Douglas Maxwell’s monologue was inspired, according to the author’s note in the programme, by a real story. It is set in a London primary school, on the day in which a little Somali girl is going to be exorcised in front of her classmates to cure her ‘elective’ mutism,: the ceremony is to be performed by ‘a community leader and some others’ - but only if Maggie Brodie, the officially retired, temporary substitute teacher, does not slay the politically correct dragon and save the day.

Given these plot premises, when I entered the Soho theatre and saw Lisa Sangster’s set, I started to worry: on the wall of the classroom, in a series of brightly-coloured everyday words with respective illustrations, the central sequence went: ‘GIRL - FAITH - CAGE’. This, it seemed, would not be a play for the subtly hearted. Fortunately, it turns out that Promises Promises is not at all a play about an issue, nor a tirade against the follies of dumbed-down multiculturalism. Instead, it is a voyage to the centre of Miss Brodie, which moves swiftly and masterfully from comedy to gothic horror story, passing through Miss Brodie’s projection into six-year-old Rosie (or Nadifa), with a definite touch of doppelgänger motives.

Obviously, there is still no escaping the topic at hand: Maggie, in many ways a liberated and progressive middle-aged woman, is being patronized by her much younger headmaster and by a social services officer (whose infantilising tone is fantastically rendered by Joanna Tope in her own one-woman show), mostly in the name of Tolerance. She is furious when she is told she has to put up and even welcome the ritual that will be performed in her class, enraged at this ‘mob of good intentions rampaging, destroying everything in its wake’. Because she is so funny, and because she seems to stand for common sense, and because of course she is the beguiling narrator of this story, we are naturally drawn to take her side.

But Maggie is also a biased, if not altogether unreliable, narrator, and she is someone with a very dark past; in her shiny red shoes, the same colour as Rosie’s, she is on a mission to make things right again, very much like an older Dorothy lost in the absurdities of the Kingdom of Oz - but she is also just as ambiguous as Dorothy, and as confused by her options. Slowly, we find out that this rage in front of her own impotence was not born in this occasion; that she often drinks too much and in fact sounds very much like an alcoholic; that her sister was taken away from her by their father and put into a convent, and that she thus has more than one reason to hate religions. Even her free attitude to sex, the power she keeps telling us she has on men because of the way she walks and the way she touches them, eventually becomes entangled in her more shadowy traits. Joanna Tope delivers Maggie’s sophisticated and twisted personality as it unfolds, without spoiling the surprise too early, and without drowning her in malice or lunacy later on. Maggie’s bond with Rosie, immediately resulting in the child literally following in her footsteps and imitating her gait, is the reason why Rosie shares her terrible secret only with Maggie: not because the latter is the only adult she can trust, but because she recognises in Maggie someone who will, at all costs and with all means, keep her promises.

Rosie being incarnated as never more than a silhouette of light, or a few red footsteps on the floor, reinforces both the uncanny quality of the play’s style and direction, and the indignation-inducing foundations of the plot, with momentous references to childhood torture in a synthetically staged girls’ bathroom. Karen McIver’s music provides a traditionally gothic soundtrack, highlighting the arabesques of words and blood, and Tope seems to control even the amount of gleaming in her eyes, ensuring it is in tune with the pace of the play. Maggie is, perhaps, the one who is really possessed by demons, but thankfully, nothing is quite that clear-cut: Maxwell still keeps his protagonist believable, so that we cannot dismiss either the depth of her misery or the full-scale horror of the episode of which she is protagonist. Maggie and Rosie ‘s stories are equally difficult to forget.

Till 13 March 2010

In 1986 DC Comics published a four issue mini-series called Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. While few would have predicted it prior to its publication, this work of Frank Miller was soon regarded as one of the touchstones for the medium and, through commercial success and critical controversy, almost single-handedly reinvigorated a moribund character. Time magazine suggested the portrayal of a ‘semiretired Batman [who] drinks too much and is unsure about his crime-fighting abilities’ was an example of trying to appeal to ‘today’s sceptical readers’.

Regardless of the criticism which the series received in some quarters, it undoubtedly did appeal to readers and the manner in which its ‘dark’ and ‘adult’ approach were progressively taken up by other comics points to the ‘scepticism’ of those readers being a widespread condition rather than the aberrant property of a cynical minority. The same dark approach lay behind the critical and commercial success which Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight enjoyed at the box office in the summer of 2008. Why is this kind of approach so popular? What explains its manifest resonance amongst vast swathes of the cinema-going and comic-buying public?

Perhaps the answers lies towards the end of the film when Batman and Jim Gordon attempt to make sense of Harvey Dent’s actions, as the brave and virtuous district attorney was driven to attempted murder by the cruel machinations of the joker. The public regard Bent as a hero, but the public face of heroism becomes a fiction, crafted by powerful men in midnight schemes because the masses could not countenance the grim truth and social order necessitates the illusion. The heroism of Harvey Bent becomes a cruel joke, which Batman, alter ego of the billionaire Bruce Wayne, attempts to hide in the best interests of the public. If it wasn’t for his own personal biography, as a man forever damaged by the murder of his parents as a child, he might have channelled this patrician impulse into philanthropy. As it is stands he rushes off into the night, chased by police and dogs, taking the blame for the crimes which Bent committed. His parting words sum up the ethos of the exchange: ‘You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain’. This is the bitter truth which the public must be protected from at all costs. The closest thing to heroism which The Dark Knight portrays is the attempted deception of the public towards this end.

Compare this critically lauded portrayal of heroism within that of another popular film series. While The Dark Knight was an enormous critical success, the Rocky films were, with the partial exceptions of the first and the sixth, critically panned. Yet both, in a sense, portray heroism. Once you look beyond the crass jingoism which frames large aspects of the Rocky series, a rather earnest narrative about heroism and virtue soon comes into focus. Each of the films follows the same format, as constancy and courage enable Rocky Balboa to triumph over adversity. The virtues the films portray have a long moral history in Western culture and yet for most of us the narrative which portrays them is one we struggle to take seriously. While the moralisation of professional boxing probably takes some blame for this, it is by no means the whole story.

What we can take seriously however is The Wire, and, its gritty social realism notwithstanding, it comes equally equipped with its heroes. Foremost among these is stick up boy Omar Little. He prowls Baltimore in his trench coat, with his shotgun slung at his side, robbing drug dealers. With his facial scar, ethical code and fearsome reputation, he becomes a mythic figure known throughout Baltimore. He crafts a mythology from the ruins of deindustrialised desolation and he sustains a heroic existence one day a time. Yet he cannot, ultimately, escape from his surroundings, and he dies ingloriously on the floor of a convenience store after being shot to death by a child.

