Why does Jonathan Freedland use a pseudonym if he declares his real name and photo on the back cover? More to the point, why did he write Pantheon? It’s clear that Freedland has no personal investment in the story. There’s no zest or excitement in his writing. The characters are lifeless words on the page. Not only that, they are thoroughly dislikable. Kurt Vonnegut advised writers to give the reader at least one character they could root for, and after reading Pantheon, I can understand why. The main character, James, is a war-injured scholar whose default response to any interaction is uncontrollable rage. This gets repetitive quickly and the character never develops. Dialogue is uninspired, alternated only with stretches of painfully bland descriptions from James’ completely contrived internal monologue.

The story’s impetus is James beating his wife. She leaves with their son for America to escape and the narrative concerns James tracking them down. Had James been less of a wooden construction, the time spent with him may not have dragged as much. Yet it would still be difficult to endure Freedland’s childish grasp of grammar, unskilled narrative pace, and dull content. Freedland says that Pantheon, besides being a ‘riveting story’, brings a secret into the open.

This secret is an affinity of numerous American scholars with eugenics: an interesting idea to explore but the plot point feels thrown in as an afterthought. It manifests close to the story’s end and Freedland seems to want to get it out of the way. Having spent the book’s entirety finding James’ family, the reunion is not a deserved reward for the reader’s perseverance.

It’s hard to find reasoning behind Freedland’s delayed  introduction of the secondary character, Taylor. He does not interact with James but Freedland’s attempt to make his narrative distinct is fruitless. Perhaps this too is an afterthought. Like much of the book, the reason must be page-filling. Is Freedland attempting to mimic the likes of James Patterson’s or Dan Brown’s blockbuster structures? If so, he fails.

This isn’t personal, and I don’t wish to damn Freedland as a person. He is an influential Guardian journalist and seems a principled man. It’s a shame neither of these make him a capable novelist. Pantheon shows Freedland possessing all the atrocities of a bad writer: he is tedious, lazy, and either believes his readers to be ignorant or does not consider them at all. Jonathan-Bourne-Sam-Freedland is not the next Harris or le Carré. He is the next roll of toilet paper in my bathroom.

With its bloodied silhouette snaking and swirling against the sparse grey expanse of Stratford’s skyline, Anish Kapoor’s looming ‘ArcelorMittal Orbit’ tower demands recognition. Funded by Indian steel magnate, Lakshmi Mittal, Kapoor’s tower won the prestigious commission from a shortlist which included Antony Gormley. It stands now, in the final days of completion, shedding off its last scraps of scaffolding, like a burning scarlet monster, a demented helter-skelter, at the centre of London’s Olympic Park.

The observation tower cum sculpture is Britain’s largest work of public art to date. Located between the park’s Olympic Stadium and the Aquatic Centre, the Orbit will impress itself upon the press coverage this summer as an ambassador for London’s Olympic Games as well as a new and immediately recognisable emblem of contemporary British culture.

Looking at photographs of the 115m tall Orbit, this might seem concerning. The structure looks undeniably sinister, unstable and even apocalyptic – like Dr Evil’s headquarters or a supersized clotted artery. Standing in front of the Orbit however, I was very happily surprised.

Whirling and swooping red tracks sweep up and around towards the sky in loops that just scream out with energy and a sense of dynamic movement. And whilst Boris Johnson continues to force comparisons with Paris’ Eiffel tower, and Rome’s Trajan Column, Kapoor’s tower immediately conveys a feeling of newness and genuine originality that is difficult to ignore.

Aesthetically, the Orbit is not perfect. Its upward, whooshing forms are halted along its centre, bunged up by the functional grey staircase that twists around its core to the viewing platform. The tower lacks the elegance and seamlessness of the London Eye or Eiffel Tower, and perhaps for these reasons has evoked such divided and vehement responses from critics.

