It is with some trepidation that one reviews The Critic, a
play which ridicules the very occupation of theatre reviewing.
Sheridan does not, however, merely direct his satirical quill
against critics but against all players in the theatrical world.
Director Luke Sandler has created a period piece, complete with
sumptuous 18th century costumes and a set inspired by Georgian
playhouses. What emerges is a ridiculous yet timeless portrayal
of the bitchy, backbiting world of luvviedom which bears more
than a little resemblance to Oxford’s own drama scene. The play opens chez Dangle (Sheridan Edwards), a hapless
critic and self-confessed theatre groupie who cares more about
theatrical intrigues than real-life politics. Dangle strikes a
comical figure, his voice rising into evercamper intonations as
he becomes indignant at his over-bearing wife. Mrs Dangle
(Heather Oliver) projects her lines confidently and adds zest
with her acidic tongue. As the play proceeds, we are introduced to a host of ludicrous
luvvies, including Sir Fretful Plagiary, a talentless writer who
cannot take criticism. He is admirably (over-) played by Dominic
Mattos, a drama queen mincing around the stage, flapping his
hands and pouting. We also meet Sneer (Alasdair Glennie), a world-weary critic
and master of damning with faint praise, and Puff (David
Cochrane), another foolish writer. These last two are a little
understated alongside the other exaggerated figures, although
both capture the posturing affectation of their characters
through body language. The cast handles the mannered dialogue with varying degrees of
success; for some it seems an effort to recall and project their
lines which results in an occasional lack of presence on the
stage. The dialogue livens up with a slapstick rehearsal of
Puff’s play, The Spanish Armada, which pokes fun at
theatrical conventions from courtroom scenes to death scenes and
a hilarious recognition scene. Actors, directors and critics all
come under fire as we are invited to laugh at the melodramatic
play within a play. A silly play, maybe, but a fun evening’s entertainment
and, dare one say, compulsory viewing for OUDS members. Thespians
and critics alike, we could all learn something from Mr Sheridan.ARCHIVE: 0th week TT 2004 

Rape, violence, murder, jealousy and tongues being cut out may
not be the ideal night out, but Love of the Nightingale
(Wertenbaker) is a punchy and engaging production that should not
be missed. It is an adaptation of the Greek myth of Tereus and Philomele,
in which a young woman journeys from Athens to rejoin her older
sister in Thrace, under the care of her brotherin- law. The story
focuses on the relationship between Philomele, the younger sister
played with affecting vulnerability by Poppy Burton- Morgan, and
her brother-in-law Tereus (Tom Richards), only recently married
to her sister Procne. As the journey progresses and is delayed by
Tereus, it emerges that his motives are far from honourable, and
he is crushed by the weight of his passion for Philomele, leading
him to violence. The play is occasionally confusing and the split-stage method
does not help this uncertainty. As the play develops, the
separation becomes more obvious and it begins to seem compulsive
viewing. This is helped not only by excellent direction but also
by an extremely talented cast: Raj Gathani is particularly good,
and his opening fight scene with Huw Davies is a treat. Fight
director Miles Warner has obviously put real effort into the
choreography. Where the production falls down is in its casting
of one actor to play so many different roles. It becomes hectic
with the same actors changing persona within seconds. However the
performance remains slick, professional and satisfying
throughout.ARCHIVE: 0th week TT 2004 

