Let’s first of all get the skeleton out of the closet and into the very centre of the room: Invasion!, 30-year-old Swedish writer Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s first play, now on at Soho Theatre after a two-season sell-out run in Stockholm, sounds a bit like Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life.

Not only is this obvious to the English audience (all the more so since the National re-staged Crimp’s fantastically experimental piece in 2007, ten years after its première, in a production directed by Katie Mitchell), but quite possibly also to the Swedish one, given that the play has been translated into more than 20 languages including Swedish, and produced at the Gothenburg City Theatre in 2004. Famously, Crimp’s ‘Seventeen scenarios for the theatre’, as he subtitled the play, each imagined and explored, at varying length, a character named Anne (or Annie, Anny, Annushka, and similar variations), who during the course of the play became, among other things, a famous star, a terrorist, a refugee’s dead child, and a new make of car. Originally appearing at the dawn of the Cool Britannia renaissance, Attempts on Her Life is an incredibly imaginative and ironic, visionary, avant-garde work, whose script does not assign speech to any named characters, but asks for the cast to ‘reflect the composition of the world beyond theatre’, and whose satirical tone lent itself, in 1997 and ever since, to the most varied critical interpretations.

Khemiri’s Invasion! is centred around a mysterious person called Abulkasem. When we first hear of him, he is a character in a play in the play, but he soon turns into many other things, too: a gay Lebanese man who loves to dance; an elusive terrorist who moves between Palestine and the United States and who writes pro-Israeli articles, but also takes part to anti-American demonstrations; a refugee apple-picker who hides from immigration control in the south of Sweden, and who barely speaks the local language; a word that comes to mean anything and that can be used as a verb or an adjective: ‘Don’t play the fucking Abulkasem!’. A boy picks up a girl in a bar and, in order not to have to explain the spelling of his foreign name, he makes up an even more impossible one: my name is Abulkasem. A little while later, the same girl is discussing the work of the woman who inspired her to study theatre to her university friends, and being unable to remember her actual name she uses the first one that comes to her mind: surely you are all familiar with the work of Abulkasem?

So much for the similarities. Invasion! is, however, also very different from Attempts on Her Life. To begin with, not only does it offers far fewer scenarios, but those scenarios are strictly connected to each other, to the point of being, in one instance, the same episode as remembered by two different characters. Secondly, Invasion! is more traditionally narrative, fundamentally naturalistic, and less experimental. Finally, and perhaps most crucially, Invasion! can be described as an exploration of how language reinforces both identity and prejudices - an interpretation more forcefully suggested than any that could be imposed on Crimp’s play.

In the bar episode, the girl sees the boy coming towards her to chat her up, and dismissively describes him to the audience as some ‘Turk’; a few minutes later, she is annoyed and appalled at her friends’ assumptions over her Kurd identity, as they pity her for what they suppose must be the difficult condition of someone who chooses an independent, secular life when coming from a traditional Muslim society. Abulkasem then turns from the cheesy boy who asked for her number and about whom she was full of prejudices, to being her escape route when she herself suffers prejudice.

Later on, the apple-picker finally gets the interpreter he had been asking for, and he starts explaining his story in Arabic; initially, we feel for the apple-picker, for his confusion and anxiety and desperation. But then he starts expressing his hate for the United States, Israel and Jews, and we very quickly do not like him any longer. Except that after a few minutes it becomes clear that the interpreter is adding things and not being truthful to what our apple-picker is actually saying - while this is very obvious, given that he is quoting opera and Abba songs and she is ‘translating’ a hate speech, it is equally obvious that most of us, if not all of us, have no access to the original Arabic words, and thus are completely, helplessly and frustratingly cut out from the truth. And we immediately like him again, of course, which is a lesson in the arbitrariness of sympathy, but also, and perhaps most importantly, in how uninformed our interpretations of reality must be when we are unable to see and hear things for ourselves, without linguistic and cultural mediations.

How can we expect to discover Abulkasem’s identity when we have to get at him through someone else’s language? The apple-picker does not know who Abulkasem is; maybe, he suggests, he is the man himself. Or, maybe, ‘you Abulkasem’. The reason why ultimately we all are Abulkasem is not that we all have prejudices and we are all ready to believe that a person who speaks in Arabic could plausibly, why not, hate the Jewish people, but that we are ourselves part of this game of mirrors, taking the easy option but also being its victims. And language, far from being a way out, closes us even more safely in our mindsets.

All of this might sound like aggressive propaganda, or like Khemiri is out to teach us a lesson in multiculturalism, but the play is mercifully saved any such feeling by being very, very funny. In this respect, Frank Perry’s translation is excellent and elastic, moving from kids’ slang to talk-show chat and academia vocabulary without a moment of hesitation; and it helps that the cast of four is talented for comedy - particularly Chris Nayak and Raad Rawi. Not only does the audience laughs, and quite a lot, but it is also continuously involved in the play, directly or indirectly, nagged for attention and manipulated (the latter made easier, in fact, by the laughter, which makes us repeatedly surrender). Possibly the most brilliant instance of this manipulation occurs at the very beginning, which sets the roll of Abulkasem events in motion and which, without spoiling the surprise, is slightly reminiscent of both Pirandello and the Young Vic’s recent production of The Indian Wants the Bronx.

Lucy Kerbel directs Invasion! having won the Young Angels Theatremakers’ Award 2008, whose panel was chaired by the play’s author; very interestingly and perhaps more than a a bit ironically, she was also Katie Mitchell’s Assistant Director for the 2007 production of Attempts on Her Life at the National. One could speculate endlessly on whether Khemiri knew Crimp’s play in this specific production, and how much Kerbel was influenced (not necessarily in an imitating sense, perhaps in the opposite one) by her work with Mitchell. Nonetheless, and independently from this factor, Invasion! is an intelligent, entertaining play, presented in a fresh production - if lacking Crimp’s fast-forward originality - and with an unobvious way of discussing prejudice.

Till 28 March 2009

Somewhere, right now, someone is writing an excellent, insightful play on the economic crisis, a play that will tell us everything we can not yet understand about it; a play to which we will look back once the recession is over, to indicate it as the one piece of theatrical work that best represented and revealed the reflections of the crisis on our daily lives, the one you must see if you haven’t lived through it and you want to know what it was all about. Unfortunately, Jane Bodie’s Hallelujah, which opened on March 3 at the Theatre503, just isn’t that play.

Created for Theatre503’s Rapid Write Programme, Hallelujah was written and rehearsed in the space of two months - the point of the project being to allow playwrights an immediate response to topical contemporary events, which in itself sounds like a potentially wonderful idea. Bodie picked up on three recent issues: the fact that we are all suddenly out of money; the fact that Alexandra Burke is singing a cover of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’; the big-snow days. She then put three characters in a closed room and made them talk to each other about these things.

These three are all there for the same man, Frank, who has recently killed himself - because, you guessed it, he had run out of money and was collapsing beneath debt. Even if in the beginning the characters believe they don’t know each other, they (and we) soon find out that they do, if only by name: the young estate agent, Martin (Mark Arends), is Frank’s estranged son; the feisty, outspoken young woman, Eithne (Aoife McMahon), is Frank’s long-time lover; the middle-aged, best-off one is Frank’s first wife (out of three, plus the lover), Brenda (Joanne Howarth). They all have their reasons to love Frank and they all have their reasons to hate him; each one of them thinks he or she knew him better than all the others. But the real question, given that he died in the red, comes down to whether any of them is willing and able to afford to pay the bill for his funeral, for a minimum of £2,600.

This is a slightly morbid starting point from which to tackle the consequences of the economic downturn; moreover, while it is true that these kinds of costs are a rarely discussed or disputed problem for bereaved families, the play does admit that the government has a scheme to help those who cannot afford to bury their relatives. Nonetheless, it could still be a good black-comedy excuse to discuss the recession. Except that it isn’t, given that it soon turns out that Brenda has plenty of funds, and simply does not want to pay for Frank’s funeral for personal reasons. So surely the problem stops having anything to do with the economy? But maybe we can expect more stimulating contributions from the other two characters, who seem to be doing pretty badly in economic terms. At one point, Eithne, who is forced to stay at the parlour because she has no money left for a taxi (nobody suggests public transport) gives one of the many dramatic, heightened tirades of the evening, and wonders, ‘When did it become acceptable to live on other people’s money?’.

An interesting point indeed, especially given the specificity of the 110% mortgages, play-now-pay-later culture to the Anglophone societies - how did it come to be? Why does it exist here and not in other European countries? When did being in debt become a normal, daily condition with no particular anxiety or shame attached to it? But instead of remaining with this issue, the play immediately swerves towards a different subject, as Martin gives his own monologue and tells us how hard it is to be an estate agent who works twelve hours a day; this is already pretty hard to sympathise with for many of us, and that’s before we even find out that Martin lost his job not because he was no longer selling enough houses, but because he was too distraught by the end of a relationship to work. There goes another good occasion to write something relevant.

We don’t get many other opportunities, either, because the play starts turning into some sort of reality show that we could title ‘Revelations, Revelations’: Frank had secretly been visiting Brenda to discuss his problems, thus she was the only one who was aware of them; Eithne started seeing Frank not during the days of Wife Number Three, but during those of Wife Number Two; Eithne also had an abortion; Frank used to sneak out to watch Martin sleep through his bedroom windows (this one very closely bordering on the ridiculous); Brenda went to the hotel where Frank killed himself and took some (ineffective) pills; and so on and so forth. Given that the trio all more or less start off by being angry and resentful towards Frank, we can expect that they will talk themselves into loving him again - which is exactly what happens. Soon enough, the two women are sharing sweet, adorable, clichéd details of their lives with him; his being a cheat and a liar can apparently be entirely forgiven and forgotten through the fond memories of his snoring. Even Martin points out that Frank was always more alive than all of them put together.

As a particularly bad instrumental version of ‘Hallelujah’ starts playing, the drama drags on and on and on, as cheesy and television-friendly as Alexandra Burke’s cover. While the occasional joke or pun make it all more bearable, the liveliness of the beginning is quickly lost to more traditional big-scenes mechanics. Even the initially most entertaining character, messed-up Eithne, is reduced to a predictable figurine: if Goldoni were still alive, the vibrant, passionate, petite young woman who swears a lot and wastes her life waiting for an older man would probably be added to his repertoire of masks.

