To retain any credibility at all when talking about classical music, here’s a tip: call Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto “Rach Two”. It’s a bit of a buzzword; it sounds like you know what you’re talking about. Jargon is three-quarters of all music snobbery, so go with it and you’ll be fine. Rach Two, then, is one of the most romantic pieces written for the piano, full of soaring leaps and impossible fingerwork, alternately brazen, gentle and moving.

There’s a grandiose elegance too, and an emotional complicatedness that belies a few very simple themes. It is a beautiful piece, and soloist Will Stuart does it justice. His driven performance was full of feeling, retaining nonetheless the precision and musicality that the piece demands. He played with style and flair, a quickness that gave the concerto energy without rushing it: a youthful interpretation that didn’t sacrifice subtlety for vigour.
The concerto is unusual in its emphasis on the orchestra, especially in the first movement, introducing as it does most of the main themes. Conductor Ben Woodgates gave an expanded Christ Church Orchestra an excellent tone, swelling under and around but not overtaking the piano’s notes. Christ Church Cathedral’s acoustics felt a little muffled, but that was probably due to the large and appreciative audience. Stuart’s was an accomplished performance that left a friend in tears: “it’s just so beautiful,” she said. And it really was. But to the bloke who farted just as the third movement began: time and a place, my friend. Time and a place.

Adam White

I feel like I’ve been on one of those jerking, rattly, helter-skelterish roller-coasters. I’m finding it difficult to coherently fit all the glimpses and fragments of inverted reality into some linear fashion.

This is not undesired, however; the play is described as a ‘big ball of bizarre theatrics.’ Bizarre is an understatement, the show is a Björk dress of a spin on entertainment. The problem with this rogue attitude towards convention is that there is a tightrope walk between the luminous creativity, energy, and eccentricity of a director/writer like Jack Sanderson Thwaite, and presenting entertainment in a manner coherent enough for an audience to appreciate the wackiness. It is a quadruple loop the loop, bruise your head repeatedly on the safety harness sort of a feat to pull off, but equally astounding to witness if done successfully.

The show is a series of manic, energetic, and balmy sketches, which are light hearted and blunderingly silly. They have principal, recurring characters, and there is a tenuous thread between the scenes which is sometimes so puny as to be terminally threatened with extinction. However, there it remains, against all odds, evidenced now and then by the players’ mocking of form by ‘accidentally’ dropping catch-phrases from their other personas, culminating in one sketch based entirely on the actors doubling up and playing other characters. This is one of the most successful sketches in the play, it is no easy task to make humour work with solely the parody of style and physiognomy as a comic foundation, and it works with sophisticated ironic ease.

The comedy is illogical and absurd, the idea being that the Irreverence Realm is replete with surrealism, the humour of this idea is Pratchett-esque in its creation of a world which is a ludicrous version of our own. So the ideas are psychedelic; we have desperate, pasty-faced fruit and vegetable addicts, a slow motion stick ‘em up gang, and a ‘wise man’ with a special hat. Some flow like molten chocolate joyously towards rapturous laughter, whilst others give us a more jolting, stultified ride. The ideas are impressive, and Sanderson- Thwaite’s talent is in evidence abounding. Comments on Python influence are unavoidable amongst student comics, as they are amongst comics in general; such is their ubiquitous, silly influence on sketch shows and with non-sequiturs and daftness replete, this show is no exception. This is not a threat to the internal-organ- rattling enjoyment of the kaleidoscopic treats on display, but the lack of pace at times is a difficulty.

The comics themselves are a pyrotechnic, harmonious mix of personalities, which adds a depth to the humour. One needn’t worry about a show in the masterful hands of Alex Craven’s dry, sardonic wit, James Rupasinha’s nervous fumbling and gaping, worried eyes, and Sarah Hillman’s hilarious physical presence. All these elements create a symphony of comedy which is alone worth seeing. James Callender has the challenging role of ‘compare extrodinaire’ who speaks to the audience and is our fourth-wall-breaking guide. He is intentionally verbose and nervous, the reason why is unfathomable, as he ends up looking like he soiled his underwear. Although he has moments of brilliance, he is in danger of being upstaged by his multicoloured hair. However, he does have the gravitas and charisma to pull off a difficult role.

The show is a dizzy whirl of flashes of comic delight and moments of jolting halts, the problem is the difficulty in pulling on the reigns of form and style to add a cogency which will stop it from descending into a free-fall of things that seemed like a good idea in the pub last night. Generally, the play achieves this, and is a very good offering for student comedy, but when roller-coasters make my head spin too much, I always want to get my feet back on firm ground.

