stranger that you normally would be
too nervous/discerning to approach when sober? So confidence is a huge and vague confusing area. Like money,
it’s always going to be unequally spread. There will be some
people who have stacks of confidence and some who have none. And
those who appear to have lots of it but really have none despite
their talent, and those who rely on artificial boosts to get
their dose of a personality trait more valuable than any
currency. Come to that, what the hell gives me the confidence to
write all this stuff about confidence anyway? Oh dear…ARCHIVE: 5th week TT 2004 

The new celebrity craze for “chestnut” locks
isn’t doing anything for me. I mean, who seriously likes the
colour brown? It’s the colour of mud, and that’s not
very pretty, is it? Not in itself anyway. It is different, of
course when we’re talking about those delectable rugby gents
returning from a game all sweaty and rumpled – a bit of mud
tarnishing a very sexy pair of legs is definitely yummy –
but if we’re honest, ladies, it’s not the mud in itself
we’re attracted to now, is it? And stuff and nonsense to what they say about the insatiable
female’s chocoholism – I wouldn’t even be tempted
by chocolate if it wasn’t for Cadbury’s purple shiny
wrapper (gets me every time, damn it.). And even then I’m thinking, chocolate only gets away with
being brown because once you’ve torn the wrapper its
devoured before you get a chance to cry “Willy Wonka!”
(as well you might). When a confectioner’s window is going
for opulence, its those slabs of coconut ice and fluorescent
sugar mice (yes really, check out the selection of rodents on
display in the cake shop in the covered market) which look
prettier on display. And so on to hair. This new trend trespassing on the terrain
of traditionally terrific tresses (think Britney, Marilyn,
Rapunzel etc) and undoing the decadent ‘dos of Holly Valance
and Beyonce beggars belief. And as for Christina Aguilera –
I adored your hair a la Genie in a Bottleblonde – really my
dear, what were you thinking? It would seem that the peroxide has addled your brain –
and well it must when you consider that these same beauties’
partiality for the St Tropez shimmer has kept pace with the
fashion for follicles. Anyone who seriously wants to waste those precious few moments
more in bed of a lazy morning in order to smother their limbs in
strange smelling orange (sorry – ‘sunkissed’)
gloop must, quite honestly, be as mad as their mother (with it
‘taking two to Tango’ and all.) There are better
excuses for missing that lecture, surely? And then of course, the end product of the current trend
results in an eerily monotone shade of hair and skin like a
photograph negative. There was one such “toffee skinned
brunette” in my Sixth Form who earned herself the
unflattering nickname ‘Dairy Milk’ (and not for having
an intimate relationship with the vending machine). Quite frankly, I think the celebrity Atkins-fad is easier to
swallow. And when the orange gets deeper and patchier with every
application, it would seem that the lovelies don’t even
bother to wipe the muck off at night – which brings me back
to my first point – mud, yuck. Does it show that I’m a
pale s k i n n e d n a t u r a l blonde?ARCHIVE: 5th week TT 2004 

Which books are currently littering your bedside table at the
moment? 48 Laws Of Power by Robert Greene and Writing a
Screenplay by John Costello. You first appeared on television as one half of Armstrong and
Miller; who is your favourite comedy double act of all time and
why? I think it would have to be Laurel and Hardy when they were
working with Hal Roach. And particularly the shorts that they
made before they got into features – Big Business for one of
them. Who would you most like to be stuck in a lift with and why?
Jordan. Or Katie Price. Though if I had to choose, Jordan. You have starred in the British comedy films The Parole
Officer and Johnny English – do you have any other film
projects in the pipeline? Yes, I’m in a film called The
Prince and Me with Julia Stiles which is out in July. What kind of music is in your CD player at the moment? A lot
of Johnny Cash, Beth Orton, Kris Kristofferson. I’m having a
Country phase. You have recently been appearing on television in the comedy
series The Worst Week of My Life – have you ever had a
similarly such disastrous week in real life? No, but I did get
married the same time that the series was on which was slightly
surreal. You started your career with Cambridge Footlights – do
you have fond memories of student drama? What was your favourite
production from your student days? So many. One favourite though
was “Norman Thane Of Spain”, allegedly an
“undiscovered” Shakespeare play that we wrote and ran
at eleven o’clock at night for one glorious week at the ADC
Theatre. If you could choose any comedian that you would like to work
with, alive or dead, who would you choose and why? Peter Cook. I
was at the same party as him once but couldn’t pluck up the
courage to say anything. Pathetic really. Or maybe respectful.
I’m not sure. Give us a description of Ben Miller’s perfect weekend?
Getting out of London and wearing my Official London
Wanker’s Barbour jacket in tiny country pubs. Do you have any advice for budding young student comedians
that you’d like to share with Cherwell readers? Don’t
give up. That’s it really. Which comedy series do you wish you had written yourself?
Fawlty Towers. Because I just love things that are funny without
jokes. And finally, Ben Miller never leaves the house without…?
Some money from my mum.ARCHIVE: 5th week TT 2004 

