Entering Merton Chapel at this hour feels something like waking up in limbo. The cool silence of the uplighting and the scurrying of shadows across the walls create an antechamber into a world weighted equally between the ancient and the avant-garde. The staging is very simple, as is the costume, which forces you to feast your full attentions on the cast, who seem to emerge from the floor of the Gothic chapel like white pins or pillars of pure potentiality in the tapestry woven by the intricacies of the architecture and Satie’s music. The action begins as the score of Le Fils des Étoiles starts, and the feeling evoked from this combination can only be described as an ascension.

Over the course of the two plays that I witnessed, Suma Genji and Kagekiyo, I was incredibly impressed by the marriage of Satie’s preludes with Pound’s translation. Separately, both are rather haphazardly effective Orient-meets-Occident combinations: Pound’s translation of the Noh plays, forged from basic notes and inherent poetic understanding, open early Japanese theatre to a Western audience; whereas Satie’s Le Fils des Étoiles, composed for a play of the same title by Joséphin Péladin, is imbued with Oriental notes. The synaesthetic fusion of the two, coupled with the lighting that makes shadow puppets of the actors’ silhouettes, transforms the chapel into a dreamscape of fantastic proportions.

Eddie Smith’s reworking of the Satie’s original score is laudable. Although the score was originally written for a theatrical piece, there is no evidence to suggest that a performance in this context ever materialized. It seems that this exceptional piece was unfortunately relegated to the realm of the piano. Smith’s transposition of the music for the harp and flute has awe-inspiring consequences, and the placement of the musicians to the side of the stage gives the sound the quality of ‘tears like a thousand lines in a storm’, trickling from the high walls of the chapel. The music embroiders the casts’ garments, turning their plain white forms into shimmering silk brocades.

Shaun Chua gave a zealous performance embodied by strong physical forms and structures that could elevate him instantaneously from the worldly to the mythical. Not being familiar with the Noh genre, I didn’t immediately understand Ayesha Jhunjhunwala’s role as an intermediary-cum-conscience figure, but once that was clear, it worked very effectively. Given the emphasis on music and musicality in this production, I thought that the role of the chorus could have been exploited to a far more polyphonic end, but whatever minor misgivings that occasionally arose, the artistic vision of the team is both admirable and inspiring, and I would be very interested to see what they come up with next. You don’t need to be familiar with the Japanese Noh form or with Satie’s music to enjoy these plays, as it is in the combining of the two that the beauty resides.  

Watching these guys perform is rather like leafing through a comic book you find on the bus – colourful, varied, a little dog-eared in places, but all-in-all it is something you are glad to have seen and passes the time quite nicely.

The four members of A Little Dark, plus the bonus talent of a live piano accompaniment, present a high-energy whirlwind of sketches with commendable stamina and conviction. The opening series of quick, quipped jokes under flashing coloured lights has that eager, “ba-dum-psssh” feel, which establishes itself as a tone for the whole show. The longer sketches that follow are delivered with the same attention-grabbing energy: a flurry of voice and gesture that ponders the naming of warfare operations, sits in on a boardroom of bunnies, and keeps on taking you to the doctor. As we flick through the show’s comic book pages, our heroes are not afraid to get political (including a novel cameo from the Deputy Prime Minister), swear a lot, drop their trousers, and explain to you just why Noel Coward plays are taking over pubs around the country.

They race through various accents (of various standards), and yoyo between highbrow and lowbrow – it just wouldn’t be a student production without a few erudite references, now, would it? And perhaps equally, it wouldn’t be a student production without a few rather crude jokes about bums, tits and willies, alas…

Bums aside, the overly-long French waiter gag was lost on me – and perhaps lost in Europe, given the dodgy accent – although this sketch wormed its way into my good books with some witty lines right at the end.

I think this is the beauty of sketch shows: you are guaranteed to like something, and although for me the funny moments were in a minority, other members of the audience managed to get a laugh out of “jerk crime”, and the incredible meetings between patients in a waiting room.

Having said that, the longer sketches generally had the best pay-off, and the creepy character of ‘Elsie Richards’ was sinister brilliance that I feel we could have stuck with for longer.

A Little Too Dark is a showcase of vivid imaginations and raw talent, with some genuinely funny moments but a lot of superfluous material, and equally a lot of unrealised potential.

For me, redemption came with the final sketch – an ingenious reworking of Inception involving New York accents, shadow puppets, and farmyard animals, both dead and alive. The most beautifully crafted of all, this was – in my mind – the sketch that justified the entire show, the ‘Marion Cotillard’ that will refuse to leave.

It seems like everyone wants to forget about the Henry Hathaway film, the original True Grit. The new Coen Brothers’ film cringes at the idea of being called a re-make. The directors have said themselves that they wanted to go back to the novel pretending that the original film never existed. Jeff Bridges claims that the Charles Portis book reads like a Coen Brothers’ script anyway. The Coens have been criticized for making clever post-modern films that don’t say a great deal about anything. But their latest film is doing something important, albeit something very different to the film released in 1969.