Kill Bill Vol. 2
Phoenix & Odeon No single figure in recent years has influenced the world of
movie-making as resoundingly as Mr Tarantino. His place in
cinematic history is already firmly assured, thanks to the slap
in the face that his first two films gave to Hollywood and all
its cosy conformity. Following lukewarm reaction to Jackie Brown,
though, he was faced with the challenge of finding a new
direction in order to remain creatively relevant amid the horde
of copycat directors striving for that trademark Quentin
‘cool’. The answer? A hibernation of six years followed
by Kill Bill, the self-proclaimed realisation of his moviegeek
dreams. Volume 1, with almost every scene saturated in pumping
blood and littered with dismembered limbs, showed him taking his
penchant for ultra-violence to ludicrous levels. Yet the audacity
of the battle choreography and the sheer innovation of his
directorial vision made it a relentlessly entertaining
experience. It’s almost hard to believe, then, that Kill
Bill was originally intended to be released as a single movie, so
different are the tone and pace of this second half. Elaborate kung-fu remains the staple of the story but there is
no trace of the cartoonish gore of Volume 1. Instead, Tarantino
opts to give his violence a brutal, palpable realism reminiscent
of his earlier work. Most surprising of all, though, is that the
movie ventures boldly into sentimental territory wholly
uncharacteristic of its director – and die-hard fans will no
doubt be equally shocked that these latter stages are actually
handled with a sincerity which belies their idol’s cynical
persona. Still, credit where credit’s due, it is Tarantino’s
muse, Uma Thurman, who carries these scenes and indeed the whole
movie. She gives another dazzling turn as ‘The Bride’,
which, with its hints of an insecurity and emotional rawness
beneath her character’s icy exterior, saves Kill Billfrom
descending into a mere “roaring rampage of revenge”
with no human interest whatsoever. As she mercilessly ticks off
those last few boxes on her ‘Death List’, the
cliff-hanging revelation of Volume 1 is interwoven into the
story, giving her mission an added poignancy, whilst flashbacks
also shed light on the tangled relationship between The Bride and
the previously unseen Bill. Sadly, though, this still can’t save the film from
ultimately being something of a disappointment when compared to
the first. The ending, in particular, is a definite let-down as
the script simply peters out in dialogue rather than concluding
on the monumental bang Tarantino’s been teasing us to expect
all along. During production, he told the press “I’m
making this movie for me. Everyone else is along for the
ride”. Self-indulgent and flawed as Kill Bill may be,
it’s still one hell of a ride worth taking.ARCHIVE: 0th week TT 2004 

Odeon S.A.D. has a lot to answer for. Obviously there’s the
escalating suicide rate in Scandinavian countries. And then
there’s my high expectations of Fifty First Dates. At the
end of a hot, lazy Sunday, I could imagine nothing, and I mean
nothing, more perfect than ending the day with a summery rom-com.
I could barely contain my excitement as I set off for an evening
with Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore. First impressions were good: the tropical Hawaiian setting,
the sunny Bob Marley soundtrack, and the dancing walrus. All the
ingredients for a happy two hour saccharine fest were in place. The opening scene outlined Harry’s (or was it
Henry’s?) commitment issues. A dedicated marine vet,
Harry/Henry’s idea of fun was pursuing, in a nice romantic
hero sort of way, meaningless sex with American tourists visiting
the island. But when he spies Lucy (Barrymore) constructing waffle houses
in a crowded café, years of womanising are instantly terminated.
The only, although pretty fucking significant, problem is that
Lucy has no short-term memory; a freak car accident involving a
pineapple and a cow has caused her brain to erase the contents of
each day as she sleeps. It’s a challenging premise to work around, and
Harry/Henry has to pull out all the imaginative stops in his
charming attempts to capture the heart of an amnesiac. The ethics
of sleeping with a brain damaged woman who can only mentally
experience a one-night stand didn’t seem to trouble the
hysterical Odeon audience too much. The sensitive issues of Lucy’s fear and distress at the
daily news that she is seriously dating an apparent stranger are
efficiently bypassed by Harry’s clever use of multi-media
resources. It’s a shame to reveal the finely crafted
intricacies of the plot, but the innovative details of Harry and
Lucy’s courtship demand sharing. So, it goes a little something like this: boy meets
afore-mentioned female, waffle-house building amnesiac, is
irresistibly attracted, and intensely stalks and harasses for
some time (in a funny way). Then for the genius part; he makes a video for her to watch
each morning reminding her that she’s lost her mind, but
that she does know who he is, she gets a little upset for the
morning (fair enough really), and by the evening kind-hearted
Harry has got laid again. I don’t know about you, but the adjectives
‘tender’, ‘funny’ and ‘enchanting’
really sprang to mind. ARCHIVE: 0th week TT 2004

