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
Junta Sekimori
Alicia Rudd
Alicia Rudd is a contributing writer for an online network of aspiring and experienced writers and journalists and has a strong interest in various genres of fiction. 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
Theo Hobson
Theo Hobson is the author of Milton’s Vision: the Birth of Christian Liberty (Continuum).
Valentin Ciobotaru
Samuel Middleton
Richard Woolfenden: Director, Xube
Richard Woolfenden is director of Xube, a production company that makes films, promos and virals for a wide range of clients. Richard enjoys the creative challenges of working with video and digital media to make engaging films. The digital video revolution, and the new possibilities that this technology unleashed, was a major factor influencing Richard’s decision to leave teaching in 1996 and pursue his passion for film. He has a keen interest in how new technology continues to impact on television and film. More of Richard’s work can be found in his blog Eclectic Trains..
Robert de Vries
Sophie von Stumm: Goldsmiths University of London, Department of Psychology
Neil Stoker
Charlie Winstanley
Rachel Halliburton: Time Out
Rachel Halliburton is deputy editor of Time Out (London).
Kathryn Ecclestone
Kathryn Ecclestone is Professor of Education and Social Inclusion at the University of Birmingham, co-author of The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education and director of an ESRC-funded seminar series on ‘emotional well-being and social justice’.
Daniel Green
Charlotte Green
Anna Travis
Anna Travis lectures in English literature, contributes to spiked-online and writes reviews for the Brighton Salon. She is currently completing a book entitled ‘Mediocre Man: The Lost Archetype of Modernity’, which this essay draws upon
Tracey Brown
James Woudhuysen
Don Eales
Don Eales is the curator of Vibe Live in London and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He pioneered many of the communication technologies that are now taken for granted, including Videoconferencing, Content Delivery and IPTV. He is currently introducing stereoscopic 3D into live events, particularly sport and music, whilst also creating exciting new applications for Augmented Reality. He has acted as Curator for both The Brickhouse restaurant and the new Vibe Live and Gallery, both on Brick Lane, London. He was recently responsible for facilitating ‘402 – The Death Row Show’, an acclaimed art exhibition which is a powerful polemic against the death penalty in America. Don also acts as an investment advisor for companies and projects (particularly film) seeking friendly funding. First and foremost though, he is a Storyteller of considerable renown, having spun his yarns at major festivals in the UK (and country pubs in Cork on many a rainy night).
Javed Mohammed
Javed Mohammed is a San Francisco bay area based writer-producer. He is the author of four books and founder of the MyFavoriteReview.com site, which reviews films and books. Although he started writing non-fiction, his interests and passion have led him to writing fiction and adapting for screenplay.
Iain King: author and philosopher
Heather Piper: Senior Research Fellow, Manchester Met
Dr Heather Piper, Senior Research Fellow, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, is a qualitative researcher and her interests span a broad range of educational and social issues. She has co-authored and edited a number of books (including Don’t Touch) and has published widely, as well as being involved in more than 20 research projects.
Her ‘voice’ in research practice and academic writing is typified by a contrarian approach, a broad based and eclectic intellectual territory in sociology, philosophy, social policy, and a sensitivity to inter-professional concerns informed by her own experiences outside of the academy.
See her new insights into a touchy subject, and email her here:
h.j.piper ‘at’ mmu.ac.uk.
Dr Andrew Calcutt: director, Rising East
Rip Cronk: Californian muralist
Patrick West
Patrick West is a freelance writer based in the UK and Ireland. He has written for The Times, the New Statesman, the Spectator, the Times Literary Supplement, the Irish Times, Daily Telegraph, Living Marxism and the Catholic Herald among others. He is author of Conspicuous Compassion (Civitas, 2004), The Poverty of Multiculturalism (Civitas, 2005), Beating Them At Their Own Game, How The Irish Conquered English Soccer (Liberties Press, 2006), and editor of The Times Questions Answered (HarperCollins, 2004).
