Blog Page 1559
Review: Bluebeard
★★★★★
Five Stars
If drama is a means of escapism, seeking to transport us into another world or merely into another person’s experience, Bluebeard pulls it off by inserting the audience into the head of an old lady with Alzheimer’s, and also into the shoes of her two adult children. It is impossible to watch Bluebeard
without imagining that it is your parent on stage, and therein lies the play’s power.
In the same way that Mufasa’s death in The Lion King upsets children because parents at that age are our entire frame of reference, the idea of parents degenerating gradually has a similar effect on me now. The idea of sudden death is in a way less heart-breaking than the experiences of Michael Roderick (David) and Carla Kingham (Emily) as they visit their mother in a care home and have to convince themselves that her brief moments of lucidity make the cost of care, not to mention her discomfort, worth it.
The mother in question, Claire (Becky Banatvala) is passive and unresponsive, and gives faultless stares into middle distance. From the opening scene, the audience settled in for an examination of mental illness at very close quarters, with a clear dichotomy between the realistic Emily and the sentimental David.
However, the tragic moments in this play are actually relatively rare: instead of watching seventy minute of frustrating, stilted conversations taking place over armchairs and cups of tea, the playwright is given terrific freedom within the disjointed memories and visions of a lady with Alzheimer’s. We are led through Claire’s tempestuous youth and invited to examine the consequences of marriage for our grandmothers’ generation: the young Claire tells us, “The first choice my mother ever made was the last choice she ever made,” before she and her daughter go on to make similar mistakes.
The play has a cast of three and some initially disorienting scenes, and the obligatory students-being-children scenes we come to expect from student theatre. My initial criticism was that the scope of one lady’s mental illness was perhaps too narrow to give a very emotional play enough substance: however, an unobtrusive but thorough treatment of feminist issues and euthanasia gave the audience more than enough to think about.
The proportion of bitter to sweet is just right, with very British comic touches coming at choice moments, particularly from Roderick’s array of characters. Banatvala is a dream to watch – she switches seamlessly from impertinent schoolgirl to wry, world-weary single mother to engaged twenty-something and back to old lady. Her attention to detail makes a non-linear play completely comprehensible: we can ascertain her age after just a few seconds of dialogue, and Kingham supports her beautifully by gradually adding impressive depth to the apparently callous Emily. It is unusual to see a student production as entertaining, thought-provoking and polished.
Review: They Will Be Red
★★★★☆
Four Stars
As I sat in front of the woodland set of Milja Fenger’s latest play They Will Be Red, waiting for the show to start, I wondered what exactly I was about to witness. There are few plays which feature solely soil, leaves and tree stumps as a set, especially within the intimate confines of the Burton Taylor stage which is laid out so that most of the audience are on a level with the actors, the soil quite literally beneath your feet if you’re on the front row. When they marketed it as “organic” in the programme, they meant it.
It is also marketed as not being a “polished final product”. However, as
the actors come on stage, the slick and intricate coordination of lights, live
soundtrack and a fast-paced script make it very clear, very quickly that this is by no means an amateur or sloppy production. They Will Be Red follows the story of Anna, and her determination to save the ash trees of England from a killer disease, at the expense of her relationships with friends and family. Whilst this is an original plot, it is the way in which Anna’s story is told through the narration of Fin, played spectacularly by Nick Williams, which elevates the play to what is an impressive height. Being just a two actor show, Williams also plays the part of every other character Anna meets, switching between them at lightning speed without breaking character or fluffing his lines once. Maisie Richardson-Sellers also delivers a solid and authentic performance as Anna, and handles Williams’ character changes excellently. Although these fast changes can occasionally cause some confusion as to which character Williams is playing at any given moment, these instances as rare and brief. It is impressive to say the least.