But Kapoor is an artist who so far has shown that he knows how to connect with his audience. In 2009 he was the first living artist to have a major solo exhibition at the Royal Academy where his interactive and pioneering sculptures attracted more visitors than any London exhibition has ever seen. In Chicago’s Millennium Park, his enormous, stainless steel bean-shaped sculpture titled ‘Cloudgate’, draws in visitors daily, walking in and around the work, playfully admiring themselves in its warped and polished reflective exterior.

It is the interactive capacity of Kapoor’s £19.6 million Orbit that will, if anything, ensure the sculpture longevity, past the brief window of 2012’s summer games. Boris and the Olympic Park Legacy Company hope that the Orbit will attract up to one million fee-paying visitors per year and will help to regenerate Stratford, making the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park a tourist destination for generations to come. It still remains to be seen that whether, in the depths of a recession, the British people will come to appreciate or to resent such a distinctive and important work of public art.

The ArcelorMittal Orbit tower is due to be  completed in May 2012

Valentine: In conclusion, I stand affected to her.

 Speed: I would you were set, so your affection would cease.

Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona, II.i.79-81

It feels sacrilegious to say it while sitting in the foyer of the National Theatre in London (I’m here to see Collaborators with Simon Russell Beale, which I justified academically by spending all morning in the British Library looking at playtexts from the early 1600s, and because tickets were only five quid and Simon Russell Beale can do anything, even make Stalin funny), but the rehearsal process for Two Gentlemen of Verona has so far confirmed what I always sort of suspected:

When in doubt about the meaning of a Shakespeare line, it is probably a sex joke.

And don’t think I haven’t done my research looking for hidden subtleties in lines like:

Speed: Why then, how stands the matter with them?

Launce: Marry, this: when it stands well with him, it stands well with her.

(III.v.19-21)

I did just spend an hour riffling through every book on directing in the National’s bookshop, only to discover that most of what’s there is about choosing a play, casting a play, and the initial rehearsal, so I probably ought to have read them a month ago. But I can’t suddenly become cultured and professional now. It would give my cast a heart attack.

There’s no denying that Two Gents is a crass play, full of sarcastic servants and boorish servants, gangster outlaws, and not-particularly-convincing cross-dressing. It’s full of young people meeting other young people. Of course it’s about sex.

A friend asked me why I even picked Two Gents, given my obsession with really human, realistic characters. It’s certainly a far cry from my last stint directing, Brian Friel’s Translations in Trinity 2010. And it’s an early work. We can see the foundations being laid for Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night, but Shakespeare’s not quite there yet when he writes Two Gents. He’s a decent playwright, but a little more time and practice are required for him to ascend to god-like status. But there’s something about the way Two Gents depicts young people going to a new place, getting caught up in the glamour and excitement of it, and losing track of who they are and what they value; I have a suspicion that many Oxford students can relate.

So what do we do with all these sex jokes? Do we trust the audience to get them on their own, even when the slang is five hundred years out of date? Do we highlight them with a physical gesture? Or will that just turn the play into a bizarre marathon of thrusting hips and suggestively raised eyebrows? Given that Two Gents has a lot of wooing, a little fighting, an attempted rape, and three different outlaw attacks, it’s certainly a physical play in its own right. In an attempt get the cast to be willing to snog/fight/hug/lean on one another, I’ve introduced both a weird game that is like tag but ends up with spooning other cast members who are crouched in the foetal position, and my personal favourite, the Huggy Bear Game. The cast undertook these exercises in remarkably good humour, with only minimal jokes about me being a lunatic.

All through school I wanted to be an actor, until one day I realised that I love acting but often couldn’t stand actors, so I certainly couldn’t cope with them surrounding me for the rest of my life. The egos, the conflicts, the rivalries, and the drama: So. Much. Drama. But theatre always pulls you back in (I’m seriously contemplating a heroin addiction as a healthier alternative), and the Two Gents cast is a fun, down-to-earth bunch. Aside from the days when a certain leading man just doesn’t show up to rehearsal and I sort of want to strangle him, or when I have to ask an actor to ‘say that again, but at least a little bit like you mean it’, and despite my terror regarding Wednesday’s first run-through, I do love the Two Gents cast.