Andrea Killick
Sam Peczek
After graduating a media degree, Sam tried her hand at teaching English in a failed attempt to escape the UK. Until another plan presents itself, she currently devotes her spare time to penning petty rants about whatever happens to capture her heart or incur her wrath. Intermittent ruminations appear on Fringe magazine’s blog. Her debut novel - a rather unnecessary tale of disconnection, sex, and Spectacle - is a work in progress, and likely to remain (safely) unpublished.
Stuart Baird
Editorial Team
David Perks
David Perks is Head of Physics at Graveney School in South West London.
William Ferraiolo: Philosophy lecturer, SJDC, Stockton, CA
William Ferraiolo received a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Oklahoma in 1997. Since that time, he has been teaching philosophy at San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton, California. He is the author of Cynical Maxims and Marginalia (iUniverse, 2007). He has published extensively in specialist publications, including Sorites, Ars Disputandi, International Journal of Philosophical Practice, Quodlibet, Disputatio and Teorema.
Matt Trueman
Matt Trueman is the winner of the 2009 Allen Wright Award for the best reviewer aged 30 or under at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Steve Fuller: sociologist and author
Dennis Hayes
Dennis Hayes is the founder of Academics For Academic Freedom (AFAF). In 2009, AFAF launched the first ever International Academic Freedom Day on John Stuart Mill’s birth date, 20 May. AFAF has also launched a new web site: www.afaf.org.uk
Martyn Perks: is a design consultant
is a design consultant and a writer and speaker on design, IT and business. Visit his website here ( http://www.martynperks.com/ ).
Sally McIlhone
Sally McIlhone is a Law graduate from Warwick University. Realising part-way through the course that she hated law and 99.9% of law students, the only valuable thing she took from her degree was how to say ‘lawyers for the dark side of society’ in Japanese. Since graduating Sally wrote, directed, produced and financed her first play, Brain Drain - a 1950s B-movie for the stage, which premiered at Brighton Fringe Festival in 2008 and received a 4-star review in The Argus newspaper. She is passionate about independent cinema, vintage fashion, literature and Simon Pegg.
Matthew Worsdale: is a Debating Matters alumnus
Colman Durkee
Colman Durkee is a student of critical social theory at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. He runs the Hidden Apparatus record (and soon to be literary!) label.
Karl Sharro: architect and writer
Karl Sharro is an architect, writer and co-author of Manifesto: Towards a New Humanism in Architecture.
He has practiced architecture in London and Beirut, and taught for five years at the American University of Beirut where he participated in various research projects on post-war reconstruction and urban renewal. He also taught a seminar that looked at the relationship between art and the city in which a number of artists, film-makers and writers participated.
Visit his website here: www.karlsharro.co.uk
Mark Taylor
Mark Taylor is a history teacher at a South London state school. He is an Institute of Ideas Education Forum committee member, and regularly contributes to the forum’s Opinion section. He writes and researches on the politics and history of education, and is currently researching educational reforms under Labour since 1997.
Adrian Hornsby
Joanna Loveday: live art writer
Joanna Loveday is a writer based in Yorkshire, UK specialising in writing on performance and live art: www.joannaloveday.blogspot.com.
Gavin Bower
Gavin Bower is a writer, and currently working with the NOISE Festival.
Kevin Rooney
Geoff Kidder: Institute of Ideas
Geoff Kidder is head of membership and events of the Institute of Ideas. He convenes the monthly IoI Book Club, and supervises the IoI’s administration and event management. He also produces debates, particularly on sport, at the annual Battle of Ideas festival in London.
Larne Abse Gogarty
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
‘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.
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.
The Protestant origins of our liberal tradition
Luther and others discovered a basic theme of Paul’s letters was the contrast between rules-based Judaism, and freedom-loving Christianity.
Cushioned revolt
This is not a blasting nerve-wrecking stand, but a sort of community appeal against war. You are fused into the revolt, yet you are only marginally affected by the violence of war.
Tout moun se moun?
This contrasts the objectives of ‘spreading democracy’ with the basic principle of Aristide’s politics, the slogan, tout moun se moun (every person is a person).
