International students tend to have a reputation for being reclusive, hermits in the nests of their rooms who emerge occasionally only to scurry to the closest shower. If it wasn’t for that thin sliver of light under a door you’d be tempted to believe they didn’t live in college at all. So many times I’ve heard questions like “Where do they eat?” or “How do they get to and from lectures with no one seeing?” bounced back and forth over dinner in hall. 

This, at least, was what I heard before arriving at Oxford. And what I was told again in the Freshers’ guide, and by the second years, and on just about every student forum out there. It seems to be a running joke across the colleges, but since I’ve been here I’ve been involved in a project that suggests just the opposite.

The name alone of the Oxford Spanish Play implies that it is an international affair; it’s quite obvious that it branches out beyond the stereotypical born and bred British Oxonians. This year the company’s production, a dual language version of La vida es sueño, or Life’s A Dream, by the Golden Age playwright Calderón de la Barca, is produced by Alejandra Albuerne, who is as Spanish as they come. But the countries involved extend far beyond simply Spain itself; the directors, Theresa and Luis, hail from Chile, whilst several of the cast members come from other parts of the Hispanic world such as Mexico.

Yet somehow the international feel of the production, which will be performed in the original Spanish, with English subtitles, has prompted foreign students with no affiliation to Spain to get involved. From Italian to American, Russian to Chinese, there is no shortage of diversity in the production. 

Perhaps this is because plays which are in English feel more inaccessible to those with a different first language. After all, Oxford has bred the likes of Alan Bennett and Oscar Wilde, so doing anything theatre related here feels pretty pressurized. What’s more, the more academic student productions tend to be dominated by students of English Literature, enough to make a budding dramatist from abroad run a mile. With the Spanish play all the actors are in the same boat; save the (surprisingly small) numbers of Spanish actors, everyone is performing in a foreign language. 

There are over 130 different nationalities in the undergraduate body alone at Oxford. But if we continue spreading the myth of the cloistered international student, we risk losing the richness that we could benefit from by living in such a multicultural university. People come from round the world to study here. Foreign languages are the perfect medium to encourage integration: they are a great unifier and equaliser, just as theatre is supposed to be.

“The Spanish Hamlet”, I am told of La Vida Es Sueño. “The most well-known play in the Spanish speaking world”. A play that deals with fate, illusion and reality. A Golden Age play, with all the mixing of philosophising, stock-character humour, and beauty of language that that entails. The play, to clarify, is in Spanish – the reason I am able to tell that the language is beautiful is due to the rather helpful subtitles, based on Michael Kidd’s translation, that are projected onto the wall.

The title means “Life is a Dream”, but the dream we are presented with is far from the idyllic image this conjures up. There are no pastoral meadows here – it is the Spanish Hamlet, after all. Instead we are given the staccato visions of the English-speaking Oracle.

Indeed, there is something ominous about the play. The juxtaposition between the late sixteenth century action and the stunning stylised costumes helps add to this disconcertion. The costumes are frankly, dazzling, as is the whole style of the play. One could simply go to watch what one could deem an incredibly useful stage costume and makeup lesson. This rather clinical description perhaps does not do justice to the monochrome majesty I am presented with, however. The pale face makeup of all the characters creates an otherworldly, ghost-like atmosphere, in a production where often the lighting has it that darkness pervades with light brush strokes of chiaroscuro and heavenly shadow-play.

I would not say that this is a normal play-going experience, in the fact that I feel very much known to be an audience member, ostracised, almost, by spectacle. There is one moment, for example, where the entire cast charge at me before a battle scene, their pasty faces bathed in red-light.

Sometimes the acting feels actively staged and contrived, which most of the time is captivating, but other times feeds into the detached, unsettled feeling that hangs over the play. However, there is much passion from the main character Segismundo, who succeeds in bringing out the scarily animalistic side of himself terribly convincingly.

It seems to me that this is an event of theatre rather than simply a play, and one would have to be prepared for that when deciding to view it. I am in the odd paradox of not thinking I would want to see it, yet being certainly glad that I did.

★☆☆☆☆

One Star

If you ever thought student Shakespeare was something to avoid, it might be worth taking a look at Merton Floats’ attempt at Phèdre. Its tediousness, exacerbated by technical flaws, is quite spectacular.