What message can we take from this? Perhaps that when a hero is reduced to a daily struggle for survival, his or her heroism is unsustainable. The Wire’s realism ultimately conveys, perhaps inadvertently, the impossibility of heroism in the late modern age. We can struggle against the constraints of circumstances and the debasing forces of contemporary times. We can craft an honourable life in the midst of violence and suffering. However the effort required is herculean and inevitably, at least in the long run, beyond us. This is the message conveyed by the sudden and pointless death of Omar, as well as by this sort of social realism more generally.
Yet if we accept this realism I think we have lost something important. Though The Wire itself admirably retains the capacity for imminent social critique, this is the exception rather than the rule and it’s primarily a consequence of the sheer talent of the creators of the series. The ‘scepticism’ which Time magazine suggested was responsible for The Dark Knight’s success has only grown since 1986 and it’s far from a positive cultural trend. The cultural theorist Mark Fisher calls it ‘capitalist realism’: the aestheticisation of capitalist hegemony. As Fisher puts it, ‘capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable’ and, as such, dominates the sensibility and aesthetics of cultural production. However unlike historical instances of a politicised aesthetics, the ensuing cultural style is neither narrowly aesthetic nor superficially political. It manifests itself in a ‘machismo of demythologisation’ which proudly undercuts heroism in the name of psychological realism (‘you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain’) and hope in the name of sociological realism (everything ultimately comes down to power and deceit). It counsels suspicion and scepticism in the name of an acceptance of reality which will help protect us against the ideological machinations of the powerful.

In fact its acceptance helps, in a sense, bring about the reality it purports to reflect. The philosopher Slavoj Žižek suggests that, far from being a post-ideological acceptance of sheer reality, contemporary cynicism is profoundly ideological in character because its hyperbolic fixation on the worst the world has to offer (cruelty, corruption, deceit) and its suspicion towards those ideals and practices seen to provide masks for that deceit (heroism, morality, authority) leaves us mired in an apathetic irony (unable to take the possibility of social change seriously or think beyond present circumstances). The sad truth is that, as he puts it, ‘even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them’. The error lies, he argues, in an overvaluing of belief. Far from representing an act of resistance, the subjective disavowal of the cynic (eg, ‘don’t you know all politics is manipulative bullshit?’) facilitates their objective complicity (a passive disengagement from political life). This cynicism precludes critique as well as protection. It simply engenders an subjective anger and an objective impotence. It also cruelly erodes the kind of social historical vantage points which would be necessary to address the question of overcoming it. Therefore in their absence perhaps the first step is to take Rocky a bit more seriously and Batman a little less so? 

You can tell the measure of a Measure by the way it treats its prisoners. In 2004, Complicité’s Claudio – dressed in an obligatory orange jumpsuit – was incarcarated in a complex of maximum security; all laser-beams and retina-scanners. By contrast, Michael Attenborough’s thoroughly intelligent staging casts its inmates in the denims and ankle-shackles of a Folsom concert crowd.

If, six years on, the political prisoners have been replaced by romanticised ne’erdowells, the authorities remain the play’s villains. Only, this time, the crimes they commit are different. Paranoid abuse of authority is replaced by a damning hypocrisy. Ben Miles’s Duke begins pacing his chaotic study, fidgeting with the fixtures in an attempt to shake off lascivious thoughts of strippers. He puts on one habit to throw off another. Likewise Rory Kinnear’s Angelo seems more culpable for his own lusty descent than for his broken promises to free Claudio. At least those hustlers and whores that stalk this very East End Vienna are honest in their lecherous lifestyles.

This is, you may have sensed, a production driven by canny characterisation rather than design. What it offers, even where some are less persuasive than others, are interesting subversions of classic roles.

Best of all is Kinnear, whose physical attributes force him to delve deeper into Shakespeare’s lead in search of credible answers. His Angelo is a portrait of repression. He enters every inch the office clerk – square glasses, short-sleeved shirt and beige trousers so ill-fitting they could be worn backwards – and quickly renovates himself as a slick-suited, greasy example of contrived masculinity. There is an easy comparison with Sam West’s Jeffrey Skilling, who shares the same over-confident authority spun from nothing.

This super-imposed show of strength makes Anna Maxwell-Martin’s fervent Isabella a well-matched sparring partner. Their first real locking of horns is eked for every last drop of drama, such that when Kinnear eventually delivers a death sentence on her brother, his words thud like arrows into a target. While her stillness gives way to a slow-crumple, he kneads his palms nervously under the table.

Yet for all that Maxwell-Martin’s individual choices are strong, she doesn’t quite knit Isabella into a concrete whole. She brings an unconscious, albeit uncomfortable, sexuality to the role, sliding herself slowly up from her chair with a sliver of sensuality not dissimilar to the lap-dancers of the Duke’s imagination. Rather brilliantly, there is also an ugly goodness – malnourished rather than wholesome – about her over-zealous piety, suggested by hands gnarled into crooked claws. She’s right, of course, but too strong in her scorn for others. Her lofty morality manifests itself in an unattractive superiority from which emerges a withering contempt for pathetic men. Her rebuttal of the Duke’s final proposal – which also undermines his own nobility – is silent rather than sympathetic.

Attenborough’s production is less successful in its treatment of the play’s broader comedy. Lloyd Hutchinson’s harsh-toned Lucio is more irritating than lubricating and, as a Pompey become bouncer, Trevor Cooper doesn’t quite match the inspiration of his initial casting. For all that the underclass are victorious in this cartoonish class war, they themselves cannot match the authorities for interest.

Regardless, this is a superb production – the sort that makes you reassess your list of Shakespearean favourites – and, in Kinnear, it is driven by a tremendous central performance. By the end, as his hands returned to his sheepish side, Angelo seemed to me the exact opposite of Malvolio: a man most notoriously absolved.

Till 10 April 2010

When Thomas Bernhard died in 1989, one year after the opening of this play had been greeted by journalistic attacks and public outrage, his will blocked his theatrical works from being produced or published within the Austrian borders. And yet in apparent contrast with this extreme choice, it is possible that Bernhard had anticipated, and perhaps even encouraged, the reactions elicited by Heldenplatz: it was maybe him, maybe his friend Klaus Peymann (also the director of the Burgtheater, where the play was being staged), or maybe his publisher Suhrkamp, who leaked some carefully chosen lines from this damning, painful text to the press in the days before the opening. Once the text was actually circulated (a full 24 hours after the first night), popular rage at Bernhard’s attack against his own country was such that he was even assaulted in the street.

Meredith Oakes and Andrea Tierney’s new translation of Heldenplatz, directed by Annie Castledine and Annabel Arden at the Arcola, makes it obvious to see why the play was found so upsetting. We begin in a flat that faces the famous Heldenplatz in Vienna, in 1988, where an older and a younger housekeeper are nervously tiptoeing around the recent suicide of their Jewish home owner, Professor Schuster, while ironing his white shirts and polishing his shoes, and emptying the suitcases he had prepared for a trip to Oxford that will now never take place. The not-too-subtle symbolism of the suitcases is made more unequivocal by the directors’ choice to have all the other characters wait for their turn at the outskirts of the scene, dressed in black 1940s clothes on which are stitched bright, obedient yellow stars of David (later on, a character will reinforce the connection by saying, with apparent nonchalance: ‘The sight of luggage has always been terrible to me’).

