Cherwell writers Matt Isard and Jacob Williamson respond to our initial Never Let Me Go review (http://www.cherwell.org/content/11443).

In order to work, the film relies on the love triangle that forms between Kathy, Ruth and Tommy so it was a great move to get such remarkable young British actors involved. Both Garfield and Mulligan show that they are worthy of the term ‘rising star’. Garfield’s performance has great passion and one of his scenes later on in the film will break your heart and send shivers up your spine. Mulligan gives a much more reserved performance that perfectly fits with her character Kathy who on the surface may seem to accept her fate, but is struggling against it just as the others are. The two have an endearing, understated chemistry that makes their relationship seem real and believable. Knightley is also exceptional as Ruth, the girl initially gets in the way of the love between Kathy and Tommy. With Never Let Me Go she adds to her range of literary roles by this time playing the unlikeable character and it is greatly to her credit that she can make the audience sympathise and pity Ruth by the end.

Not only are the actors beautiful to watch but the scenery surrounding them is equally stunning. With the film being shot all over England, Romanek captures some beautiful images of the countryside such as Holkham Beach and Clevedon Pier. To give the film an extra feel of strangeness the visual palette was made completely devoid of primary colours, leaving behind only muted browns, greens and blues. The purpose of this was clearly to add to the atmosphere, but it also makes the visuals very dreary. Although the fate of the characters is not explained right away there are enough clues for most to guess what will happen and this predictability, along with the slow pace of the film and subdued colour palette, might bore some viewers and prevent them from grasping the overall meaning that Romanek is trying to put across. However, these elements are also what makes the movie effective. It tugs subtly at our emotions and the fact that Romanek avoids using obvious tear jerking motifs or crowd pleasers is to his credit.

The film sticks very closely to both the original message and dialogue of Ishiguro’s book. For some people, it will not strike the right chord, but for others it will be a delightful and haunting watch. Thanks to the superb acting of the leads and the layered source material, the experience will stick with you long after the film has ended.

Jacob Williamson on Never Let Me Go

Many words can be used to describe Glyn Maxwell, poet, novelist, writer. As it usually the case with eclectic artists, defining their career seems impossible. He studied English at Oxford, and poetry in Boston under the supervision of Nobel prize Derek Walcott. He has proved to be a most versatile and prolific writer, moving from poetry to radio plays to libretti. As his new creation After Troy is staged at the Oxford playhouse, we took a chance to ask him a few questions.

Glyn Maxwell has written a lot for theatre, usually in verse (pentameters). Why such a choice? ‘Theatre feels like the place I was always heading, being more interested in making up character and figuring out how he/she speaks, acts in the face of others than I am in figuring out who I am. And if you introduce a constant – say, people speak lines in pentameters, Shakespeare’s constant – you suddenly have this further resource. The lines go by like the world turning, at a steady pace, so you can make the sound of characters who can’t think fast enough for that, or some who love their own thoughts too much, or some who speak merely to shore up sound against the terror of silence– you introduce one constant and all these things become possible. I’m not saying there aren’t terrific prose plays around, but you need to be a real master of voices to make it work.  And I’m aware that ‘verse drama’ barely exists now beyond myself and a couple of other eccentrics, and has a unique burden to bear – the weight of the great ones and the almost total failure of everyone since… All I can do is keep trying to show that verse on stage can make the sound we make now on the street, in the pub, in the bedroom, in Parliament. Ancient Greeks didn’t talk in hexameters but if you master the line you can make anyone talk like it’s today.’

There is an eclectic selection of themes ranging from classical to contemporary and different genres, how does he match theme to genre? ‘Switching between genres just seems to be the nature of the engine. It’s how it rejuvenates. I can’t go straight from writing a play to writing another play, but with a couple of days off I could be ready to do some libretto work. I suppose they are neighbouring chambers of the brain.’

Given that in the plays the verse has a core importance, I asked whether prose had no hope for authority.The reply was that prose can wield immense authority, but it can never fly free. ‘The great prose works survive at least partially because of the matter in hand, the sense of a great truth being passed down. What the best verse has over that is a relationship with time itself. The forms of the best verse, the one which survive whole ages – are mortal responses to time. That’s what all those pentameters are doing – I breathe, I walk, I think, in spite of time. The sonnet – I love, I hope, I sigh, in spite of time. That’s the power that free verse writers don’t think they have a use for. If you subject yourself to the pressures of form, you are incorporating the presence of an Other. Now that might be God for one, or an absent lover, what matters is there’s something to remind the self it isn’t free. Cells age, oxygen sucks in and out, day ends, love fades – not much is free about you, what on earth can be free about poetry? To wrestle with the language for a rhyme, this is to be in the presence of the language’s history. Any poet should be humbled almost to silence by that encounter.’