And luckily, the Two Gents cast finds Shakespeare’s sex jokes as funny as I do.

Kate O’Connor is the director for Barbarian Productions’ The Two Gentlemen of Verona to be performed May 1st-5th in Christ Church Cathedral Gardens, complete with penis jokes. Tune in next week for an actor’s perspective, and for more information about Two Gents visit their website, www.barbarian-productions.com, or follow them on twitter @twogentsox.

As Andy Warhol lay upon the factory floor, profusely bleeding from the bullet wounds administered by actress and author Valerie Solanas, it was Billy Name who clutched him to his breast and supported him, as he supported him throughout his entire star-studded career. From the opening of the factory on East 47th Street in 1962, Warhol thought of Name, his lover, friend and contemporary, as a man who ‘inspired confidence. He gave the impression of being generally creative … I picked up a lot from Billy.’ 

Name and Warhol first came into contact in the early days of the 1960s, when the former was working as a lighting designer with Nick Cernovich and playing as a musician at the Theatre of Eternal Music. Name recalls ‘it was the end of the period of the romantic avant-garde bohemia, when artists ‘kept’ younger artists and a male artist would always have a young man around.’ Soon enough, Warhol and Name began a relationship of both professional and personal passion. ‘I started working with Andy when he first got the loft space which became the factory in January 1963’ he tells me. ‘We were friends and lovers for some years before that.’

Name’s work at the factory was famous. It was Name that instigated the iconic ‘silverising’ of the factory, bedecking every inch of the place with tin foil, shattered mirrors and silver ornament – a look Warhol picked up from Name’s identically silverised apartment. As Warhol’s work rocketed to renown, Name became chief photographer at the factory, converting a bathroom into a darkroom and taking up residence in a storage cupboard. Name captured celebrated shots of Warhol’s self-titled superstars in all their avant-garde glory — polished to perfection at legendary parties and orgies, celebrating fake weddings and crashing on the factory’s beloved red sofa after amphetamine-addled adventures.

Even today, Name’s identity is defined by this flurry of photography, his brief capturing of a world of pop, plastic and primary colours. Silk screen prints of his factory photos are to be displayed at the New York Metropolitan museum of art this September. As I question him about his artistic legacy, and the legacy the factory left with him, his role in the Warhol story becomes clear. ‘I was a character at the factory in its day. My work as narrator began after Andy died. Many people are interested in the work and scene of the factory. I respond to these people.’ Warhol created the idea of the fifteen minutes of fame, and it is because of Name’s continuing work that his own legacy has not been lost in the blink and speed of a shutter.

 

In 1979 Andy Warhol spoke about Studio 54 in an interview, manipulating his own already infamous quote: ‘It’s the place where my prediction from the sixties finally came true: ‘In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.’ I’m bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is, ‘In fifteen minutes everybody will be famous.’’ As usual, Warhol was being both oblique and articulate, but the quote accurately described the club. It was the location for your ‘fifteen minutes’.

Studio 54 was initially converted from a theatre into a nightclub in 1977 and immediately became the place to be seen. The opening night was graced by Debbie Harry, Michael Jackson, Jerry Hall and even Salvaldor Dalí among a host of other names; those at the top of their game, mainly musically, but also from every artistic field. It was the coolest people of a generation in one club with some alcohol thrown into the mix and a soundtrack that showcased the best of disco in particular and music in general. Unfortunately said alcohol caused the club an early hiccup and a run-in with the authorities, followed only a couple of years afterwards with another closure due to allegations of fraud. The club was, however, re-launched with Warhol himself in attendance and became a golden place for new music.