Wrapped around Ingrid Bergman
The power of the story lies ultimately in the portrayal of Alicia by Ingrid Bergman; a complex character who is trying to atone for her father’s guilt while also putting her own frivolous past behind her.
Passionate people at w…w…w…war!
The interweaving of Sexby’s narrative and Angelica’s own tumultuous story means an otherwise straightforward ‘will they, won’t they’ subplot is intimately bound up with the rights and wrongs of the historical conflict.
The problem with families
What is the state’s role in raising the next generation? Can parents be trusted to bring up children without interference from government?
Waking up from the American Dream?
At present America is fighting various battles – some on the outside, some inside the country. For one, American militaries are operating in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Somalia, Georgia and Lebanon; further troops are stationed in Turkey, Kenya and South Korea. For the other, the United States quarrel with a presidential election, the credit crunch, gas prices, and decisions on abortion, gun laws and same-sex marriages.
16mm delights
My first encounter was a brief reconnaissance, a dash not unlike Martin Creed’s Work No. 850 that had been performed 134,000 times one floor up. Goshka Macuga’s room seemed clean and polished; Cathy Wilkes’ seemed to be trying hard; Runa Islam? I wasn’t sure; and Mark Leckey’s section seemed confusing.
Unconventional classification
This is a diverting exhibition, and I was certainly engaged while meandering through the four floors of the gallery, the setting of which was very appropriate for this catholic set of ephemera. I particularly enjoyed Pae White’s striking tapestry suspended between the top two floors, and the stunning patterns produced by Marey’s 1901 smoke machine (I want one!).
Rigorous geometry
Coppermill is an imposing East-End venue, high-roofed, full of architectural interest, yet small enough to feel intimate. Martin Creed responded to the strong geometric features, combining sound with a variety of visual media, making a rewarding final show in Hauser and Wirth’s series of three at Coppermill.
Mine the past, move on
The play’s blatant agenda as an agitprop piece for the ‘Reclaim Labour’ movement lead it into trouble as soon the central issue of Thatcher’s funeral begins to take shape.
Ballooning humanity
The personal importance of the experiment to the lives of those involved is the central theme of the film, which at times boils over into genuine desperation and elation over its ups and downs.
Why doesn’t listening to modern classical music matter any more?
Like every art form, music should continue to provoke and explore different ways of getting under our skin, but though I would hate to have a world without dissonance, I believe that rock music stole classical music’s thunder when it took over the role of providing society’s songs and dances, not least by absorbing the power of electricity to provide the level of energy that an increasingly sex and technology obsessed society needed.
Music for life
How can music help improve young people’s lives? I suppose unlike the Music Manifesto I firmly believe that the answer comes as much in the discipline it instils as in the flights of creative self-expression it can let loose.
Darwin on the couch
We pity Darwin, not because of the political, academic and religious challenges he faces in trying to get his ideas out, but because of his overwhelming need to gain emotional ‘closure’.
Therapy culture revisited
Our view is that education is now the key to our future. This is not to revert to an archaic form of change through education but to recognise that, at the present moment, it is only by asserting subjects that we can develop subjectivity.
Head to head on space exploration: ‘man not machine should explore space’
Two students from Barton Court Grammar School in an email head-to-head on whether man or machine should be exploring space in the twenty first century
Head to head on space exploration: ‘man not machine should explore space’
Two students from Barton Court Grammar School in an email head-to-head on whether man or machine should be exploring space in the twenty first century
Social critique by stealth: why a subversive heart supplies the veins of all good comedy
Although the interwar years of Weimar Germany and 1960s Britain appeared to be golden moments for anti-establishment mirth, it is easy to miss the insubordinate heart of satire that is still beating as strong today, as thoughtful humour is so often social critique by stealth.
A Hypochondriac Nation
We are now a nation obsessed with our bowels and bumpy bits, indulging in the guilty pleasure of a meat-feast pizza then seeking penance with the cholesterol kit. But why should it follow that a healthier population must be more obsessed with health?
The ‘Regeneration Games’, London, 2012
Professor James Woudhuysen argues that an Olympics ‘Win/Win’ won’t work
The Gates of Eden are rusting!