However, They Will Be Red is not just about saving trees. Fenger’s script is about growing up, change and how we deal with it. Well, I say script – Fenger wrote the backbone of the play, and the rest has been brought together through improvisation in rehearsal; each night, the cast plan to change it slightly. Just like the set itself, They Will Be Red is alive and changing. This may seem risky, but fear not, the backbone of the script is a sturdy one, switching from humorous one liners to poignant directness just as smoothly as Williams moves between characters. This is one not to be missed.
Lip-Syncing Reconsidered
Beyoncé faked her performance of the United States national anthem at President Obama’s inauguration ceremony. Since this revelation, crestfallen fans around the world have delivered declarations of disappointment and despair on the Internet. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky has even called for Obama to resign over the lip-syncing controversy.
The outrage has revealed how supremely ignorant the public is regarding the ubiquity of lip-syncing. Lip-syncing is an unfortunate but permanent fact of the modern world. The majority of high-profile vocal performances by popular musicians are pre-recorded and subsequently lip-synched live. If you pay big money to see Rihanna, Katy Perry, or Justin Bieber at giant arena gigs, you’d better be a fan of light shows and costumes, because the vocal performances will be the same as those on your iPod.
Is this practice acceptable? That depends. There are often practical reasons beyond laziness or lack of talent to justify lip-syncing. Michael Jackson never would have been able to pull off his immortal dance routines onstage while simultaneously preoccupied with singing. Strong winds might have caused Beyoncé’s vocals to sound muddled, and the microphone may have picked up an undesirable whooshing noise. Poor Ashlee Simpson claimed to have been suffering from a bout of acid reflux disease during her notorious Saturday Night Live flub; this is clearly a reasonable excuse. But often, no such practical reason exists, besides that it is easy to sound good when you aren’t really singing.
Frankly, we have brought this upon ourselves by coming to expect music to sound perfect. Do today’s pop stars possess much cleaner and better-tuned voices than the musicians of yesteryear? A bluesy, mournful sigh emanates from Billie Holiday’s grave at this suggestion. Although there is one exception: Justin Bieber was grown in a laboratory underneath Disney World, and his vocal chords, constructed from carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer, are flawless.
The truth is that even in today’s recorded pop music, the singers themselves contribute minimally to the finished product. Computer programs like Pro Tools and Auto-Tune allow producers to touch up, process, and homogenize vocals to the degree that computers do about 80% of the singing.
If pop singers fake their live performances and allow producers and their computers do the majority of the studio work for them, what are they? They are mere spokespeople for the music to which they attach their names and their pretty faces. Brad Pitt may be the new face of Chanel No. 5 perfume, but nobody mistakenly attributes the creation of that iconic scent to this laughably miscast celebrity representative.
There is no need to abandon pop music over this lamentable reality. However, we need a widespread shift of recognition. We need to start delivering credit where credit is due. Somebody is still making the music, even if it’s not Taylor Swift and Harry Styles. It’s time for songwriters and producers to emerge from the shadows.
With the increasing disappearance of live instrumentation in pop music, producers can now usually claim all of the credit for creating the backing track and the general sound and aesthetic of pop music, and through the use of aforementioned computer programs, they are responsible for the tweaking of the vocal tracks that so strongly determines how they end up sounding. Often the songwriter and producer are the same person, and certain songwriting-production teams share these responsibilities. Some of these individuals have had enormous influences on contemporary music, yet they receive a grossly disproportionate lack of recognition.
A Swede named Max Martin has been perhaps the most important figure in pop music of the last fifteen years. He has written and/or produced a mind-blowing number of megahits, including ten number one chart-toppers. His work ranges from some of the most recognisable hits of the Backstreet Boys, N’Sync and Britney Spears to ‘It’s My Life’ by Bon Jovi and more recently, Katy Perry’s ‘I Kissed A Girl’ and others and Taylor Swift’s ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together’
Martin’s full discography also includes songs by Kelly Clarkson, Taio Cruz, Usher, P!nk, Ace of Base, Cyndi Lauper, Simple Plan, A-ha, Carrie Underwood, Ke$ha, Céline Dion, T.I., Robyn, Avril Lavigne, Pitbull, Nicki Minaj, Maroon 5, Justin Bieber, Christina Aguilera, Carly Rae Jepsen, and James Blunt, among many others. The inconsequentiality of the singers who end up with the credit for these songs is illustrated by an anecdote about one of Martin’s most successful hits: “…Baby One More Time” was first offered to the Backstreet Boys and subsequently TLC, who turned it down before it was passed on to Britney.
