Charlotte Starkey
Barney Norris
Lewis Richards
Celine Lowenthal
David Owen Norris
David Owen Norris is a pianist and broadcaster.
Manick Govinda: head of Artists' Advisory Services and Artists' Producer at Artsadmin.
Manick Govinda is Head of Artists’ Advisory Services and Artists’ Producer at Artsadmin working with artists Zarina Bhimji and Zineb Sedira. He is also a freelance writer, and is co-curating artworks commissioned for Town Hall Hotel and Apartments in East London by up-and-coming local artists. He is an active member of the civil liberties campaign group the Manifesto Club, leading the campaign against the UK Home Office’s restrictions on invited non-EU artists and academics.
David Birch
Nikos Sotirakopoulos
John Boyden
John Boyden was the Managing Director of the London Symphony Orchestra in the 1970s, Recording Engineer to over 2000 CDs and the re-founder of the Queen’s Hall Orchestra, the original Proms Orchestra.
Diana Damian
Oscar Warwick Thompson
Tom Bailey
Katherine Sansom
Scott Pepe
Viral Shah
Emilie Felsing
Nick Thorne
Tessa Barratt
Stephanie Davis
Sally Millard
Paul Kilbey
Paul Kilbey writes on music and culture for Culture Wars, Huffington Post UK and several others. All his articles are listed at www.paulkilbey.co.uk.
Ana Carla Costa
Karen Zouaoui
Karen Zouaoui is a graduate student at Université Paris Diderot
Rosemary Amadi
Maahwish Mirza
Niall Crowley
James Howell
Sarah Strang
Sarah Strang is an artist.
Richard Swan
Luke Douglas-Home
Jake Hollis
Bill Borde
Bill Borde works in advertising.
Alastair Donald
Adelah Bilal
Kate Hoyland
Kate Hoyland is the author of The Icarus Diaries, a literary thriller. For many years, she was a producer at the BBC World Service, specialising in Asian and international news. As a journalist, she has worked across Asia – from Bangkok, to Beijing, to Seoul – and now lives with her young son in London, where she divides her time between writing, counselling, and training for the BBC.
Temi Ogunye
Peter Heller
Peter Heller is an astronomer and physicist. After dabbling in the software and aerospace industry he is now a strategy advisor, trend scout and futurologist.
Daniel B Yates
Miguel Fernandes Ceia
Harry Hoare
Valentine Rossetti
Jason Smith
Mike Jakeman
Sabreen Maryam Ali
Mark Napier
Michael Atkinson
Michael Atkinson is a New York film writer and author of seven books, including HEMINGWAY DEADLIGHTS and HEMINGWAY CUTTHROAT, from St. Martin’s Press.
Dave Porter
Lauren Grillo
Graham Marsden
Jane Turner
Lindsey Shive
James Hamon
Gavin Davies
Stephen Bowler
Angelica Michelis
Piers Benn
Anwar Oduro-Kwarteng
Rob Killick: CEO, Cscape
Rob Killick is the CEO of the digital agency cScape, and writes for a range of publications regularly on economics, the internet and privacy. You can see his blog, UK After The Recession, here: postrecession.wordpress.com.
Claire Fox
Claire Fox is the director of the Institute of Ideas
Joel Cohen
Chris Sims
Chris Sims is a contributor to the Erotic Review and politics.co.uk.
Simon Belt
Cheryl Hudson
Guy Aitchison
Guy Aitchison is a contributing editor at openDemocracy.net and web and blog editor for POWER2010
Dan Schneider
Sadhvi Sharma
Ashley Frawley
Ted Harrison
Dr Ted Harrison is a writer, artist and theologian. He is former BBC Religious Affairs correspondent, Radio 4 presenter and independent television producer.
Mark Carrigan
Mark Carrigan is doing a part time PhD in Sociology at the University of Warwick while also working as a private tutor and freelance researcher. His doctoral research is a longitudinal study of identity and culture in the lives of 16 undergraduate students. This project tracks their personal development over their time at university in order to understand how structural, cultural and personal factors interact in making them the adults that they become. He also conducts research on asexuality and is currently involved in a number of media collaborations which attempt to promote these findings, as well as the questions they pose about our hypersexualised society, beyond a narrowly academic audience.
The common theme which unites his research interests is the desire to understand the difficulties which late modern society poses for the innate human need to forge a meaningful life out of conditions which escape our control. Details about his work and other projects he is involved in can be found on his ePortfolio.
Beatrice Winberg
John Ellingsworth
John Ellingsworth writes for Total Theatre Magazine, Animations Online, the Circus Development Agency, Spoonfed and the Guardian. He edits an online circus magazine.
Stefanie Zobus
Rob Clowes
Rob Clowes is currently working on the completion of his book: Being Human after Facebook
Junta Sekimori
Alicia Rudd
Alicia Rudd is a contributing writer for an online network of aspiring and experienced writers and journalists, and enjoys reading literature. Alicia’s profile page can be accessed at Suite101.
Thomas Gartrell
Hannah McConnell Proctor
Wes Brown
Wes Brown is a writer and editor based in Leeds. He is the General Editor of Cadaverine Magazine and a member of the Leeds Salon. He also writes a blog.
Sophie Carmichael
Ella Hickson
Ella spends her time writing plays and freelance journalism, as well as running her new production company Tantrums. Her first play Eight won a Fringe First, the Carol Tambor ‘Best of Edinburgh’ Award and the NSDF Emerging Artists Award at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2008. The show toured to New York in January 2009 and enjoyed huge critical acclaim and sell-out audiences. Eight opens at Trafalgar Studios, London, on 6 July 2009. Ella has recently finished her second play Precious Little Talent which will open at Bedlam Theatre during the Edinburgh Fringe 2009.
Federica Ancona
Robert Greenwood
Tom Slater
Steven Sherman
Steven Sherman is a writer who lives in New York.
Rowenna Davis
Sean Bell
Jo Herlihy
Leigh Caldwell
Leigh is chief executive of Inon, an economics and software consultancy based in London, and heads Intellectual Business, a new think tank which explores analytic approaches to business and how to apply the principles of economics and the hard sciences in commercial environments. He also writes a blog on the economics of information and behaviour, Knowing and Making
Chiara Marchini
Inua Ellams
Daniel Monk
Daniel Monk is a senior lecturer in law at Birkbeck College, London. He has written numerous articles about sex education and children’s rights generally. He is currently researching home education and would be interested in knowing what people think about it!
d.monk@bbk.ac.uk
David Hamilton: freelance writer
Shahid Bux
Siddharth Rajan
Austin Williams: director of the Future Cities Project.
Austin WIlliams is an architect and director of the Future Cities Project, which has a critical take on attitude towards modern living. He regularly writes on the these of urban development and architecture, and his most recent book is The Future of Community. Austin has also recently launched Mantownhuman: a Manifesto towards a new humanism in architecture.
Hamish Todd
Giulia Merlo
Dominic Fox
Vittorio Pelosi
Tom Hopewell
The play’s the thing
The book is not a bible in how to direct a play; it is one man’s account of what has, and has not, worked for him – a passionate, dedicated, lived and lively statement of what can happen when theatre is performing powerfully; and Murray believes deeply in the importance of theatre for the world beyond the stage.
Reading Margaret Thatcher
Investigating the legacy of Margaret Thatcher may seem, at first, to be a retreat from engaging with modern politics, but I believe exactly the opposite is taking place when contemporary artists turn to her. One way of understanding the present is to interrogate the past.
McCullin’s War
A key characteristic of the exhibition is the lack of colour photos used by Don McCullin during his career. McCullin said himself, ‘I thought that black and white images in war were much more powerful,’ and his photos reinforce this statement.
Lorca, reduced
Ty Glaser’s evocation of Yerma, in her steeling of girl into woman, is truly stunning, from her initial outburst when attempting give her husband some milk, up until her final stand, forcing him to confess his culpability in their barrenness.
Total immersion in a musical world
I thought I knew the piece when, some years ago now, Thomas Guthrie asked me to accompany his version with three-quarter life-size puppet and animation. And the dramatic focus provided by the puppet transformed the experience for me. I found new things to enjoy – things I could take back into puppet-less performances with other singers.
At home with East End protest
Tower Hamlets didn’t suffer so badly from the riots compared to other areas of London, probably because of this tight-knit community of which Bayjoo’s young men are part.
Far from decorous
Instead of a conscience Catherine and Heathcliff have instinct. They are not overthrown by passion, there is nothing so transcendent as that. What they are to each other is a matter of survival, it is hell without the glamour. Their play is mixed with violence and their tenderness touches on savagery. There is no drama to their desire.
The middle of nowhere
Towers are monuments to our uncertainties. When Johnson talks with hopeful vagueness of the ‘mythic’ nature of towers, the word he is really after is ‘magic.’ The Orbit was designed to make the Olympic Park a ‘must see’ destination; the Orbit, that is to say, is a coercion; all towers are. Towers attempt to convince us that they, and by extension we, stand at the centre of things.
The 40 hours that shook European elites (and the timid Left)
The radical Left in Greece has always considered the European Union as the watchdog of European capital and a barrier to developing a different model of development and progress for the Greek people. Nevertheless, when the moment came, for the first time in 30 years, to challenge this burden, they seemed to consider the situation unbearable, and were afraid to step forward and lead.
Loose change
Why have the subsidised orchestras failed to commission new music that entertains as well as challenges? Why have they done nothing to nurture a single living composer for whom the public might learn to care? Given less generous funding, the Arts Council’s dependents would have been forced to find at least one composer every decade with audience appeal.
Disconnected
Howl’s doesn’t quite articulate the totality of its mediums - the acting travels from panto to parody, and this humour doesn’t find its place in the production. Guillermots’s own Fyfe Dangerfield’s score and Stephen Fry’s narrative input do help to lift the energy and convey some of the novel’s charm and dramatic richness, yet they’re not fully integrated in the show.