As the housekeepers discuss the Professor’s personality and temper, two fundamental things emerge. The first one is a somehow typical, unspeakable undercurrent of tension, cruelty and sadism, that same feeling of glass shards lying just underneath the surface that one gets when reading Elfriede Jelinek’s novels. In this psychologically violent context, Barbara Marten as Frau Zittel, her bright blue eyes shining icily from her mourning outfit, is as frighteningly controlling and submitted as you can possibly wish her to be. The second thing made clear during the first few minutes of the play is that the Professor jumped out of a window because of his discouragement and desperation at the state of his country, a state that reminded him of the year which made Heldenplatz famous in history: 1938, when Hitler was cheered enthusiastically by the Austrian population as he entered the square. These same loud cheers are still being heard fifty years later by the Professor’s wife, in regular fits that overtake her since they moved back from Oxford, where they had escaped during the war, to this particular flat in Vienna.

In Berhnard’s falsely lulling theatrical style, we are rocked rhythmically back to recurring considerations over the new, fresh rise of antisemitism in Austria throughout the rest of evening, each line bringing us nearer to the center of the spiral, until we are so close and the noise is so loud and the violence so incandescently bright that we can barely control our pulse. It is uncle Robert, the Professor’s brother, who, in spite of his resignation, delivers the most scalding condemnations against the Austrians, during a long and foggy scene at a cemetery, as he sits white-faced but gentlemanly with his two nieces: ‘The Viennese are Jewhaters and will remain Jewhaters to all eternity’; ‘this Austrian stupidity is utterly repulsive’; Austrians are nothing else but ‘six and half million feeble-minded raving mad people/screaming incessantly at the top of their voices for a director’ - and the director, who had already come once, will come again and ‘give them the final push down the abyss’.

The black and white rigor of Iona McLeish’s set, the clock ticking louder and louder, the cacophony of moods during a family dinner of dissonant dialogues and geometrically angled cutlery, they all turn the screws tighter and tighter. Yet the atmosphere remains reasonably civilised - until, that, is we first hear those cheers ourselves, the hysterical chanting to Hitler,  and then they seem so wildly unexpected and yet so obviously anticipated that it is hard, if not impossible, not to find them profoundly affecting and upsetting. And one can understand why this would be a deeply uncomfortable truth to be told about ourselves, for any of us whose grandparents might have been complicit of the cheering, and again here and now, at a time when in the aftermath of a recession, hatred is once again raising its head.

Till 6 March 2010

Boris Johnson has made a virtue of opposing the construction of towers in London. One of his first appointees was former Westminster Council leader Simon Milton, a fierce critic of towers, who was named chief advisor on planning days after Boris took office. The hype that surrounded this appointment and Boris’ anti-tower policy claimed that under Ken Livingstone London was on its way to becoming Dubai-on-Thames. Aside from the factual inaccuracy of this statement (see below), London already had a strict anti-tower policy in place maintained by a number of planning departments, quangos, and conservation groups. As London prepares to get out of the recession the question of towers will become important once again. It is worth challenging Boris’ policy and making a case for the construction of more skyscrapers in London.

The conservation lobby’s favourite phrase when it comes to towers in London is that they are ‘visually intrusive.’ In fact, what is really visually intrusive is the sight of so many organisations working to halt the development of London and freeze it in time. The unchallenged assumption that such bodies promote is that the existing condition of London cannot be bettered and that any modern development needs to be modest in comparison to historic buildings. This self-effacing ethos is truly baffling: if the architects of St Paul’s Cathedral or the Palace of Westminster had followed the same reasoning, neither would have been designed as ambitiously as they were. The conservationists’ attitude, and Boris Johnson has firmly established himself within that camp, betrays a lack of faith in our generation’s ability to produce buildings of equal quality.

The outstanding buildings that have been built in London over the past few years show that this pessimism is wholly unjustified. The Gherkin, the London Eye, and the Millennium Dome have not only displayed ambitious architecture and cutting-edge technology but have quickly become symbols of London. The Dome may have been a PR disaster, but it broke new grounds in architecture and engineering, illustrating what British firms are capable of if given the chance. Yet the critics curiously insist on seeing these as the exceptions rather than the norm. This partially explains why the most talented architects and engineers in the UK have to do their best work abroad.

Before and since taking office, Boris has thrown his rather hefty weight around in opposition to several high-rise schemes, such as Ian Simpson’s Beetham Tower on Blackfriars Road, Allies & Morrison’s ‘Three Sisters’ on York Road, and Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands’ Doon Street. Armed with new mayoral powers that allow him to order local councils to refuse applications, Boris has become the uncertain element in the equation for developers planning high-rise buildings in London. However, Boris’ policy on, or against, towers has not yet become the subject of intense public debate, because his term has coincided with the recession, forcing most developers to shelve or postpone their planned schemes. In a sense, economic stagnation carried out Boris’ policy on his behalf. But as we prepare, or so the theory goes, to get out of the recession, several schemes are expected to be revived, and with them Boris’ anti-tower policy.

A closer look at the Dubai-on Thames claim reveals how ludicrous it is, and how misguided Boris is in making opposition to towers a central plank of his planning policy. Between 2000 and 2009, 34 high-rise schemes (taller than 100m) were proposed in London, compared to 111 in Dubai. (Source: http://skyscraperpage.com) The Dubai towers are nearly all concentrated along one road, the London towers spread around a much larger city. The tallest tower in Dubai is 828m, the tallest in London will be 300m (the yet-to-be-built The Shard by Tower Bridge, designed by Renzo Piano.) The average height of a London tower in this category is 150m; the average in Dubai is twice as high at 300m. Furthermore, most of the Dubai towers are either finished or under construction, few of the London towers have been completed.

Not that I am opposed to the idea of Dubai-on-Thames – in fact I think it’s a rather exciting prospect – but the idea that the few modest buildings planned for London threatened to transform it into a Dubai-like city is the product of a very fertile imagination with little grasp of the facts. In reality most of the opposition to high-rise buildings is based on a conservative outlook expressed in a highly moralistic language. The ‘visual intrusion’ that so many of the critics of skyscrapers deride is the intrusion of the 21st century into our contemporary fields of vision. However, this is not simply a clash of modern versus traditional, but a wholesale abandonment of ambitious development as a valid path of progress. Even the advocates of high-rise buildings have to coach their support in the language of sustainability, arguing that they make more environmental sense. Even more ludicrously, designers have to go out of their way to prove that towers have a minimal impact on the skyline of London in order to gain consent, begging the question of why would you bother to build a tower if you don’t want it to be visible!