Some of Martin’s frequent collaborators include Lukasz Gottwald (also known as Dr. Luke) and 24-year-old Benny Blanco. In their own right, either or both of these men are responsible for Ke$ha’s “Tik Tok” and “We R Who We R,” Maroon 5’s “Moves Like Jagger,” Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the U.S.A.,” and the list goes on and on. Nearly all of Rihanna’s hits have been created by a Norwegian writing-production duo known as Stargate. These unsung heroes are the real pop stars of the modern world. Though their hair and makeup may not be as flawless as that of the young men and women who strut around onstage moving their lips while their songs play in the background, it is their talent and creativity that have shaped the music we listen to today.
Distraught fans and Senator Rand Paul, go ahead and rip the Beyoncé posters off your walls. But if you really care about music, you should at least replace them with Max Martin posters.
Snow news day for Oxford sport
The recent snow has inconvenienced many Oxford residents in the last week, but the impact on sports teams has been particularly harsh. In a week in which even Oxford United’s scheduled fixture against Rotherham at the Kassam stadium had to be postponed on safety grounds, both university and college level sport have suffered severe disruption.
Amongst the countless postponements and cancellations, some of the more high-profile included Wednesday’s scheduled clashes between Oxford University’s Rugby Blues and the RAF, and the pre-Varsity ladies’ hockey versus Cambridge. Oxford University football club’s Varsity game against Oxford Brookes, scheduled to take place at Iffley Road tonight, has also been postponed.
This has left many of Oxford University’s sportsmen and women feeling frustrated. The University Rugby league club has suffered the cancellation of several training sessions, as well as the first game of the new year, due to take place last Sunday. Their captain, Liam Loftus, expressed his disappointment: “Fresh from our pre-term training camp in Portugal over the vacation, we were keen to hit the ground running this term, and build upon the success we had in Michaelmas.”
His sentiment will be familiar to anyone currently involved in Oxford sport at any level. In the slightly less glamorous ranks of college football, Exeter have been denied the chance to extend their lead at the top of the Premier Division, with two consecutive games called off due to snow. Captain James West was philosophical about the disturbance, saying, “After the long Christmas break we were all looking forward to playing again.” He added, “Obviously there is nothing we can do about it, we’ll just make sure we’re ready for when the games start again.”
In what has been a difficult week for him and his colleagues, Oxford University’s acting head groundsman, Chris Sutton, explained the scale of disruption: “We look after 12 football pitches, six rugby pitches and three lacrosse pitches as well as training areas and summer sports facilities, over seven sites. During the period from 6th January to 27th January we will have had 34 football, 15 rugby and 5 lacrosse games cancelled because of the weather. As well as virtually all training sessions.”
Though many outdoor sports teams have been forced to replace their usual practices with ‘classroom sessions’, gym work and snow runs, for some hardy clubs it’s been business as usual.
The Oxford University Cross Country Club’s scheduled race against Thames Hare & Hounds on Wimbledon Common last Saturday went ahead as planned despite the weather conditions. Naomi Webber, women’s Captain, commented, “we didn’t really think twice about the race going ahead. Cross-country races don’t get cancelled for minor meteorological issues such as snow. It just added to the fun!”
The snow did present some novel difficulties, however. Henry Mitchell, OUCCC Men’s Captain, explained, “in the men’s race, Oxford featured strongly at the front with four dark blues tracking a Thames athlete over the first three miles as this was the only way not to get lost. “The course was only sporadically marked with indistinguishable white flags, some of which had been stolen by locals, and was pretty confusing.” The men’s team had navigational issues, adding 300m to their course through missing a turn. Mitchell and Liam Mulroy were the only athletes to finish the race with times of 43.54 and 44.40 respectively.