Charlotte Brunsdon
 
Dir. Jack Sanderson-Thwaite
BT, 7.30pm

Remember the last two weeks of April? Remember the cricket, the punting, and the blissful sunshine spilling out all over the quads? Remember the Met Office blithely telling us that it was the driest April since records began in 1659?

Flash-forward to May, the only one of the summer months that falls entirely in Full Term, and gaze disconsolately over a stunning vista of grey on grey. That is, if you can see it at all through the driving rain and forbidding clouds. The only people more miserable than the punters, picnickers and cricketers, are the global warming theorists. Where did it all go wrong, indeed?

There is, of course, an interesting point to be made here about how our expectations change. A British summer is the worst kind of oxymoron – the type that provokes wry laughter from foreigners and indeed, most natives. Whole years drifting by without a real cause for short sleeves haven’t exactly been unheard of. I think it’s only been the last couple of years when we’ve not only had real hot weather, but a lot of it. So rather than dropping everything and rushing out at the first rays of sun, we’ve gone steadily on in libraries and workplaces, safe in the knowledge that it will still be there at the end of the day. And that’s why, I suppose, people have been stomping around the streets of Oxford taking the rain as a very personal insult. “How dare you be raining?”, we ask the sky. Never mind that it’s early May in Britain, where’s the sun?

This is perhaps compounded by the fact that the clothes people choose to wear always seem to depend on yesterday’s weather, rather than today’s. If it was sunny yesterday, people will be wearing T-shirts and shorts, cotton skirts and flip-flops, in scant disregard of the puddles. It always seems to take a couple of days before it really sinks into the collective consciousness that wellies are the way to go. It’s hard to be Little Miss Sunshine when you’re wearing a miniskirt while it’s five degrees.

And, of course, Oxford is so very nice in the summer time. There are the traditional pursuits, already mentioned, of cricket, eating strawberries and cream and messing about on the river. But the simple, day-to-day course of life is also immeasurably better. It’s all in the details: the scent of flowers after dark, the intense colour of the sky, cobblestones baking in the sunshine warming your feet. It’s an old cliché, but it’s true, everyone really is much more cheerful. Total strangers smile at you and hold doors open. Even the people drifting past in sub fusc seem a tiny bit more serene. The only real disadvantage is that hot weather brings the tourists out en masse – hands up who’s had to dodge a Japanese-language tour taking up most of Broad Street – but it’s perhaps not too steep a price to pay for the glorious weather.

Still, there are probably wonderful things to be said about rain, although it must be said that right at this moment I am at a loss beyond the decidedly Aristotelian “it makes the plants grow”. Perhaps there is some moody poetic beauty about the dreaming spires seen through a blurring mask of rain. Still, I’m not convinced. Any beauty there is palls after ten solid days of thick grey clouds and endless downpour. There’s only so far you can go to wring literary significance out of stormy weather. Ultimately, it all comes down to the decidedly unromantic feel of rainwater down your neck, cars whooshing past through six inches of dirty water, and a sudden need for paracetamol and cough syrup. In short, there’s nothing like rain for making everybody miserable.

So I shall hurry to look on the bright side – no pun intended – and remind us all that it might just be improving. No longer must I run down Holywell Street with the Cambridge New History of India on my head because the heavens are opening in cacophonous fashion above. It’s been a gradual process. At the beginning of the week, the sun came out for twenty whole minutes and rumour has it that there were people seen engaging in sporting activity. Later on, this was followed by whole days of sun, and again, a renewed hope that maybe this time we could trust it would stay. I’m particularly enjoying the nights, at the moment. The heat of the day lingers, becomes deliciously cool and still, and it’s a joy to sit outside reading or having a picnic. Let’s hope that it stays, if not for good, or even long enough to develop an even tan, but long enough to dry out my umbrella and eat ice-cream without excessive need for self-justification. And, of course, long enough for the general mood of soporific misery to leave the city with the fog.

But perhaps I have been a little too scathing about the rain. If we pause to consider the even brighter side, fifty years from now, whilst we all roll in battered wheelchairs across the dried, arid sands of the Greater South-eastern Deserts of England and Wales, watching salamanders loll in the baking sun, we can look back to the good old days at Oxford, when temperatures were not hot enough to melt lead, and occasionally, water even fell from the sky. Take your comfort where you can find it is the moral of the story, I guess. More importantly, take an umbrella, and sing in the rain while it lasts.
Iona Sharma

It was always going to be interesting: six of Oxford’s finest young playwrights paired with six directors, randomly assigned to a group of actors and then given twenty-four hours to produce an original piece of theatre, all in the name of charity.

