According to the press release, the ‘universe of the artist’ is connected ‘with the main themes running through the Louvre’s collections’ so that the visitor can ‘rediscover celebrated works by Old Masters through the eyes of this major artist of the contemporary scene’. On a closer look, however, the presumed ‘dialogue’ between the works of Jan Fabre and the Old Masters comes down to a rather fortuitous juxtaposition on mostly superficial grounds.
Whilst Fugard’s dialogue is crackling and funny, his monologues can sometimes run away from him: the writing loosens up and though he comes across some profound and strong images, he over-indulges along the way. It begins to feel like too much of a good thing and there’s nothing Reeves or Spall can do to keep us hooked.
Unfortunately Klytemnestra’s trial is used only as a framework here, rather than being fully integrated into the play itself. So whilst a lot of the separate elements are strong – the trial testimonies, the African chorus, the chemistry and clashes between mother and child – they never quite come together, leaving us with an ambitious but confused production.
Diaz’s narrator masters a fabulously authentic idiolect, combining phrases of Spanish (refreshingly unitalicised) whose onomatopoeic meanings are often clear but occasionally opaque to the non-speaker, whilst touching on – but never quite becoming – the stereotypical streetwise Noo Yawk-based Latino.
Is Ali Shari’ati, the so-called ideologue of the Iranian Revolution, a poster boy for a utopian Islamic left, lost but not forgotten? Or is his legacy rather an allegory of good intentions gone awry and the irresponsibility of pursuing an exotic Leninist eclecticism at the edge of unreason?
The end of the Vietnam War took much of the wind out of the sails of the American ‘68ers, many of whom were more interested in dodging the draft than fighting imperialism.
What is of course excluded from this entire discussion is any reference to the most defining discourse in the Middle East: anti-imperialism.
Levy’s book poses interesting questions – why do humans tend to gender their objects? Or think their computers have personalities? But rather than engaging with the why and how of these issues, he simply takes their existence as further evidence for the inevitably of human-robot affairs.
Excremental surplus, Davis argues, is the primordial urban contradiction. Even eight generations after Engels’ depiction of latrines in working class Manchester, shit still cakes the lives of the urban poor—‘a virtual objectification of their social condition, their place in society’, Davis quotes another urban theorist.
Instead of the focus being on the deformed Merrick and his travails, it is the Elephant Man as metaphor for the society of which he was a part that truly resonates.
A second line of argument implied in this work is the shift away from the notion of human responsibility. With the rise of secularism that parallels the rise of the mind doctors, bad or criminal behaviour is increasingly ‘explained’ in diagnostic, morally neutral terms. Covertly, science is made to do the work of social control and perfectibility.
While F comes across as someone who would be quite annoying as a friend, her observations on men, sexuality and life in general often ring horribly true, as does her propensity for disastrous relationships.
It is encouraging to see how keen the audience was for this piece to work, despite its obvious failings. Though there was plenty of grumbling after the show, people were still unwilling to remove their headphones once the piece was over. Off the back of PunchDrunk’s hugely successful ventures, there’s a real thirst for the audience to be taken out of their comfort zone.
The play’s opening is a lot darker and more urgent than scenes that follow it: we watch young Mahmood incarcerated and ordered to pray. Edgar teases out our prejudices here: he urges us to believe this is some sort of extremist training, and it is only later we learn that Mahmood has been locked away to break his drug addiction.
The novel takes us on the kind of ‘where were you’ journey, from Thatcher through to Tavistock Square, from charmed youth through to the first deaths of his generation.