Don Eales recalls the political power of popular song, and asks where the voices of challenge and dissent are today.
Muslim Cinema: an introduction
An introduction to Muslim Cinema allows Muslims to take a critical reflection about their own beliefs and culture, as well as providing a window for those who are of other faiths to see who Muslims are. Where does one start?
Film and social change
Films use allegory through symbolic representation to convey a meaning other than the literal. In Charlie Chaplin films, the literal is the story of a tramp and the comedy arising from everyday events. The allegorical is the reflection on the times from the effects of automation to the class difference between rich and poor in films like Modern Times
How Bollywood portrays ‘the other’
Although Hindi films have been known to be merely melodramatic, the portrayal of Indian Sikhs and Hindus as protagonists and Pakistani Muslims as antagonists is a theme that is reinforced throughout most but not all of the films dealing with the subject.
Against an ‘Ethical Lifestyle’
Through ever-progressing ethics we ‘learned’ slavery was wrong a couple of centuries ago; racism and sexism turned out to be bad sometime during the 20th century; and homophobia became unethical a decade or so later. In another half century we’ll all become vegetarians.
Intergenerational complication - too late for a hug?
Removing fear and mistrust and encouraging spontaneity in intergenerational interactions is likely to be a much longer and slower process than the one through which these fears have been firmly instituted in risk-based assumptions and practice.
The accursed cultural theory, excess and the morbid imagination
Wilson sets the stage for a logical reconstruction of self loathing as it currently appears in the most advanced capitalist nation.
Changing cultural paradigm
America is no longer the ‘melting pot’: it no longer assimilates minority groups into the majority culture. Instead of a homogeneous cultural majority imposing Western values on ethnic minorities, we now have heterogeneous cultural pluralism developing through acculturation.
New Cultural Paradigm: Community Art at the End of the Culture War
Mass culture is now composed of an array of equally entitled subcultures connected through a ubiquitous techno-social environment of camera phones, social networking on the internet and cable television channels dedicated to specific audiences.
The community mural and the changing cultural paradigm in America
Ironically, the autonomous self is dependent on immersion into culture. As a function of culture, the community mural inspires symbolic experiences of an actualisation process that reveal our potential as well as define our limitations. A subtle ‘leap of faith’ occurs as the viewer identifies with values and ideals expressed in the mural.
The internet: made for Islam?
But what of the ostensible contradiction between Islam and modernity? Far from being in antithesis to Islam, the internet is entirely germane to a religion that has always been ‘wiki’ in its nature.
Forget about it
In many respects, search engines know more about you than you do yourself. Human beings forget; digital databases do not. Thus, Mayer-Schönberger suggests, the digital age is becoming an enemy of progress. Forgetting is what make us human. Amnesia is what allows us to move on, develop and mature.
Children’s rites
Geoffrey Ben-Nathan’s intentions are admirable, and his prose pleasant, but he fails to differentiate between state and society. Officialised rituals can emerge organically, and state intervention needn’t be the default panacea for any of society’s perceived ailments.
Slaves to fame
The fame game may have been going on for years, but it doesn’t explain just why children, when asked a generation ago what they wanted to be when they grow up, answered ‘a fireman’ or ‘a policeman’, now invariably respond ‘famous’.
Illuminating the path
At the moment death truly becomes inevitable, reaching an acceptance is vital: literature may show doctors ways to help our patients achieve this, and indeed help us to be better doctors at a time when our patients need special understanding and skill.
Meatloaf
Just imagine; people simply get bored of consumerism, vandalism, of all isms in general. The good times when we bought all manner of unnecessary things with borrowed money were merely a blip on our otherwise toilsome shared existence; the recession was a return to the norm, rather than a rough patch.
From a tower block’s heady heights
Michael Fassbender dances with remarkable grace around a very fine and precarious line between loosely paternal amicability towards Mia and something altogether more adult. Without having to speak, Katie Jarvis conveys pitch perfect responses to the attentions and charms of this older man.
Face-based landscapes
RAGE made its debut simultaneously onscreen, on DVD, online and as a mobile download. Gimmicky? Perhaps. But it may well be the film’s saving grace.