Likewise, Oxford’s rowers have kept busy. Last weekend, they took to the Isis for the IWLC races in Arctic conditions, described by one first year as “a boat race in a blizzard.”
The only real survivors of the past couple of weeks have been those sports lucky enough to find their natural home indoors. The Oxford University swimming club’s weekend meet was one of the few sporting fixtures to take place, though even then one of the two days was lost to the snow. In what was the last opportunity to fine-tune their racing skills before Varsity, OUSC lined up against the top clubs in Oxfordshire. Hertford fresher Naomi Vides was particularly impressive, setting new club records in the 200 breaststroke (2:40.39) and the 400 IM (5:12.50).
Meanwhile, many indoor sports teams have been able to continue training for their respective Varsity games later this term undisturbed. Boxing captain Mikey Davis explained, “The boxing club has just got back from our pre-season training camp in Tenerife and everyone is currently training hard for our two big competitions of the year, Town vs Gown on 5th February and the Varsity match on 9th March.”
With conditions still far from perfect by midweek, one college rugby player remarked that “we really don’t have a clue when the next match will be”, words that seem symptomatic of the uncertainty surrounding Oxford sport.
Cherwell tries: surfing
When wandering around the OUSU fresher’s fair, being bombarded by every single club you really couldn’t be less interested in, it takes a lot to grab your attention. But, at a little stand buried in the chaos of the sport section, a banner simply read “Oxford Surf Club”. Surfing? Oxford? Really? After a brief chat with the club President, I was convinced. Four weeks later, and I was off on a four hour minibus journey to give it a go for the first time on a trip to that favourite of post-GCSE holiday destinations, Newquay.
On a cold November morning with temperatures at just over freezing, I found myself in the surreal position of standing in a wetsuit on a beach during university term time. After a quick instruction by the obligatory perma-tanned, bleach blonde surf instructor, the novices of the group (10 of the 15) headed out to the sea. Any lingering preconceptions I had about there not being real waves in England were immediately quashed; in November they are definitely big enough!
Until you’ve tried it, you can’t possibly understand the skill needed to make surfing look as effortless as the professionals manage to make it seem. What ensued for me was a series of nose dives, face plants, wipeouts and general falling off in an attempt to achieve the impossible. How could anyone possibly stand up on a moving lump of water on a stick of foam? And, of course, those with the annoying ability to ‘balance’ were quick to bounce up on their feet, leaving me and some fellow strugglers flailing in the white water.
But, after a few hours and a ridiculous number of attempts, I finally ‘popped up’ onto the board, and rode a wave onto the beach, greeted with whoops from my fellow surf club members. Suddenly, all the effort and aches seemed worthwhile. It may seem ridiculous, but it really is one of the best feelings in the world!
After defrosting our feet for a couple of hours, we decided to see what the Newquay nightlife had to offer. After discovering the local haunts: Belushi’s Surf Shack and Sailor’s Nightclub, we toasted our success into the night.
The next day we ventured out again in the freezing temperatures, donning the still damp wetsuits once more. We all celebrated the moment when the final person of our group got up onto their board for the first time, a great achievement with 10 novices in the group. However, our final day was cut short with bad conditions, thunder and lightning striking over the sea.
Arriving home on Sunday night still smelling of the sea, it seemed bizarre but brilliant to have packed so much into one weekend. If you have ever wanted to be that surf hunk/chick, then you should definitely get involved with OSC
The secret (college) footballer: The snow
There are some subjects that I’d rather not speak about. Some things are too painful, some issues too sensitive, to be openly discussed, even anonymously. Yet with this week shaping up to be much like the last, it’s about time I came clean and admitted it. The thing is, there isn’t any college football being played at the moment.