One cannot reproach Arends, Howarth or MacMahon, who all do a good job with what they are given; apart from an awkward moment of people jumping up and down a sofa to indicate the passing of time, a choice left unclear and unrepeated, the same applies to Gemma Fairlie’s direction. Lorna Ritchie’s set is perhaps the best guessed aspect of the show: a perfect reproduction of all the slightly run-down, nauseatingly pastel-colored waiting rooms of the world, with a sad choice of teas on a trolley and out-of-date magazines - and the clever addition of a great number of air-deodorants in every available socket and on every available surface, to remind us of the nature of the place. But Jane Bodie’s play is a disappointment; not only because it decided to play safe by being a completely traditional work, where the context would have tolerated and welcomed much more daring experimentation, and not only because even as a piece of traditional theatre it refuses to produce memorable or at least real characters, not to mention dialogue. It is a disappointment because it fails to say anything relevant, anything personal, anything at all about the issues it promises to discuss.

It is, in fact, completely disconnected from them, using them merely as pretextual plot devices,  focusing instead on producing real-life drama that looks the way soap-operas tell us real life looks. Hallelujah is not theatre, it’s EastEnders. This progressive exposure of not-even-that-dirty secrets (it is honestly hard to understand why Brenda and Martin would be so shocked, even outraged, by Eithne’s abortion - surely it is none of their business anyway?) suffocates everything else; what we are left with, instead of a play about our serious times, is a play that will be dated and obsolete long before the recession is.


Till 28 March 2009

‘Most people appear to believe that deep down they (and other people) are mad, bad and dangerous to know’. But this was not always the case, argue Adam Phillips a psychoanalyst and Barbara Taylor a historian, who have come together to produce a historical and contemporary analysis of kindness.

Their overriding thesis is that competitiveness and individualism, coinciding with the rise of modern capitalism, have brought about the loss of our general inclination to enjoy being kind to others. People who are kind realise how pleasurable it is. Kindness can be pleasurable! Yet we have come to regard kindness as moralistic and sentimental. Kindness opens us up beyond ourselves, ‘it is potentially more promiscuous than sexuality’ (p12). The authors assert their belief that ‘children begin their lives “naturally” kind’ (p9), agreeing with Nietzsche that the moral requirement to be kind is a sinister symptom arising with Christian European culture.

The Stoics believed in oikeiôsis, the attachment of self to other. The Stoics were famously self-reliant, but communal, united by reason and mutual affection, as emperor Marcus Aurelius stressed. The Epicurians spoke of the extravagant joys of friendship, ‘which dances around the world’ (p19). David Hume and Adam Smith also believed in the natural sociability of man. In this respect they were like the pagans of old, but quite unlike post-Augustinian Christianity, where, the authors assert, ‘kindness became linked, disastrously, to self sacrifice’ (p19). With Christianity, kindness became universalised as divine love which irradiated the soul with caritas, redeeming our ‘original sin’. Without God, man had no kindness.

Luther and Calvin were even more ‘ferociously anti-human’, which, according to the authors, ‘has left some vicious legacies: the hatred of present-day right-wing Protestants for “liberals” and “secularists” has a very long pedigree with little kindness in it’ (p24). Protestant caritas was institutionalised – charity in the modern sense. From here, the link is made between Protestantism, capitalism, Hobbes’s Leviathan, expressing the hedonistic ‘warre of alle against alle’.

The defenders of kindness persisted in spite of the march of waspish capitalism, however. Enlightened Anglicans insisted that ‘true pleasure was always generous’ (p26). This was taken to an extreme by the ‘benevolists’, ‘Friends of Mankind’ with much ‘moral weeping’. The position of the authors here is that kindness is not secondary to the ego, not an afterthought, but primary, á la Rousseau’s, Emile. Children are naturally friendly, it is a species thing, as are animals and ‘savages’. ‘As a small child, Emile feels an instinctive pitié for his parents’ (p34). Nonetheless, the blot of Rousseau’s ‘exceptional callousness’ in his private life is acknowledged! With the French Revolution, Rousseau became an ‘icon of revolutionary kindness’ (p39). So kindness became part of the radical cause. However, the terror of the Revolution destroyed this dream, in tandem with the influence of Thomas Malthus, whose dystopic vision concluded, in effect, that egoism was the engine of human civilisation and progress.

By the 19th century, kindness was corralled, ‘ghetto-ised’ into specific groups – romantic poets, clergymen, charity workers, and especially women, who ‘were naturally prone to sympathetic incontinence’ (p42). Add to this the Christian celebration of maternal love and the gender divide is complete, with men espousing the higher forms of charity while women are regarded as spontaneously kind, ‘the angel in the house’ of the Victorians. For Wordsworth and Dickens, children were the last vestiges of kindness in a cruel world. John Stuart Mill espoused brotherly love, while in France, August Comte developed a neurological theory of kindness.

The battle lines were drawn between the altruists, warm hearted women, humanitarians, Christian socialists, versus the ‘cold’ market principle of Hard Times. The very broad notion that ‘kindness is part of the fabric of human subjectivity’ (p46), that kindness itself was pleasurable was forgotten when the emphasis shifted decisively towards the Christian split between gratification and duty of care for others - kindness as self-denial. Freud and psychoanalysis are in here too: ‘moving away from the tender heart to the inflamed genitals’ (p47).

Yet Phillips in his sections on psychoanalysis, quoting from Freud and Winnicott’s work, temper what might have become an all too sentimental take on kindness with a number of Freudian themes which make kindness more complex. Psychoanalysis depicts two attitudinal currents side by side: one current that is erotic towards and debasing of others and other that is affectionate and kind. The key question that divides psychoanalysts (although Phillips plays down the division): ‘Do we crave sensuous satisfaction as so-called drive theorists say, or do we crave intimacy or relationships? Do we want good company or good sex?’ (p60).

This is a false choice, the authors admit, because there is no sex without some measure of kindness, although if we are too kind the sex is unsatisfying. As Phillips says, ‘It is not kind to over protect other people from oneself, especially from one’s sexuality’. Philips acknowledges, following Freud, that hate is our first relation to the world, but suggests that the reason for this hate is self-protection, ‘which love could, if we were lucky, help us to recover from’ (p64). However, Freud stresses that it is desire per se, and its satisfaction that attracts us, not so much the object (other) of our desire. As Phillips admits, ‘we are more in love with our desire than we are with other people’ (p77). Using Freud’s word, the object-person we desire is merely ‘soldered’ onto our desire. And of course the use of the term ‘object’ says it all! We are only kind to the object insofar as they will keep on satisfying us. Sex described by Freud is ‘transgressive in its intent’ (p80).

After World War II, British analysts described in detail the complex kindness engendered in the mother-child bond, a kindness that must prevail over the erotic. Kindness is a way of avoiding incest. Civilisation seems to depend on it. Parents must not debase their children. However, Winnicott suggests that parents must be able to hate their children. For the child, ‘can believe in being loved only after reaching being hated’ (p92). Genuine kindness must know hate. The real bond, to feel real, has to include hatred.

The authors favour open kindness, freely given, which includes a rough erotic generosity over and against free-market individualism that creates hate and division and debases affection. Against Thatcherism, they praise the State’s ‘kindness’ in setting up the welfare system and the NHS, an example of, ‘The kindly state dedicated to universal well being’ (p101). Now all this is changing. For instance, ‘In the past womae’s association with kindness was a source of some prestige, but now it is a sign of disempowerment. Kindness may be admirable, but it’s a mug’s game’ (p108).

Well, maybe it was feminism that reduced women’s prestige. The former Irish President, Mary Robinson, recently suggested that women who stayed at home were ‘selling-out’. Maybe the authors secretly subscribe to the idea that kindness is a mug’s game. After all, they are against any sort of kindness that is sacrificial or that comes with any sense of duty. When we think that ‘carers’ in the home – people caring for their sick relatives – save the benevolent state £56bn each year – imagine then being against sacrificial kindness. What about the on-going kindness of teachers, nurses, police and so on and on. This is kindness of a different register to the spontaneous kind that Phillips and Taylor celebrate.

The authors say that acts of kindness are not to be seen as ‘acts of will, or effort, or moral resolution’ (p117). They make a false dichotomy between ‘official’ types of kindness that comes pre-stigmatised by them as ‘moral superiority’, or ‘domineering beneficience’ by ‘well fed moralists’ or ‘the protection racket of good feelings’, and unofficial kindness shown by “natural” children (reminiscent of AS Neill’s Summerhill and other disasters), animals alleged to be spontaneously kind and even ants in their social colonies. This is reminiscent of Richard Leakey’s ‘discovery’ that early hominids were essentially non-violent, when all the evidence is against this. After all only one hominid species survived!

The kindness that the authors hope for so forlornly in the current climate is haunted by the opposite: kindness as veiled egoism; as disguised sexual seduction; as a cover for aggression, or all three together. The irony, conceded by Phillips to some extent, is that psychoanalysts, with a few notable exceptions like Winnicott, paint the bleakest picture in relation to kindness. Kindness does not appear in the comprehensive index of Freud’s 24 volume Standard Edition. Psychoanalysis is scepticism and is sceptical about kindness and indeed unkind about anything good. This is the curse of psychoanalysis itself. Freud privileges the death drive over eros. The notion that kindness springs freely from children, women and animals before they are damaged by civilisation is an old story and one that probably Phillips and Taylor cannot really believe. It is a myth created by the structural effect of being situated within a civilisation. The treasured ‘lost object’ is always elsewhere, outside, other and heavily idealised.

Thus, it is not just the capitalists and free-market types that create the ‘me-first’ unkind selfish culture, the liberals have their own forms of entitlement me-first culture too, but they refuse to acknowledge it, beyond advocating enlightened self-interest. Phillips and Taylor come close to saying that left-wing people are kind, whereas right-wingers are not! Being itself presupposes what Spinoza called, conatus essendi, the struggle to survive, which does not imply much kindness to spare. Having largely dispensed with the Judeo-Christian heritage, the authors have little to go on, except that kindness and decency that still paradoxically linger in the minds and actions of many.