The results were varied, both in content and quality. The majority clearly fell vitctim to a conflict between the grandiose ideas of the playwrights and the time constraints imposed by the exercise. The Gingerbread House in particular, while to be commended for its artistic vision, was dull and practically incomprehensible, and surprised everyone by abruptly finishing within ten minutes.

The two most enjoyable plays, Alex Christofi’s The Reception and Cathy Thomas’ Who Needs Jesuits? kept it simple. The former centered around three slightly-inebriated bachelors slumped in a forgotten corner at a wedding reception, while Thomas’ delightfully irreverent production began as a stereotypical family breakfast that soon degenerated into bedlam. Both managed to be funny without seeming contrived and featured some excellent one-liners – but the highlight had to be an enthusiastic dance from Jack Farchy wearing nothing but a polka-dot mini dress. Also deserving special mention was Tom Campion’s touching play about the relationship between two cantankerous old men, roles which were played to perfection by Jonny Totman and Peter Clapp. And, as one would expect from any self-respecting playwright hailing from Wadham, there was of course a gratuitous and completely unnecessary reference to Nelson Mandela.

While, conceptually, the idea of the 24 Hour Plays pulled all the right strings, in that it tested the creative skill of the playwrights and the initiative of the actors, the productions were, by and large, over-complex and over-ambitious, and as a result unpolished and unclear. In many of the plays the audience was left confused and frustrated, and dare I say it, wishing they had spent the last two hours watching re-runs of The OC. Ultimately, in a production with such unique time constraints as this, simplicity would have been preferable as opposed to trying to make artistic statements at the expense of coherence and clarity.

Sarah Davies
Dir. Various
Keble O’Reilly

Summer’s onset leads, like the turning of the seasons, to a crop of plays performed in the balmy environs of college quadrangles, and it’s with almost equal unstoppability that we see at least one of these, every year, to be Shakespeare’s tale of Woman’s love for Beast. The sheer frequency with which it’s performed makes this most luminous and stylish of comedies subject of a close watch, even cross-examination.

In an imaginative bid for reinterpretation Sophie Duncan’s production in Oriel shifts the play into Blitz Britain, transforming the fairies into abducted evacuees in lost-boy style fairy-schoolgirl outfits and giving the Rude Mechanicals even more the air of a group of earnest misfits as Home Guards. It’s a lively and interestingly skewed view on a wonderful show and if the weather holds one well worth your money.

That said, it’s difficult these days to say with the properly casual air, even to an Oxford readership, “If you only see one Midsummer this year…”. A judgment particularly difficult in this case as Sarah Branthwaite’s OUDS Japan Tour offering has not yet seen the light of day. It must truly be a tribute to the quality of the drama scene that two entirely seperate Midsummer Night’s Dream casts could exist side-by-side.

However it’s the decidedly un-military Mechanicals who light up this show, most notably John-Mark Philo’s enormously entertaining Bottom. ‘Fabulous’ would perhaps be more apt; the rattling, fustian camp of his performance transforms Bottom’s unwilling seduction by the queen of the fairies into a hilarious spectacle of a groomed, healthy young man trying to let an amorous lady down easy: Philo has the presence of a hippo kickline.

Particularly entertainingly warped is the ‘chink’ in Maxim Cardew’s marvellously deadpan Wall, through which Philo steals a moment’s romance with Jessica Wild’s Flute, a woman playing a man playing a woman with poise. Flute’s mourning for the play-dead Bottom often feels like the play’s real ending and Wild’s sweetly solemn is carried into a stirring, candlelit conclusion on Oriel’s library steps.

Robert Morgan
 
Dir. Sophie Duncan
Oriel College, 8pm

As a ‘New Writer’ in Oxford, what do you feel are the obligations of the modern playwright?
Obligations…I think the obvious ones are firstly to entertain and secondly through entertaining bring the audience into contact with ideas and viewpoints that they wouldn’t necessarily have considered otherwise. The way theatre is now, it’s never going to change the world, but it can act in more subtle ways, and I believe it’s about presenting ideas and getting them into the public eye, getting the audience to consider them, rather than simply hammering home one point of view. I’m not sure I’ve fulfilled either of them yet. But I’m trying.