Odeon The Girl Next Door is the kind of film for which the term
fantasy really should be used, although thankfully not a single
orc appears. Instead, it depicts a creature far more readily
found in the collective imagination of the male contingent of its
adolescent target audience, and tells a story almost as
implausible as any sword and sorcery epic. This is the kind of fantasy where, whilst most of us spend our
teenage years living next door to smelly old crones with lots of
cats, one smart but overly-conscientious high school student
finds himself sharing a property line with the delicious Danielle
( 24’’s Elisha Cuthbert). As if that weren’t
enough good fortune, she adds the cherry on top and falls for
him. Alas, it turns out that the word cherry hasn’t been
used around young Danielle for quite a while; will her past as a
porn starlet ruin everything? The thought that such a thing could be considered potentially
ruinous, rather than merely a stroke of very good luck, may be
treated with incredulity by many young men out there. There are
feelings behind that swiftly-shed basque, however, and it is on
the people, rather than the porn, that the film focuses. Director
Luke Greenfield does surprisingly well and serves up something
that has a little more to it than most high-school movies. The
Girl Next Door is cute, funny, warm and well put together, with
few pretensions but more than enough coming- of-age wish
fulfilment to balance out the inevitable, and often very funny,
lashings of teen sex comedy. If the boys in the audience can suspend their disbelief (and
envy) regarding the unlikely coupling, and the girls can rein in
their jealousy when the camera lingers yet again on Cuthbert,
they’ll have almost as much fun as Dick van Dyke auditioning for Chitty Chitty Gang Bang.ARCHIVE: 0th week TT 2004  

Miss Kittin is a female DJ and one of the main progenitors of
the electroclash movement. Electroclash happened in 2002, and we
all now pretend we never really liked it anyway. After work with
the likes of Felix Da Housecat, Tricky and Chicks on Speed comes
this, her debut solo album. And the results are quite dull. It goes on for a really long time, it’s quite European
and I bet some of you will think it’s really cool. Well, you
will be wrong. You see, Miss Kittin evidently has ambitions of
making a broad, diverse record which bursts out of the realms of
traditional electronica by mixing in some r&b, rock, dub,
soul and ambient noises. Which is fine. But I Com just sounds too damn polite and
conventional. I mean, Miss Kittin, come on, this is your debut
solo album, you should have tried a lot harder and made an album
which blows minds and will be played for years to come.
You’ve let yourself down. The ingredients are there but it’s all just crying out to
be a lot more spiky and exciting and fun. Kittin’s vocals
are thin and weedy. Her detached delivery doesn’t cut it
over a whole album. And the production by world renowned duo GLOVE
is flat and airless. An electronica record needs to sound
outstanding to be noticed in 2004. Too often, the music on this
album sinks into the background and occasionally it verges on bad
Europop. The single, ‘Professional Distortion’ pretends
to rock. On ‘Requiem for a Hit’ Kittin goes a little
blue with the call to “show me your tits and let’s make
a hit.” Most of the songs are steeped in irony, but she does try her
hand at sincerity on what proves to be the album’s emotional
fulcrum ‘Dub About Me’. Over seven gruelingly dull
minutes, Kittin opens her heart and asks, “Baby, what about
me?” She is responded to by a male robotic vocoder. Perhaps
worst of all, with ‘I Come.com’ Kittin gives us a title
which cannot deliver on its innuendo. And that sums the album up for me. It makes gestures to rock,
it attempts humour, it tries to be smart and it assumes
it’ll be the soundtrack to hip parties, but it never quite
gets there. The all too obvious comparison to Miss Kittin is Peaches.
Where Peaches succeeds is her ability to inject her music with
some blood, tits and ass. Judging by this dreary listen, Miss
Kittin has just confused cool with conservatism.ARCHIVE: 0th week TT 2004 