Madonna, Wham! and Culture Club all performed at the club on their rise to fame, cementing it in music history. The old adage of ‘sex, drugs and rock’n’roll’ was never more adept. The club was a hotbed of all three, with young music and film stars mixing with those  deemed beautiful and interesting enough on the door. If you were young, gifted and talented it was the place to be. But, like all the best things, it quickly burnt itself out. By the late 80s, only a decade after it was first opened as a nightclub, Studio 54 was almost over. 

Studio 54 was an inspiration. Anything went; in fact, the more outrageous the better. Of course, it was also a hub for drugs and plagued by financial and red tape difficulties, but this only adds to the myth. The artistic and the beautiful drank, danced and watched the next big thing rise. Even Frank Sinatra once failed to get past the doorman. The policy of mixing the beautiful with the famous created a concept that was bigger than the club itself. It wasn’t models or actresses or artists or people after their own ‘fifteen minutes’ by themselves in their own little niche, it was all of them thrown together in a riot of glitter with Blondie’s ‘Heart of Glass’ on the soundtrack. 

At its peak the club was the most well known nightclub in the world. It had a huge impact on clubbing culture and spread of disco music globally. But the legacy it left was more than that: it broke some damn good artists and, most of all, it gave people a damn good time. Warhol hit the nail on the head with his assertion that it was all about feeling (or being) famous, no matter who you were. It’s one of those places any music fan would travel in their time machine to. Though, I’m not sure I’d have been let in at the door.

There is a video, complete with slightly dodgy German subtitles, of an interview with Lou Reed, circa 1993, looking still almost impossibly young and with the very same Brooklyn drawl. I am never quite sure if  Reed’s voice sounds like the hiss of a cigarette being extinguished in the dregs of a dram of whisky, or whether that is only the surroundings in which it is best experienced: regardless, it constitutes one of the more memorable baritones of the last fifty years of pop music. He leans in to the camera, and says: ‘The advantage of having Andy Warhol as a producer was that, because it was Andy Warhol, they would leave everything in its pure state.’ Cue a vaguely hilarious impression of Warhol, and an earnest acknowledgement to the camera that, with Warhol’s input, or lack thereof, the Velvet Underground’s records were able to come out ‘exactly like they’d been made.’

Reed was only 23 when, in 1965, Andy Warhol became the band’s manager and producer to spectacular effect. Warhol’s unique cachet of cool afforded the Velvet Underground an incredible quantity of artistic freedom, such that, even though The Velvet Underground and Nico (arguably the best record of the 20th century) only sold 10,000 copies, as Brian Eno puts it, ‘everyone who bought it formed a band.’ Indeed, artists as disparate as Kraftwerk, David Bowie and My Bloody Valentine have cited the group as an influence. This is not to say that Warhol simply placed his stamp on the band and left them to it: between 1965 and 1967, they formed an integral part of his technicolour multimedia roadshow, Exploding Plastic Inevitable. It is tempting to think of this as ‘The Andy Warhol Show: he sings, he dances!’ – and certainly there was an element of self-promotion to the roadshow, which showcased performances from more glamorous members of Warhol’s factory, screenings of Warhol’s films and music by the Velvet Underground, as curated by Warhol.

However, what this meant in practice was a secure recording contract with MGM’s Verve Records – exceptionally good shoulders to rub with and unprecedented free rein over the sound they created. Warhol controlled the image. The first step to establishing this was introducing ridiculously beautiful German model-turned-singer Nico. The second was, inevitably, the banana. The image is lurid and almost obscene (heightened by the rather unsubtle pink peeled banana revealed by ‘peeling [the sticker of the banana skin] slowly’) – and remarkably powerful. Warhol’s name is in the bottom right hand corner, in late 30s script typeface Coronet: a mass-produced signature. The band’s name is nowhere to be found. The disappointing sales of this album led to the deterioration of their relationship with both Warhol and Nico, with their subsequent album recorded with Tom Wilson as producer. The proof of the partnership, however, lies in the pudding. Lou Reed looks into the camera once again and says, ‘We’re all alive to see history validated somehow. Not only us, but Andy’s faith in us. We have time to point to as the real judge of who or what did what first, best and always. The proof is in the work, and the work is on the record.’