A clatter of bones amasses and crumbles
Creatures shift, transform and explore in front of us, they contort, jump from one environment to the other, lonely in their otherness. It’s a set of dangerous and decrepit characters in search of a story.
Conflicting responsibilities
At its strongest, Two in Your House gives a potent flavour of the ideological and personal boundaries inherent in the home as a site of struggle. It is packed with wit and charm, serving as an incomplete portrait of a significant recent event whose cultural and political life is short-lived despite its implications.
The case against American military dominance
Preble’s case against a robust American military internationally predictably starts with the damaging role it played in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Aware of the exhaustive commentary already delivered on this subject, Preble swiftly initiates an exploration of why the United States has philosophically felt the need to serve as the world’s police power.
A diet of anxiety
If a few people wish to eat themselves into supposedly an earlier grave, that is an individual lifestyle choice. It may not be a choice to either be applauded or celebrated, but it is the choice of the individual, and should not be micromanaged by governments or public health groups.
‘I wish the government would stop trying so hard to make my life safer’
As one panellist pointed out, less than 60 people have been killed in the UK by terrorists in the past 10 years. It is also worth noting that statistically residents of the United Kingdom were actually more likely to be harmed by terrorist attacks in the decade prior to 9/11.
Relocating to the Man Cave
The characters and settings of the Man Cave films are grotesque caricatures, and the dudebro is, in reality, a tendency rather than an actual person. But the driving force behind the stories — the retreat from public life, the elevation of the domestic, and the use of a stunted emotional development for the forging of brotherhood — are all genuine features of contemporary society.
From water spouts to rockets
If science fiction writers have been right about the future before, what are more contemporary authors saying and could they really come true as well. Some may argue they already are! George Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty Four’ or indeed Anthony Burgess’ ‘A Clockwork Orange’. Both predict dystopias dominated by mind control and surveillance? Chime any chords?
A reminder that press freedom is a good thing
The recent production at the Arcola Theatre in Dalston is very apt in its timing. On the Record, directed by Michael Longhurst, interweaves the experiences of five real-life investigative journalists from around the world fighting corruption, violence and trying to get the big story, in a single 90-minute act.
An overblown scandal
The conclusion to this debate was delivered by a man who wondered onto the stage wearing 1960s clothes, a beard and a bad temper. An uninvited hippy came onto stage and, with the audience’s encouragement, went on a rant (not dissimilar to that made by Gordon Brown regarding Murdoch’s ‘criminal media-nexus’ at the House of Commons) about the increasing apathy and lack of transparency in the press.
Wheezy arguments
Advocates of the smoking ban don’t trust ordinary people to resolve any conflict between smokers and non-smokers, or not to chain smoke in front of their babies. In the same way, Simon Davies seems to think that readers need exaggeration and sensationalism in order to be convinced that the smoking ban is wrong.
Coldness and hostility
The simple black exterior evokes no sense of intrigue, no yearning to discover what lies within. Moreover, it is a blot on the landscape, stark and unadorned. It does not invite you in, it is not welcoming, and, in fact, it verges on blandness.
Chance meetings of camera with character
The depth of emotion conveyed in Ben Hardy’s ‘East End Boy’, in which a wailing child hangs fearfully in his mother’s arms, terrified after a bombing raid on 28 September 1940, is perfectly mirrored in the mournful embrace of John Chase’s ‘Old Compton Street, Soho, 1999’, following David Copeland’s nail bomb attack on the Admiral Duncan pub.
‘Tox,Tox,Tox’
Can graffiti, something associated predominantly with teenagers who are labelled antisocial, be called art, and is the spraying of a tag really street art? What does graffiti really represent apart from the artist?
Educational aspirations
Toby Young argues that children shouldn’t be given easier options, but that they need to be challenged. Taking up the suggestion that parents might not go for an academic education for their children, he argued that we should give parents a bit more credit, that his school was attracting children from every walk of life, and that the majority of Free Schools have generated a better curriculum that that on offer in comprehensives.
Struggles with abstraction
If we subscribe to the belief that the symphony is the ultimate symbol of classical music generally, the highest, purest classical form, it follows pretty quickly that the best of classical music is firmly confined to the past. Pushing so hard to expand the cultural reach of mainstream symphonic tradition is ultimately a deeply conservative thing to do.
A thirst for the new
In truth, ‘Nonclassical Club Night’ might have been a misnomer – ‘Classical Non-Club Night’ would probably have been a more technically accurate description. This isn’t to say, though, that it was a completely standard classical recital – and nor is it to say that the changes of format and tone which it adopted weren’t incredibly beneficial.
The potentials of silence
There were moments during these long pieces when I did wish the ICA had some more comfortable chairs. But to describe any of the Wandelweiser repertoire as boring would be – to push Cage a little further – unimaginative. There are very conspicuously more questions than answers in all of this music, but I struggle to see what’s wrong with that. Wandelweiser are radically unpatronising to their audience.
Alien England
Vivid scattergun readings by Sinclair and Moore, whose striking first-person narrative was a moving insight into the tragedy of the story, compellingly transported the audience to Clare’s countryside. What the ensuing witch-hanging-blackface-jig-metal-pounding lacked in consistency or subtlety, it made up for in genuine lunacy.
Balance rather than busyness
The line ‘What did you expect: the Spanish Inquisition?’ is little more flippant than much of the original text by Da Ponte, who, in adapting his text from the play by Beaumarchais, deliberately expunged all references to politics. The Marriage of Figaro is absolutely not a commentary on the banking crisis, and is all the better for it.
Hearing art
All the artists who spoke treated sound as something other. As a musician, I was surprised by this - perhaps just because I am used to putting sound first, but also perhaps because the visual element of musical performance is and always has been a firmly established part of music: any musical experience always involves seeing things. But the reverse is not the case.
Meaning and mystery
A picture emerged of a composer who clearly cares far more about the brilliant sonic effect of his music than about tiffs within the avant-garde or abstruse questions of technique. Every work we heard unfolded a strange, imagined shape in the air, leaving a trace which sat in some unknown relationship to logic.
Operatic polemic
The commitment of Burstein and Edwards to their piece is never in doubt, and good for them. Furthermore, the creators’ zealousness has attracted the support of a hugely talented young theatre company. It’s just a pity that this company’s faith hasn’t been better rewarded.
Asking the right questions
In the discussion which followed the concert, it was refreshing to hear Philip Thomas and Anton Lukoszevieze (the founder of Apartment House, as well as its cellist) strongly defend Cage as a composer, not just an ideas man, as he is sometimes viewed.
2LDK
The facts to be learned range from the curious (we learn that towels are ‘very popular generic gifts’ in Japan, and most people therefore have far too many) to the crazy (‘It is also common to eat a bean for every year of your age’), and they document everything from rubbish collection etiquette to gardening habits.
Unconventional city sounds
Prokofiev provides the DJ with several opportunities to improvise – ‘cadenzas’, if you want (apparently the DJ’s score reads ‘go nuts’) – and Switch capitalised on these opportunities fully. The performance was a remarkable display of virtuosity, both performative and compositional, with Prokofiev juggling between his divergent influences with sincerity and ambition.
Not a big deal?
It seems uncontroversial to write that the NCH is not the answer to this country’s higher education problems. As Dennis Hayes very convincingly argued, it is barely even the question. And we must, of course, wait until it’s actually been open for a while before we can properly judge its merits. In the meantime, the corroding effect of educational bureaucracy may well constitute a more substantive target for debate.
Should the United States help drive global development?
USAID is currently undertaking several projects around the world, two of which Dr Shah spoke about in considerable detail. One of them is helping impoverished places in Africa, and elsewhere, to decrease the percentage of malnourished people while aiming to stimulated their economy at the same time.
What ever did happen to Modernism?
What Ever Happened to Modernism? indeed proposes its own definition of Modernism to reveal that it is more to do with a synchronic ‘structure of feeling’, to paraphrase Raymond Williams, than with a continuum in time. Modernism here refers to idiosyncratic approaches to art linked together by the wish to come to terms with the meaning of life and the value of language.
A Beatnick Blade or a Maverick Sabre?
This ability to appeal to different types of crowds is what I believe will separate Maverick Sabre from the typical unlucky in love male singer-songwriters whose lyrics range from heart-wrenching tales about the women they loved and lost to equally tear-inducing stories of the women they love and haven’t yet lost but (due to their aforementioned bad luck) are likely to lose in the near future.
I know a dirty word
It makes you wonder, if we were all left to clean up after ourselves, from our houses and gardens to our schools and streets, whether we’d be so pernickety about that spot of dust on the kitchen surface, or that banana peel in the corner.
Towards ‘interculturalism’?
Democracy, tolerance and equality are ‘core values’ that are frequently cited as the cornerstones of a British way of life, but as Rattansi points out, these values are vague, simplistic and not exclusive to Britain, and - especially historically speaking - have not always acted as the uniting undercurrent of British life.
‘Muscular liberalism’: a paradoxical political philosophy?
Multiculturalism is far from dead. No apartheid exists in Britain. David Cameron touched on a few minority Islamist groups that hold segregationist attitudes, but many more Muslims live integrated lives. Nor does multiculturalism necessarily mean opposing to ‘British’ political values.
Not what you expect from opera?
Niall Crowley asks if the work of Birmingham Opera Company – featured in a recent BBC documentary along with a screening of their unique production of Verdi’s Othello – and their goal of ‘making opera speak to a broad audience’ is just another attempt to use the arts for the purposes of social engineering or something to be celebrated.