While Boris has come to represent the rounded end of the anti-skyscraper spear, in London, in truth the opposition runs much deeper and wider. It ranges from curmudgeonly individuals who regard every proposal for a tower in London as a personal insult to themselves, to local councils who, with few exceptions such as the more enlightened City of London and Southwark, regard towers with the dread usually reserved for invading barbarians, to a variety of official and semi-official outfits whose chief function is to put the case against development. In a typical development in London, designers have to deal with the local council’s planning department, consult with the local community and ‘stakeholders’, a very flexible definition that allows any busybody to have a say on the development in question, English Heritage (who as a principle regard the 20th century as one lengthy mistake), CABE (the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment), who serve as a sort of taste police monitoring ‘design’ as if it’s a separate entity from the rest of the scheme, and the Minister of State for London.

Into this already crowded scene steps the Mayor and the GLA with the full force of the law behind them, with powers to cajole and bully designers and developers into modifying their schemes downwards and if all else fails reject them altogether. Boris has used these powers to galvanise the anti-high-rise sentiment into an object of policy. So far, he has gotten away with this unchallenged. But it is incumbent on us, those who welcome the prospect of transforming London’s skyline into an exciting scene that represents the city’s dynamism, to publicly challenge this short-sighted and un-ambitious policy. This requires challenging not only Boris Johnson’s anti-tower bias, but the entire planning context that regards any development proposal as ‘guilty until proven innocent’.

The cultural dimension of this opposition should also be challenged. We often hear words like ‘vanity’ and ‘greed’ brandished around when discussing high-rise towers, and they are often seen as the representation of the nasty side of capitalism. But this only reflects the esoteric context within which this debate is carried out, the assumption that any developer in the UK would sink hundreds of millions of pounds into ‘vanity’ projects is as ignorant of economic facts as it is the result of a general sense of pessimism. What makes towers attractive to developers is that they represent a solution to the shortage of space in dense contexts. Towers make particular sense in London where available land is always at a premium. In fact, high-rise projects often create a much better condition on the ground, freeing up valuable space for public use. The bias against towers is largely a manifestation of the prevalent culture of low expectations that looks at any ambitious development with suspicion. The ‘phallic symbols’ seen by tower critics are products of their own dirty minds.

Towers do indeed have a symbolic value, they represent the ambitions and power of a society on its way up. New York would not be the same without its famous skyscrapers, which once represented the optimism and ambition of America. The reason thousands of people move to London every year is not to enjoy the ‘uncorrupted’ view of the Treasury from St James’s Park as Boris Johnson and his deputy mayor for planning Simon Milton seem to think, but to be part of the dynamic metropolitan experience that London has to offer. It is only befitting that the city’s skyline should be allowed to reflect this dynamism, and a few more houses and nicer offices wouldn’t hurt either. Time to tell the Mayor who takes pride in setting his sights low to retrain his sights and aim higher. Boris, don’t stand in the way of progress.

Karl Sharro is an architect and writer based, grudgingly, in a low-rise building in London. Visit his website. 

The visualisation company Hayes Davidson has developed a tool to allow members of the public to design their own London skylines.

Stella Gonet was the first Titiana I saw; I remember being faintly shocked by her randy Fairy Queen, who tussled loudly with a man named Bottom in a huge, swinging hammock. That was at the Barbican in 1995 and, as a young girl, I was frightened a little by this prowling Fairy Queen; she also lent the play a veneer of sophistication and ‘adultness’ that somehow pushed me away.

Yet A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a play that is obsessed with young love and young people. This is perhaps why Gonet’s horny Titania upset – she felt too grown up. Judi Dench, now in her 70s, might not be the obvious choice to solve this problem, yet her performance is remarkably youthful, innocent and free.

Dench’s Titiana is both regal and ridiculous. In the opening scene, Dench is a dead-ringer for Elizabeth I, processing smoothly above and amongst her subjects. But the clues to her later transformation are there from the start: though she sweeps about in a majestic gown, two white forms sprout up from behind her dress, faintly reminiscent of angel’s wings. Once under Oberon’s spell and trapped by Bottom’s questionable charms, Dench’s early commanding presence melts away and her Titiana dissolves into a giddy school-girl, in love for the first time. 

Dench abandons herself to the role and finds real innocence in her performance. Everything about her feels young: her smile is impossibly wide and her laugh guttural and unconscious as she fawns over her ass, clinging onto his furry form and affectionately joining in with his snorting laughter. To see one of our finest, most experienced actors drool over a donkey only notches up the silliness of these scenes, as well as highlighting Shakespeare’s talent for conjuring up near-impossible fantasies, yet somehow making them believable on-stage.

Dench’s playfulness is systematic of the light, whimsical feel to Peter Hall’s absorbing Rose Theatre production. The show is underpinned by a desire to have fun with Shakespeare; a quality that is sometimes lost in more ‘complicated’, modern-day productions. Hall achieves this playful feeling by encouraging exuberant but unfussy performances from his actors and creating little interference on-stage. The floor is black, the props kept to a minimum and the scenery sketched in with some clever lighting; these simple stage effects allow the piece to skip along at quite a pace and prevent any feeling of formality creeping in.

The smooth staging and unfettered performances mean the show often feels more like a drama festival, a family Christmas schtick, than a Shakespeare production. This is just as it is should be and means that Bottom and his amateur actor pals, rehearsing a sublimely awful play to perform to Theseus, fit in seamlessly with the overall production. In fact, whereas sometimes this framework involving Bottom and his pals can feel a little stiff - tagged onto a more formal, ethereal Shakespeare play – here, this paltry but plucky group of performers set the tone for this bubbling, high-energy production.

Chris Jones as Bottom absolutely owns the stage, which juts into the audience and allows him to grab hold of the audience instantly. It is a performance packed with natural comic flourishes – silly gestures, winks, lewd noises, whatever feels right at the time – from an actor unfazed and inspired by Shakespeare. From amateur actor to ass, he is an explosive and addictive presence on-stage and when his slow-mo death finally arrives, the audience is reluctant to let him go.

Bottom is obviously comic gold, but there are nuggets lurking everywhere in this production and none more sparkling than Charles Edwards’ Oberon. Looking and sounding like Dr Who in fancy dress, Edwards plays the Fairy King as a limelight-hogging Queen. Edwards sulks, struts, gossips and meddles his way through the play in a vibrantly camp performance, which works well with Dench’s giddy transformation.

There are notably tougher, more complicated roles in this play and Rachael Stirling, though she is an undoubtedly powerful actress, feels slightly out of synch with the show. Her Helena is the character on the wrong side of young love and her absolute submittal to the dashing Demetrius sometimes feels too painful in this relatively painless production.

Reese Ritchie also has some problems as Puck – he can cackle and pounce across stage as much as he likes, but his Puck is missing some punch. It is a gem of a role – open to bold, unique interpretations – but Ritchie misses the mark, hovering somewhere between frightening and fun. 