A discussant reviewing On Kindness criticised this ‘deconstruction’ of kindness. Kindness, like the joke, is destroyed by analysis. Indeed it is a joke to analyse something simple like kindness. In a radical sense, kindness is beyond the trade-offs of the erotic and affection; beyond a cost-benefit analysis, beyond a psychoanalysis. Kindness does not belong to anyone or any time. No one has it. For Levinas, it is ‘otherwise than being’. We could paraphrase Slavoj Žižek and call it, ‘the fragile absolute’, and Derrida in Adieu (to God) speaks of, ‘the welcome that welcomes beyond itself’. The authors are correct to point out that charity without kindness – charity is very far from always being so – is unkind. However, kindness comes from elsewhere; it is a gift that gives ‘without counting the cost’, and it is more in us than we are in ourselves. We could paraphrase Lacan by saying that, ‘Kindness is giving what one doesn’t have’. It is senseless and priceless - such is the anarchic nature of kindness that defies description and analysis.

It is tempting to think that this book, complete with it little pink highlighted title, speaks to a self-regarding ‘kindness’ - kindness as gesture – engaged in praising the kindness of the Other, while despising (being very unkind to), traditional forms of giving in the West, especially the paradoxical gifts of capitalism, enjoyed not least by liberal intellectuals. This pink version of kindness even when made more real by hate, has little in common with the ultimate and intimate connection of kindness with (symbolic) death and sacrifice, ‘the gift of death’ to use the title of one of Derrida’s last books.

Freud ridicules kindness, recounting a joke made by Heine, who declared that he would indeed be kind and ‘love his enemies’ and obey God’s commandment if God first granted him a humble cottage, good food, a bed, flowers and, ‘a few fine trees before my door; and if God wants to make my happiness complete, he will grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees’.

Out of all the numerous different reasons why the East End can claim to be the new (and better) West End in terms of cultural buzz, Shakespeare in Shoreditch was representative of at least two: first of all, it was part of the very new and very exciting London Word Festival, a three-week celebration of poetry, music and performance, held in (mostly small) East End venues (from Brick Lane up to Hoxton and Stoke Newington), that puts together new, young, brilliant authors like Joe Dunthorne and Ross Raisin, and more established ones like Iain Sinclair and Robin Ince. Secondly, Shakespeare in Shoreditch informed or reminded the audience that, as recently confirmed by scholars and archeologists, the ancient foundations unearthed last June in a small street off Curtain Road are, indeed, the foundations of London’s first purpose-built playhouse, the Theatre.

The Theatre was inaugurated around 1577, and was home to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, including young William Shakespeare - which makes it a plausible venue for the original première of Romeo and Juliet. According to the legend, when the company was kicked out by its landlord, who reclaimed the site, James Burbage, actor and producer, dismantled the theatre and carried it across the frozen Thames to South London, where it was re-built as the Globe. The story teaches us, amongst other things, that young kids in skinny jeans haven’t discovered anything new in terms of cultural vibrancy: Shoreditch was always where it’s at.

On this particular East End night, some patience and a very flexible frame of mind were required of the audience - particularly the kind of audience who usually sees Shakespeare’s plays at the Globe or in Stratford-Upon-Avon. The venue, South of the Border, was a small vaulted bar cum stage underneath a Mexican restaurant. The doors opened half an hour after the scheduled starting time, and once inside, we discovered there were no chairs - which soon turned the room into a camping site. For some it was a bit too much, but those who remained were in for more than a treat.

The organisers of the Festival had commissioned five young authors to choose one of Shakespeare’s plays, and re-write it with the 2009 East End in mind; results were mixed. Poet and storywriter Salena Godden picked The Merchant of Venice, and re-imagined it as an interview to a contemporary Antonio whose memoirs, For a Pound of Flesh, had been a best-seller. Author and editor Lee Rourke was inspired by the grave-digging scene in Hamlet, specifically decided to ‘focus on the brute materiality’ of it, and turned the gravediggers into working-class Eastenders who complain about the transformation of the area and the advent of digital economy, remembering instead with fondness the close-knit pre-war and WWII community. Freelance journalist Jean Hannah Edelstein transposed A Midsummer Night’s Dream into a polygonal, indie love-story set in contemporary Hoxton. While these were all valid and more or less entertaining attempts, though, the two real gems of the evening were the contributions of Siddharta Bose and Joe Dunthorne.

The former had chosen Othello, and reinvented it putting the spotlight both on its protagonist’s outsider status, and on his power to woo people and charm them with his storytelling abilities. By far the best performer of the night, Bose was also the only one who engaged with the East End’s sense of place more than just ironically or superficially - it is quite easy to elicit recognising laughter from a young, mostly local audience by mentioning the indie crowds or the beigel bakeries, hence it was the road most trodden, but Bose was more observant, and insightfully reproduced the ‘Bollywood to Battersea’ feeling of the area: not only the vintage clothes but also the Curry Mile and the gigantic Vodka ads, the variegated atmosphere of two very different yet neighboring kinds of citizens sharing Brick Lane and the industrial archeology buildings. All of this filtered through the perspective of a raconteur who does not belong to London, and who therefore is the ideal representative of an area that has always been dedicated to transients, yet with which transients have often fallen in love.

And last but not least to come on stage, Joe Dunthorne had picked King Lear, with the explicit aim of matching both the uncontrollable pride and the murderous body-count of the Shakespearian original. His work turned the King into singer/songwriter/producer Ridley Truck (his debut EP carrying the brilliant title ‘I Named My Daughters After STDs’) and the King’s daughters into Ridley’s biggest fans: Errol, Regina and Delia - you can guess which would be the only one honest enough to tell him that his last album was over-produced. In a wonderfully funny rendition of the arrogance of post-everything music against good ol’ rock ‘n’ roll, and a hilarious description of the kind of East End posse that surrounds Ridley, Dunthorne was the one who engaged the most with Shakespeare’s language, working it into contemporary slang, quoting but also re-writing his lines - surely something that requires quite a lot of self-confidence and even brazenness, but then that is partly what successful adaptations are all about.

Throughout the evening, the five authors were accompanied by the live-drawing Mustashrik, an artist and designer who illustrated their work as it was happening - with an auction for the results at the end of the night. It is unfortunate that by then the event had lost a considerable amount of its audience to lack of physical comfort, different expectations and lateness (having pauses between every performer did not improve the situation, given that people were sitting on the floor or standing, and that every piece was around 30 minutes long). Shakespeare in Shoreditch was a daring experiment, and as such, it was to be expected that some aspects of it would have worked better than others.

The merit of this event, and more generally of the London Word Festival, lies first of all in providing a platform for the sort of literary enterprise that would otherwise remain untried or unnoticed. Not only the fact that this show was a sell-out, in spite of the occasional in-course defection, proves that there is an interested, enthusiastic audience for this sort of event, but the other fact that such audience was mostly under thirty demonstrates that theatre and performance, in the East End, are still considered quite cool - a good sign for the Tower Theatre Company that, having acquired the site of London’s first Theatre, is going to build a new one on top of it, and bring performance back to Curtain Road in a more permanent and regular way.

One night only; London Word Festival on till Wednesday 25 March

In form, Enda Walsh’s latest is almost the exact mirror image of his previous play, The Walworth Farce. While the latter’s male household has been supplanted by a female one, there is the same claustrophobic inertia and the same enforced, inescapable and everlasting ritual, played out daily to its death. New Electric Ballroom, however, offers none of its predecessor’s hope: though it presents the same moment of choice – a beckoning crack of light from the outside world – opportunity slips away from its inmates, leaving them at the mercy of a hollow cycle of isolation.

Inside an Irish cannery, Ada, Breda and Clara whittle away the present by attempting to recapture the past. Broken only by the frequent intrusions of their fishmonger Patsy, the women repeat vast beat poems harking back to their youth and, specifically, the Roller Royle’s visit to the titular dancehall. Their relived traumas – like a tape stuck on regret – suggest a community ill-equipped to survive the invasion of glitzy Americana; a place best left to its own locality without the notion of elsewhere, of an unreachable ‘Wondrous Place’.

The combination of Walsh’s expressionistic text and the gentle disco glisten of Sabine Dargent’s industrial design creates a dream-like quality that muddles with the strangely concrete setting. It is a real world, albeit one that seems controlled by a Beckettian puppet-master: sunsets fast-forward, time dissolves, nothing much happens.

Words and the act of speech take centre stage. Walsh’s characters vocalise only to fill the void of the immediate future. They are ‘people talking just for the act of it. Words spinning to nothing. For no definable reason.’ Stuck limpet-like to the past, the women’s words become a vain search for catharsis, as if, somehow, this time around the ending might be different. For all their fixated repetition, however, history remains fixed.

As Ada, Catherine Walsh instils a huge intensity. She wields a lipstick at her elders as if it were a police baton, conducting the beautifully spoken, yet trembling, nostalgia of Ruth McCabe and Rosaleen Linehan. Mikel Murfi’s jittery Patsy, dragged in and dolled up in the shiniest of blue suits, is played to perfection. He cowers behind a babble of words, before affecting a startling transformation into the rock ‘n’ roll icon of their memories.

However, the superb quality of the performances and Walsh’s own spot-on direction cannot evade the fact that the play’s academic successes do not translate well into performance. The quirkfire density of the text, delivered in thick Irish accents, leave you straining to keep pace and snatching to comprehend. Moreover, the fiction finds itself in a constant battle with the reality of the theatrical event.

In both New Electric Ballroom and The Walworth Farce, knitted together like yin and yang, there is the most unexpected of comparisons: the work of Forced Entertainment. With its focus on the oddities of mimetic representation, The Walworth Farce resonates with the rushed chaos and crass costuming of The World in Pictures or Emanuelle Enchanted. New Electric Ballroom, in turn, shares its fascination for the conjuring power of words with Spectacular and, one presumes, the forthcoming Void Story. However, where Forced Entertainment have made an artform out of boredom, Walsh cannot grant the same level of permission to his audience. The fiction must hold our attention, rather than challenge us to keep watching, as do the reality-centred performances of Forced Entertainment. Walsh simply slips off the tightrope between postdramatic and undramatic too often.