Talking proper
Lynne Truss’ war against everyone from Americans to teenagers to green grocers is a short sighted belligerent war on those-too-stupid to use the apostrophe or spell correctly. When, in fact, language changes so rapidly, to try and pin it to a set of rules is lunacy, and if these rules exist, who decided Truss was the one to make them?
‘Jesus Christ was the first celebrity’
‘It is like the TV show, The X Factor, it is the same casting format. It is not true communication. You are part of the jury when you are judging Jesus. The art provokes the viewer to reflect upon their inner view of the image of Jesus from the historical perspective of art history or visits to churches and to be aware of the multiple narratives at work.’
Alight, Attack
Mechanical shapes of peachy human flesh extend from the canvas appearing like counterparts of a weapon emerging from the depths of a white void. The slow agony of trench warfare soldiers and a creeping sense of death provides a cutting contrast to scenes reminiscent of the powerful resurrection of Christ in painting and drawings titled ‘Returning to the Trenches’ by Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson.
Into
My lines, my drawings, my sweethearts, wispy-haired and still blue
From an unfortunate birth that was quite dangerous
I am still here watching you
Joyful filth
A startling illustration, a stipple engraving, of a cholera victim, created in 1831 and owned by the Wellcome Library, presents the monstrous presence of the disease. The diptych presents the transformation a neatly coiffed, nubile twenty three year old Venetian woman, into a gnarled, green-lipped hag.
Provisional relationships
Nogueira and Orozco exhibit a wry curiosity towards the everyday matter explored in their expansive respective solo shows. Within each series of installations lies a powerful interplay of physical energies that pervades, invades and collides, disconcerting and subverting our relationship to everyday matter.
Red and blue heavens
The difference between seeing a manuscript illustration in a book and seeing the real thing is almost absolute. Medieval manuscripts are immensely tactile: the smoothness of the parchment (usually calfskin) on which the hair follicles can sometimes be made out, the richness and vibrancy of the colours based on rare pigments such as lapis lazuli, and above all the astonishing glow of gold leaf.
‘The golden age is still ahead of us’
Two aspects of the book stand out. One is the sheer excitement of the search, the traditional longing of mankind to know more and to discover more, although Jayawardhana has to record the failures as often as the successes. The other is the way that planet-searching has become a huge aspect of astronomic research in the last two decades. Jayawardhana names project after project, most of them using existing ground-based telescopes and facilities.
Life off Earth
This book’s importance is simply justified. There are only two possibilities: either the Earth is the only planet in the universe to harbour sentient life, or it is not. Each of these possibilities is, as Arthur C. Clarke famously noted, so astonishing as to verge on the incredible.
Being cross with Trump
It is this very film that acts as David’s actual slingshot, in giving the pebble missile-like strength that might topple Goliath. It is only now that the authorities are sitting up and questioning their own actions. Only right now, when the film has won many awards, and they have seen this film. It was recently, just a few days ago, shown to Scottish Ministers and Alex Salmond.
Barking mad in Paddington
In their minds, what did the demonstrators achieve by blocking his entry, thereby preventing him from questioned by us? Did it in fact stop the chance at devastating the BNP as an idea, through interrogation and by publicising the absurd, childish, thick, nonsense of its message?
Complacent wit
The splicing of scenes together to make them unfold concurrently and intermittently, a device commonly used in movies, but easily taken for granted, is surprisingly thought inducing in written form. But the offshoot of this script-like style is unfortunately, a rather monotonous matter-of-factness that irritates from an early stage.
Probably the best advertising strategy in the world
Wouldn’t it just be more civilised for a nation’s cultural life to revolve around something other than deliciously crunchy breakfast cereals and not believing it’s not butter?
All-night architecture
The students at Critical Subjects were offered the opportunity to explore topics such as critical thinking, the nature of beauty, visionary architecture and design autonomy. Rather than organising lectures, the sessions throughout the day were debates with speakers from the world of architecture and beyond.
Legal aid: the case for the defence
Whereas ‘no win no fee’ policies, legal insurance and private arbitration may all seem like cost effective replacements for legal aid, the truth is legal defence is irreplaceable. These methods of replacing the legal aid system would in fact result in the ‘cheapening of justice’, and the value of what it represents.
Rethinking Asia
Buy a world map in China, and China (the Middle Kingdom) is in the centre; not ragged islands on the edges of Europe, fringed by a small sea. We have not come to terms with Asia’s rise, and can have no conception of what it means for us (beyond, perhaps, a nagging anxiety that it can’t be good). As power shifts to the twin giants of China and India, we can only realise we are small, and what we think might not matter very much.
The politics of voting
This Intelligence Squared debate did include some of the unimpressive arguments that have characterised the AV debate more generally, but it also touched on some far more interesting and under-explored issues that lie at the heart of the debate about electoral reform.
Another fine mess?
We now generally accept that there are very important things called human rights that are possessed by all persons simply because there are persons, and which must be respected universally. However, we all generally still accept that the world is made up of communities called nations that are entitled to organise and dictate their own affairs, and that the members of nations owe each other more than they owe to outsiders.
Iranian origami
The real question here, however, is whether domestic human rights abuses alone are sufficient to label a country a real ‘tiger’. I’m not sure that they are. Countries with questionable human rights records and nuclear ambitions may cause legitimate and understandable alarm in the international community. But does this mean that they constitute a real threat to international security, that they are genuine tigers?
Meat-eating and moral confusion
Singer’s first, animal-centred argument is the stronger of the two, because it offers necessary and absolute reasons not to eat meat. But I do not agree with it. In fact, I am quite offended by it. However nice it may sound to some people, the idea that we should treat all animals with the same respect we afford to humans is monstrous (and, you guessed it, somewhat misanthropic).
To bash, or not to bash?
Peter Hitchens made engaging and under-acknowledged arguments. They relate to the extent to which liberal secularism is, or can be, neutral between competing worldviews; the relationship between religion, culture and politics; and the place of moral authority in the context on considerable moral disagreement.
Mobility tomorrow: just take a cab!
Government, economists and product developers would be well advised to concentrate on those recommendations made by futurologists that consider the wishes of the user. The needs of the customer decide whether a technological innovation becomes successful or not, and the user prefers those innovations that improve upon existing technologies in the fields of energy, communications and mobility by dissolving the tensions between robustness, safety and cost-effectiveness without any compromise.
The Theatre of Protest
Similarly theatrical is the recognition that the human body is a symbolic site - be it dancing in the confines of kettle-raves, sportsday in Topshop, the spontaneous choreography of facing an armoured police line, or being violently dragged from a wheelchair. Indeed, when Cameron decries ‘the mob’, he is like a particularly insensitive critic, failing or refusing to grasp the nature of a very complex and energetic ensemble piece.
A persifleur out of time
This afternoon’s matinee audiences would have been coming of age in the throes of the sexual revolution, and those lines of blue rinses were precisely the middle-class benefactors of its flowery excesses. Later generations wouldn’t have seen love as so doggedly essentialised, and Coward’s subtext of immutability and courtly linguistic swooning feels very dated indeed.
Becoming never looked so real
Where Willy Russell might have stood twenty years ago giving voice to the national ordinary, now reality shows and their techniques - from gameshows to docusoaps to news programmes - increasingly proclaim their democratic victory, telling us we are finally reflected to ourselves. Yet even a cursory glance at these claims reveals their emptiness.
Quite an execution
The novel starts with a heart being thrown from a passing train to the roofs over Borough Market. Though it is very clearly stated that it is a human heart, the reader might find the imagery so unlikely that one might think about the heart as something fantastic or metaphorical.
Expecting the unexpected
When Billy Pilgrim is abducted by aliens, this does not mean he was taken to the reality of his train of thought or stream of consciousness; it does not have a metaphorical meaning. In the context of Slaughterhouse 5, Billy Pilgrim really is abducted by aliens – or at least it has been written to be understood as so; this does not sustain an ‘allegorical’ or ‘poetic’ interpretation.
The review of the review of the nonexistent
Roberto Bolaño offers the reader a fictional biographic encyclopaedia of fascist writers of the American continent. Even if one doesn’t sympathise with their fascist ideas, when reading, one is moved by the fierce idealism in which magazines and journals get published and disdained, poems go unnoticed, novels ignored.
The human predicament
Bucky Cantor is described as having an unbending sense of duty and honour, instilled in him by his now dead grandfather. The novel is in three parts, each corresponding to one of Bucky Cantor’s moral failures – failures in his own view, of course.
This is fact, not fiction (on biography)
Many writers, and examples could easily come from the sci-fi genre, did not have to endure the predicaments present in their characters and their plots in order to write. Furthermore, normalcy, or middle-class bourgeois normalcy, is, these days, predicament enough. Still, each individual’s account, in fiction or real life, is full of drama because it is one’s own.
History’s preception
The title of the novel refers to how the characters relate to their world, sleepwalking, without questioning conventions, and remaining oblivious to what is changing. As the novel progresses, we also realise that each one of the parts, still acknowledging the sleep and sleepwalking metaphor, is a state of consciousness
Character, education and the role of the state
For Arthur, character is ‘an interlocked set of personal values which normally guide conduct. Character is about who we are and who we become, which can result in good or bad conduct.’ If character is about values then it’s important where we get these values from. Surely teaching children good values in school is preferable to law of the jungle in terms of peer pressure and media messages?
The Master Storyteller
Throughout this collection of interviews, which took place of a series of months, Almodóvar exudes a well balanced streak of eccentricity, coupled with a sense of professionalism that is rooted in formality and devotion to his work. He explains in-depth the many disparate influences which inspired his earliest films, from Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe to the varied iconography of popular culture.
Rediscovering forgotten pleasures
‘I see art in its simplest form as the means for refining and exploring human communication. Every language has its limitations and what I try to do in my work, is develop the visual means of intuitively conveying emotional and conceptual content.’