It’s the ultimate dilemma for the indecisive: two women,
attractive, intelligent, devoted. One’s your wife, the
other’s your mistress, but really there is little to choose
between them. Adultery is a common theme, but there’s a
peculiar openness about this love-triangle that makes it even
more complicated. Everyone knows about everyone else, and consequently spends
their time trying to convince themselves, and each other, to
change. The women are desperately trying to believe he’ll
leave her, the man that one of them will leave him – or at
least just leave him alone. It’s difficult to care much about the hapless Mickey, who
seems more the pathetic victim of female competition than a
scheming adulterer, while Linda is the most frustrating. As it
becomes obvious that Mickey prefers the feisty Jenine, we really
want to tell her to send him packing, to get a new man and a
haircut. But you can’t help but feel sorry for the woman who
has clearly lost all self-respect, unashamedly begging her
husband not to leave. Yet by the end of the play it still hasn’t happened. The
women are still engaging in bitchy, jealous dialogue, inevitably
reaching stalemate with their apathetic lover who refuses to
express a preference either way. The production carries off the tension and complexity of the
situation quite successfully, and there is some impressive acting
from the lead actors, particularly Hannah Glickstein as the sexy,
tormented Jenine. However, it is an uncomfortable play to sit
through, particularly towards the end, and some of the cast seem
to struggle with Motton’s progressively black humour. One of
the final scenes raises a decidedly queasy smile as the couple
stumble upon the mistress sitting by a lake, literally
‘washing her heart’. AKM’s is an original, if patchy production, which is
funny enough not to fall apart under its own awkwardness.ARCHIVE: 5th week TT 2004 

Twelfth Night
Oriel Gardens Twelve months ago, theatregoers were denied the delights of
Oriel quad’s annual allotment of classic drama when
Marlowe’s Edward II was shelved at the eleventh hour. But,
after a six-year moratorium on the Bard, director James
Methven’s return to Shakespeare more than makes up for last
year’s cancellation with an energetic, sexy and affecting
take on the tale of Illyrian romance. As Methven modestly notes,
“This production will be exuberant and a celebration of love
and reconciliation”. In the opening scene, we see Orsino (the old master Chip Horne
endearingly marking his departure from University drama)
enraptured by lonely passion for Olivia, dissolving into
transports of orgasmic ecstasy, thereby striking the keynote for
the venture’s commitment to sensuality. On hearing the nifty
barbershop rendition of “Singing in the Rain”, we know
we’re in for something slightly unconventional, a notion
reinforced by the appearance of eunuchs, kilts and a shotgun.
Look out too for the director’s own bearded and bedraggled
performance as the sea-captain. A cast that is, by Oxford standards, stellar, has been given
freedom to explore the individual humours of its characters,
happily resulting in a wholesome variegation of jest, not a
mélange of contradictory comic pursuits. The many recognisable
faces operate brilliantly in isolation, better in ensemble. Organic unity is firmly secured by both Ruth Weyman’s
wittily thought-out costuming and the garden setting in which the
wings, stage, actors and audience are all contained throughout.
This externalisation removes all sense of the latent, and, by
extension, the disturbing, licensing the audience to observe this
play’s gaiety and poignancies without being perpetually wary
of killjoy provisos. There is nothing to fear here. The tone is light, but not Shakespeare-lite: no compromise is
made on the speaking of the verse; the application of modern
directorial techniques maximises the potential in every word and
no utterance is left unilluminated. Nao Hudson (Viola) is diminutive and forthright, but moving
where the poetry demands; Elisabeth Gray’s superlative
Olivia is as monumental in mourning as she is later hilariously
enfeebled by desire. A self-righteous, jittery Malvolio, Gethin
Anthony’s is an astonishing piece of sustained
characterisation, blending puritanical stiffness with a pathetic
vulnerability, while Heman Ojha’s clowning is more Kirov
than Krusty, a nimble, harmonica- playing gymnast as Feste. This is broad comedy par excellence, none broader than the
gargantuan Chris Milsom (Sir Toby Belch), whose guffawing ability
would put that arch-bellower, Brian Blessed, to shame. However, a
revel without a cause it is not, and we are constantly and warmly
reminded of the ambition to expose the humane and sincere in both
lovers and loving. Methven’s Twelfth Nightis simply
dazzling.ARCHIVE: 5th week TT 2004 