Racine’s play, written in the seventeenth century, draws heavily on classical predecessors. For unconvincing reasons this version is set in 1960s Italy, which is supposed to be brought out by the stark majesty of the venue, Merton’s chapel. Present-day high Anglicanism equates to twentieth century Italian Catholicism, the reasoning would appear to run. The bland, generally monochrome, contemporary costumes do little to contribute to any specificity of time or space, and nor does the set, which – generously – comprises of two chairs and a table.

The choice of venue is perhaps the most problematic part of this production. Merton’s chapel, renowned in the choral world for its excellent acoustics, is rather unsuited to drama. Lines have to be delivered slowly, or they risk being swallowed up in the echoes of the cavernous building. At numerous points during the play, especially when moments of anguish are reached, you are hard pressed to understand what is being said, a problem that is only compounded by the decision to put the seating in traverse.

If lines become inaudible, the actors’ expressions become more important. But, here too, Phèdre has been set up to be as incomprehensible as possible. Four stark white lights are the only additions that have been made to the gentle background lighting of the chapel, and they have been angled in such a way as to glare right into the audience’s eyes.

But on the occasions when the actors are both visible and audible, you realise you have not missed too much. Bridget Dru, playing Phaedra, is competent enough, but Hugh Johnson, who plays Hippolytus, spends more time engaged in repetitive hand gestures than in expressing anything, and when Theseus (Jonathon Oakman) asks his son, “Traitor, how dare you show yourself to me?” Oakman seems bored rather than emotionally involved.

The highlight of this production has to be the gong sounded right at the end, which must count as the single well thought-out use of the venue. The sound echoes deliciously around, and you realise you are free to leave at long last.

Who are The Men, besides ready made material for an Abbott and Costello routine? (‘Have you heard of The Men?’ ‘The who?’ ‘No, they’re something else entirely.’) They’re a band of four, all of them, in fact, men — that much is undeniable. What’s less clear is where these men belong in the million-piece jigsaw puzzle of today’s pop-music scene, or whether they fit in at all. A band from Brooklyn without that borough’s hard-on for ornamentation and innovation, a band with dozens of influences but few close cousins, a band that often sounds like 1973 or 1983 or 1993 but rarely like 2013: The Men are a band the universe has cosmically, comically misfiled.

Where they truly belong is beside the seminal alternative bands that hatched from 1980s American suburbs: Hüsker Dü, Dinosaur Jr., The Replacements. Like them, The Men began as plausible hardcore practitioners, grew unsatisfied, and evolved into something softer, sweeter, and stranger. And as with those bands, the ceaseless marvel of The Men is their capacity for reinvention: reinvention of sound, as they retune their guitars for everything from sensitive songwriting to senseless noisemaking; of genre, as they incorporate influences as diverse as doo-wop, black metal, and surf rock into the basic punk recipe; and of affect, as they shuttle between the adolescent extremes of punk’s emotional range (from unsustainable elation to unjustifiable beleagueredness, from a wish for self-obliteration to an equally deadened apathy). What separates The Men from their predecessors is, as their spare name suggests, a commitment to obscurity. Renouncing rock-star-sized personalities, even stable lyrical presences, The Men are happiest submerged beneath booming guitars. Not that The Men don’t have things to say — but when they do, they let their guitars do the talking.

For most, The Men’s first impression was their second full-length, Leave Home. It’s a bipolar introduction, one that suckers you in only to push you away. Opening track ‘If You Leave . . . ’ is one of The Men’s trademarks, the almost-instrumental: the vocal is repressed to a single mantra-like lyric (here, a response to the title’s hypothetical): ‘I would die’, while a fluctuating instrumental backdrop inflects the lyric with conflicting tones: indifference, remorselessness, masochistic glee. Despite The Men’s many efforts to disquiet us — the lyrics portending self-destruction, the album ordering leave, the cacophonous guitars warning you are not welcome here — Leave Home is an immediately commanding listen. It’s a compilation of some of most ear-grabbing guitar tones of the past few years: the gargling low end of ‘LADOCH’, the eardrum-numbing high end of ‘Shitting with the Shaw’, the bulldozing mid-range of ‘Bataille’. And with these tones The Men engineer song after song modelled on perpetual-motion machines, songs whose unflagging momentum can barely be believed, songs that seemingly never stop moving, even when the album’s over.