That the two palpably darker roles stutter slightly is perhaps indicative of a production that, although deeply enjoyable, can feel a touch light in places. But does that really matter in a play that ends with a spectacularly awful amateur production, which is largely there for big, belly laughs? This is a play that both celebrates and laughs at the illusion of theatre and the illusion of young love - something that Hall’s production recognises and recreates quite wonderfully.

Till 20 March

Doing politics

This week on CW, as speakers are announced for the London Pre-Election Summit: the Battle for Politics on Saturday 20 March, Luke Gittos reviews James Fishkin’s When the People Speak, and argues that ‘deliberative democracy’ is more deliberate than democratic. Simon Belt explains how the Manchester Salon is filling a gap in the market for critical debate. Cheryl Hudson is disappointed by the political banality of the otherwise enjoyable My Name is Khan, while Sarah Boyes participates in a politically unchallenging poetic performance on the legacy of 1968, and Timandra Harkness finds a little bit of politics in The Gambler at the Royal Opera. Meanwhile, Matt Trueman reviews some comedy.

25 February 2010

The upcoming general election will see the political class fighting for the attention of voters who appear to have given up on politics all together. It almost seems like a waste of time having an election in the first place. After all, when you ask the public to give their opinion, it always comes out wrong. James Fishkin’s new book proceeds from the premise that the public, like children, say a lot of stupid things that we don’t really think. Luckily, Fishkin has the system to smarten us up.

Fishkin identifies four problems with mass opinion. Firstly, it is difficult to motivate citizens in society to become informed about an issue to the point that their view becomes valuable. In a system where every vote certainly does not count, it becomes rational to remain ignorant, rather than waste your time forming opinions about issues which will never have any impact. Secondly, where respondents do not know about an issue they are more likely to pick an answer at random, and distort the final results of the poll, than admit to their ignorance. Thirdly any genuine opinions that emerge tend to be as a result of closed political discussions with a close group of friends or family who usually share the same views. People rarely put their relationships at risk by discussing politics with people they may disagree with and consequently, are rarely put in a position where their own orthodoxies can be challenged. All of this leads to mass opinion, which is highly vulnerable to manipulation through sound bites, emotive headlines and expensive advertising campaigns.

Fishkin imagines that in order to remedy these ‘problems’ with public opinion, people should be incentivised to come together on a given day to discuss a political question and be given proper time to think about their opinion. The aim of the discussion is for the public to achieve ‘high quality deliberation’ in ‘good conditions for thinking about public issues’. You may say ‘so far so good’, but it is these ‘conditions’ that expose Fishkin’s subtle prejudices about the electorate and raise questions as to how ‘deliberative democracy’ changes the relationship between representative and represented.

Fishkin’s perfect debate is one in which each side nominates an expert to argue their corner and prepare briefing materials for the participants to be taken through. It is important that no-one presenting in the discussion ‘dominates’ or ‘polarises’ as these will ‘distort’ the view of public opinion that emerges at the end of the debate. Through providing information, insuring that a diversity of opinions are represented and by weighing the arguments on their merits the participants emerge with opinions that they are motivated to act upon, which may have unseated some of their lazier orthodoxies and as ac consequence will be less susceptible to manipulation by weak arguments. The participants’ views are registered at the end of the day as an accurate reflection of the public’s thoughts on an issue. Ideally this should then be acted upon to make the deliberators feels as though ‘their voice matters’. The democratic process is complete.

The first point to recognise about deliberative democracy is that it is driven by prejudices about the electorate. By arguing that meaningful political discussion and debate can only take place if each drop of information is fed to the participants by expert, Fishkin implies that we are unable to properly consider political argument in the real world. In reality, political debate takes place in all kinds of environments where the discussions are frequently dominated, polarised, misinformed and bigoted. Over time, though, the ideas that succeed are those that prove persuasive in spite of the ‘distorted’ environment they are discussed in. No doubt bad ideas can hold sway for a time, but it is only by defeating these in the cut and thrust of debate, however polarised, that better ideas ultimately convince people. The aspects of political debate that Fishkin identifies as ‘distortions’ are in fact essential to real world debate.

The second point about deliberative democracy is that it provides an easy route for the political class to obtain legitimisation from the public, without actually winning any arguments themselves. Historically, political parties have had to convince the public that their vision of society is the correct one in order to be elected or re-elected, with legitimacy coming after this battle of persuasion and leadership had been won. With deliberative democracy, the process is inverted, in that the political class seeks legitimacy from the public prior to arguing any ideas of their own. This not only demonstrates a profound delegation of authority from the political class to the experts who are charged with extracting these anaemic opinions from the public, but also represents a deeply cynical rejection of democratic principles.

Fishkin is not apologetic about these aspects of deliberative democracy; in fact he celebrates them. He tells an anecdote about a deliberative poll in China that sought to obtain a scientific sample of public opinion about where and how investment in infrastructure should be distributed. He begins:

‘The…case highlights the issue of how deliberations by the people might be connected, institutionally to deliberations by actual decision makers…formal authority is not necessary to have an input…both formal authority and advisory connections to decision makers are worth experimenting with to make the thoughtful and representative voice of the public consequential’

He then quotes Mr Jiang (the minister who commissioned the poll) explaining how he had gained legitimacy through this process, ‘I gave up power and found that I got more’. This is surely a degraded idea of ‘democracy’. Fishkin seems more interested in extracting approval from the public in order to legitimise the power of the elites, than in giving the public a role in political change. Democracy should mean that power is challenged and limited in response to political decisions, not confirmed in advance of them. The remarks of the Chinese minister illustrate how deliberative democracy relegates the public in the democratic process to an advisory role to the ‘real decision makers’; this widens the gap between the political class and the electorate rather than bridging it.

At a time when political culture has reached its lowest ebb, it is tempting for politicians to try and tease ‘opinions’ from an uninterested public through managed and inclusive exercises such as deliberative polling. But it is not a replacement for politics. Fishkin’s theory of ‘deliberative democracy’ is imbued with prejudices about our own ability to deal with tough political arguments, and also has the potential to alter the role of the electorate into one of a political consultancy. Whether or not this election is fought on the basis of any ideological conflict remains to be seen; we should be wary about accepting the scientifically sterile debates which constitute deliberative democracy as a substitute.

My Name is Khan broke global box office records as the largest grossing Bollywood movie worldwide in its opening weekend, including in the United States, Britain, Australia, and the Middle East, while in Mumbai itself the film opened successfully despite advance opposition from chauvinist politicians who objected to its cosmopolitan message. The film also made a critical splash internationally, receiving rave reviews from Mumbai to New York.

The movie’s critical and commercial success can be explained in part by its fusionist approach, it’s merging of mainstream Hollywood and Bollywood themes and techniques. Its two main characters, Rizvan Khan (Shah Rukh Khan) and Mandira (Kajol) and its director Karan Johar are all up-and-coming Bollywood stars. The film is shot on location in India and the US (it contains some magnificent cinematography), and is distributed by the Fox International studio group. The global appeal of My Name is Khan is also no doubt due to the fact that it deals with the themes of terrorism and the West’s war upon it, tracing the devastating impact of 9/11 on a Muslim man (and his family) living in America.