Which pieces of New Writing have you particularly enjoyed this year?
There are a number of writers I admire. I think the my highlight was Kathryn Rickson’s Bare Feet on a Cold Floor, which was the most assured piece of student writing I think I’ve ever seen, and the best thing to grace the Moser. I really enjoyed the 24 hour plays last week, it was fascinating to see what people came up with. Ben Arnold is definitely a writer to watch – he’s got a unique style and some great ideas. And Tom Crawshaw’s NWF winner was great fun, too.

Are you working on anything at the moment?
I’m working on a couple of things – I’ve got a show going up to Edinburgh called I’m a Lab Rat, Get Me Out of Here! and a play hopefully on next term which is a little darker called Knuckles in her Heart, both of which I’m really looking forward to.

Should we move on from the Past Masters?
It’ll always depend on what the audience wants to see. I personally want to see new ideas and interesting takes on old conflicts. If that’s done through reinterpreting classics or through brand new plays then so be it. I like watching new plays because it’s like meeting new people – it’s exciting, it can lead to more than what it starts as and it’s always got the potential to make you feel something completely different.

What place should New Writing take in the future of the theatre?
‘New Writing’ seems like a rather grand title. Obviously people will continue to write plays, and some of them will have the potential to define an era or capture a moment in history. I think writing is becoming more and more accessible, so hopefully we’ll see a bigger diversity of playwrights and new plays – it’s all about expanding the horizons of the audience (without them noticing, because then they usually get scared and run away).

[1] Find a place to play

This really shouldn’t be difficult: after all, you are in Oxford, and there’s a good chance your college has a croquet lawn. Of course, you’ve got to make sure you’ve got the right lawn: for example, in Magdalen the New Buildings centre lawn is the croquet lawn and St Swithun’s lawn is the Frisbee lawn. You don’t want to get those two mixed up in case you end up having to roquet with a Frisbee whizzing through your hair. But that hardship, unlikely though it is, is as nothing compared to what some people go through in order to find the perfect croquet location: croquet has been played on iced over lakes, in Nevada’s Black Rock desert, and even at the South Pole.

[2] Get your equipment

Again, you should be OK here  to borrow your college’s gear. Take care to keep it in good nick, though: competition-standard equipment doesn’t come cheap – for instance, the only set of balls recommended by the Oxford University Croquet Club costs £139 for four, and the set of hoops costs £188. And if you’re buying a mallet, you have to contend with almost as much conflicting advice as when buying a golf club; some of this advice centres on, for example, the relative merits of wooden shafts and fibreglass shafts, but some is a little more obvious – here’s a direct quote from the OUCC website: “For inexperienced players, it is advisable to have a mallet with a relatively wide head to reduce the likelihood of mis-hitting.” If only that could apply to cricket bats, I’d be sporting a two-foot-wide one.

[3] Decide on the rules

Most croquet played in Oxford is Association Croquet, but that’s not to say that other forms of croquet don’t exist. Golf Croquet, in which each player takes turns trying to hit a ball through the same hoop, the winner being the player who manages to hit the ball through the most hoops first, is the fastest-growing version of the game. For a less simple and more strategy-heavy game, you could always try American-rules croquet, in which physical skill counts for less than clever tactics; or, if you find croquet a little bit too easy, you could always try playing it on a bicycle – Bicycle Croquet hasn’t caught fire worldwide yet, but it does have a dedicated following in Graz, Austria.

[4] Learn the lingo

‘Hoop’ and ‘mallet’ are nice and easy, but you should know at least a few more terms. ‘Making a roquet’ is when your ball hits another ball;  ‘running a hoop’ is when your ball passes through a hoop in the correct order; and ‘becoming a rover’ is when your ball has scored its last hoop point. That’s only the start of the jargon, though: ‘Von Schmieder Sweep’, anyone? (It’s a stroke played with the mallet held horizontally with the shaft just a couple of inches off the ground played on a hoop-bound ball lying about a foot behind the hoop which allows you to roquet a reception ball lying further behind the hoop, if you really wanted to know).