Leave Home’s antisocial rock is not for everyone — perhaps not evenThe Men themselves, who about-faced on their third album, Open Your Heart. Unlike Leave Home’s experiments in noise and energy, every song on Open Your Heart channels at least one established genre: rootless country rock (‘Candy’), blues-note-soaked psychedelia (‘Presence’), sprawling Daydream Nation–stylejams (‘Oscillation’), note-perfect imitations of seventies arena rock, covers to classics that don’t actually exist (‘Turn It Around’). But The Men are not simply an immaculate cover band with catholic taste: their generic versatility is always a means of depicting emotional realism, in all its grain and depth. Nowhere is this clearer than on ‘Please Don’t Go Away’, The Men’s most affecting almost-instrumental. Taken alone, the song’s single lyric (the lacklustre title, stammered over a seesawing two-note melody) wouldn’t convince anyone — but placed in a pandemonium of shoegaze guitar squalls, doo-wop squeals, and rapid-fire snare-drum fills, it transforms into an urgent appeal for reconciliation. Forgoing any clarifying context — there’s nothing here approximating a story, a scene, or even a verse-and-chorus skeleton — The Men give us three minutes of choked-up-ness, of emotions overbrimming and words not sufficing. 2012 was a year of great lyrics, loopy extended metaphors, meme-ready rap lines — but few bands understood the eloquence of inarticulateness quite as well as The Men.

If new single ‘Electric’ is any indication, we’ll be meeting yet another incarnation of The Men on their fourth album, New Moon, out March 4th. An earwormy burst of proto-punk from a band whose aim was once to alienate and bewilder, ‘Electric’ is simultaneously a radical step forward for the band and their most accessible offering yet. More than ever, The Men’s influences are right on the surface: the verse’s three-chord vamp is pure Modern Lovers, while the sneering references to neutron bombs and jokers and thieves come straight from The Stooges’ apocalyptic rock. So where can we hear The Men in all this? Just wait for the chorus: the drummer attacking his kit as if he had something against it, the guitars ditching the horizontal chug of the verse and leaping upward in an ascendant pentatonic riff, the singer shutting up because there’s a certain species of joy only overdriven guitars can express. Who are The Men? They’re your favourite part of the song.

★★★★★
Five Stars

From the opening seconds of ‘Pompeii’, which feature atmospheric chanting, to the last pleading notes of ‘Get Home’, Bad Blood is a masterpiece of epic proportions. It’s been a long time coming, and at times it seemed it might never arrive, but Bastille’s debut is emphatically worth the wait. While many albums attempt to present one coherent picture, telling the same story from start to finish, Dan Smith has produced what sounds more like a book of short stories, a series of snapshots from different narratives and ideas, moving swiftly between the many themes and ideas swirling around in his head and changing setting so rapidly that the minute you’ve got a hold on the meaning of one song, you’re thinking about the next one.

The lyrics are exquisite, as fans of the band will already be aware, the material on Bad Blood being largely familiar to any followers of Bastille. But it doesn’t matter how many times you’ve heard “Your hands protect the flames/From the wild winds around you” and other such gems from album highlight ‘Icarus’, a song that’s been around for a full year and a half. It will still tug on your heart strings, describing but not judging the self-destructive life of someone living every day as if it might be his last (“Icarus is flying too close to the sun/
Icarus’ life has only just begun”). As for some of the previously unreleased tracks, it surely won’t be long before festival and tour crowds alike are singing “Felled in the night by the ones you think you love/They will come for you” on the chorus of biblically-inspired ‘Daniel In The Den’, a song about dreaming and unreality. References and allusion are common throughout, with ‘Pompeii’ transporting the listener to the devastation of the Roman city destroyed by a volcanic eruption almost 2000 years ago, and ‘Laura Palmer’ calling on the David Lynch cult TV drama Twin Peaks.

The lyrics are mostly simple – “When all of your flaws and all of my flaws are laid out one by one” – but powerful, and it’s a heartless person indeed who feels nothing as Dan Smith unashamedly announces “There’s a hole in my soul/I can’t fill it, I can’t fill it/There’s a hole in my soul/Can you fill it, can you fill it?” on ‘Flaws’. The same can be said for the music. Despite Smith’s prowess as a producer, as seen on his Other People’s Heartache mixtapes, he resists the urge to bury the album in production, instead achieving a simple, heartfelt effect from start to finish. This is never more evident than in ‘Oblivion’, a song that Google tells me was used in an episode of Vampire Diaries (OK fine, I heard it watching the show), which features little more than a piano and Dan Smith sounding for all the world like he’s standing in a desert staring at the night sky as he mournfully proclaims, “When oblivion is calling out your name/You always take it further than I ever can”.