Talking about themes such as Troy, or Lily Jones’s Birthday (based on Aristophanes’ Lysistrata), the inspiration often begins with the classics. Is this always the case?

‘What I want to talk about in After Troy is the a very strong theme of parents and children, the difference between oral and written cultures, the strangeness of divine beliefs. These ideas may be implicit in the old story, but every writer discovers his or her own passions within it. I don’t read any ancient languages, and I use the translations only to learn the story. I love the story but I don’t see why I should tell it like a Greek from several millennia back: men in masks, choruses…To be blunt, we English had some fairly storming theatre since then, we learned how to interrupt each other and have four people on stage at once.’

We wonder if classical themes are still relevant nowadays? Maxwell replies that ‘any story that has reached us, whether it’s biblical, classical, folklore, dwarfs the age we live in, simply by the marvel of its longevity.’

A poet’s work is to tell ‘how ordinary people bury stories and move on, as if those stories won’t erupt out of the ground again –  as poetry does, as Troy did, six times after the Greeks destroyed it’. We remain enchanted by the pure magic of poetry as the words still ring in our heads.

Mephistopheles bounces on the heels of his All Stars, all impatient energy, and prowls over the top of the Ethical Philosophy section, crushing Locke and Williams underfoot. Be honest. You’ve always wanted to do it yourself. With all its thousands of yards of shelves of pomposity and expensive obscurity, the Norrington Room in Blackwells cries out to be used as a jungle gym, and the Creation Theatre company have finally brought every undergraduate’s daydream to life.

But when the novelty of the staging wears off – as it is bound to do at some point in the course of the three and a half hours of Dr Faustus – what is left? Behind the glaring smokescreen of sound and colour and light, what actual substance is there? Quite a lot, it turns out. This production is full of youthful exuberance, and a small cast of five brings off Marlowe’s sprawling and often scholastic script with jubilance and panache. On the whole.

By far the strongest aspect of this play is the company’s trademark physical theatre. Crashing, dashing and smashing books around like Greeks tossing plates at a wedding, Creation Theatre veer between sublime ensemble pieces and what can only be described as telekinetic ninja rape. At worst, it is comical, and at best it is jaw-dropping. Marlowe offset the high tragic seriousness of his main character’s descent into damnation with a great deal of clowning and son et lumiere to keep the cheap seats amused, and this cast do exultant justice to the scope for special effects.

The specially commissioned soundtrack mixes Trent Reznor-y industrial sludge with what sounds like the background music to Silent Witness. Add a fully destructible set, four banks of lighting and a series of gymnastic dance interludes, and you could be forgiven for thinking you were at a Nine Inch Nails gig. But Dr Faustus is no Avatar: the visual candy floss is complemented by some very credible acting. Gwynfor Jones steals the show as a Mephistopheles steeped in sarcasm and congenital arrogance, and he is backed by a versatile ensemble team playing everything from theological scholars to devils.

Yet now, Faustus, needst thou must be damned. All the company’s hard work is almost undone by Gus Gallagher’s unsympathetic Dr Faustus. Gallagher is not exactly hammy; ‘gammony’ might be a better way to put it. It is a performance full of saturated fat and unhealthy additives. He does not enter into the character’s rich intellectual angst, and so the dramatic axis of the play – the scholar’s compulsive hunger not just for real power, but for real recognition, the yearning to see learning and subtlety and flair translated into worldly happiness and satisfaction – comes across as a boring sub-plot. Gallagher simply doesn’t enjoy the script, playing Faustus as though he were Young Werther. It takes a lot to spoil a line like ‘Sweet Analytics, ‘tis thou has ravish’d me,’ but he manages it without even trying; and the final rhetorical climax of the play is without soul or heart. Nevertheless, he does not quite succeed in spoiling what is otherwise an engaging and worthwhile production.

I’m going to make a little breach of Cherwell Stage etiquette here. Ordinarily it’s considered good manners to review the script and the production of a play as an organic whole, with good reason. Student stage criticism has a half-life of a week at most, after all, so to all intents and purposes the particular production happening right now is the play.