It’s impossible for the film to start completely from scratch with a clean slate. The first film isn’t just a generic Western: it’s a John Wayne movie, and it must have been hard to leave his personality behind. It’s a story that must have struck a chord with Wayne. He liked the novel so much that he lobbied for himself to play the drunken marshall. It’s as much about Wayne as anything else and played around a lot with his considerable age. In a sense comparable to what the 2006 film Rocky Balboa was to Sylvester Stallone, this was a reprise of Wayne’s past roles. John Wayne’s decision to take on four men at once has Maddie Ross whooping: ‘No Grit Mr. Cogburn? Not much!’. For a finale, having been berated by Maddie ‘You’re too old and fat to be jumping horses’, he proves her and the audience wrong by taking a run up and jumping the picket fence. The jaunty music plays him out.

Jeff Bridges’s Cogburn is more grounded. The Coen production is deliberately nostalgic, much more of a period piece and Bridges totally inhabits this world, so much so that sometimes his authentic slurs are barely comprehensible. He gabbles to himself, his back turned away from Maddie and the audience, giving the film a realistic solidity which the fantastical adventure of the original lacks. Still, it’s hard to imagine that the Coens wanted to escape the Wayne legacy entirely. The Rooster Cogburn of the novel never wore an eye-patch and, according to Mark Kermode, the detail comes from Henry Hathaway, director of the John Wayne version.

The two interpretations of Cogburn point towards something important about the way these films work as a whole. The trailer for the 1969 film didn’t promise anything more than a frolic – ‘A slip of a girl, a pot-bellied one-eyed western marshall and a texas ranger wearing britches a size too big’; japes, larks and ‘irreverent humor’ with a tomboy, a drunk and a bully. The original hid its complexities behind a comic front; John Wayne played a snoring, drunken lout whilst himself being, next to Bogart, one of the biggest smokers in Hollywood and dying of lung-cancer. Meanwhile, the film’s morality is rarely black and white, even if the ‘Cowboys and Indians’ cliché might have led us to believe otherwise. During the course of the film, John Wayne takes down several teenage boys, steals a horse and cart from three strangers and kills a pony. The courtroom scene at the opening is a fantastic conceit as we are in fact seeing the trial not only of Rooster Cogburn but also of John Wayne himself. The new trailer for the Coen brothers’ film, on the other hand, promises to deliver justice more simply: ‘Retribution’ proclaims the last word of the trailer. The nostalgia is for a more simple world in which the success of the chase is all.

In the last five minutes of the new True Grit we witness the passing of a whole way of life and realize what the whole film has been working towards. The Westerns of the ‘60s, even the thoughtful ones, had bright blue skies and verdant landscapes. The Coen’s True Grit has a look of its own, all snow, ice and mountain desert; free from John Wayne, even the landscape becomes part of a swan-song for the Western genre itself.

The Coens execute a master-class in cinematography, humour, and performance. The film’s energy and violence gives the ageing genre of the Western a youthful sheen and mirrors what Hathaway succeeded in with Wayne: silencing the doubters and proving the audience wrong. They have this Western take a run-up and jump the picket fence one last time.

A man sits at a desk, frantically typing away, before breaking off for a hoarse coughing fit. As we soon discover, this is George Orwell, composing what will be 1984, living alone on a remote Scottish island while slowly dying of TB. This grim existence is soon spiced up by the arrival of Sonia Brownwell, literary femme fatale, whom Orwell has invited here in a last-ditch attempt at love, followed swiftly by the lecherous editor Cyril Connelly, bent on keeping Sonia and Orwell apart for Orwell’s own good.

Orwell’s (Nick Davies) and Sonia’s (Georgia Waters) first meeting is beautifully awkward, with Orwell’s social reticence juxtaposed with Sonia’s flirtatious and assured tone, behind which an appealing vulnerability lurks. This is brought out clearly in her scene with the sleazy and self-confident Cyril (Andrew McCormack), keen along with all the other men on the London literary scene to objectify and seduce her, a rare and resented powerful woman, labelled frigid when she rejects their lechery. Their relationship in itself is sure to be a poignant affair given the tragic circumstances, but the subtle characterisation is what makes it particularly appealing to watch.

Meanwhile, Orwell is visited by hallucinations of the animals he created for Animal Farm, including old friend Boxer the horse, whose innocent concern for his beloved author George is extremely touching. Their conversation is tense, with Boxer sensing that something is wrong, slightly jealous at sharing George with Sonia, and fearful of events which an invented horse simply cannot comprehend or help with. His sweet naiveté is juxtaposed with Orwell’s pained grasp of harsh reality, such as when he contemplates with confusion the fact that Orwell killed him off, trying to salvage the situation by linking them as sufferers- ‘My lungs got me too, didn’t they George?’ ‘No Boxer, the pigs got you. You were faithful too long.’ Orwell’s patience but clear unease around Boxer makes for extremely moving viewing.

A well-acted production of an interesting play about interesting people. The visitations from animals add a surreal element to an otherwise painfully real situation, and the interior and exterior worlds of Orwell complement each other to make a very powerful whole. This is certainly one to make time for in 6^th week.

Thursday to Saturday of 6^th week, Corpus Christi Auditorium, 7.30pm, £5/£6