It is a touching piece well-presented, but, for all its merits, New Electric Ballroom cannot escape the fact that it works better on the page than on the stage.

Till 29 March 2009

In his Guardian review of This Isn’t Romance, Michael Billington points out that ‘sibling incest is a dramatic subject as old as the hills’; looking at the latest theatre productions in the UK, one gets the clear feeling that it is also having a lively comeback, and that right now it is an extremely fashionable dramatic subject. The National Theatre alone staged three plays that mentioned incest in the last couple of months (and that’s not counting Frank McGuinness’ new version of Sophocles’ Oedipus). But obviously theatre does not exist in a vacuum, and its present interest in sexual attraction and/or relationships between relatives reflects a general growing concern that has recently found expression in many arts and media. In the age of sexual liberation and of sperm-donation, the issue of ‘genetic sexual attraction’ is going to produce a more and more urgent (and probably painful) debate, as one study indicates that ‘50% of reunions between siblings, or parents and offspring, separated at birth result in obsessive emotions’.

In-Sook Chappell’s first play This Isn’t Romance, which won the Verity Bargate Award 2007, is very much a play about incest, but also, at least in intention, a reflection on separation, identity, and the crippling loss of it resulting from growing up as a foreigner, and yet also eventually becoming one in your own culture. Protagonist Miso Blake was born in Korea, but she grew up in Southend-on-sea, adopted as a child by an older couple; now 32, she travels back to Seoul to find the younger brother she abandoned at a street corner 25 years before. She arrives there and on the stage as an elegant, fashionable ex-model, apparently in control, but it will not be long before she reveals the profound pain and resentment that will, by the end of the night, bring her to an almost literal self-effacement. Miso and her brother, Han Som Kim, immediately fall desperately and agonisingly in love, recognising themselves in the other: ‘You are me’, they both keep repeating, and ‘I look in the mirror at myself and I see you’ – also, presumably, as a way of putting the accent on what is often adduced as the basis of sexual attraction between siblings. As Miso tries to make it up to Han Som for what she did, to ‘save’ him, she bumps into the new faces of Western colonisation: American fashionista Naomi, who refuses her a modeling job, and lewd, English hotel-owner Jack Cash (yes, really), to whom she offers herself in the frantic quest for money that moves the plot along. Desperation brews and ultimately explodes.

This is most definitely not romance, nor is it ‘sexy’, as the play’s director, Lisa Goldman (who is also Soho Theatre’s Artistic Director) had defined it in the e-trailer; it is, rather, a bit obscene and pornographic – which is not meant as a negative criticism, but rather as a specification that not much is left to imagination or interpretation when you stage a five-minute cunnilingus in a restaurant, followed by the same man bumping the woman while he gorges some oysters. Indeed, obscenity fits the kind of heightened, violent and heated atmosphere of the text much better than sexiness would have. This makes it all the more regrettable that in spite of all the boldness and explicitness of the rest of the evening, either the writer or the director chose to censor the only sexual act that would have been worth seeing staged, that is, the first encounter between Miso and Han Som, opting instead for a definitely more lyrical, but also less brave screen projection.

There are some other problems, as well; in particular, many question are left hanging: why did Miso abandon her brother? Why did she wait so long before coming back to look for him? Was she just taken away or was she legally adopted – and if the latter, was it so easy to do so without realising she had a brother? There are frequent suggestions that South Korea is a heaven for sexual tourists, with vending machines selling teenage girls’ knickers, but we could also be talking about many other Asian countries and you would not know the difference. Billington writes that the author ‘conveys the contradictions of South Korea’s beauty-worshipping society where botox coexists with Buddhism’ – actually, this is, almost to the letter, something Naomi tells Miso, but from the fact that one person on the stage mentions the existence of a particular issue once does not follow in any way that the play investigates such issue, as, indeed, this one does not.

Most importantly, for a work which is really one long, almost unsuspended dramatic climax, dialogue is marred by the repeated and regular flowering of clichés that keep interrupting the flow of words, and poking the audience in the ribs. Lines like ‘I am a man. Men are not monogamous’, and its correspondent ‘You’re a woman, of course you do [like games]’ are as annoying as much as gratuitous to the economy of the action. Others, like Miso’s explanation to her brother ‘It is inevitable because of our story’, pronounced in between kisses, sound like unnecessary live commentary.

Nonetheless, the production does have several good moments. One of the most interesting ideas is the indication that Miso’s lust for her brother is, more than anything else, a result of her love-hate relationship with her own Korean identity: the very same identity that pulls her to him and that she wants to erase in order to be able to be with him. Jennifer Lim is excellent as Miso, indomitably and restlessly guilty, insecure and yet determined to the point of being scary – in fact, she ends up terrifying Mr Cash from sleeping with her – and in spite of the occasionally cringeworthy lines she is fed: I do not doubt the power of genetic sexual attraction, but it does sound a bit forced when, having talked with her newly-found brother for less than an hour, she is already telling him ‘I can feel you pushing up inside me’ (in a very unmistakable sense). Mo Zainal is thoroughly convincing as her highly physical and tormented brother, and Elizabeth Tan is delightful as kitty-waitress by day and bunny-stripper by night. Jack Cash comes across as satisfyingly sleazy, thanks to Matthew Marsh’s scenery-chewing performance, abounding in the kind of swinging, almost camp swaying movements that, in 2009, seem to only really work on Kevin Spacey.

While incest is not a new or unusual dramatic subject, the additional significance here is given by its entwinement with larger questions, especially those of cultural belonging (particularly experienced through the forced adoption of another language, something that Miso comes back to several times) and Western paternalism in exploiting Asian countries. These are complex and hurtful problems, and This Isn’t Romance is an admirable attempt at combining them; what fails the text (and the audience) is its recurrence to lazy aphorisms that, in the shouted context of a feverish production, sound all the louder.

Run over

Tough love

This week on CW, Angus Kennedy reviews Terry Eagleton on Trouble with Strangers, and argues real solidarity has to start with self-interest. Tara McCormack reviews Conor Foley on humanitarian intervention, and suggests his criticisms don’t go far enough. Meanwhile, Dolan Cummings looks at military intervention close up in Generation Kill.

Also on CW this week, Austin Williams on Palladio the genius, a second CW review of Slumdog Millionaire, Dancing at Lughnasa at the Old Vic, and dancing lads and dads on tour.

13 March 2009

I hope it won’t be too much of a spoiler to tell you that Terry Eagleton’s new book on ethics ends with an exhortation – a Lacanian psycho-ethical maxim - to ‘Stick to your desire!’ He calls for faith on the political left, a keeping of the faith all the more necessary and urgent since changes in global capitalism have made capital even ‘more predatory’ and have ‘helped to dispirit and deplete the left’ (p326). The political left should stand up to it with ‘the implacable refusal of an Antigone’ and console itself – ‘if it finally fails’ – with ‘the bitter-sweet satisfaction of knowing that it was right all along’.

Things have got a little worse then, this Sophoclean tragedy has deepened towards climax, since Slavoj Žižek finished his The Ticklish Subject: the absent centre of political ontology (Verso, 1999) ten years ago with a chapter called ‘Whither Oedipus’ and Lacan’s maxim ‘Do not compromise your desire!’ rounded out an exhortation to dare to ‘reformulate a leftist, anti-capitalist political project in our era of global capitalism’ (p4). The left is to share Antigone’s fate and escape being buried alive only through suicide? Imagined as the battered and blinded plaything of an implacable fate (global capital), the left can hope for victory only in the jaws of defeat. ‘Seize in your being that which has seized and broken you’ as another radical continental philosopher, Alain Badiou, in his Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (Verso, 2002), would gloss his compatriot psychoanalyst Lacan’s maxim ‘do not give up on your desire’ (p47). Badiou’s conclusion? ‘Keep going!’

Lacan is important for these thinkers as his work expresses key issues for anyone wanting to ‘keep going’ with the left’s project. His conception of the Other as radical alterity confronting the self in the Symbolic order is a development of Sartre’s and de Beauvoir’s thought which took the spirit and the historical specificity out of Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic and gave us instead Self and Other ‘trapped in their conflict, and their mutual incomprehension for all time’ (James Heartfield, The ‘Death of the Subject’ Explained, 2006, p66). This eternal and irresolvable standoff with the signified always already out of reach expressed the ideological stasis of the Cold War of course, but also formed a reaction against the human subject at the heart of the Enlightenment project: the project believed by Adorno, et. al., to be so discredited by the Holocaust. With the defeat of the working class, the Other looms large indeed at the present and the subject is notably absent. People still think and act of course – we have individual subjectivity and our personal histories in that limited and internal sense – but the conception of ourselves as being agents of change - historical subjectivity - is a dead letter. In this context, Eagleton is absolutely correct to ask why do we have ‘trouble with strangers?’ It is to ask, after all, how we might be able to recreate solidarity. And it is in pursuit of this answer that he examines the attempts of moral philosophers to give altruism a firm footing.

Eagleton uses Lacan’s three psychoanalytic orders to structure the book and also to suggest through this ordering (although he stresses the provisionality and limited character of the suggestion) something of a historical progression. The Imaginary in which the child cannot yet recognise itself, or differentiate itself from others, is a prelapsarian, early-capitalist, world of Hume and Smith where we share without greed because I am as much you as me. A world of moral sentiment, fellow feeling and at least the fading memory of a shared community of needs. A world of possibility. We are not yet constituted as commodities, as objects of exchange, by the value relations that make up the Symbolic order of capitalism’s bourgeois highpoint, with its rules, laws, regulations and exchanges, its Kants and Hegels: a world of necessity. The final order, the Real, is not what lies underneath ideological appearance, no transcendent truth here, but represents impossibility as such, the unknowable that is humanity itself, our self-consciousness, and the ‘recalcitrance of the material world’: the world of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer but equally that of Levinas, Derrida and Badiou. It is here, in the Real, that Eagleton tries to find a way out of the impasse of the human subject’s desires, need and wants, its power frustrated by the alienating Other of Capital. Even if this means being desirous onto death.