A single sensation
With Ford being atavistically fashion conscious, it was perhaps inevitable that his ostentatious influence would engulf the design, and so it does to great effect, though not letting it degenerate into a glossy self-aggrandizing vanity film.
A matter of style
As in all Almodóvar films this world is populated with the beautifully deranged. Emotionally damaged characters dance with the devil and pay the consequences. It tells the story of Lena (Penélope Cruz), a vampish secretary and on-off call girl who is mistress to suave and wealthy businessman Ernesto (José Luis Gómez).
From under Tuscan skies
From a conversation on the theme of his book - whether an artistic copy can be as worthy of praise as its original - a most intriguing and evocative tale of intertwining falsehoods and realities unfolds. The narrative, a fable and a comedy, has Shimell and Binoche playing a child-like game of Mr and Mrs.
An intense cloud of emotion
Cardona and Mercado must be credited in particular with conveying, with immense believability, the simple joys of lovers, such as the experience of a warm embrace, a stolen kiss or a touch of the hand, which continues on when Miguel’s Earthly body is no more. Also
Literary orienteering
Énard sumptuously evokes the fragile Constantinople in transition, as she slipped from being the spiritual and political hub of the ancient Holy Roman Empire, into the hands of the marauding Islamic conquerors, who were now, under the rule of Sultan Bayezid, moulding and transforming the city in their own idealised image.
A Phoenix from the Ashes
With a shift towards aesthetic quality in the art world, is the world of cinema now rekindling its love affair with aesthetics too?
A return to beauty and civility?
In 2010, it is safe to say that a shift is occurring once again, this time, away from the vacuous and the obscene; an ever increasing sense of ‘de nouveau’ is now surging through the citadel of contemporary art.
Food for thought
Lyons’ intention in this book is to investigate food scares, both on their own merits and from an historical perspective, in order to understand our essential but often shaky relationship with what we eat. Today this means confronting and assessing the worth of a lot of government advice and challenging popular perceptions of modern mass-catering practices.
Brought to book
Libraries are not only a public service but a fought-for part of our heritage. But is the provision of Catherine Cookson novels to pensioners something the state should fund? If people are not using libraries why should funding continue?
Angry, misunderstood and resentful
What The Slap appears to rail against is the perceived failure of liberalism in Australia in the era of John Howard. Here is a society built on the protection of the rights of the individual (Hugo, only three years old, asserts confidently ‘No-one is allowed to touch my body without my permission.’) and a policy of open immigration.
Life and letters in Manila
The great problem with Syjuco’s novel is Salvador himself, who fails to become the equal of Miguel’s labours. An introductory essay promises a rumbustious figure, possessed of sufficient moral vigour to expose police brutality, but enough impish humour to pen an essay titled ‘It’s Hard to Love a Feminist’.
The Whingeing Nation
What irks the most is when the pungent smell of negativity crops up in a system that is working. Criticism should be constructive for it to be justified. Rants about the myriad problems in society only serve to fuel the fire of cynics who pick apart the threads of progress.
Perceptions of The Doors
‘There really hasn’t been a major male sex symbol since James Dean died and Marlon Brando got a paunch. Dylan is more of a cerebral heart throb and The Beatles have always been too cute to be deeply sexy. Now comes along Jim Morrison of The Doors.’
You can hear it in my accent when I talk
The real highlights of the exhibition are the small cultural insights of the sitters New York stories displayed beside the stunning photographs. Their concerns and motivations highlight what it means to be English, to be an immigrant and where the two intersect.
The legacy of Brutalist vitality
Yet Kermode and many other Hulme residents found something to celebrate in this dystopian existence. A transient and extraordinarily vibrant mix of people descended upon Hulme as the opportunity for cheap or free housing in the very heart of Manchester led to waves of youthful creative energy.
Big Two-Hearted Hemingway
Hemingway hasn’t been, not since the 1940s, a mere writer and man, but a preposterous piece of Americana, a living riposte to a 20th century that seemed to otherwise deplete opportunities for masculine privilege and duty as the years of industrialisation, commercialisation, domestication, and entertainment-media saturation rolled on.
Art on your wall
Where Warhol leaves little to the imagination, some of the best pieces here are intricate and detailed montages of startling images and often highly-sexualised motifs. Hirst’s minute reproductions of bottles of pills, which look from afar like a computer circuit board, is actually laced with Biblical sayings. Religion as a drug, anyone?
A new perspective unveiled
Unlike in other cultures, it is Taureg men who cover their faces with the cloth. A boy is given his first veil once he reaches puberty, marking his cross over from childhood to adulthood. The veil can also be tied in various ways, which is used to reflect the different regions, social class, age, and tribal affiliations within Tuareg society.
Transformative dance
The cities of London and Addis Ababa were shown to be so similar yet contrasting. Interviews revealed similar levels of background traffic, low-rent rehearsal spaces and prestigious performance venues. Yet, children face death everyday on the streets of Addis.
Not quite as appearances suggest
The cast were impressive in their roles, as Wilde’s script is dense, fast-paced and laced with jokes, innuendo and sarcasm, and they didn’t falter. Algernon (played by newcomer Alex Felton) in particular, seemed well at ease in the role of a ‘relatively impoverished gentleman’ living the good life at the expense of relatives and others, moving from country house to city residence in search of dinner and fun.
More than skin deep
In this exhibition, skin is exhibited not only in terms of scientific facts, but in a much more personal and spiritual sense. The issues of race, disease, ageing, and even plastic surgery were touched upon in an honest way, not to insult anyone in anyway, but to openly address the different opinions of how skin can be regarded.
The omission of Amis
This adaptation fails to engage with the nature of the novel; where insight and dramatic irony are necessary, jokes and feelings are watered down by what must be a thorough misunderstanding of the entire project.
Booze, porn, sex and debt
In a deconstructed, homogenised world the notion of uniqueness seems absurd, and Dunne implies that this terrible contradiction will wreak more havoc in a future faced with material and moral scarcity.
Defined by vulnerability
For sure, the frame is pitted and buckled – as the genre demands – but overall, its integrity remains. We do not go beyond good and evil, as Nietzsche once urged, but instead luxuriate within its normative parameters. The three bogey-men thrown-up in the course of the story all get their just desserts.
Feminism comes triumphantly home
What motivates this abuse of authority, according to the author, is (male) sado-masochism on the level of the individual, whereas the political reasons are directly intertwined with the pragmatic and soul-less capitalism most Western societies subscribe to at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the new millennium.
Dare to be dull
The uniting thread of conservatism, North says at one point, is a belief in inequality and a hatred of socialism. He also remarks that the British are not brutal or mean, but believe in character and standing on one’s own two feet; this too is Toryism in a nutshell.
Better schools for all?
The government has made some important proposals, such as refocusing on teacher quality as the key determinant of educational attainment.But this good work is in danger of being undone by the overly prescriptive and quixotic nature of the curriculum changes. The aim should not merely be to have good schools, but instead, a good schools system, so that all pupils regardless of their background and where they live have the chance to progress in a stimulating and challenging environment.
The politics of the new
This is a cynical and expedient attempt to discredit ideologically driven politics and politicians, by accusing them of acting in their own narrow self interest, as though believing passionately in certain values and ideas is backward and reactionary, and has no place in political discourse.
There is an elephant in the room, and it’s not immigration
The phenomenon of the BNP is not due to people suddenly becoming racists, but more to do with the human need to understand the world around us, to get answers about why things are the way they are. Some communities feel that they are separate from wider society, they do not know where they fit, everything that used to give their lives meaning has been broken down, they have no hope, and they need an explanation for this, somebody to blame.
Keynes, the straw man and this irrational, crazy world
If you have any doubt about the irrelevance of the EMH in the real world then just look at how the world’s leaders responded to the financial crisis. Governments everywhere stepped in with massive subsidies to keep the financial system afloat. Would leaders who were supposedly ideologically wedded to the principles of the free market have acted in such a concerted way to bail out the markets?
The white working class: a race apart?
I am nervous about this focus on residents’ alleged ‘world view’. It is a thinly veiled reference to the notion that the white working class think differently to everyone else because – damn it – they keep voting the wrong way.
Exploring the Concrete Jungle
While Out My Window seems to affirm the postmodern rhetoric of alienation and isolation we are all familiar with, it is worth asking if Cizek’s account of postmodern life actually fits this description. By visually uniting these social realms in the webdoc’s physical presentation she has cleverly interrogated the reality of the perceived split. For the most part, she reminds us that we do participate in the two worlds simultaneously most of the time.
I don’t speak French, but my football is OK
The best ice-breaker in the World Cup traveller’s arsenal is the cycle of naming teams or players in a slightly foreign accent untill both you and the local you are talking to come to an agreement about who exactly you will base your conversation on, and then exchanging sponteneous, barely informed judgements upon them through a combination of grunting and thumb-led indicators.
Counting the subaltern generation?
Whilst the oldies moan that us young’uns don’t do politics anymore, I find myself moaning that the only thing on offer for those who at least want to try is patronising congratulations for ‘having a go’. If events like ‘Counted?’ continue to pass for youthful politics, that subaltern voice will stay subaltern, turned off and uninspired; As was displayed in their performances, their contributions will remain atomised and self-involved.
A troublesome memory
Offering a master-class in the construction of a narrative arc, Mackie at times dares to weave in the necessary building blocks of structure explicitly, as when she writes that a ‘character has to develop’ and when Nevis explains that ‘I wanted to know what was real and what was not…the twist, the revelation, the change. The truth. What an excellent dénouement.’
Where’s the beef?
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.
Why can’t we all just get along?
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.
The power is ours!
Politicians offer up various reforms, seemingly plucked from thin air, which they offer as the palliative cure for restoring ‘trust’ in the political system (and, of course, trust in them, the political class that manages it). But, so often, these reforms are touted with little regard for how they affect our democracy as a whole and not even a flickering recognition that the people themselves may like more than just a walk on part in this important discussion.