The album is so packed with excellent songs that it’s almost impossible to pick a favourite, and mine’s been oscillating wildly since I first heard it. Currently it’s  ‘Icarus’, but we probably shouldn’t go into why “Drinking from a paper cup/You won’t remember this” speaks to me. Instead, listen to it yourself, pick your own, and love it forever.

★★☆☆☆
Two Stars

I wonder whether you can justifiably call an album “very average”, let alone an album by a band with the reputation and track record of Suede. When Suede first really emerged in 1992, they sounded like a mixture between David Bowie and what would become Placebo – a sexy, streamlined, neo-glam band. Nowadays, they sound more like Simple Minds, U2 and Manic Street Preachers bellowing at each other at an old farts’ convention.

Perhaps it’s to be expected or, indeed, only right that such a band should focus less ontheir sex appeal when they’re on the wrong side of the hill. However, you’d think they’d try and at least keep some of the elements that made them so much fun to begin with. The slinky riffs, deft lyrics and androgynous sexuality are all conspicuously absent. Without a new reason to like Suede, this album looks like a disappointment before it’s even really begun.

There are some really cheap tricks employed on the record – dialling back the lead guitar (which, incidentally used to be the closest thing to Mick Ronson since Mick Ronson) on the opening track in order to open up space for a chorus that seems to involve more wailing than screaming, or blatantly stealing the riff from Tenacious D’s ‘Wonderboy’ on ‘Sometimes I Feel I’ll Float Away’ – definitely a low point of both the album and the band’s career.

It’s strange that this album should be such a let-down. With all the great Britpop legends — including Pulp, Blur and Shed Seven — returning (and Oasis finally giving up the rather pathetic ghost), you’d think there’d be no better time for Suede to strut their stuff onstage. Perhaps they’re embarrassed about their age, no longer able to play the agent provocateur (hasn’t stopped Uncle Jarvis), but that really is no excuse. They’ve lost their raison d’etre, lost their mojo, and lost their relevance.

Bloodsports is fundamentally a decent album, but you should really expect more from Suede. If we’re measuring this relative to their past output, this is a piss-poor effort.

★★★☆☆
Three Stars

No doubt Palma Violets are soon to be widely hailed as the next big thing, the ‘saviours of rock n’ roll’ here to save us all from the mere mortals that have been clogging the system for far too long, with their first offering: 180.

Playing secret gigs at an exclusive venue in South London and releasing a free preview of their forthcoming album seems to tie in with the modern dynamic of an indie ‘guitar band’, that NME claimed “it’s time to get very excited about” in May last year. However, all these biblical claims and acts of ‘indieness’ point to exactly what is wrong with the whole affair. It’s nothing new.

Introducing the album, ‘Best of Friends’ attempts to set an epic scene that is never quite met. The single, released last year, is easily comparable to anything from The Vaccines’ back catalogue with lazy lyrics such ‘I wanna be your best friend, I don’t want you to be my girl’ telling a clichéd love story with an equally clichéd sound that loosely resembles Babyshambles’ Down in Albion but with a slightly less sincere result. Tracks such as ‘Set up for the Cool Cats’ and ‘Last of the Summer Wine’ start with a more convincing atmospheric backdrop which is reminiscent of late ’60s psychedelic rock.

The Violets have been compared to a number of bands from this period and genre, and with good reason: the vocals on ‘Cool Cats’ could easily be those of Jim Morrison and the whole album has an air of the psychedelic to it with its loose grooves and echo-laden distorted riffs. With various easily made comparisons to Joy Division, Velvet Underground and other such indie royalty, reinforced by a fan club including Nick Cave and Bernard Cave (both spotted at a recent gig at Glasgow’s King Tut’s) Palma Violets’ prospects look promising. Pulp’s Steve Mackey at the head of production duties adds yet another level of legitimacy to what is, to all intents and purposes, a very listenable album by a band that I would definitely enjoy live. The problem is that it’s just all been done before, and smacks of a tried and tested formula that’s unlikely to stand the test of time.

Oxford’s annual Asian theater show, ‘Chutney & Chips’, was back at it last week, delighting crowds who streamed in to St John’s Garden Quad Auditorium for one of four performances. Nisha Julka’s original script combined traditional Bollywood tropes–love triangles, song and dance, and comic relief–artfully in a way that spoke to the Oxford audience. The core conflict in the production was about what it means to be both Indian and British; yes, just like “Bend It Like Beckham,” but situated at Oxford and in which the main characters don’t play soccer but rather act in a play. And though that sounds irreverently self-referential (oh, a play about characters who act in a play), the whole thing does–perhaps surprisingly–work. Chutney & Chips is enjoyable because it doesn’t take itself too seriously. 