With new writing, however – and especially with new writing that might get resurrected on a different stage one day – it seems wiser to pare the soul away from the body once in a while, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do with Back to Back.

The Writing: You walk into your Oxford entrance examination, and turn over your paper. On the reverse side there are only six words: Love. Discuss. You have 20 minutes. Shit. Where you do even begin? Brotherly love? Agape? Platonic love? Book-burning, sheet-staining, rain-kissing romance?

Neuss’ play is the best response to this question you could possibly hope for. It opens with a mother (called Mother) sending her daughter (called Child) to find love. This she does, in the shape of young lovers LOVEr and beLOVEd, who rush into one another’s arms in a shower of amatory cliche (“two become one, it’s unnatural, like cell division going backwards”), lie down and wake up to find everything they hate about one another tattooed on their backs.

What follows is a thoughtful and thought-provoking dramatisation of love and resentment as two flipsides of the same phenomenon: “My darlings, don’t you know how harmonies are born? I can weave together dissonances, make us all sing together.” Neuss’ language is teasingly, deliberately enigmatic, more poem than play. She presents the script as a kind of puzzle-box, with the essence of love locked away in its heart under a lattice of paradoxes and riddles.

This little box is elegantly wrought, but when you finally get to the centre you may be a little disappointed: for at the centre there are only more questions. 20 minutes simply isn’t enough to arrive at any kind of answer to the question What is love?, and it is impressive that Neuss even achieves dramatic closure. In Back to Back’s breathless dash through the full course of a relationship, many things fall by the wayside and get left behind, unfinished: the central conceit of the tattoos, for instance, is not developed as far as it might be, and the characterisation is a little too sparse even for an allegory.

Nevertheless, this tantalising and carefully crafted piece would certainly have gotten its author into Oxford.

The Production: Directors Orrock and Gilbert put as little as possible in between the playwright’s vision and the audience. The staging is starkly simple – the action revolves around a double bed with two single blankets – and the ubiquitous nightwear creates a gentle wash of intimacy. There are one or two exquisite dramatic touches: the lovers reveal their naked backs to the audience before going to bed; and when they fight to read one another’s litanies of hate they wrestle as though playfighting.

The acting is good, if a little blunted by the allegorical nature of the script. Jenni MacKenzie is hauntingly fragile as Child, while Luke Gormley’s blend of tenderness and wiry aggression is compelling. The physical relationship between all three of the main characters is extremely strong. Overall, Neuss’ words have been sensitively brought to life, although the production does not quite contrive to add the flesh and blood that are missing from the script.

This ambitious production encompasses two Voltaire plays in a new English translation. Mahomet is an invented tale of the prophet Mahomet’s arrival in Mecca in the 7^th century, in which a young man is manipulated by a religious leader into carrying out an assassination, while Zaire is set in the 7^th century and tells the ill-fated love-story of a Muslim sultan and his Christian slave. The plays are united by themes of religious fanaticism (Muslims in the first play, Christians in the second), but they constantly contrast this with the good teachings of religion, showing both its positive and very damaging effect on human life, posing powerful and unsettling questions.

The setting of these plays in Mansfield Chapel was, according to director Jean-Patrick Vieu, an accident, but an inspired one, for it is its juxtaposition with the surroundings that gives this production much of its power. The horror of the otherwise slightly melodramatic murder scene is infinitely enhanced by the fact that it takes place at an actual altar, yet the chapel’s simple decoration means that its overtly religious nature does not intrude too much on the action. But the chapel is also a hindrance to the production in that its echoey acoustic

s made it difficult to hear the actors, especially when they inevitably had their backs to me or were at the other end of the aisle in which the play is being performed in traverse. Straining to make out every word of the rhyming couplets meant that it was sometimes hard to follow the plot, especially in the first play, where characters came, quarrelled and left with high speed.

The lack of set means that all attention is focused on the actors, which sometimes worked well, particularly in the emotional dialogue between Zaire (Franki Hackett) and her father during the second play, but sometimes during speeches the other actors looked rather static and awkward, and occasionally the acting buckled under the scrutiny. However, perhaps due to the more personal nature of the story, the characters in this second play proved easier to relate and warm to, and Zaire’s dilemma when faced with a choice between her dying father’s Christianity and her lover’s Islam is executed powerfully through the use of the necklace she and her father pass between them.

These plays present issues very relevant to our times, and do so in a refreshing and unselfconscious manner. It will be a shame if the glitches and logistical issues detract from what should be a raw and moving experience in a beautiful venue.