A knowing bow
The Emperor Jones is not a great film, and its source play is not a great work of drama, but both are important, and both have small moments of greatness - in the film’s case, mainly through the titanic presence of Robeson subverting some of the well-intended, but ultimately destructive, tendencies of O’Neill’s character portrayal.
Politics without condescension
The word ‘amen’ is the ending to most prayers, and in its original meaning, in Hebrew, it means ‘as it goes’ or ‘so be it’. The fact that the title also includes the definitive period sets up the tension of the film, which follows the lives of two non-Jewish men in Germany, who try to subvert the Nazi death camp machine. But, as in most little man vs. faceless corporation tales, the two little men are crushed.
One of a kind
When the film premiered, it was actually taken as a comedy, and Amin was furious, and threatened to kill all French citizens living in Uganda unless Schroeder cut requested parts. Schroeder did, but restored the film once Amin went into exile. The whole project was apparently Amin’s idea - a sort of vanity hagiography because he felt he was not respected in the West.
Documenting lives
Of the three films, the Lee film was a solid, paint by numbers bio-documentary, the Christ film was not only wrong on virtually every historical claim, featured ‘experts’ who are nothing but apologists, but was shoddily made on almost every cinematic level, but the film on the 75-year-old Rivers was shockingly good, detailing her highs, lows, good and bad points, and with a depth and profundity that is rarely seen in such films.
Good to a lesser degree
The film’s ending, while a narrative failure, considering the film’s beginning, is an interesting commentary on the shallowness of American life (then and now), as it celebrates the shallow, the idea that mere persistence ends up with reward, and that other people’s desires are meaningless. And, at film’s end, Ben is in no better emotional and psychological shape than he was at film’s start, save that he now has a mate to share in his anomie.
Skimming the buildings
The best part of the package, though, is Visions Of Space: God’s Architect, an hour-long BBC documentary on Gaudi, hosted by art critic Robert Hughes. As with many of the writings and documentaries of his, Hughes adds little to our knowledge of Gaudi, but this film does a great deal more of explaining and showing Gaudi’s work to its best advantage.
‘A mook. What’s a mook?’
Scorsese, as an artist, NEEDS to go back to working with low budgets, so that his creativity is hungry, not sated. Mean Streets is an example of an artist with a growling belly. His last decade of DiCaprio-starred films, by contrast, is a surfeited maw.
Eye-level realism
Jancso’s camera is a husking cleanser of all poesy and symbolism- even the acts of courage and kindness toward captured prisoners or civilians are seen as utterly random, and not ennobled in the least by Jancso’s camera’s eye.
‘Commie kitsch’
The film was a joint Soviet-Cuban production, meant as blatant propaganda for the Communist cause, but Kalatozov’s film so rhapsodised Cuban sexuality and reveled so in its visuals, that even its backers as Mosfilms, the Soviet State film company, pulled it after a short distribution period. It was critically denounced both in Cuba and the Soviet Union.
A face like clay
The film has many good moments, such as when Allen tries to pawn his Medal Of Honor, only to have the shop owner show him many other such medals that no one wants. Another is in a barbershop, after his first escape, when Allen narrowly escapes recognition by a dimwit cop who describes him to the barber, as neither recognise he fits the description.
Stasi surveillance
He is amazed to see not only that information was omitted, but that this operative fabricated the details of a whole play Dreyman and his cohorts were supposed to have written for the 40th anniversary of East Germany’s founding.
You can’t topple Kopple
The film melds history and drama with pathos and even humour. The scene where strikers go to New York City, and one gets schooled in how poorly they have it by a New York flatfoot, is priceless.
The theatre of the real
The Travelling Players takes its sweet time before revealing its true nature. Nearly ninety minutes go by before a viewer will try to stop taking things on face value, and realise that the film’s drift through time (often veering back and forth in a single scene or dolly shot), and its blackout sketches, are not meant to be taken literally in any way
Tale and performance
The camera always seems to look at its lead character’s life slightly askance, as if it was somehow recapitulating the clearly warped view of life Mouchette owns. In essence, the film called Mouchette recapitulates the point of view of its character Mouchette, which allows the viewer to both ‘feel’ a bit of the character’s warp, while also being able to step back and intellectually distance oneself and ‘understand’ the character’s warp.
A disarming perspective on war
This film, while political, is not a slice of realism. It has symbolism and allegory throughout. British racism, as example, towards natives and Indians, is never shown, but it existed. Ichikawa’s aim was to clearly demonstrate the quest for humanity, embodied in Mizushima, but aimed at the viewers.
The obliquity of moment
Many critics saw the film as an allegory of the then contemporaneous fall of the Soviet Union, but, nearly two decades later, the film’s resonance shows, again, how shortsighted most critics are. Mere politics do not define this film, for it is a transhuman essay on loneliness.
Fractured narratives
At the time of independence, the idea of diversity was about the right to free and open political, linguistic, cultural and religious expression. What stands in its place today is a politics of representation that has made diversity itself a political right rather than a cultural fact.
Questioning the carnivalesque
When the abandoned placards have been swept up and the first cars and pedestrians are released from the bottleneck to take back the formerly ‘liberated’ streets and town squares, the city seems to breathe a collective sigh of relief as the normal routine resumes unscathed. Serious change cannot be effected without action, but ‘aimless hyper-activism’—doing because ‘something must be done’—can actually channel energies away from any seriously progressive project aimed at large-scale social change.
Refocusing remembrance
At one point during the traditional Festival of Remembrance, thousands of poppies flutter down from the roof of the Albert Hall. It is a moment of riveting theatricality as young men and women in their spick and span uniforms stand to attention and let the silent flowers settle on their shoulders and on their heads. Yet, we need to be reminded how the poppy came to be adopted as such a powerful symbol.
A surfeit of moralising outrage
Robin Cook’s ghost haunts the film, as the statesmanly Richard Rycart, valiantly fighting to bring the nefarious Lang to justice because, as every disappointed Labour loyalist knows, everything would have been fine if Robin Cook had stayed around government. It’s a wonder that Claire Short and Mo Mowlam don’t turn up in the film and thus complete the hagiographical halls of broken Labour dreams.
Murky Harry
In a sense Harry Brown is a postmodern moral fable. And it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the gritty ultra-violent and moralising revenge ethos of this film speaks to a significant number of people.
Does Granny Smith still matter?
The past three decades have witnessed a historically unprecedented depoliticisation of economic life, as a narrowly economic discourse of modernisation is used to present profoundly political agendas (for instance ‘slashing’ public services to produce ‘balanced’ budgets) as objective necessities.
The old one-two punch of history
The sheer vitality of Žižek’s thought usually serves to ensure that his work is an enjoyable read. In First as Tragedy, Then As Farce this effect is amplified by the urgency of his topic and the passion with which he approaches it. It’s perhaps inevitable though that this urgency does not translate easily into prescriptive politics and this is the one aspect of the book’s thesis which disappoints.
‘You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain…’
The virtues the Rocky 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. But contemporary cynicism helps, in a sense, bring about the reality it purports to reflect.
Living dolls: reconsidering the legacy of the 1960s
The cultural outgrowths of the new left in general play a key role in many of the processes of social change which Walter hints at. Its stress on ‘independence and self-expression’, the focus on authenticity and self-discovery, ultimately are capable of being uncoupled from their political content and rearticulated in a resolutely depoliticised way. Far from undermining capitalism through a reclamation of authentic subjectivity, this cultural radicalism in fact helped fuel the emergence of contemporary consumer capitalism.
The blind leading the blind?
This exhibition left me with the depressing feeling that the vacuity of postmodern intellectual poses in academia has been uncritically reproduced by some in the cultural world and, as a consequence of being divorced from their philosophically underpinnings, actually rendered more vacuous.
It’s tough being a man these days
The obvious points of reference are films like Taken and television programs like 24. Yet unlike Bryan Mills or Jack Bauer, who never stumble or display weakness, Tommy Craven struggles from the point of his daughter’s death; we see that behind the icy exterior of a man who knows what do and how to do it there is weakness and doubt.
Secularism and Multiculturalism: an encounter with Charles Taylor
As compelling a speaker and thinker as Taylor is, there seemed to be something rather muted and unsatisfying about his account. One was left with the impression that his experience holding public hearings on cultural integration in Quebec had left him slightly fazed by what the anthropologist Robin Fox called ‘ethnographic dazzle’ and, with it, a movement towards an understanding of social integration which over-estimates the need for social unity and under-estimates the real tensions which stand as obstacles to it.
Their fault
The exhibition aims to explore the process through which scapegoats are produced and the inevitability of such figures in any society. Although the message is at times trite, it is also sensitising to the pervasiveness of the scapegoat and the processes through which such figures are produced.
Who are you?
The eight rooms are laudable attempts to concretely illuminate different aspects of a characteristically nebulous issue. However the overall effect is one of an unwelcome eclecticism and fragmentation, as a sustained sense of the profound questions being asked by the exhibition gets lost in the particularity of the different rooms.
The Girlfriend Experience – a sex-worker’s verdict
We praise actors and therapists for their ability to delve into the recesses of their own and other people’s emotional lives and readily accept that, with care, they need not be harmed, despite the fact their jobs put them through the emotional wringer every day. Isn’t it about time we accepted the same could be true of women working in the sex industry?
Frantic drive
Amid all of this is some of the thinking that went into the piece – about the environment, broadly, and how it is despoiled. We see a river that overfills with supermarket detritus, and fish are replaced by plastic water bottles (the smaller ones chased off by a 10-litre whopper). I’m unsure quite how this fits with the grandstanding, spectacular character of the performance.