He has written before (in After Theory, Penguin, 2004) of that universality that cannot be taken away from us and is constituted in our very shared corporeality: in the end we all have our bodies in common. And in Trouble with Strangers, he develops this idea in terms of how it is our bodies in their very common particularity, yes, but a shared particularity, should and could support an ethics of solidarity: the trick is not to try and treat everyone universally, everyone equally, but to attend ‘to the peculiar needs of anyone who happens to come along’. In this sense we can be Good Samaritans: we can attend respectfully to the strange needs of strangers. This opens up a space for him in which politics and ethics can operate: on the ground of identity rather than difference.

But is this enough? Can we really step off the shifting sands of difference onto the firm shores of identity to save ourselves? The young Marx had a more dialectical, a more realistic maybe, view of the problem as expressed in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. The human subject exists simultaneously both as ‘commodity man’ and as a ‘rich human being’. As Mészáros explains in Marx’s Theory of Alienation (Merlin Press, 2005), Marx’s rejection of transcendentalism did ‘not carry with it the dismissal of ideality without which no moral system worthy of this name is conceivable’ (p163). Rather he argues that ideality must have a natural basis. Man as a human natural being, a ‘being for himself’, has needs and powers: ‘human fulfilment - the realization of human freedom - cannot be conceived as an abnegation or subjugation of these needs, but only as their properly human gratification’ (p167). That fulfilment is found in that productive labour we must carry out in order to survive. It may seem paradoxical that the necessity of work to avoid death represents the realisation of human freedom but the point is clear in phrases like ‘he made something of his life’.

In terms of the question of ethics as explored by Eagleton, neither the Imaginary nor the Symbolic alone offer an answer. The first says you may, the second says you must not: neither are adequate to the reality that human natural beings are not in themselves good or evil, just human. They are for themselves. Whereas Eagleton retreats to the body to avoid or reconcile the opposition, Marx describes how alienated man ‘becomes an abstract activity [Symbolic] and a stomach [Imaginary]’. The world turns upside down as we labour for the profit of others. We end up feeling ‘free’ in the exercise of our animal functions (in our private lives: drinking; eating; etc) and enslaved in respect of our human functions: at work we can feel like caged animals. Luckily, however, the world does keep on turning, change keeps on happening, and, in addition, we are not blind to our circumstances: we are aware after all that we are not fulfilled. That awareness creates a need within us, a need that demands satisfaction, and needs produce powers…

Thus it is possible still, even today when the left project is certainly more imaginary than real, to continue the process of trying to sidestep alienation through conscious and practical human activity. That means politics of course, but it can be more than the politics of ‘keep going’ or ‘stay true’. Many people, for example, see no contradiction between their moral scapegoating of bankers’ greed to explain the recession and their desire for a fairer world that meets the needs of all. But the business of writing someone off as a greedy animal leaves one stuck in an abstract ethical dualism, proud adherent to a ‘fairness’ that has the lofty moral superiority of a Kantian imperative maybe, but little room for the really human at all. In a time when any form of self-interest is castigated as morally wrong, because it appears to occur at the expense of others, we must hold this up as an abstract absurdity and point out that being human is a matter of fulfilling needs. There is a balance to be maintained between society and the individual, and between production and consumption. This current economic crisis is indeed related to an excess of consumption over production, but a human response is not to consume less: it is to produce more of what we need.

This demands a critical engagement with ideas that seek to limit productive activity and economic growth. A challenge to environmentalism and its false opposition of the natural to the human. A no to calls for restraint, for a new austerity and for frugal sustainable living. To the regulations and risk assessments that hold back development. To the ideas of green ethics, business ethics and corporate social responsibility. These are immediate practical and political issues for anyone interested in questions of human ethics and in this respect it is striking that Eagleton never once mentions environmentalism in Trouble with Strangers. What is this sudden shyness? One minute he is ready to face up to the terrible and impossible dragons of the Real in the guise of a tragic heroine, the next he has nothing to say about the kind of limits – natural ones – that are not impossible at all for human ingenuity to overcome. Even in normal clothes.

The good life for most is a matter of desiring the good, desiring goods. This is not to reduce morality to an Argos catalogue but just to say that material well-being and sufficiency is an important, if not the most important, part of what we would call Good or Right if we wanted to use capitals. Rather than holding on to our desire, indulging in speculative utopianism, we must demand satisfaction. Our first step forwards towards solidarity must be to start being self-ish again.

Read on, Angus Kennedy on morality:
Feeling Solidarity, review of Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers?, by Zygmunt Bauman, CW, 30 January 2009

All is not well within the world of humanitarian aid organisations. In his new book, The Thin Blue Line, Conor Foley, an experienced aid worker, discusses many of the problems associated with the burgeoning relationship between contemporary aid organisations and recent military and ‘peacekeeping’ interventions which have been conducted ostensibly for the purposes of ensuring human rights. Foley’s book should be required reading for all those supporters of so-called humanitarian interventions, as he has many insightful critiques and anecdotes, both drawing upon his own wide experience but also upon other critical accounts. At the heart of this often insightful book, however, lies a contradiction that Foley cannot overcome: on the one hand Foley wants to make a case for (limited and ‘neutral’) humanitarian aid, yet on the other hand, the events discussed within the book, and the problems associated with them, seem to point to the opposite conclusions to those he would like to reach.

Foley does not shy away from discussing the problematic effects of contemporary humanitarian interventions, discussing recent interventions in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. In the case of the Kosovo intervention Foley argues against the orthodoxy that in Kosovo the Albanian population were being subjected to a campaign of ‘genocide’; rather, as Foley points out, in Kosovo there was a political problem about territory and sovereignty (p90). The NATO intervention simply turned a counter-insurgency campaign that the Serbian government was waging against the paramilitary organisation the KLA into a full scale disaster. He does not spare his fellow aid workers either, arguing that UNMIK was, in short, a disaster with little overall planning or control, incapable even of ensuring that the province’s electricity supply was restored (p88) whilst the staff were a mixed bag ranging from seconded civil servants to people who had simply turned up to Kosovo on speculation (p87).

Foley also discusses what can really only be described as the obscenity of bombing Afghanistan, an utterly impoverished state. This was a state already so devastated by the previous decades of superpower-sponsored war that by the second day of bombing by the world’s most powerful states, US pilots were returning to their bases having failed to drop their bombs as there was simply nothing left to bomb (p95). He describes also the bizarre spectacle in East Timor under the UN ‘peacekeeping force’ UNTAET, in which the budget for bottled water for UN staff was about half of the total budget for the new Timorese government (p142).

As well as detailed critiques, Foley also has some interesting broader political quarrels with contemporary interventions. He points out that any kind of intervention tends to internationalise a conflict, so for example even straightforward aid can distort totally a local economy for the worse. Furthermore, as Foley argues, there is a fundamental contradiction between intervention and any notion of self-determination. Foley also draws attention to the strange spectacle of humanitarian organisations lecturing the citizens of poorer countries upon social and economic rights that not only could simply not be implemented due to the material circumstance of the state but that go far beyond what actually occurs in even the most liberal and wealthy societies. He gives as an example a UNICEF lawyer lecturing social workers in Kosovo on the Convention on the Rights of the Child (p43). Foley also argues that actually the impact of aid is often far less than we might like to think (p132-133) and that ultimately political solutions are the best ones.

So where did it all go wrong for humanitarian organisations? For Foley, traditional neutral humanitarian organisations have been co-opted into what he terms political humanitarianism, a development that has serious implications both for the organisations themselves and more importantly for those on the receiving end. Foley argues that his shift began in the 1990s, when many aid organisations were increasingly co-opted into the political agendas of powerful states, whilst organisations such as the ICRC, which mostly sought to remain apart from this trend, were increasingly vilified. For Foley this reached its apex under the post-9/11 Bush administration, which showed an utter disregard for international law. For Foley, Afghanistan was where military and humanitarian mandates became indistinguishable – aid workers became part of the front line in a global war waged by the Bush administration and assisted by Britain.

I am not sure to what extent Foley’s arguments that traditional neutral humanitarian organisations have been hijacked and co-opted into other people’s political agendas tells quite the whole story. From Foley’s own illustrations, it would seem that many organisations were very willing participants. First in the roll call of shame must be Oxfam, actually calling for the bombing of Serbia and resisting pressure from Belgrade staff to condemn the bombing of civilian targets (p159 – 160); however, let us not leave out CARE calling for military intervention in Somalia (p161).

Moreover, it is unclear why Foley singles out the Bush administration when, as he himself as so well demonstrated, political humanitarianism (as he calls it) emerged in the 1990s. So, bizarrely it seems to this reviewer, Foley ends up arguing, despite his intelligent critique of interventions in the 1990s, that Blair’s liberal internationalism presupposed the existence of an international rules-based system, which was then undermined by Bush (p228). Yet it is really Kosovo that marked the high point (or low point) of political humanitarianism, for example the downgrading of sovereignty; the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq simply followed in the path already established by the liberal internationalist governments of Blair and Clinton in the 1990s. There was some kind of ‘international rules based system’ before that, and it was premised upon the formal presumptions of sovereign equality and non-intervention as codified in the UN Charter, precisely the presumptions that liberal internationalism has sought to erode.

Despite Foley’s criticisms of what he terms political humanitarianism, he is none the less sympathetic to the frustrations and limitations of traditional ‘neutral’ humanitarian aid, and believes there is a case to be made for active humanitarian organisations and, in certain circumstances, a moral case for intervention (p151). So is it possible to steer between the Scylla of indifference and the Charybdis of political humanitarianism? For Foley the answer is yes, and that solution is to be found in developing international law and increasing what he calls ‘humanitarian accountability’ (p200).