Agatha Christie caused a stir when she adapted her Death on the Nile for the stage, altering it nominally to Murder on the Nile, and conspicuously denying the moustach-etted detective his role de force. Fortunately, this production provides the reintroduction of Monsieur Poirot in the form of Matt Lacey, who delivers with estimable gravitas and faultless ‘langue Belgique’.
Quite brilliantly, Lacey’s Poirot combines volatility with an aloofness that allows for the character interaction Christie had so sought. Indeed, these interactions, between the highly innovative minor characters especially, are the source of much of the play’s humour; of particular note is the bohemian-clad Salome Otterbourne (Emerald Fennell) in all her sexual and passionate theatricality. Poirot blushes masterfully at her advances, while Colonel Race (George Carr) fastidiously revels in this build-up to the dénouement.
Grace Overbeke, moreover, is distinguished in her leading role as the ignorant yet manipulative down-on-her-luck American, while her ‘so English’ fiancé Simon Doyle (Jamie Brindley), maintains a manly rapport with the bevy of stylish women on stage. All in all, the play is an energetic mixture of tension and humour, executed by an enthusiastic cast committed to the era of glamour.

Daisy Dunn
Dir. Steve Lomon
Worcester Gardens, 7.30pm

It took an informal chat between two PCs to bring into the open what everyone must already know: the University owns Oxford. From shop-owners to senior Councilors, people who might easily go from one week to the next without stepping foot inside a quad have to tiptoe around our college authorities.

What this leaked transcript  illuminates is the extent to which we treat Oxford like a campus rather than a city. And that collective ‘we’ often tries hard to blind itself to dissent, when it should be open to possibility. Most members of the University are happy to conduct medical research on animals, or at least not to think too hard about it. They should certainly be forced to.

The problem is that Speak is its own worst enemy, targeting students and their beloved sports grounds rather than asking for our support. The second thing they would be wise to consider is a formal denunciation of the ALF – their more radical colleagues in the fight for animal rights.

Instead, the group persists in its aggressive and unreasonable tactics. But Speak fought for and won its right to be unreasonable last term when the University failed to prosecute its famous activist leaders Mel Broughton and Robert Cogswell. Ever since, counter-organizations like the student-run Pro-Test, as well as further attempts by the University itself, have failed to stop their demonstrations, and the antagonism rumbles on day after day in the Science area.

Until now, Speak seemed to be fighting a slowly losing battle. Provocative tactics were being met with less and less indulgence. As a passer-by, it’s easy to let ‘Stop the Oxford Animal Labs’ fade into background noise.
But this week’s embarrassing revelations by the police will prove to be their best chance yet. The bullies have suddenly become bullied, and added to the unreasonably forceful language of the police is the undemocratic clout of the University’s name. The police seemed eager to please only the University and Oxford’s ‘impressed’ response to the arrests is both highly embarrassing and damaging. We heard of the police’s ‘draconian’ policies and their aggressive desire to ‘take bodies’: a product of Blair’s target-lust to which the University is also notoriously prey. But it seems that the University have ultimately failed in their mission to steamroller over those who dare to speak out. If Speak is wise – and for reason’s sake we can only hope they aren’t – the group will play the victim now, and court rather than challenge the student body.

But a warning must also be extended to Pro-Test tag-alongs and the rest of the student onlookers. This tape provided an unusual and strangely satisfying insight into two police officers’ attitudes. But in general, we can’t know what goes on behind the closed doors of Wellington Square or St Aldates Police Station. What we can do is re-evaluate our attitude towards ‘townies’ and learn to think as individuals towards other individuals, whatever the official line from the all-powerful University. Otherwise, we can hardly be surprised at Town’s blatant antagonism towards Gown, in a situation where power falls so heavily on one side.
Willa Brown and James Rogers

The Canterbury Tales is quite a project to undertake, and this production is somewhat ambitious.
One thing that struck me was the conspicuous absence of even a semblance of actual sexuality, a theme that is supposed to be prevalent and even excessive in all of Chaucer’s tales. This is particularly lacking in some of the female roles, where any attempts at supposed seduction are a little naïve.
Hillary Stevens, seen twice in roles of ‘temptation’, is more like a child experimenting with high heels from a dressing up box than an object of obsessive desire. Similarly, Johanna Deveraux’s Wife of Bath was more like a children’s television presenter than a scrumptious harlot. As a whole, the adaptation is good, and the language flows – comprehensive to a modern ear but maintaining an air of restoration.
Having evidently drawn heavily on the recent adaptation by the RSC, this play is a mildly amusing with a few inspired moments. If you like perky theatre, it works.

Kate Antrobus
 
Dir. Harriet Bradley
Magdalen Gardens, 7.30pm