Real unreality and unreal reality on stage
Since Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species, the existence of God and the afterlife has been doubted by the people. Assigned to the secret mission of finding the ghost loris by Queen Victoria, the fictive explorer Gilbert sets out to find the equally fictive monkey in order to send it to the taxidermist Lucius Trickett for preservation
Is technology making us smarter or dumber?
We can argue with the current shape of technology and propose how it might be better. But there is seldom much engagement in this direction. More common is dour warnings about our impotence in the face of new technology; that it is the agent and we the passive recipient.
Electric selves?
Given the social designation given to the new web, it at first seems paradoxical to claim that Web 2.0 could be undermining something about our social nature, yet this is precisely what is being claimed by many critics. So is this really the case? Sherry Turkle takes up exactly this question in Alone Together.
Civilisation: Should we rehabilitate this unfashionable idea?
It is not just the negative associations with a neo-colonialism to which we react but a dominant cultural mood which is nervous of asserting any strong values at all, or that one work of art, or thought or activity has intrinsically more value than any other. Values we are always told are relative – although it is seldom explained relative to what. It is this cultural climate that is really inimical to the full-blooded and positive account of civilisation Armstrong seeks to articulate.
Facebook, freeware and working for fun
The dirty secret of free software and services is that they imply free – read unpaid – labour. While this may be difficult for certain business models to accommodate, such as the print media and the music industry, which now have to compete with free alternatives, it is far from clear that it is difficult per se for capitalism as a social system.
The new public space
An individualised nightmare existence without human contact has been imagined by many, but Anna Minton exposes the privatised and chilling reality of today’s urban spaces.
Malice oozes seductively
This is a play with vintage, and what it means to us now is something very different from what it would have meant to its contemporary audiences. Thankfully, director Lucy Bailey knows this and has rather spectacularly played up the kitsch in this production by West Yorkshire Playhouse.
‘Journalism dropped the ball’
The overall feel of the production is far from dour or comfortable. It’s a punchy 75 minutes, paced like a rolling news channel during a crisis, with each speech urgently taking over from the last in a raucous fiesta of opinions. The actors drive the play like jet engines, pumping the polemic with fiery vigour.
Controlled and subtle inner rage
The various characters do seem to foster romanticised versions of themselves, and fail miserably in their attempts to realise them. So really, the author is making a statement through her characters about how ordinary people become trapped in socially constructed forms of behaviour.
Earthly angel
A dark gothic novel of suspense about assassins and Angels, set in worlds past and present.
Shades of light and dark
Phillips is able to deliver a powerful and evocative message through four central characters whose close familial bond is described between shifting narrative perspectives of past and present, to illustrate the endurance of close, personal relationships which permeate and surpass the boundaries of place and time.
Ordinary village folk
The striking clarity with which Sarah explains her story also provides a balanced and unromanticised version of the early American justice system and sheds light over its true situation amidst fear and unjustified mass superstitious panic under the pretence of religious ideology.
Respect and respectability
Gee’s novel certainly recreates the atmospheric conditions of the historical period, including the insecurity of women and their dependence on the male instigated moral constraints brought about by marriage. Their very respectability, in fact, rests on the acquisition of an eligible bachelor to secure their status as respectable individuals in a male dominated society.
Sound bites from a revolution
Although we follow Paine through the upheaval of two revolutions, however, seeing him succeed and fail in his struggle to influence their direction, and meet some great historical actors along the way (Jefferson, Danton, Burke), we leave the play surprisingly ignorant of the content of his arguments
Poodles in the Wilderness
I was struck more by the handful of people who resisted the impulse to look behind the screen, obstinately remaining seated, their refusal to participate in crossing the threshold from passive observer to active participant paradoxically becoming an assertion of subjectivity.
The possibility of love
The voice is not the high-octane, clever, boyish excess of his early ‘testosterone novels’; it has matured, his ‘compulsive vividness of style’ has relaxed into an easy-going wisdom. There is still the high laugh-per-page ratio. There is still the finger-clicking rhythm. Still the mode is tragicomic. But there is something different, something significantly different about the author of The Pregnant Widow from that of the lunatic Yellow Dog.
In defence of poetry
Are the implications of the poem that going out with a bread-knife is as much a desperate act as calculated violence? This is where Duffy takes the cultural risk, where poetry becomes dangerous, unflinching.
For modest liberation?
It’s often difficult to see how Levy equates such disparate strands of behaviour: what brings such targets together for Levy doesn’t always read like concern that women have become ‘female chauvinist pigs’ so much as a deep-seated dislike of promiscuity, hedonism and sexual permissiveness.
Waiting for the pregnant widow
Speaking in Manchester, Amis likened the relationship between reader and author to that of lovers, and so to expand on the analogy, if Amis were to be our lover: he would be lush, indulgent, too demanding of our attention in his stripling desire to delight.
Trouble in paradise
Some might find Celia’s misfortune a little too relentless for one child to manage, but there is a refreshing lack of self-indulgent dwelling on said circumstances; writing the narrative as though through the eyes of a child was the best thing Smyth could have done.
Fight and faith
Playwright Ella Hickson, whose new play Eight explores the discontentment of privileged twenty-somethings, argues the recession will prove a stern test for a generation unused to hardship and lacking strong beliefs, but also an opportunity to work out what really matters and might be worth fighting for.
Found in translation
Just like sand runs through a time glass, this piece acts as a constant reminder of the inescapable sense of caducity that frustrates every human being. As Cherkaoui and Pagés cling to each other’s bodies, theirs appears to be the ultimate attempt to redeem the transient nature of human beings.
A quest for unrestrained perfection
The performance that stood out and made the evening unmissable was the final piece by Benjamin Millepied, ‘Everything doesn’t happen at once’. It released the energy that seemed to have been dormant throughout the evening and finally burst in this climactic performance.
The paradox of being
Dance as an intellectual, not merely instinctive activity, deploys the wide ranging potential of the body to articulate its relationship with the mind.
Difference in sameness
When Eric Underwood lifts Sarah Lamb during a delicate duet, she gently accommodates her basket-shaped body in his curved arms, just like wine poured in a goblet would end up taking the shape of a tulip. An image bound to be memorable as the seal that only dance can put on beauty.
Between brain and body
What we see on stage is nothing like Artificial Intelligence, but bodies, pure bodies in never-ending motion. Restless limbs stretch to the brink of their muscular tension, undulating shoulders trace sinuous shapes, marking the space in which the bodies relentlessly conquer their consciousness
Jazz and the myth of authenticity
The counterculture never did have any time for aspiration. Jazz, for some, may have been a form of cultural slumming, but for many blacks, working at monotonous, low-paid jobs and paying high rents to live in overcrowded apartment buildings, the music and its performers offered a glimpse of a better life that was demonstrably within the grasp of black Americans. Music was one arena in which blacks could be seen to excel.
A eulogy for pop
Despite Simon Cowell’s insistence that the programme is looking for ‘the future’, when it moulds the bright eyed hopefuls into ‘stars’, they all begin to resemble the throwaway pop stars of yesteryear.
Folk with a classical education
Jim cites the ability to record onto a computer as one of the first things that drew him to arranging and composing music. Nonetheless he rejects the notion that Ranger3 are a shining example of the ‘anyone can do it’ ideal: ‘Making music is definitely more accessible in terms of price. Anyone can do it. But I don’t think you can do it quickly. You still have to learn how to record and how to make good music!’
The politics of rap in a changing America
To the extent that rap substituted for the Black Power movement, it must be judged a failure as a political movement. Marx’s famous aphorism about the first time tragedy, second time farce, is relevant here. While Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Panthers leaders like Huey P Newton and Bobby Seale mixed canniness at exploiting media image with organising on the ground, Public Enemy, or Kanye West, epitomised the former with nary a trace of the latter.
The bigger economic picture
The financial crisis taught us that it is dangerous to leave decisions about our economy to self-appointed ‘experts’. To hold politicians and business leaders accountable, the public needs to be educated, informed and engaged in a high level of economic debate. It’s time to take the battle of ideas out of the conference hall, and on to the streets.
The evolution of a weird super-story
The big story we have accepted has a very strange aspect. In one way it completes a triptych of betrayals of the people: the greedy bankers destroying the economy; the MPs’ expenses scandal; and now the press, in cahoots with politicians, big business and the police misleading the courts and carelessly pursuing a morally reprehensible course of invasion of privacy and bribery. We are all supposed to be joining in the circle of condemnation and moral outrage, waving our pitchforks at a newly discovered monster in our midst.
Gets your motor running
Crawford’s well-aimed blows at scientific management principles, staff team-building exercises and the resistance of modern machinery to home servicing will strike chords with many, and he synthesises a fresh and thought-provoking outlook from his experiences. However, alongside the ambition of his remit, his basic argument - that we can make the world a better place by fixing stuff - is pretty modest.
Transparency works both ways
If the public is treated as if mere information is required before the correct view of its significance can be arrived at, then attempts to engage the public with big ideas or really change their attitudes will fail
Swimming against an authoritarian current
The Bully State is often useful and entertaining. But Monteith’s anthropomorphising of social pressures into a list of bullying ‘socialist’ do-gooders risks underestimating an important part of hyperregulation today.
The myth of racist kids?
Adrian Hart was prompted to research and write his report after working on a film with an anti-racism awareness drama group at schools in Essex in 2006. He described this as his ‘wake-up moment’ where he realised the pressure on schools to provide reports of racist incidents led to the misinterpretation of ordinary childhood exchanges.
The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education
Ben, a teacher, was the first to get passionate: ‘I disagreed with everything you said. I can feel myself getting angry!’ he said. ‘I think that what you’re saying shows an absolute lack of compassion.’