Canadian band The Stills sold out The Zodiac, promising an
interesting plunge into ‘80s mope-rock, whilst trying not to
be upstaged by the ought-to-be-huge Walkmen. Given just how good
the latter were, The Stills had some work to do. They began well:
Dave Hamelin on drums set a frenetic pace and didn’t put a
stick wrong all night. The guitar lines were clever, complemented
the vocals and created some complex and beautiful harmonies, and
the gravel- throated singer/guitarist swayed and posed and fawned
as well as any frontman. And when the band were static they had
an excellent animated video playing behind them. The problem was how safe this all was. The four guys played an
amazingly tight set, with everything in its place and everything
where they wanted it to be; this, as much as anything else, was
what was wrong. The stage was never for a second threatened with anything
spontaneous, unexpected or, in fact, interesting. They played
multiple false endings, they left the stage after half an hour (a
joke which might have been funnier if they had played more than
40 minutes in total), and never pushed themselves at all. It only got interesting during the final song when the drummer
took over vocals and sang his heart out. There was more to get
excited about in that one track than the whole of the rest of the
set. In short, anything The Stills might have to offer is
available on a CD, and at least you can play a game of solitaire
while listening to a cd, which would be considerably more
inspiring than watching them play live.ARCHIVE: 0th week TT 2004 

Textile from the Islamic World
Ashmolean Museum
Until 13 June Islamic Art never fails to fascinate with its strong sense of
aesthetics. From pottery to carpets, paintings to architecture,
miniatures to fabrics, there is a vast array of styles. The
aftermath of September 11 has almost totally erased awareness of
this diversity from the popular imagination, replacing it instead
with a rather one-dimensional and bleak idea of the religion.
Media representations of Islam have focused entirely on the
aspect of jihad, adding fuel to the Western misconception that
Islamic culture is devoted to terrorism and oppression. As a
consequence, Islamic culture in the Western imagination is tied
up with nihilism and creative sterility. A new exhibition at the Ashmolean, which is drawn from the
private collection of Lloyd Cotsen, dispels exactly such a
stereotype. Textiles from the Islamic World showcase a small but
wide-ranging selection of textile fragments from Central Asia and
the Near East, spanning the pre- Islamic period of the First
Millennium A.D. to the 17th and 18th century Safavid Persia. This
seems an ambitious timescale to attempt in what is admittedly a
presentation of “traces of textile art, rather than
monumental pieces”. However, the collage-like assembly of
fabric manages to evoke the impression of an elaborate culture in
miniature. Although many fragments are in faded and frayed
condition, the intricacy of the swatch-pattern makes it a small
effort to imagine the original grandeur of the fabrics. They
display brocades, compound weaves, lampas, plain weaves, samite,
tapestry and twill to provide a snapshot of the expansive weaving
styles of Central Asia. There are only two ’whole’ examples of textile,
which is initially slightly disappointing. It is inevitably
somewhat of a barrier when one is seeking to achieve a sense of
perspective. One of the whole pieces is a fuchsia pink Ottoman
Velvet Carpet from 17th Century Turkey. Indeed, as the
centrepiece of the display there is a marked contrast between its
sprawling size and intact nature, and the other framed fabric
pieces, some no more than six inches in width. This is, I think,
the single criticism that can be levelled against the exhibition:
that the tiny scraps of fabric seem more to be swallowed up by
their incongruous frames, than to have their detail of work
complemented. It is a shame for works that have survived the test
of time to be obscured by their presentation. The outstanding features are the fabled ‘Mongol’
cloths of gold. One feels almost a shade of sadness on viewing
the gold threads dispersing an attenuated shimmer through the
small thin material. I certainly mourned the modern age’s
premium on plastic and lycra in lieu of gold and silver. The
brocade incorporates Chinese symbols such as the dragon, fusing
Islamic motifs like vine and floral patterns with a distinctly
Far-Eastern style. This exhibition is a powerful example of how
broad the cultural influence of Islam was in Asia and the diverse
character of its complex culture. It must be seen to be believed.ARCHIVE: 0th week TT 2004