But Khan is no ordinary Muslim. He has Asperger’s Syndrome, which, rather than acting as an affliction, allows him to break convention, see through and overcome intolerance, and speak truth to power. Khan grows up in Mumbai under the loving and watchful eye of his mother, following his brother to San Francisco after she dies. He spends much of the first half of the film clumsily but successfully wooing Mandira, an American-born Hindu woman with a young son. Following the 9/11 attack and the subsequent increase in anti-Muslim prejudice, a family tragedy impels him to journey across the United States in search of the president so that he may tell him ‘My name is Khan and I am not a terrorist’.

The opening scene is among the most powerful of the film. It traces the painful progression of Khan through a post 9/11 American airport full of fearful and paranoid people. He is a Muslim man wearing a backpack and acting in a visibly nervous and socially awkward way, never making eye contact (symptoms of Asperger’s rather than evidence of guilty wrongdoing), and draws stares and suspicion from his fellow passengers. Finally, airport security guards lead him away for a full body and baggage search but when they find nothing incriminating, Khan tells them of his innocence and how he plans to meet the president. The security guard laughs and asks Khan to ‘Say howdy’ to the president from him too. Noting the guard’s name badge, Khan writes in his notebook that ‘John Marshall’ wishes to pass his regards to George W Bush. John Marshall, of course, was also the name of the greatest Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in US history.

Unfortunately, the film fails to live up to the promise of this opening. While the love story is moving and there are some emotionally powerful scenes, the film’s central message is finally just banal. As a boy, Khan learns from his mother that the fighting between Hindu and Muslim is pointless and wrong since there are only two kinds of people in the world, ‘good’ people and ‘bad’ people. The only result of hatred and intolerance is, we learn, many mothers’ tears. Khan’s marriage to a Hindu woman demonstrates his own inability to hate, his own ‘goodness’. Yet, rather than the message being a means to overcome divisions caused by identity politics, the tolerance the film preaches is a means of reinforcing an acceptance of separate identities. The post 9/11 discrimination Muslims face forces them to hide the outward symbols of their ethnic and religious identities. Khan’s determination to overcome this prejudice encourages other Muslims to reclaim these symbols again, pointedly demonstrated by Khan’s sister-in-law Haseena (Sonya Jeehan) who re-embraces her hijab as a part of her denied self. 

In post 9/11 America, Khan remembers his mother’s teaching well. So, rather than a serious and intelligent study of the political impact of the 9/11 attacks on American Muslims, the film unfortunately descends into a simplistic morality tale. While the landscapes of Khan’s American travels are spectacular, the people he meets are grotesque caricatures. White America is unrelentingly ‘bad’, racist and violent, while black America is depicted as ‘good’ in the soulful victims of a hurricane ‘Mama Jenny’ (Jennifer Echols) and her son ‘Crazy hair’ Joel (Adrian Kali Turner).

The most grotesque caricatures come, however, in the person of the US presidents. George W Bush and his followers represent the hate and fear that must be overcome by dark-skinned people in the US and worldwide. Obama represents a new dawn, the possibilities of love, hope and peace: not just in his politics but in the colour of his skin, he offers something new, something ‘good’. It bears pointing out that the black-and-white morality of the film is simply a mirror image of the War on Terror itself, with Bush’s position that ‘You are either with us or against us’ flipped; the good guys are differently cast but no political complexity is added, indeed it is simplified further.

It is perhaps refreshing to see a depiction of black America redeeming the sins of white America and interesting to have a portrait of post 9/11 politics as seen through Muslim eyes. In one of the best scenes, Khan is refused entry to a charity dinner at which the president is speaking, despite having the £500 entrance fee, since he is not a Christian. He instructs the administrator to keep his entrance fee ‘for all the non-Christians in Africa’. The film admirably punctures hypocrisy but ultimately it tries to do too much, to be too many things, to be too worthy, and to solve the world’s problems. 

The central and most interesting issue the film sets out to deal with – how Muslims experience and respond to life in post 9/11 America – becomes obscured and caricatured and finally obliterated so that what is left is a kind of postcolonial Forrest Gump. Is life really just a box of chocolates?

It’s an innovative initiative: use performance poetry to explore the ‘60s and their legacy through the music that was made, loved, played and listened to. As performer Adisa quickly points out, for many these years were shot through with the idea that ‘the personal is political’; the desire for self-expression, new forms of connection and engagement and the breaking out of old restrictive identities shaping a generation. Yet as this show goes into the second half, and Adisa takes off a lively chat show preacher with his commercialised radical message on ‘Revolution TV’, it’s today’s cynicism – and cynicism about the cynicism – that really gets under your skin.

1968: the year that never ended is an apt name for what serves as a striking example of today’s celebration of cultural differences in terms of race. Indeed, there is something in being proud of who you are; something more difficult in deciding what it means to be good at what you do, and you hope that Adisa might next time turn his talents to a topic that reflects a little less the dominant mainstream view. A one-man show plus special guest (Randolph Matthews), it traces the childhood and early adulthood of a second generation immigrant, caught on the cusp between old and new, with a father who smacks him and a mother who unhappily confides in her son. This is honestly more victim than happy bunny. Though it’s also a story of self-definition, of growing up – whose most moving moments are actually caught up with feelings of loss, of the permanently distant father who dies, the giving up of past – the open nature of the new. That Adisa has worked in an educational setting comes as no surprise.

In fact, this piece is set to interrogate themes of leadership, and the father-son motif works well. Adisa is a lively performer as he leaps and laughs around the stage, telling us about what it was like to be young and playing two-people games on his own, trying to DJ and not having the right accent, beefing up and finally finding a girlfriend. The sense is more one of self-belief, but one which can at times genuinely push out into the world. A touching moment is when this young man discovers new types of music, reggae, afrobeat…classical! It is okay to like classical, it is okay, hooray! It’s the music that touches and communicates, helps people open up – and perhaps discover new ideas and ways of being in the world. And it’s the music of 68 that we have appropriated, and relate to, now.

The final night of a national tour, the show has been presented by Renaissance One, who specialise in contemporary literature, poetry and the spoken word, and are - perhaps testament to the hint of revival in performance poetry - ten years old this year. A successful tour around the country shows the draw of their approach to contemporary audiences. But by Adisa’s end-of-show audience-participation chants of ‘1, 9, 6, 8 – who do we appreciate?’, this generally engaging act seems to have forgotten what the answer might be. He’s maybe not the only one. 

I’ve been to a wide variety of meetings about politics in my time, and now organise regular Manchester Salon discussions. This event at the City Inn hotel in Manchester appealled because it was being organised by Total Politics as a Question Time event ahead of the forthcoming general election. The format was a traditional three way head to head between Labour (Tony Lloyd MP, Manchester Central), Conservatives (Graham Brady MP, Altrincham & Sale West) and Liberal (Mark Hunter MP, Cheadle) with the fourth panel member being David Ottewell, chief reporter at Manchester Evening News. Shane Greer, executive editor of Total Politics chaired the event.