Let the information be free
Anderson analyses Steven Brand’s famous quote that the ‘information wants to be free’, noting Brand also said another kind of information wants to be expensive, and the two are contradictory.
Mind, brain and self in the age of Facebook
The technology has heightened our perceptions about things that are going on in our culture and highlighted the concerns that we have about it, such as privacy, risk, celebrity and the intergenerational relationships between adults and children. Social networking technology is reflective of these concerns; it doesn’t generate them.
Policing the Brighton public
After discussing many aspects of the booze ban in Brighton last week, it struck me that many of us were thinking about how this law might be fought in a legal way. I think that bringing it out into the open and forcing the council to defend it, politically, has a much better chance of reversing the DPPO sooner than any challenge in the courts.
Free speech and identity politics
It was the Rushdie affair that marked the beginning of a new kind of battle between a minority and the state, where instead of taking action against discrimination or poverty, Muslims burned books and attacked publishers on the basis of their hurt feelings. The principle that it is morally unacceptable to offend was established in relations between different people in a way that we still suffer from today.
Energise! Power to the people
’We realised that we had to look much more carefully at energy and its uses and production. The politicisation of climate change is a serious issue because it stands in the way of solving problems and stifles debate,’ said Joe.
Passports to modernity
‘These are living and breathing social documents that talk of human beings speaking to other human beings. The language and mode of expression is radical, bold and strident. And I think it relates to what we’ve already discussed…that artists saw themselves as part of a much bigger change that some sections of society were attempting to bring about.’
Look who’s watching now
What is truly your own private space? Is this the space of a lodger in a communal bunk house, at home or in a park making love, or can it be on a bus pondering the day ahead? What about those social but private liaisons? How do you regard the strip joint, couple’s kissing in the cinema or a Wall Street brothel. And what about what’s public - anarchists in city square, assassinated individuals, dead soldiers on the battlefield?
We need mirrors?
It would appear that pathos and disappointment define a strong contemporary current, with fewer options projecting and inspiring us forwards. It seems that that the scope of our future orientation is constrained. We’re not just nervous about setting ambitious goals. The attempt to do so is understood as seen as arrogant. Such audaciousness will see us repeating past mistakes
Breathless
The poetry of Keats is informed by personal experience but expressed in shared universal language, embodying a positive distinction between public and private. His letters, on the other hand, indicate the profound tensions that existed simultaneously for the individual.
Privacy and the public
Privacy intrusions don’t just happen when information is inappropriately gathered, stored or shared. Intervention in people’s private lives and private thoughts now occurs so routinely around that it has become a normal fact of life.
Ascent and Exchange
When they set out to write these texts, neither author must have expected to create an especially political book. But for the first time in decades, opinions about the detailed management of the economy are intensely political, and any book, article or quotation on financial matters in the last few years is likely to be re-read in that light.
Beyond normality
The process of transition towards liberal democracy has been portrayed as a process of normalisation. The West, according to this reading of history, is the embodiment of the historical standard, and what is wrong with the institutions in the East is that they are not yet Western. Artists and curators in Serbia have been persistent in offering alternative readings of the recent political changes in their country.
Re-enchanting the material world
Conceptual art, which emerged in the 1970s, and one contemporary strand of which appropriates elements of everyday life, comes to be emblematic of ‘material spirituality’. The artist re-enchants the material world we inhabit by injecting ‘thought’ into it.
The staged page
So many factors: if a performer plays a poet who reads a poem, he is firstly performing a poet, then performing a poet’s voice, all this before the actual poem. To deliver the poem then, even if he just ‘reads’ , it would be a performance regardless of how pared down a delivery it is.
The birds and the bees on DVDs
While individually interesting, viewed together the films provide a remarkable snapshot of images of personal and intimate life in Britain in the twentieth century and of changing aspirations and representations of the good life. They also provide an important record of government and quasi-government attempts at informing and regulating sexual behaviour.
Maggots feeding on the body of art
A traditionalist, nationalist perspective argues that modern art has steadily been eroding traditional British values, whilst today’s cultural institutions are a love-in for the liberal elite.
‘Deradicalisation’ as ideological conformism
The idea of ‘de-programming’ in itself has a long and ugly history, often associated with practices of brainwashing, thought reform or mind control as used by New Religious Movements and other cultish groups. Such programmes attempt to ‘gut-check’ participants into thinking along more ‘appropriate’ lines that serve to inhibit critical thinking and express support for the status quo.
Real dogs
CW’s second review of the box office smash Slumdog Millionaire argues it is neither Bollywood nor completely realist, yet holds uncomfortable truths about slum life.
She freed herself
Her story was challenged, her accounts of suffering were dismissed and she was even seen to have been complicit in her own capture. This book is a very touching, nuanced and determined two fingers up to those rumour-mongers.
‘The Big Society’ (or ‘Compulsory Voluntarism’)
‘The Compact Code of Good Practice on Volunteering’ continues: ‘The key element (of volunteering) that it is freely undertaken’ (my italics). Maybe the government thinks that this simply means ‘done for free’ but in fact it describes an activity ‘willingly, uncoercedly or generously’ given. As such, it is about the rights of the person who gives up his/her time.
A large central void
Several reviewers have criticised the banalities of the libretto, but, to a certain extent, this is the least of the problems. Even La Traviata opens with the line ‘You’re late. We’ve been playing cards’, but Wainwright’s words are genuinely lamentable throughout. Add to this the fact that there is no drama, no turmoil, no excitement, no arias (to speak of) and no coup de grace - and you are left with a large central void to act your way out of.
Palladio the genius
Understanding the work of the architect’s architect when there are no substansive differences between traditionalists and modernists today.
Theatre, Life, Death, God, Love and Faith - yet an un-Bergmanesque Bergman
As with many Bergman characters, Helen’s profession as an actor is her life. Among the deleted scenes are several soliloquies where she says that her life is a masquerade, putting a shocking spin on what is seen in the film version.
Passing through
Wendy’s car becomes an interesting symbol. Without it she can’t take her dog anywhere, and it’s devastating to find out that the cost of repairing it is more than she can afford. It is never seen being driven, and this combined with her dependance on it suggests it represents employment.
Chocolate covered broccoli
Jonathan Blow, one of the greatest minds in the gaming industry today once stated that ’games inherently teach’. These teachers did little with this fact.
Metalheads
On the one hand the other set pieces are made to be real and they’re all real people even if they sometimes do unrealistically apt things. But on the other hand it’s completely insane in context and nearly too funny to be true.
Dancing with depth
If you want to know who killed Nancy then this is the film for you. If you want a humourous and interesting exploration of the eclectic lives of rock musicians then you could do worse, but they could do a lot better.
A house in the north
Carlos’ brother, Sergio, is going to be the manager of a soon-to-be-built shopping centre: not any shopping centre, but the largest in the area, ‘where people will go to take photos of each other riding on escalators for the first time in their lives and buying everything they need to make them feel less like the peasants they are’.
The drama of property
So we’re back to the same living room with Steve, and it’s hot and everyone’s trying to be friendly and hostile in equal measure, as this white pregnant couple who embody the concept of gentrification try to get along with their black neighbours-to-be. And because it’s 2009, ‘race’ is a word nobody uses any longer. Except, as Steve finally suggests to his wife’s horror, that are they all secretly thinking it?
Re-invasion
Mariam Haque, in particular, shows a remarkable talent for comedy - in fact possibly turning out to be too funny for the play’s own good, making it almost impossible for her fellow actors not to guffaw.
A not-yet-adult tongue
Throughout the fragments, the air between them, as well as their tone, their way of negotiating the space of the stage all remain invariably the same: not threatening, and not necessarily angry or desperate, mostly just annoyed, the way you would if the person you live with had misplaced the scissors, rather than if you were worried those scissors could end up in your chest.
Accessories to a conspiracy
From Calypso to Circe to Penelope, from the descent to Hades to a nightmarish vision of a war that was any war, Allen consistently showed a fortunate relationship with Homer’s text, a love that managed to walk on the brink of reverence and shy veneration.
Between nymph, frustrated child and femme fatale
She teases constantly, yet almost never shows to enjoy any of it. She mirrors her lovers’ sentences, repeating almost word by word what they tell her, giving back the image they want - and in this sense works very much as a reflection of their morality or lack thereof.
Thick with humanity
David Lan’s direction maintains the richness of Wilson’s reticence and control, and counterbalances the long, wordy speeches with strong, visceral and willful movements and gestures - Bertha’s caresses and embraces to Seth, Herald’s under-the-skin violence in cutting some yams on a tin plate.
Blissfully unaware incarnation
Here there is a relatively settled Chinese community, but also the first patronizing guided tours, on the model of today’s London walks, which probably benefit from the interest raised in the English public by writers like Burke.
The stranger lurking
There is no lack of big topics here; perhaps there is, rather, an overabundance of them. But Pautz’s text is blessedly devoid of intellectual smugness and lecturing, the energetic and overall excellent performances across the cast save the long exchanges from fatigue.
An ecstatic, animalistic howl
What really brings the text home as a stab to the heart is the cast. Fishburne gives each character his chance to shine during a few glorious minutes of confrontation, and each actor in this production takes that chance by the neck.
Shoulder-shrugging sportsmen
There are cigarettes, trench coats - the Nazi ones angular and thick and rigid, the American ones softer and scruffier - femme fatales in dressing gowns, and a touch of fog; there are tight-fisted demonstrations of power and confidently-handled glasses of Scotch.
Nikolai’s broken cry
The real and true menace is not Communism, nor the new government, but the Future, and it the Future which has its thundering cannons pointed firmly against the sentimental bourgeoisie.
An urban bucolic
The music’s emotional ebbs, together with the projection of Jack Wake-Walker’s beautiful shots of the Thames and of crossing cranes against the sky, seemed to be redeeming the presence of The Restructure; they opposed the most human to the least soulful.