A multifunctional gem
Would you have thought a self-described ‘fuckumentory’ featuring Ice-T couldn’t be enlightening? Think again. Perhaps surprisingly, it is wordsmith Ice who provides some of the funniest and most convincing examples of when no other word will do.
Future un-presented
Unlike a typical documentary photograph, making reference to an event which has already occurred, these images can be seen to inhabit a more flexible, perhaps even timeless, space, allowing the viewer to contemplate both a possible past and future.
The hypnotic power of television
Despite the abundance of homage within the film, it is distinctive and innovative enough to have its own individual presence. The story itself is familiar territory, but it is told with enough vigour and flair to keep things interesting.
Seeds of rebellion
Paronnaud’s rendering of Satrapi’s graphic novel is such a joy to behold. This is a film that simply had to be animated, not only because it is maintaining the style and mood of the source material, but mainly for the fact that it enables the entire story to be imbued with Marjane’s vibrant personality.
A life with no hope of escape
The film bathes in the banal: during a fantastically impressive storm, one luckless man finds no respite in the overcrowded bus shelter, another repeatedly tries (and fails) to choose the fastest queue to wait in, another runs for an elevator whose doors close just a moment too soon – its occupants unmoved and unresponsive.
Social graces gone askew
Heller has a keen eye for nuances in behaviour; her books are chronicles of social graces gone askew, awkward moments, miscommunication and tension.
‘And be with me in wonderland’
The challenge of Thatcher to the social concord of the Scottish elites was different from that posed by previous governments, but the political and national confidence that Professor Devine argues grew in the aftermath of that period is perhaps more difficult to see.
CW editorial note - 16 August 2010
Edinburgh festivals, Brutalism and Cognitive Surplus
CW editorial note - 29 July 2010
Ferraris for All and The Case for Working with Your Hands
CW editorial note - 19 July 2010
Ernest Hemingway, the Taureg people, arts funding and the World Cup final
CW editorial note - 8 July 2010
LIFT in London and World Cup in South Africa
CW editorial note - 1 July 2010
The World Cup, South African theatre, LIFT
CW editorial note - 24 June 2010
Exposed, the tyranny of guilt and the French football farce.
CW editorial note - 18 June 2010
Environmentalism, Puccini and Joe Meno
CW editorial note - 11 June 2010
The World Cup and South Africa, Limehouse Nights and the perfectly trashy.
CW editorial note - 27 May 2010
Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, Martin Amis’ Money and Perry Anderson’s New Old World
CW editorial note - 20 May 2010
The new politics, aspiration, South African film
CW editorial note - 13 May 2010
Cameron and conservatism, Harry Brown, The Ghost Writer, science and democracy and the British directors’ school.
CW editorial note - 6 May 2010
Juries, social policy, arts funding and immigration
CW editorial note - 29 April 2010
Better and better, evidence-based policy, the BNP, Pressure Drop and Posh
CW editorial note - 23 April 2010
Youth engagement, libel reform, the BNP, new economic thinking, Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s Behud and much more theatre.
CW editorial note - 15 April 2010
The Big Society, education and the election, a therapeutic Odyssey and trash culture
CW editorial note - 8 April 2010
CW’s UK election 2010 blog, theatrical ageing, plus fiction and film
CW editorial note - 1 April 2010
Macbeth, Irving Penn, Anne Rice and the soul of the Royal Mail
CW editorial note - 25 March 2010
Frank Furedi’s Wasted, Martin Amis’ The Pregnant Widow, and Janacek in London
CW editorial note - 18 March 2010
Pledges for Progress, reviews of David Willetts and Slavoj Žižek, Alice in Wonderland, and the London Word Festival
CW editorial note - 11 March 2010
Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, Chinua Achebe, and Muslim Cinema
CW editorial note - 4 March 2010
High-rise London, cynicism about heroes, and London theatre
CW editorial note - 25 February 2010
Deliberative democracy, My Name is Khan, and political performance
CW editorial note - 18 February 2010
Women and equality, Natasha Walter and public schools
CW editorial note - 11 February 2010
UK general election, POWER2010 and socially conscious films
CW editorial note - 4 February 2010
HBO’s latest, world in wonder, detectives and spies
CW editorial note - 28 January 2010
Charles Taylor, Barbara Ehrenreich and more mime
CW editorial note - 21 January 2010
The London Mime Festival, Benjamin Franklin, positive thinking and Brummies.