On February 22nd, exactly 25 years after Andy Warhol drew his last breath, Rocky Horror creator Jim Sharman launched an online tribute, or  ‘cinematic séance’, dedicated to the life and death of the legendary artist. Decidedly not a biopic, the featurette consists of 40 minutes worth of music, colour and imagery. 

This trippy reverie captures the essence of Warhol on many levels; the visual experience emulates his bold vibrancy and strobe-like multiplication and the looseness of the structure, and dislocation from strict chronology, calls back to the freedom and near-chaos of Warhol’s circle, particularly at the locus of the factory.

The very nature of the film’s dissemination aligns with Warhol’s perspective on art’s place in society and the rapidly self-reproductive ability of images in the modern world. Sharman commented: ‘Online movies are a new art form and their potential is evolving, yet cyberspace seems the perfect place to explore the Warhol enigma. I imagine Warhol would have loved the net, and we’ve enjoyed creating this unique 40 minute portrait.’

Despite these broad links, the film fails to illuminate the subtleties of Warhol’s existence and largely reinforces a popular and simplified characterization. 

The performance art aspects are stilted and struggle to connect in any recognisably human way with Warhol’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities.  Such scenes include an encounter between the hospitalised Warhol and another version of himself who assures him  of his worth, expressing this sensually over a pair of red patent leather shoes, as well as a depiction of Valerie Solanas’ attempted murder of Warhol in 1968, which focusses on a bright, bloody handprint on a glass door as he struggles to escape. The efforts spent on aestheticising these exchanges obscures the real force of what is going on. And, just as Warhol has been marginalised in every recent film in which he has been depicted,  (Factory Girl, The Doors and Basquiat), even here he is pushed to the side by Sharman’s commitment to mirroring his aesthetic.

The  music barely even engages with the atmosphere evoked by Warhol’s art and the lyrics remain firmly in the real of function and narrative. Additionally, the music inevitably suffers from comparisons to the musical achievements of Warhol’s associates, particularly in the light of The Velvet Underground’s similar project meditating on Warhol’s life, their album Songs for Drella.

Significant as an internet movement, this short film may not live up to the hype surrounding its release, but it you’re willing to part with the $6.99 fee then it will provide an interesting insight into the way Warhol lives in today’s consciousness.

A Year in Tibet

2nd March, New College

Adventurer, writer and filmmaker Sun Shyun shows clips of her documentary A Year in Tibet, and speaks about her experience travelling in the Autonomous Region of Tibet.

Doors  7.30pm

This means War

General release 2nd February

The romantic comedy is given an espionage twist in this big-name spy caper, with Chris Pine and Tom Hardy attempting to out-Bond one another for the attentions of Reese Witherspoon. Licence to thrill.

The Best in Stand-up

3rd March, Oxford Glee Club

Featuring seasoned but somewhat unknown performers, such as Jarred Christmas, Mike Bubbins,  Kevin McCarthy and Marlon Davis, this stands to be a varied bill of guaranteed laughs.

Tickets £14/£5 with NUS card. No entry after 8pm

The Speech Project

3rd March, North Wall Arts Centre

Using the rhythms and natural melody found in Irish speech, composer and producer Gerry Driver showcases a unique collection of new music. 

Tickets £14/£10. Doors 7.45pm

Oxford Ukuleles

5th March, The Port Mahon

An informal workshop session for the YouTube instrument of the moment. All abilities welcome; no strings attached.

Tickets £3. Doors 7.30pm

Yes, Prime Minister

5th-10th of March

The writers of the classic BBC TV series reunite for this anniversary production, with the PM facing disaster in a world of spin and sexed-up dossiers.

Tickets £16.50-23.50, Doors 2.30/7.30/8pm

Eclectric present Objekt