Haunting the heart
Silver’s words kept leaving Cheshire cat’s smiles hanging in the air behind them, the full philosophical wit and insight only hitting us with a delay of a few seconds, or even re-emerging many hours later during a tube journey or a lunch-break walk – ‘I depend on people empathising with me in order to read my own mind’; ‘when I grow up I want to be a pilot; or a member of the cabin crew; or a passenger’.
The dark Clerkenwell mist
Avant! Noir happily managed a smooth equilibrium of media and styles, music and words and images all melting into each other, suggesting further shapes and colours, stretching the genre without straining it.
Shiny red shoes
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.
The not-too-subtle symbolism of the suitcases
‘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’.
Physical incarnations of commas and dots
Jodie McNee, as the curious, fervently religious and yet independently-minded Sarah, is the force to be reckoned with. She proceeds with eyes and palms wide open, looking for names to everything under the sun and relentlessly examining life’s minutiae, eventually discovering how to fully inhabit her own force: ‘I know now I must find out the names for myself’.
Pavement lanes
Towards the end, I found myself holding my breath during a mother and daughter confrontation, hoping Oglesby would let her characters finally inhabit the same dramatic tension without interrupting, only to be disappointed again when it all suddenly turned into a slapstick chase of the robot around the hospital beds.
A lesson not a dialogue
There is sophisticated style in this production, and there is, as Zuabi declared was his intention, remarkably little anger. Annoyingly, however, there is also a very clear intent to tell the audience what to make of the story, an intent fully embraced from the moment you step into the Young Vic until the time you leave the building.
Diane solves problems
If it was enraged indignation for Mitchell’s dilemma that Beane was after, I am afraid that it will be almost impossible to muster for most of us - watching Mitchell taking his decision, I suddenly understood Wallace Shawn’s lack of sympathy for those who lament the loss of the cherry orchard.
Rom-com renewal
As demanded by the rom-com tradition (explicitly invoked during the evening), Bob and Helena, the protagonists of Midsummer, are superficially different, and belong to separate worlds (yet deep down, you don’t need me to tell you, they are similar). She is a high-flying divorce lawyer, he is a small-time crook who still exudes an aura of eye-liner-wearing, scruffy adolescent.
A refusal of cause and effect
Loher touches upon a cornucopia of eternal human questions and philosophical concepts, the wide range of which might be the weakest point of her play - from the most obvious two, sex and death, to motherhood and the female connection with water.
Charming and witty evenings of folly
In Hitchcock’s movie, Rupert was played by the wholesome, clean-faced James Stewart, who does not have an ounce of malice in him. At the Almeida, Rupert is inhabited and transformed through a memorable performance by Bertie Carvel, whose presence on the stage illuminates Hamilton’s dialogue and builds up the final scene to exquisite tension.
A small, icy cloud of threat
Sexual interests, obsessions of control and morbid romance are weaved in several directions between all these boys and girls, crossing over genders and reciprocity, as alliances get destroyed and reconstructed. They are all the same and yet very different.
Fragile-looking plastic furniture
What is central is the vulnerability of the women, and yet how dangerous they can seem, even to us who have witnessed Marie’s fight-or-flight response at a mere knock on the door.
A maxim for every occasion
In imagining that Valadon would be the torch-bearer of lust for life and unconventionality in art, and Degas would be the defender of dedication to work and respect for the tradition, Wertenbaker not only adheres to a tired cliché about gender, but also forces upon her characters a set of values and attitudes that belong very specifically to us.
General tearful mayhem
The play was written by a very young woman and is interpreted by more young men and women, yet I have not been out of high school long enough to find their attitudes believable. The overall impression is like Dawson’s Creek set in a comprehensive inner-city high school doing an episode on religious differences.
‘Model’
Surrounded by tackiness and wasted abundance, Dijana is no different from any of these cheap objects around her: she is rushing, like them, towards obsoleteness, in the fastest lane of disposability, hugged then forgotten, desired only until she becomes repulsive as a reminder of the very desire she fulfilled.
We all want magic
Thanks to Mamet’s talent, and thanks to the splendidly staged production that the Arcola makes out of it, there is no line in the sand, in spite of our best and repeated attempts at tracing one throughout the hour, we are mostly cynical about the whole business - or are we?
Lost in adaptation
Where Spark had beautiful, amusing, tender glass figurines of women, at once perfectly unique and amazingly recognisable, Adams’ adaptation has wooden, two-dimensional stickers of poses, grimaces, and caricature.
Languid cynicism by the pool
There is a certain amused enthusiasm à la Baz Lurhmann behind all this: the beautiful and damned, the young and wealthy, in their trunks and bikinis, walking glamorously towards tragedy.
God’s waiting room
The subject willingly and explicitly tackled here is faith. Or Faith, rather. The setting is a waiting room with a group of mismatched chairs and a pitiful plant. The protagonist is a ruffled, averagely awkward guy called Adam who is being interviewed, cross-examined and poked at by a God whose voice we hear intermittently as he plays both good and bad cop.
Slow and unsteadying
It is regrettable that, in comparison to much of the European audience, the British should still appear so firmly set, a priori, against slowness and silence and anything that can be called, generalising for practical purposes, experimental theatre. There are no linear conclusions to be drawn from Tighe’s adaptation, but there is a very stimulating invitation to make your own way into the text.
Selling Medea
How do you turn Medea into a desirable, advertisable product? And how do you make people want every little piece of her? First of all, you turn her into a victim. The sheer violence, masqueraded as care, with which the four women of the marketing company abuse Medea physically and emotionally, making her into a savage, tangling her hair and smearing her face with dirt, is perhaps the strongest point of the production.
Constant humming of claustrophobia
Kursk gives us a very interesting glimpse at what hyper-realism could do to and with theatre, as well as a very well-crafted, well-researched work - the producer, writer and co-directors visited two hunter-killer nuclear submarines to make sure to get the atmosphere right, and the sounds, the protocol, the fluid exchange of precise professional terms all testify to it.
Gloriously gut-churning
It is fitting to the general character of Atreus’ and Thyestes’ family, and to the feelings evoked by it from ancient times through to Renaissance, that Hannah Clark’s set for this production recalls, with exactitude and gusto, the dirty basements lit by dangling lightbulbs recently seen in so many horror movies, from Hostel to the Saw series.
Storming drama
Instead of the black and white moral impositions risked by any work with political and environmental issues at its core, and instead of force-fed ambiguity, there is a very touchable likeness, and sympathy for everyone involved.
A tiny orchestra
Whitemore’s main innovation was to distribute the role of self-deprecating narrator and protagonist among three different Simons, played in this production by Jasper Britton, Felicity Kendal and Nicholas Le Prevost. On paper, this may sound unappealing, but on stage it actually works very well as a way to render the dynamic and un-lecturing, improvising style of the diaries.
A safety valve on a dodgy boiler
Perhaps this lack of a narrative centre would be less perceivable if Reg, who is the core of the piece, were a thoroughly convincing character - but he is not really. For a man who believes himself to be the best thing that happened to proletariat since Marx, he is considerably spoiled and aloof.
Warm compulsion
Frayn’s talent lies in making all these idiosyncratic and occasionally annoying characters seem entirely lovable: as much as their individual peccadillos and weaknesses are exposed, we still really like them - not because they’re funny, but because they are very human.
Friendly neighbours
‘I’m not going to make you work for me or commit a crime or lay a finger on you. One day, I might ask for a bit of conversation, the next go for a walk with me. Nothing terrible, nothing degrading.’
Scholarly finger-wagging
It would be interesting to know how much of the play’s pacifistic moralism comes from Schehadé, and how much comes from Hughes’ own contribution - particularly because both authors were working on the text in significant times for their respective countries.
Sympathy and indignation
If we were to consider the play from a more strictly formal, aesthetic point of view, it would probably have received fewer stars than most critics gave it, as it is built more like a television documentary than as a theatrical work. As it is, the strength of the message and its emotional consequences make us somehow forget that, for example, the space of the stage is not used very well, and that many characters barely move as they speak.
Lyrical prose and physical theatre
Inua Ellams recounts his childhood and adolescence, all the while exuberantly trying to establish a significant space for himself both in the line of people who came before him, and in the cities in which he grows up, moving from Nigeria to the United Kingdom.
Don’t play the fucking Abulkasem!
The fact that we switch so easily between liking and disliking the character 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.
Dead in the red
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.
Shoreditch was always where it’s at
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.
Indomitably and restlessly guilty
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
The power of mothers
Paul and Trudi are not that different from most mothers and children; they remember a different past, even though they lived through the same one. Trudi thinks that Paul failed because she did not push him enough, and Paul thinks that he failed, if he did, because she pushed him too much, instead of supporting him.
Guilty impotence
Singh’s use of the small venue’s space is reminiscent of some of the Young Vic’s most brilliant productions: the Clare becomes a black, empty box, where a metal trash bin, an old public telephone and a basic wooden bench are enough to recreate any bus stop in any Western metropolitan city on any given night.
Standing up to Ibsen
Rita and Alfred’s fight over her jealousy for Olivier and her need for physical devotion contains the most awkward line of the season: ‘I have a uterus’.
Radical unreasonable reason
An exploration of two types of political radicalism, with a defence of using reason to make unreasonable demands.
Intentism – the Resurrection of the Author
Far from being a regressive reaction to postmodernism, Intentism is a small part of what happens next.
The rise and fall of an agent of change
The film unpicks the complex dynamic in the American political system that lead both to the rise and the inevitable fall of this charismatic agent of change. It is laden with the complexity of social dynamics within modern society through its depiction of a tragic inevitability.
Last time on Culture Wars
Designs for life
How to direct a play, London theatre and Terence Conran
4 February 2012
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