Arriving at the City Inn for the Question Time, we were greeted with free flowing wine or beer and delightful canapes with a 70s theme served by a large number of very attentive and well organised staff. Prepared by the invitation reminder, I came armed with a couple of questions to ask, but no announcement was made about what to do with these. Thankfully I was stood by the person who had the pile of written questions, so I got to know where they were being collected. Collating questions behind the scenes without encouraging anyone on the night to write them seemed to miss the chance to engage the audience and encourage the widest scope of questions. More alarming was the fact that the pile of questions weren’t actually being looked through or read by anyone ahead of starting the Question Time, which came across like going through the motions of ‘involvement’ in the way ‘listening’ councils ask you what colour you’d like the ‘No Alcohol Here’ signs to be.

The first question, predictably, was whether the investigation into the way MPs claimed their expenses was a waste of money. To his credit Graham Brady just said that the claiming of expenses was a way of boosting salaries endorsed by the infrastructure of parliament and it would just have been better to be open and honest about paying MPs more. But both Mark Hunter and Tony Lloyd then went on to say that they as politicians didn’t want to have the responsibility for deciding on MPs salaries or expenses themselves and would like someone else to do it for them. Lloyd insisted he believed the political process was the most efficient way of changing the world, and yet he’d prefer some unelected technocrat to decide on his own pay because he doesn’t trust himself to make the right decision. And they wonder why people don’t trust politicians.

The next selected question on whether taxing bank to bank transactions could help deal with climate change began to irritate some of those who felt somewhat alienated from the political process in general and in this rather anodyne meeting, with questions being shouted out and suggestions that the all male platform was dull. Alas, it was all a little thrashing about in the dark, literally given the subdued lighting, but clearly there is a frustration with the way in which we are all being disenfranchised -  the public and politicians alike. Although Total Politics and these Question Time formats are responding to this depoliticisation, the overly posh approach that emphasises style over substance, with politicians rather desperately trying to win approval through self-flagellation, isn’t going to solve it. Alas it will need some real politics and a sharp and critically honest assertion of self interest and how best we can achieve it.

For instance, the dull Question Time format with managerially-focused questions could be replaced with a more critical assessment of the process of what’s happening to democracy today. The naughty-but-nice mini burger canapes we were served after the Question Time with yet more free booze were as good a place to start as any. Nice partly because it’s flavoursome but also nice because it naughtily kicks against culinary correctness. The Junk food: myth and metaphor discussion organised by the Manchester Salon in February was premised on the idea that such orthodoxies need to be challenged explicitly. And our immigration debate in March will open up a discussion that’s been closed down by politicians too scared of their own shadow, and attempt to pose a positive case for open borders without blaming the public for nationalist rhetoric or racism.

With the election campaign gearing up to be narrower and more timid than any other, the Manchester Salon is lining up a series of critical discussions that aim to get to the heart of why politics is in decline and totally transform it. To join the Manchester Salon mailing list, contact us and suggest the topics you feel passionate about and want to have opened up to a more critical debate.

Perhaps ironically for an opera about the thrill of the roulette table, this production seems determined to keep the audience off the casino floor for as long as possible.

Beneath a huge but low-grade illuminated ‘Casino’ sign, a red-haired woman paces anxiously in an anonymous coat. Finally a small door opens and Alexei emerges. He’s done as she said and pawned the jewellery, but all the money is lost.  This is not going to be an opera that glamorises gambling. Dostoyevsky, who wrote the book on which it’s based, was a compulsive gambler for much of his life.

But it’s about much more than the urge to stake everything on chance. Act one begins properly in the zoo, where Alexei’s employer the General (Alexei’s a tutor, little more than a servant) tells him off for gambling. Alexei answers ironically, ‘Don’t try to win your money, earn it by honest toil and endeavour!’

But it’s quickly clear that the General is also living beyond his means, borrowing money at exorbitant rates from the Marquis while waiting for the aged Babulenka to die and leave him her fortune. Polina, the General’s ward - the redhead who was so desperate for Alexei’s winnings - has no money of her own either.

Prokofiev finished this opera in 1917, when a certain revolution interrupted plans to produce it at Moscow’s Mariinsky Theatre. And the tensions of class, of who has money or must be seen to have money, are central. Owning nothing, Alexey has no chance of success with Polina, for whom he nurses a hopeless passion, on just his tutor’s wages. Add to this his impulsive nature, and it’s no wonder he likes a flutter.

Prokofiev took his own risks with the musical style of the piece. There are no romantic tunes here to whistle on the way home. The whole opera is a dense pudding of prose set to conversational rhythms – great for understanding the drama, but demanding for the audience. Without big musical cues, and with no arias to break it up, the staging and performance really have to give this piece structure, and under Richard Jones’s direction it does carry the audience along.

The production is rich in the comedy (and tragedy) of class, but it throws in a more modern take on human frailty. At the Zoo, with its false-perspective rows of cages, the characters lean on a rail and look out to the audience, as if we too were animals in a pen. And this animal imagery carries through the whole piece. Even in the hotel corridor, paintings of monkeys fencing and dining tell us clearly, ‘You’re not so different as you think from mere beasts’.

Act two moves nearer to the casino, but only as far as the hotel lounge, where the general’s assurances to the Marquis that his Babulenka is as good as dead already are interrupted – by the arrival of Babulenka herself, feeling much better and keen to do some gambling. Her ungrateful relatives are not pleased with this news, and Alexey mischievously offers to help her enjoy her wealth by staking it at roulette.

Before long, reports reach the General – and his mistress, Blanche, to whom he’s been waiting to propose – that Babulenka has lost everything. Blanche hears the bad news from Prince Nilsky, and in a few moments he is showing her into his room. The general is furious, ranting that in Russia, Babulenka would be arrested – ‘Judges would restrain her!’ Presumably the very reason all of them are in the fictional German town of Roulettenburg instead.

In her room Babulenka, smaller, greyer, sadder, hits the vodka. Across the corridor Polina reads a letter from the Marquis, who has abandoned her to her debts. ‘Ungrateful, heartless,’ sings the ruined General.

But Alexei stakes whatever he has left on saving Polina. And so, finally, we get to see him in action. Unlike the other settings, the casino floor is packed with a chorus of excited gamblers and poised croupiers. But as the wheel spins, everything freezes except the wheel itself, the focus entirely on Alexei himself, ‘Oh my God,’ he sings, ‘This is madness, I’ve gambled so much money on a single throw’.

But he wins. He wins so much they close that table and he moves on to the next. And then he breaks the bank, and they close the casino for the night. The chorus, who have had very little to do until now, perform an exuberant song and dance number proclaiming him as ‘wild and savage’.