Astronomical occurrences have always held a particular
fascination for humanity. One such example is the Transit of
Venus, when the planet can be seen to move across the sun. In
celebration of the first transit to occur in 122 years, which
coincides with opening night, the play seeks to examine the
scientific frenzy caused by the previous transit in 1874 as well
as the way in which it captured the popular imagination. The play itself is an interesting piece of abstract theatre.
It does not have a distinct plot but is created piecemeal from a
variety of first hand accounts about the transit, from newspaper
articles and scientific journals and concluding with a poem taken
from an 1874 issue of Punch. The play shows us the whole gamut of emotions that accompanied
the event, from the initial sense of opportunism and scientific
rivalry to feelings of triumphalism, recrimination and acrimony
afterwards. The production is especially skilled at the stylistic effects
of contrasting these seemingly overwrought accounts with a bare,
mechanical rendering of them on stage. In one scene, the actors
carry out automaton- like movements accompanied by the steady
beat of a metronome effectively bringing out the mechanical
exactitude of the scientific endeavour. Another interesting scene
has the cast repeating phrases from newspapers such as
‘fatal difficulty’, ‘twelve years of error’
in a canon effect, eventually descending into a monotonous
cacophony of voices. As conceptual theatre goes, it is an intriguing and well
thought out production.ARCHIVE: 5th week TT 2004 

The Topsy-Turvy World of Gilbert and Sullivan is a cheerily
nostalgic piece, following the career of the legendary composing
duo through the Nineteenth Century interspersed with songs from
their repertoire. This new script, commissioned by the
university’s Gilbert and Sullivan Society, manages to
capture a Wildean decadence and comical style that gives the
production an authentic late-Victorian air. Musically, the
selection of songs (such as ‘I’m Called Little
Buttercup’) is excellently performed, with soloist Jordan
Bell standing out as a real aural treat. There is, however, a danger of the high quality of the music
overshadowing the script. That is not to condemn the script
itself. It’s a pleasantly light-hearted affair that’s
guaranteed to raise a laugh. The only problem is its occasional disjointed feeling, as its
attempt to tell the story of Gilbert and Sullivan can lapse into
more of a narrated stage documentary than anything else, in which
the music is nothing more than an interesting interlude. This
lack of cohesion can leave the audience feeling unsure of where
exactly they have reached in the plot, which undermines the whole
point of the production telling a biographical story. Nevertheless, this play certainly has its high-quality
moments. The scene in which Arthur Sullivan (Simon Tavener)
attempts to educate a brash American lady (Anna Larkin) on the
nuances of English music and the Aesthetic Movement is
particularly amusing. It’s also a production that is
extremely attractive to look at, with lavish period costumes and
scenery, and a vast array of dancers and chorus singers. The Topsy-Turvy World of Gilbert and Sullivan is certainly a
production that is worth seeing. As a play, it is a good showcase
for frivolous comedy and beautiful settings. As a musical, it
succeeds on the strength of its performers and the undoubted
popularity of the operas that it is derived from.ARCHIVE: 5th week TT 2004