For Foley, the International Criminal Court (p175) is a potentially positive step in the right direction, representing the potential for universal justice. At the moment, he argues, there are practical problems with the implementation of universal justice through the mechanisms of the ICC (p177), such as American refusal to ratify it, leading to accusations of double standards. Foley also argues that the ad hoc criminal tribunals established after Bosnia and Rwanda also represent positive steps in the right direction, going so far as to say that the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) represents a system of justice far superior to that of a national court. Foley also praises the ad hoc tribunal set up for Sierra Leone (SCSL), arguing that it is a positive feature of this court that it applies international rather than domestic law and that this means that the court is safeguarded from domestic pressures (p193).

In fact as John Laughland has shown in his excellent book on the ICTY, the new ad hoc criminal courts are more or less utter travesties of justice, and the kind of institutions that would have surely have made even Stalin blush. Furthermore, given Foley’s identification of the anti-democratic aspects of political humanitarianism, it seems odd that he can then argue that it is actually a positive thing that a court applies international rather than domestic law and is actually insulated from the society over which it presides.

Given the many important problems that Foley has raised about other aspects of intervention, it is unclear why he believes that the ICC could genuinely be a mechanism for universal justice and, more importantly, that universal justice could exist in a divided world. Domestic law has many limitations, as Anatole France wrote, the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread; formal equality masks real substantive inequality, and the parameters are set (defence of property for example). Compared to international law, however, even existing domestic legal systems are paragons of justice and fairness, as at least within certain narrow parameters we can all have recourse to some sort of system of redress or enforcement of agreements (for example). International law consists of treaties between states, there is no mechanism of enforcement, international law rests upon the political will of states. As such it is subject to all the limitations of political humanitarianism and more.

The same problem is to be found in Foley’s argument for increasing humanitarian accountability. Of course aid agencies are not accountable to the people they supposedly serve (p205) and as Foley points out, various schemes involving consultation are by no means the same thing as proper accountability. The problem is that this is not a problem that can be resolved in the absence of a transformation of power relations in the world, as Foley himself argues, the problem is the political problem of power differentials (p204).

‘Dear Frederick, Thank you for your nice letter, but I am actually a US Marine, who was born to kill, whereas you have clearly mistaken me for some kind of wine-sipping, communist dick-suck, and although peace probably appeals to tree-loving bisexuals like you and your parents, I happen to be a death-dealing, blood-crazed warrior who wakes up every day just hoping for the chance to dismember my enemies and defile their civilisations. Peace sucks a hairy asshole, Freddie. War is the motherfucking answer!’

Corporal Ray Person is actually a nice guy. James Ransone, who played the worryingly unstable Ziggy Sobotka in season two of The Wire, is far more affable as Person, who enlivens Generation Kill with a steady stream of one-liners, and indeed many-liners, especially when cranked up on Ripped Fuel (a dietary supplement for body builders, used by the Marines in lieu of proper food or sleep). The above is his improvised response to a letter from a schoolboy expressing the wish that the soldiers would not have to fight. Letters from schoolkids are what the men get in lieu of the military supplies and sundry personal necessities of which they are constantly running out. But Marines are not supposed to grumble. Marines make do. And in any case, even if some of them are nice guys, what they really want is action, to ‘get some’.

Generation Kill is the latest television drama from David Simon, who brought us the rightly acclaimed The Wire and the sadly underrated Homicide. Having been screened on HBO in the US last summer, and in the UK earlier this year on the relatively obscure FX channel, Generation Kill is now available on DVD, which is likely to win it the substantially bigger audience it deserves. In fact, before I go on, allow me a digression: DVD is the only way to watch this kind of television. Catching it in one-hour installments once a week as part of an evening’s viewing, regardless of the station or time slot, simply wouldn’t do it justice. Quentin Tarantino once said that he makes the kind of films the characters in his films would watch when they went to the movies, and indeed his films often have a superficial quality, as if made up of clips meant to represent a certain kind of movie flickering in the background of another movie. Generation Kill, like Simon’s earlier output, demands closer attention.

I confess that I watched the whole of The Wire with subtitles. It started with just the scenes involving street drug dealers – I have no pretensions to being down with US black urban slang – but I soon found I got more out of the whole thing when I could follow every sentence (I used to write TV subtitles, and realise you never get every word). Such carefully written, vibrant and witty scripts deserve to be followed more closely even than we follow real conversations with our friends. In the case of Generation Kill there is the added factor that, even with subtitles, it’s never very clear what the hell is going on; hence you really have to watch it more than once.

All this is to say that if you think of television as a medium that’s supposed to hold your hand and tell you a story, you’d have to say that Generation Kill is a terrible failure, because David Simon is so obsessed with realism that he’s produced a TV show that is impossible to follow like normal TV. What would it be like to find yourself in a humvee in the desert in the middle of Operation Iraqi Freedom, surrounded by grunts who speak in an impenetrable military argot littered with code words and acronyms, and who don’t know what’s going on anyway? It would be confusing, that’s what. Welcome to Generation Kill.

So why watch it? In fact, the plot and characterisation are as carefully crafted as the elusive script – you just have to work at them. And while there is no comparing this seven-episode series with a novelistic, multi-season series like The Wire, the result is certainly worthwhile. Simon has made much of Generation Kill’s realism, having gone to great lengths to ensure every detail is as accurate as possible. The cast includes former Marines like Rudy Reyes, who plays himself (and ironically looks more like a film-star than any of the others), and Simon is especially proud that serving Marines have enthusiastically acknowledged the series as true to their own experience (1). That’s all very interesting, but I think of secondary importance to us as viewers: it matters only because it means the production team went beyond the clichés and worked hard to find a story in that experience that means something to us all.

Generation Kill is not only confusing; it is about confusion. Much of the drama comes from the fact that the characters have absolutely no idea what’s going on around them. We follow the Marines of the First Reconnaissance Battalion’s Bravo Company, ‘the tip of the spear’ bursting into Iraq from Kuwait in humvees in March 2003. The whole war was of course famously badly thought through, but it’s only gradually that the men begin to doubt the existence of an organising intelligence behind their orders. Bravo’s commander, ‘Godfather’, takes advantage of the lack of strategy to get as much action for the company as he can, and so the men find themselves tearing through a foreign country on a constantly shifting mission that is only tenuously connected to the situation as they find it. Moreover they are occupying Iraq without relating meaningfully to any of the Iraqis (or ‘hajis’) they drive past, or even ‘engage’ (shoot at).

The language barrier is only the most obvious problem. The men soon figure out that their translator Meesh has been instructed from on high to spin things a little for the sake of morale, which explains why all the Iraqis they talk to are so gushing in their praise for the American liberators. The fact that the soldiers, and their superiors, know so little and care less about what the Iraqis really think is a recurring theme. One scene in episode four comes the morning after an incompetent lieutenant ordered an air strike in the middle of the desert. He is now desperately in search of evidence that there was in fact something there. His men watch from a distance as he and Meesh question a frightened herdsman, and the men take turns to speculate about what’s being said – complete with comedy accents.

‘Excuse me, Meesh. Tell the man that we come in friendship.’

And Meesh says: ‘Dude! My big American friends are going to fuck you up if you don’t show us some blown-up tanks.’

And the Haji’s all: ‘Hubba-da hubba-da, hubba-da dubba-da, dubba-da!’

And Meesh is all: ‘Dude! These Iraqis love the fact that we are here. They fucking love freedom and they thought that those fireballs last night were fucking wicked, dude!’

‘You Americans have killed a lot of sand. The sand was very evil!’

And the lieutenant’s all: ‘Meesh, I just shit my panties. Tell the nice man if he doesn’t show me at least one blown-up tank, I’ll look very stupid and the other officers will all laugh at me.’

And Meesh is all: ‘Dude, throw me a freakin’ bone here! How about a freakin’ pick-up truck with bald tires?’

And the haji’s all: ‘Hub dubba, dubbedy dubba!’ And Meesh says: ‘Lieutenant, this haji dude is totally bummed he can’t save your career. He’s got no tanks. But check it out: you can have his bitchin’ daughter.’

And the lieutenant’s all weepy and shit.

Fuckin’ frat house pussy.

The irreverence and wit, casual vulgarity, and camaraderie based in shared confusion and simmering anger, are typical of the series. For these men, life is tough, and it simply goes on regardless of what the war means to anyone else. They don’t have to think, except to amuse themselves – the only decisions they have to make are when to take a dump or go for a ‘combat jack’, and those things are obviously constrained by circumstances. The meticulous attention to details yields charming surprises as well as gritty truths about the Marines’ way of life in Iraq. Rather than working themselves into a murderous frenzy by listening to death metal as we’ve read about, they sing to themselves, bursting into spontaneous renditions of everything from ‘Fuck tha Police’ to ‘Sk8er Boi’, as well as ‘King of the Road’ and ‘Tainted Love’ (complete with overhead hand-claps).

To an extent, the series dramatises boredom – the handmaiden of confusion – but there are also plenty of action scenes. In one exhilarating night assault, the humvees charge through the desert, apparently in order to secure an airport for British Paratroopers, though it later seems to have been more of a whim on the part of Godfather. The men enjoy this, of course, as well as racing through hostile towns under fire, blasting anything that moves. But they do reflect afterwards that it might be more sensible to employ seemingly idle US tanks against Iraqi artillery, rather than humvees.

In the first episode we meet embedded Rolling Stone reporter Evan Wright (the familiar face of Lee Tergesen from Oz), who is immediately written off by the men as a liberal pinko, but soon earns their indifference. Generation Kill happens to be based on a book written by the real Evan Wright, but the inclusion of a writer or intellectual type in a drama like this is often a device to give the viewers a more sympathetic and reflective character to identify with. In this case it proves unnecessary: the series does a good enough job of revealing the humanity of the grunts themselves, while ‘Rolling Stone’ is cartoonishly out of place. The Viking-like Sergeant Brad Colbert (Alexander Skarsgård) – who we learn was raised by upper class Jewish adoptive parents – is the one most frustrated by the Marines’ inability to help the ordinary Iraqis they come across, but the unadulterated white-trash Corporal Person is capable of insightful reflections too: ‘This is really interesting, Brad. You know, Iraqis don’t really seem good at fighting. But they never really completely surrender either.’