The great strength of the production is the infusion of Bollywood into anything and everything. The thorough celebration of all-things Indian makes the thematic conclusion of the play never in doubt–Jeevan will, of course, reconnect with his Indian roots and get the girl that he loves. I found Chutney & Chips’s exuberance of India exhilarating  The costumes are wonderful rich and Indian to a T. The opening 10-minute Bharatanatyam sequence is well-executed and sets the scene for the rest of the play: there ain’t nothin more Indian than Bharatanatyam.

The token white characters (yes, Bollywood films have them too) had the innocuous names of Dave and Sonia. But Dev and Sonia are Indian names too, and Chutney & Chips makes a strong case against racial exclusivity: the point here is that anyone can be Indian, no matter the color of skin or accent of voice. Indeed, Chutney & Chips’s message of pan-Indian universalism is something that Indians themselves should take to heart–too often it seems that India is riven by internal rivalries: Hindu v Muslim, north v south, caste v caste, etc.

The strongest part of Chutney & Chips is how well song and dance was integrated into the production. From the opening Bharatanatyam sequence to the closing Harlem Shake, everything was just fun. Including, incidentally, the scene that used Some Nights by fun. The seeming randomness when dance would break out was just awesome: the needlessness of the dance scenes is what makes Bollywood Bollywood, and Chutney & Chips captured it perfectly. The best dance was the impromptu red repairmen dance at Bridge. It sounds ridiculous, and it was. But so good.

The use of music was strong as well. I wouldn’t want to take the music director in a round of Antakshari–I’d get hosed. Clearly these guys know their stuff, and they chose the exact right music for the right scenes. The wide range of music, from classical Indian to Western pop, was excellent. Even better was how the music was integrated into the plot. I don’t know of a better song than Pretty Woman for that moment when Dave met Sonia, and Jeevan’s strumming of Ladki Bardi Anjanni Hai was perfect.

I enjoyed the simple sets and props. The totality of props included a few tables, chairs, a bed, and a broom. But even these items tell a story. For example, the set director somehow found an old palang to use–a cheap bed to Western eyes, but so much more to Indians in the know. I nearly gasped when I saw it rolled on to stage: I mean, that’s what I sleep on when I go back to India.

The acting was varied throughout the performance. The highlight, no doubt, was the passionately comedic performance of the character Mukesh (Johnny Lever beaten at his own game, dare I say). Continuing with the ‘play-within-a-play’ motif, Mukesh is told that he is the breakout character in the play-within-a-play. While that’s not true, Mukesh certainly was the breakout in Chutney & Chips. He was sassy and sexy, and you can’t beat unzipping blue coveralls to expose a full tux underneath (very Bondish). The other strong performance was the bit piece of Jeevan’s high school girlfriend’s over-protective older brother. He gets to beat up Jeevan, and actually does. Those kicks hit real ribs, and I’d hate to see the bruises day-after. The fight was certainly better than the stale Bollywood fight scenes of the 80s.

Unfortunately, most of the emotional scenes (particularly when Jeevan confided in Rachana) didn’t seem exactly right. The actors had trouble expressing openness and love between one another. Luckily our amateur actors have at least 5 years to learn these emotions before their parents marry them off in arranged marriages. Paging Dr. Mukesh from Chandigarh.

I had two other criticisms of the performance. First, Chutney & Chips suffered from something that all Bollywood films and old Indian aunties can commiserate with: bloat. The performance was perhaps 15 minutes too long.

My second criticism is more substantive, however. Thematically, Chutney & Chips played it too safe. There is nothing outre in the three couples of Jeevan and Rachana, Chirag and Shivani, and Dave and Sonia. All are heterosexual, and each pair is racially homogeneous. Unfortunately while Indian film today is pushing boundaries on sexuality, race, and religion, Chutney & Chips was uncomfortably blase. Indeed, the only stirring of social criticism in the script is the portrayal of child marriage, though Balika Vadhu does a better job in that regard.

Chutney & Chips 2013 was a strong performance, and I look forward to the 2014 iteration. I will certainly be there, and I hope to see you too.