It’s hard to convey the disappointment us players are feeling right now. It’s hard to take knowing that you’ve sacrificed spending quality time with your family at Christmas in favour of lonely hours spent kicking a ball against a wall by way of training, only for your first few games of term to be cancelled. But you have to remember that, for you, playing football is a job, whereas for the handful of fans who turn up to watch you each week it’s something they can’t live with out. Most of all at this time I feel sorry for them.
Having said that, I’ve been a tad frustrated by the decidedly ambivalent attitude of some figures within the club hierarchy towards this string of cancellations. The senior tutor has spoken for what seems to be a significant proportion of the college’s non-playing staff in suggesting that the current lack of games will be a welcome chance for college footballers to focus on their studies. Perhaps they were simply trying to offer consoling words; either way they certainly managed to stir up a bit of dissent in the dressing room.
Nonetheless there is a sense in which their message rang true. I’ve been using these past couple of weeks to make up for the lack of attention I habitually pay to other, more important, things in college – friends, hall, the bar. Ultimately, I know I speak for many of my colleagues when I say that the events of the past week have forced me to admit to myself that there is more to college life than football.
My Evening with the Gods
To kick off its Live Friday programme marking its 330th anniversary the Ashmolean was transformed into a festival of light, music, dance and drama. The majesty of the museum’s exterior was all aglow, and the sight alone of the busy queue outside was enough to excite me. Inside, it was a hive of activity, and the buzzing throngs were the densest crowds I have ever seen at a museum.
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My first port of call was Hades, where shades, chanting, staring, and crouched on tables, made a good attempt at convincing us that we were in the eerie Underworld – a feat which I imagine must be hard to pull off in a friendly café. The Latin Play (excerpts from Plautus’ Miles Gloriosus) which I saw next was brilliantly funny and vibrantly-costumed, and although mishaps with the subtitles – which were not addressed quickly enough to stop half a row of people leaving in the middle of the play – do not help to promote Classics to an audience who are not all Literae Humaniores students, the Latin was spoken with character and clarity – with the exception of some Italianized Latin, which sounded so fluent that whether I understood any of it really didn’t matter anymore.
Overall, the structure of the evening’s programme scores top marks. My tickets for the two priced events of the night were timed generously apart so that I just caught the end of the Roman Pantomime and the start of the Persian Language Workshop – just to check whether my Persian-loving tutor was starring there – before heading to the operetta. Wandering around for the hour in between, I could see people wearing plumed helmets, trying on togas, playing what looked like ancient backgammon; no lack of things to do.
But like all sweet things, the evening did have a more sickly side. The problem was not so much the “Carry on Classics” vibe, but if you’re going to “carry on”, you might as well carry on all the way. The only heroes I saw in “Elysium” (the 4th floor bar) were two people wearing laurel wreaths. And the “atrium” in which the Greek dancing was performed turned out to be in a secluded corner of the otherwise open-planned building, depriving all the people who lined up along the banisters, overlooking the actual atrium, of a proper view. While it would not have been wise to topple the monumental statue of Apollo at the centre of the atrium, the graceful swirling of dancers can hardly have caused more damage than the strangely – advertised “Fight with the Gods” in the cast gallery.
When manoeuvring through the masses got tiresome, I took a moment to appreciate the museum’s collection, and found it rather comforting to see groups of people other than school children or tours doing the same; indeed, where better to mingle or rest your (as Homer says) “weakened knees” than beside 3,000 year old pottery?
Finally, the operetta The Judgement of Paris ended my evening in style, set in an elegant portrait room on the 2nd floor, tucked away from the main hub of action, with a grand staircase of its own. The music was heavenly and the singing of Venus particularly mellifluous. Whoever designated the 4 th floor as “Olympus” should have had a rethink.
All in all, it was a worthwhile evening considering that it was free, but it was the priced events that made it truly divine. After all, gods don’t make an appearance for nothing!
An athlete or an aesthete?