What prescience. When another Marine marvels towards the end of the series that it’s taken just ‘21 days to take down a country’, Sergeant Colbert more cautiously suggests, ‘We may be here all summer long’. Six years on, President Obama has finally set a ‘sort of’ exit date of 31 August 2010. Hundreds of thousands more American soldiers have served in Iraq between the initial invasion and the present, thousands losing their lives. Generation Kill is not about the politics of the war, though it obviously touches on political questions, but in presenting such a rich and detailed account of the lives of US troops in Iraq, it does highlight the gulf between the war as experienced by those fighting it and what we imagine it means in global and national political terms.

Perhaps grunts are never that interested in politics, but there is something in the story of these grunts that speaks to us all. At a time when military conflicts make less and less sense, and old-fashioned political positions appear increasingly meaningless, it is salutory to be informed that Marines make do without meaning.

1) Generation Kill: the new Wire, by Andrew Billen, The Times, 15 January 2009

Danny Boyle has created a masterpiece in Slumdog Millionaire. With some great technical work and a rather unique storyline (based on the novel Q&A by Vikas Swarup), Danny has created what some are suggesting the best movie of 2008 worldwide.

The movie is set up in the slums of Mumbai. It centres around a young man Jamal Malik as he’s seated in the hot seat, on the verge of becoming the first 20 million rupee winner of the Hindi version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. There are forces, including the host (Anil Kapoor), who believe he is a fraud though and they have him arrested - after all how can a poor, uneducated kid from the slums get further along in the show than prestigious doctors and lawyers?

We soon learn how he came to learn the answers. They come to us via in-depth flashbacks that show Jamal and his brother Salim fighting to stay alive in a very unforgiving and often neglected India. The movie follows Malik’s recollection of how he came to know the answers, the telling of his life from the slums of Mumbai, the murder of his mother in an anti-Muslim rampage, through to his rise to being an assistant in a call centre.

This isn’t a Bollywood film, even if there are some elements (and the credits pay homage with a traditional Indian film dance), and yet it taps in to Indian culture in a way not really seen in movies shown in the West, showing the lows and highs of life in the world’s largest democracy.

A major reason for the staunch criticism lies in the very title of the movie. The very fact that slum dwellers are referred to as dogs does not go down too well with the Indian audiences. A Westerner portraying India in the way that it has been, is not acceptable to many. However, for all those people who are upset about the depiction of India in Slumdog, let me remind them that this is the real India. This is how majority of Indians live. And it depicts them as being street - smart and intelligent and not ignorant illiterates. The silver lining was the slum where the boys used to live, is no longer the slum they knew. Instead, the place had evolved. The optimism of the boys is heartening.

Nonetheless, certain parts of the movie do raise one’s eyebrows. Firstly, Darshan Do Ghanshyam was not written by Surdas. It was written by Gopal Singh Nepali for the movie Narsi Bhagat (1957). This song is also credited as traditional and originally written by 15th century poet Narsi Mehta, on whose life that film is based. Secondly, after winning the game-show, the boy sits on the railway platform and nobody recognises him! Considering the popularity of the show, is that realistic? And of course the greatest flaw in the storyline is that programmes like Kaun Banega Crorepati and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire are not in fact broadcast live. As a result the entire structure of the film becomes unrealistic. For a film that boasts being realistic, such flaws cannot be overlooked.

Apart from these errors, it is undeniable that the movie is a visual treat and the screenplay and storytelling are masterful. The actors are a treat to watch. The movie has everything in it - action, thrill, violence, drama, melodrama and a fairy tale ending to a disaster-filled love story.

Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire is a film equivalent of Nadal’s performance at the Aussie Open: funny, shocking, spectacular, turbo-charged. It takes your breath away at the same time as it makes you want to jump with joy or to grab the person next to you. This is without doubt one of the better movies I’ve seen for a while. It’s an uplifting movie, rich in character, story and visuals. It is one of those rare movies that I found myself emotionally attached to.

This review was initially printed on the Future Cities Project.
Slumdog is also reviewed by CW’s Film Editor, in Choose Life.

I left Dancing at Lughnasa eager to rave about it – Brian Friel’s use of language is so pure and distinct, his characters so tangible and his family so real – yet found myself repeatedly coming up short. Deep down there is something amiss here; despite the play’s easy charms, sensitive observations and lilting comedy, it is hard to decide what to latch onto. Put simply – I’m not entirely sure what this play is trying to say and I’m not convinced that Friel or the Old Vic are either. 

Part of the problem is the theatre itself, which has adopted a temporary in-the-round formation for the season, which kicked off with the excellent Norman Conquests. Ayckbourn’s trilogy worked so well because the audience demographic and on-stage characters were damn similar and because the round formation concentrated Ayckbourn’s already considerable wit. But the Old Vic stage has done something funny to Friel’s play here. Despite the intimacy afforded by the round, it feels like the Old Vic stage and all the baggage and tradition that comes with it, is pushing Friel’s soft, lyrical piece in slightly the wrong direction.

The Old Vic needs huge, powerful plays on its stage – mesmerising and enchanting ones are not enough. It feels like Friel’s play is constantly struggling to keep up – that despite their best efforts, neither the audience nor company can resist moulding this delicate narrative into a larger, more traditional play. This is partly down to the sheer size of the stage – you need big stuff to fill it – but also due to the particular expectations that this theatre’s distinguished history provokes. The Old Vic’s recent successes have been huge productions, where the play’s weight and theatre’s history have matched up perfectly. There is still room for innovation on this stage - but only with plays that are significant and even loud enough to meet its peculiar demands.

Despite this conflict there is a lot to enjoy and reflect on here.  The play in part explores the clash between the old and the new, the religious and the secular, through the lives of five single sisters living together in 1930s rural Ireland. Sister Chris’ son Michael retells their lives and it is with these reflective monologues that Friel casts his spell; Friel’s respectful and easy relationship with language means that his sublimely crafted narratives feel free and spontaneous. Peter McDonald displays an instinctive sense for the tone of this piece and rather than exploiting Michael’s monologues, allows the quiet passages to shout out for themselves.

These monologues are not only wonderful to listen to – they also create a visually effective framework for the play, as we watch Michael watch his family watch each other. The combination of Michael’s narrative and the intimate round-formation allows the audience to quickly become one of the family; we are at home with this struggling gaggle of sisters and grow seamlessly in tune with their daily lives.

But whilst this narrative nudges the audience in the right direction, it also results in slightly overblown characters. We see the characters as Michael saw them as a little boy - in all the naïve and garish simplicity that youth encourages. Niamh Cusack is wonderful as the resiliently energetic and upbeat aunt Maggie, but she grows less convincing as time passes. It as if the young boy has crystallised the best in this woman and whilst her defiant optimism is an initially attractive trait, it starts to feel unrealistic and even irresponsible as the gloom sets in. In the opposite direction, Michael’s ultimately estranged father comes across as so flippant and camp, that one starts to wonder how on earth their son was ever conceived. Though these inconsistencies might remind us of the subjectivity of a retold past, it also makes it harder to believe in the characters and the decisions they make.

The isolation of these characters also means that no matter how nuanced and contextually aware Friel’s play is, this remains a relatively self-contained piece. The sisters are so removed from society, that although they live in constant fear of the disapproval their actions might provoke, it is hard for the audience to really feel this; we never see society so how are we supposed to fear it? This is a particular problem late in the play, when sister Rose goes missing for three hours and the whole family goes into turmoil: ‘Will we ever be able to lift our heads again?’ Whilst we know these characters well enough to engage with their emotions, we do not know their world enough to understand where these feelings came from.

It seems to me that the wrong things have been amped up here; brother Jack takes on a pivotal role in this production and his return from Uganda deeply affects his devoted sisters. Whenever Jack enters the kitchen, his sisters’ swivelling heads unconsciously track his movements around the room – it is visually striking, but I suspect that Jack’s overwhelming presence is forcing a formality onto this piece that isn’t there. Yes – the returning brother highlights the clash between the older, religious sisters and the younger, less devoted ones. Yes, Jack’s awkwardness in his home emphasises this now secular man’s uneasy position in 1930s Ireland. But this is not a conventional play and Friel’s best moments resist such tidy analysis and easy answers. 

The climaxes come at strange points here, and the only thing that links them is music; the wireless is switched on, the sisters spread open their arms, let their world’s spin and stamp out their anxieties with furious, feral dancing.  It is with these releases that the play and its characters really breathe, pulsate, live. These explosions are the key to the play’s mysteries and although this production is careful, considered and skilled, I wish this company had opened its arms a little wider, spun a little faster and really let the music take control. 

Till 9 May 2009

Palladio is one of those figures of architectural history generally known more by name than output, and so it is interesting - and curious - that there is currently such a concentrated focus on his work. Two exhibitions: one online and one gallery-based, explore his life and work and have been used explicitly to promote a broader acceptance of Palladio’s influence.

Admittedly, it is the 500th anniversary of his birth, but even as the self-confessed Palladian architect Francis Terry writes in the RIBA Journal: ‘by contemporary taste, he should be derided as a backward looking plagiarist with no ideas of his own’ (1). So what is it that has brought about Palladio’s new-found acceptability?

A clue can be found in Sunand Prasad, the current President of the RIBA’s insistence that ‘Palladio’s relevance will last and last’. Indeed, the word ‘Legacy’ in the exhibition title is instructive. It seems that Palladio is the tool by which today’s architects can find succour. Palladio is portrayed as an architectural uber-Mensch: loved by clients, developers and the public - he is, as the Royal Academy of Art (RA)‘s promotional literature states: ‘the architects’ architect’. The exhibition calls him ‘the eternal contemporary’. The message seems to be: if only we could connect in that way today.