Back to his tiny hotel room under the roof, where the hotel staff wheel in a row of safes. So now it’s just Alexei and Polina and enough money to bale her out of all her troubles. A happy ending, you might think?

ROBERTO SACCÀ AS ALEXEY IVANOVITCH & ANGELA DENOKE AS PAULINA-  PHOTOG © THE ROYAL OPERA/ CLIVE BARDA – FEBRUARY 2010

But no, this is no fairytale. Polina cannot, after all, cope with feeling bought by Alexei. Sobbing over a stormy orchestra, she runs out and leaves him there. As he goes after her, gamblers wearing animal masks wander in to examine the safes.

Which is a pity, because there is plenty in The Gambler without having to tack on the idea that gamblers are animals, ruled by animal impulses and caged by society, or their own addiction, or whatever it is.

There are very human motivations for the gambling in the opera. Alexei starts with unrequited love and a social situation that leaves him few options. Babulenka starts with gambling for (whisper it) sheer fun and then loses her fortune almost wilfully to spite her callous relatives. Are these stories not more interesting and more believable than broad-brush comparisons with zoo animals?

To complete my research into the psychology of gambling I went on to the Ritz casino and proceeded to lose the price of an opera ticket at roulette. Frankly, it wasn’t nearly as exciting as watching it happen on the Opera House stage, but I was unaware of any animal instincts at work. Unless you count an immature urge to defy the moralising that surrounds recreational risk-taking in the 21st century.

Remaining performances on Thursday 25 and Saturday 27 February 2010

That Mostly About Arthur is mostly funny because of Jonny Sweet’s adopted persona, rather than the craft of his material about his fictional older brother Arthur, is probably ironic somehow. It’s also a very common syndrome amongst emergent comedians. While Sweet suggests very promising future, his debut show – which saw him steal away from this summer’s Edinburgh Fringe with the Best Newcomer award – is too untamed and haphazard to fully satisfy.

Here, armed with a standard issue clunky clip-art and google-image slideshow, Sweet sets about eulogising Arthur, seeking ‘a slumber-party vibe’ to do so. So begins a journey from the school corridors of Filey, in which Arthur would receive high-five after high-five, through a celebrated career as ‘the best blurbist of his generation’ and the face of Outlook Express: a trajectory that would ultimately end in controversy and, later, tragedy.

In reality, though, Arthur is little more than a construct that enables Sweet to jumble together a string of random titbits. Here the emphasis is on the zany, the surreal and the non-sequitur. Anything remotely sensible is off-limits in a set that hops from death by dog to games of Pear Touch (essentially touch the pear without touching the pear).

Indiscriminate and meandering it may be, but Sweet just about manages to pull it together somehow. Perched firmly on the spectrum, he fidgets his way around the stage, shattering social conventions and manhandling his audience like a safari chimpanzee. Everything is over-familiar, from the speech peppered with public school anachronisms to the padding touch and the gently slobbered kisses imprinted on foreheads. That on the night I saw him, Sweet easily handled a ten-minute break in proceedings, due to a technical hitch with his projector, is symptomatic of the strength of character over material.

All of which bodes well. With a tighter focus of script and, perhaps, more control of character, Sweet could become a deftly anarchic absurdist.

Run over. Mostly About Arthur can be seen at BAC on 24 February 2010. Jonny Sweet also appears in Party at the Arts Theatre, 1-13 March 2010.

Best described as a miscellany, every moment of Tim Key’s Edinburgh Comedy Award winning hour – for show would give the wrong impression – requires savouring. Not because it’s a machine-gun clacker to leave you gasping for air, but rather because its profundities and poignancies are so infinitesimally small that to blink is to risk missing one.

Key trades in slivers of everyday life as slotted between glass slides and viewed through a wonky microscope. In an assortment of petite poems and mumbled musings, he offers a pointillist portrait of modern, urban existence. ‘Tanya googled herself / Still nothing,’ reads one. Others cover thrill-seeking colleagues skinning eels in their lunch-break, the moments in which relationships crack, and ‘the thorny issue of dew’.

Sprinkled around this primary structures, cleverly fracturing the poetry recital feel for something more roundabout cabaret, are a series of sundry set-pieces. Soft-focus videos bring his words to life, lists of animals into which Key may or may not fit and a final mini-adventure that sucks one straight back to childhood.

Stylistically, Key’s main comedy tactic is a tightrope of delicacy and precise clumsiness. Miniscule moments of sensibility are interrupted by the blunt or the surreal. Frequently, Key wraps up his micro-narratives, romantic as they can be, with a sudden burst of realism. In one, several suburban names – Anna, Geoff and Tim, I think – are tearing at a fleshy corpse. One guzzles down the testicles, only for Key to add, in a gorgeously unexpected footnote, that the majority are lions and gazelles. Only Anna (who chomped on the chaps) is revealed to be human. ‘Probably on her gap-year,’ he suggests.

The result is that Key can play with punch-lines, subverting his set-up quite classically, without us spotting their approach. His fumbling delivery, often in the form of asides, explanatory digressions and footnotes, allows him to catch us off-guard as a postmodern gag-man. It’s not the carefully orchestrated chaos that many would have us believe.

If anything, in fact, Key has smartened up since I last saw him. In The Slut in the Hut (2008), a shabbily-suited Key scuffed his way around an over-cluttered portacabin venue. His set, supposedly structured around four different beverages, seemed to be determined by whatever came to hand. Permanently searching himself and his venue for material, at one point Key withdrew a waterbiscuit from a pocket to find it inscribed. Here, the waterbiscuit returns. Only this time, in a mini-disc case, deliberately protected for use.

The result is to give Key a philosophic authority. Rather than a failed bum, out of touch and dealing in the preposterous, he has become an ethereal laureate, still strange but also strangely wise. With that wisdom, he achieves something quite theatrical; namely, to change the way you see the world. And that is something only the best of comedy can do.

Run over. The Slutcracker returns on 3-6 May at the Arts Theatre, London, alongside Party, in which Tim Key also appears.

I’m a woman, get me out of here!

Women and equality this week on CW. Assistant Editor Sarah Boyes previews a new BBC documentary on the legacy of 1960s feminism, and finds its contested legacy expresses itself in contemporary concerns about women’s appearance. Mark Carrigan is sympathetic to feminist writer Natasha Walter’s acceptance that the cultural realm is important when thinking about female liberation, but points out the problem with simply reintroducing old ideas into a contemporary context. Timandra Harkness finds the 1948 film Letter from an unknown woman holds a pleasing artifice whose passive heroine is no role model for today.

Meanwhile, web editor Angus Kennedy disagrees with Kevin Rooney’s campaign to ban public schools in the Times, unpicking the debate about equality and arguing that it means more than simply removing privilege. And a Battle on Print from Sean Bell on the dangers involved in over-playing demands for transparency, especially when it comes to people’s private lives.

18 February 2010