If I offered you a career at the age of 20, but told you that by the time you were 35, or even younger, you’d be forced to find a new one entirely, you’d more than likely tell me you weren’t interested. Those of us who are fortunate enough to leave this venerable institution with a degree will most likely set off on a path that we’ll follow until our retirement, but across the country and across the world there’s an exception to this rule.
Sportsmen and women perhaps have the shortest life spans of any profession, if we take Macaulay Culkin out of the equation that is. The average age of retirement for a professional footballer in Great Britain is 35, the point at which most of us would be in the early stages of our careers. The question is, with this being the case, is it reasonable for highly paid and highly valuable sportspeople to prepare for life about sporting death by heavily promoting themselves in the prime of their sporting lives?
Perhaps the most obvious and most recent example of this is Tom Daley. Ah Tom Daley. Most girls aren’t even reading this anymore. I’ve said ‘Tom Daley’ and their heads have begun to tilt to the side, their mouths slightly open, their mind wandering. I hate Tom Daley because I have no reason to hate him. He’s successful, he’s personable and girls love him. In fact, he’s everything my mum wants me to be. And after the last couple of years, you can’t help but imagine he’s also very, very rich.
But criticism of Britain’s golden boy has recently been raining in from the leading authorities in British Diving as Daley embarks on his latest celebrity escapade, playing a major role in ITV’s latest, and frankly horrendous, Saturday prime time show ‘Splash’. Head of British Swimming David Sparkes has said: “Tom is an incredibly talented young man, but he’s yet to achieve his full potential and it’s only going to get harder to achieve that Olympic gold medal as he gets older.” In drawing comparisons with the Chinese athletes who dominate the sport, Sparkes noted that they certainly won’t have “such distractions from training”. But is this reasonable? All sportspeople have a lifespan and Daley, and his agent, are acutely aware of this. Can we really condemn someone who has all the right talents to exploit our celebrity culture for doing so?
I see very little problem with what Tom is doing now. He’s just completed the most gruelling summer of his life, and he’s now an 18 year old boy with the world at his feet. We’d be wrong to say that we wouldn’t reach out and grab it if we had the chance. The question is, is Sparkes right in worrying that Daley may be about head the same way as some other well-known sporting faces, from the brink of glory to the obscurity of D-List Celebdom? A certain Miss Anna Kournikova might have something to say about that.
It’s at this point I have now lost the attention of the men. You’re sitting there, flicking through this article while eating lunch, and one man has now turned to the other and said: ‘Ooh remember Anna Kournikova?’ before that man nod of approval is exchanged. I also haven’t just brought her up here so that I had the opportunity to google her, honest. Wimbledon finalist in 1997 at the age of just 16, Kournikova had the makings of a future grand slam champion. Few would have predicted that it would have been her best ever result. Not only was her career blighted by injury, but by fame. Her looks immediately caught the attention of the media and she was plastered on billboards across the world, advertising everything from sports bras to trainers. We cannot see it as a coincidence that her rising fame outside of tennis, coincided with a dramatic drop in performance within the sport.
There are countless other examples of sports men and women who have become worldwide celebrities as a result of their actions outside their chosen field who have had flourishing careers, with David Beckham springing to mind as the most obvious. It seems that it is all about timing and scale. As an 18 year old boy, perhaps Tom Daley should hold back a little. While his brand is now clearly a hot seller, he has the chance to be defined by sporting greatness. For any devoted sportsperson this should be their ultimate goal.
Having examined all the facts, I’m now going to do what a historian does best, and sit on the fence. If I had the opportunity to do what Tom Daley is currently doing, would I? Probably. If I were Tom Daley’s coach would I be annoyed about what he is currently doing? Probably. Put it this way, I wouldn’t like to see the look on my tutor’s face if I told him he’d have to hold on for one of my essays, because I was too busy shooting another episode of my upcoming TV series. Although saying that, perhaps a show called ‘The Olden Maze’, in which I teach minor celebrities about the Anglo-Saxons and then make them answer questions on the topic in order to escape the terror-inducing labyrinth which I have had constructed, might be a slightly more lucrative career path than my history degree.