The Guardian’s Steve Rose assumes that love of Palladio is about his cross-sectoral appeal. Rose quotes arch-traditionalist, Robert Adam as saying: ‘Just you wait… Richard Rogers will say, ‘I’m really a Palladian’ and so will Norman Foster’ (2). As such, Palladio is readily caricatured as something of a consensus-builder - providing something for everyone. But actually (as I argue in The Future of Community) there are actually no substantive differences between traditionalists and modernists these days. The reason that so many and varied architects can claim or admire Palladio’s heritage, is because there is no critical tensions between architctural schools. As such, we have a flabby consensus that stultifies the very theoretical development that made Palladio who he really was. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but too many seem content to imitate the imitator, rather than the originals. As such, in the current period, whoever claims Palladio - little of substance will be created.

The RA’s exhibition on Palladio is complimented by the Royal Institute of British Architect’s (RIBA) online resource ‘Palladio and Britain’. The former is a rather compact exhibition of sketches and models housed in four rooms of the Royal Academy; the latter exhibits 200 or so drawings from the RIBA Library where ‘80 percent of (Palladios drawings and books) in existence’ reside. Actually, both exhibition and website opened to muted fanfare on 26th January 2009 (3).

For many advocates of his work, Palladio’s I Quattro Libri dell’ Architetura (The Four Books of Architecture) are key to his elevated status as a major architectural figure. Some of the drawings and writings from the Four Books are on show and these are genuinely fascinating. These books comprise his study of the architecture of classical antiquity, first published in Venice in 1570, exploring the rules and plans for buildings based on aesthetics (design rules) and technical expertise (construction rules).

Essentially these magnificently illustrated volumes on the nature of architecture. In the contemporary argot, they are ‘accessible’ meaning that they have a straightforward clarity, and as such, over the years have inspired architects and patrons, including Inigo Jones in England and Thomas Jefferson in America. Inigo Jones (perhaps best known perhaps for his design of Covent Garden) studied Palladio’s Italian buildings closely and brought a large collection of his drawings to Britain in the 17th century. Other drawings were ‘acquired’ by Lord Burlington and in 1894 these were all gifted to the RIBA. These now form a fabulous resource which includes a great deal of written detail about Palladio’s life and work, as well as photographs to compliment fine reproductions of his original drawings, woodcuts and preliminary sketches, a large percentage of which are now online.

Palladio began his career in Vicenza and became famous for his works throughout the Venice and Veneto region. Much still survives, from the refectory and cloisters at San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice to the magnificent Villa di Maser (Barbaro) situated not far from Treviso. (The exhibition contains a huge model of this villa, but if you are looking for architectural details you will have to consult a tiny, photocopied plan on the side wall).

Educated by humanist Gian Giorgio Trissino, Palladio is known as much for his domestic residences, his barns and farms, as he is for the grand-scale religious buildings. He certainly influenced the skyline and there are some wonderfully luminescent Canaletto’s at the RA to admire in the first exhibition room. It is interesting to judge whether Palladio’s unbuilt sheme for the Rialto bridge in Venice - captured by Canaletto - would have been as appealing as the one that was eventually constructed.

The exhibition itself, designed by Eric Parry Architects, is unprepossessing… some might say, cheap. A series of rather poor grey metal stands contain the displays but these sit awkwardly in the ‘Palladian’ interiors of the Royal Academy/ Burlington House. One display of Palladio’s fascinating speculative housing projects is contained within what can only be described as a replica bus shelter. This poor layout is less noticeable because of the surfeit of large scale wooden models. Each model lacks sufficient detail - or maybe lacks differentiation between the styles of model making - to facilitate close examination. They only permit an appreciation of the form, but not the depth, of Palladio’s work. Indeed, the exhibition lacks real substance, and the initially impressive models clarify little.

I recommend the audio guide, not least because it is less an instruction about what to see and more of an iPod download: a journey with the curator’s conversational chat providing a pleasant backdrop. However, the fact that the first item in the audio package indicates that the El Greco portrait hanging at the entrance ‘might’ be of Palladio ought not have been the best first choice. Even though it is true that few verifiable images of him exist, it doesn’t bode well for the rest of the show.

The exhibition describes Palladio’s early work and methods; followed by a room on his influence, a room on his later projects and a small room on his sketches. Palladio’s studies of Roman and classical architecture informed his sketches. Scale, proportion, beauty are all documented and displayed in some of the exhibits. He was not averse to mixing details from historic periods provided it worked. One of the curatorial notes states: ‘The basis of architecture by Palladio, or for Alberti, was mental invention’. One display shows his rapid sketches and the alternatives that he generated after consultation with the client.

The real Palladio brought together theory and practice in an exemplary manner, so it is ironic that he name has been associated with ‘pattern book’ architecture ever since, and doubly ironic that contemporary interpretations make him sound like an idol, rather than an historic figure whose work should be critically appraised. It was Inigo Jones who ‘popularised’ Palladio’s ideas and ‘style’ in Britain and Europe and conceptualised the notion of a ‘Palladian’, and ‘neo-Palladian’ architecture whereby ‘traditional’ architects (like the aforementioned Francis Terry of Quinlan Terry Architects) can dip into his pattern books and easily replicate authenticity. Terry says: ‘it’s an amazing treatise, without question the greatest pattern book of the Renaissance. We use it in our office on a daily basis, for anything from sizing a door architrave to spacing modillions on a pediment. It is a five hundred year old cook book whose recipes still taste good’.

There’s nothing wrong with that but unfortunately, Palladio’s pattern-book approach became bastardised in later years to mean a pick-and-mix catalogue of parts. Gone went the intellectual rigour; artistic integrity; and the instinctive ability to rationalise based on years of study. The contemporary architectural milieu is hoping simply to reclaim the popular appeal of his methods without the hard part. For example, Palladio, the exhibition notes say, was the “inventor of structural methods” - hardly a claim that could be pinned on any architect today.

Whereas Palladio theorised about architecture - this exhibition lauds the 500-year old soundbite from his favoured client: ’[Palladio can] rival the ancients [inspire] the moderns and will appear marvellous to future generations’ (Barbaro). What many fail to appreciate is that he worked hard at it. Today architects are confused by, rather than masters of, history. In some ways, many are still trying to find the easy way of attaining greatness. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but too many seem content to imitate the imitator, rather than the original architecture from which Palladio took his influence.. As such, an unintended consequence of this exhibition might be to reinforce the common perception that plagiarism has its merits. Either way, this brief snapshot of his life - occasionally conveying him as some kind of early ‘collaborative learning’ exponent - distorts the intellectual genius and artisitic integrity of Palladio.

(1) Francis Terry, ‘The polite truth about Palladio’, RIBA Journal, January 2009
(2) Steve Rose, ‘Palladio: the battle for an architect’s soul’, Guardian, 31 January 2009
(3) www.architecture.com/palladio

This review was initially published on the website of the Future Cities Project, which has a critical take on contemporary attitudes to modern life and cities today.

Austin Williams’ recent book The Future of Community was reviewed CW by Lee Jones in What makes community?

Looming large for any abstract investigation of gender are the dangers of stereotyping. After all, in taking maleness as its subject, Mission Possible attempts to capture something of a property shared by 48 per cent of the world’s population. The attempt to generalise, to pin down some universal quality or other, is met by almost three and a half billion messy particularities, each proving an exception to the rule.

The three short pieces that comprise State of Emergency’s latest offering tackle this problem with varying degrees of success.

Jeanefer Jean-Charles presents the most hackneyed version in ‘It’s A Boy’ – an exploration of the moment of response, where two alternate paths open: ugly violence and amicable peace. Using an unashamedly modish urban physical language in which House Dance combines with a jaunty contemporary style, Jean-Charles suggests a pack mentality that overtakes individual decision-making. Here maleness bubbles over into a picture of competitive masculinity – chest-puffing and chin-thrusting – that aims to undercut and humiliate. Respect comes from others rather than the self, bred from image rather than self-worth. With masculinity imposed and imposing the animal male begins to resemble stags immersed in a courtship ritual without an object over which to do battle.

‘Wilderness’ proves a playfully tender piece concerned with the father-son relationship set around a weekend camping. In aiming at loose narrative, however, Kwesi Johnson blurs the picture somewhat with a third dancer playing a range of hazily defined roles around the parental dynamic. That said, there are flashes of real wit and invention in the choreography; not least in the charmingly performed duet between Carl Harrison and a tent, whereby the lightness of the latter provides a joyfully contrasting accompaniment to the human body. At times, the tent escapes Harrison; at others it chases him, like a nightmarishly springy slug tracking its prey. Occasionally, the two merge to become a single animal, before separating as if by mitosis. In spite of this, Johnson’s piece feels slightly piecemeal and its tendency towards overplayed humour leaves it feeling slightly weightless.

In contrast, Colin Poole’s ‘4s:kin’ is a densely packed and intoxicatingly pure piece that, in spite of throwing the widest angle on gender in focusing directly upon it, presents a swirling picture of maleness. Solely reliant on the interplay of male bodies and light carving up the stage, ‘4s:kin’ achieves a mixology of masculinity and femininity that combines to form a vision of classical Man. With muscles arched and heads held high, whether grappling in wrestled combat or comradeship, the company seem to have stepped from a Greek Vase or Biblical illustration. Poole instils a nobility, a majesty, a mischief and, moreover, a deep-set attractiveness into the male form and mentality that swells with grounded self-confidence.

Rather than overlaying symbols of character as Jean-Charles and Johnson do, Poole is content to use his dancers as the men they are, as examples displaying something altogether above and beyond themselves. Through the elasticity and stillness of these bodies, we glimpse real personalities and, more than that, the suggestion of a universal or abstract term sharing the space with us. In this, ‘4s:kin’ confirms itself a complex, passionate and thrilling piece and marks Poole out as a choreographer at the top of his game.

Touring till 9 April 2009. For details see http://www.stateofemergencyltd.com/

Them and us

This week on CW, Sarah Boyes reviews Arab American critic Steven Salaita’s Uncultured Wars, a challenge to the platitudes of liberalism, while Colman Durkee looks back at a pro-Japanese film from WW2 Korea, which challenges the dichotomy between colonisers and colonised. Meanwhile, Dolan Cummings reviews Charles Tilly’s Credit and Blame, which warns against institutionalising grudges. And Nathan Coombs asks who is and isn’t a ‘real Marxist’.

6 March 2009