CW editorial note - 14 January 2010
India’s identity politics, films about loneliness, scapegoating and German theatre.
CW editorial note - 7 January 2010
Poppy day, the carnivalesque and Lenin in exile
CW editorial note - 23 December 2009
The Bully State, progressive education and Keira Knightley.
CW editorial note - 11 December 2009
Fay Weldon’s Chalcot Crescent, Cathi Unsworth’s Bad Penny Blues, plus Jonathan Meades, The Girlfriend Experience and identity.
CW editorial note - 4 December 2009
Terry Eagleton, Jerry Cohen, and London theatre
CW editorial note - 27 November 2009
Wolf Hall, The Little Stranger, plus The Habit of Art and lots more London theatre.
CW editorial note - 20 November 2009
Jolly Wicked, Actually, Asian food, and Bright Star
CW editorial note - 13 November 2009
Delete, contemporary classical music, the arts and protest and the UK’s Supreme Court
CW editorial note - 6 November 2009
Frank Auerbach’s London building sites, post-colonial Africa, poetry and ghost stories.
CW editorial note - 3 November 2009
Public space, Chelsea Theatre’s SACRED festival, vampires and other theatre
CW editorial note - 23 October 2009
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher and the birth of the modern man, Romanian cinema, Damien Hirst etc.
CW editorial note - 16 October 2009
Dramas out of crisis, Fantastic Mr Fox, Andrew Motion’s The Cinder Path and rites of passage.
CW editorial note - 9 October 2009
More satellites, some theatre, and more prawns.
CW editorial note - 2 October 2009
History and scholarship, Darwin and therapy culture, District 9 and a radical lawyer.
CW editorial note - 25 September 2009
Le Grand Macabre, popular opera, David Mamet and ‘raunch culture’
CW editorial note - 18 September 2009
Thomas Paine, 2nd May 2007, industrial policy and Mathilde Rosier
CW editorial note - 4 September 2009
Outbreak 1939, and why bother reading?
CW editorial note - 28 August 2009
Matt Trueman wins the 2009 Allen Wright Award at the Edinburgh Fringe, musings on music criticism, the politics of media, Kadare and Amis.
CW editorial note - 14 August 2009
The Edinburgh Festival Fringe and the National Youth Orchestra at the Proms
CW editorial note - 7 August 2009
Historicising the therapeutic turn, John Calvin and Blood Wedding in London.
CW editorial note - 31 July 2009
Mind, brain and self in the age of Facebook, and a lousy West End musical
CW editorial note - 24 July 2009
Battle of Ideas, Eight, Container and Black Rock
CW editorial note - 17 July 2009
The psychology of well-being, financial crisis drama and the limits of autonomy.
CW editorial note - 10 July 2009
Luke Kennard, Adam Foulds, gay icons and Medea.
CW editorial note - 3 July 2009
Medea adaptations in London, and Freedom Summer in Brighton.
CW editorial note - 26 June 2009
Columbine shootings, Fanny and Alexander, As you like it and Novel about my wife.
CW editorial note - 19 June 2009
Human rights, twenty-somethings and the recession, and Kursk
CW editorial note - 12 June 2009
London theatre, opera and dance, and the case for a drinking culture
CW editorial note - 5 June 2009
Jazz mythology, Žižek’s Violence and Wendy and Lucy.
CW editorial note - 29 May 2009
Free speech and deception, Philip Ó Ceallaigh’s short stories and London theatre.
CW editorial note - 22 May 2009
The politics of rap in a changing America, Ranger3, the art of democracy, the Battle for the Economy and confrontational theatre.
CW editorial note - 15 May 2009
Post G20 Public Summit on the economy, the ascent of money and world trade, and plays about climate change.
CW editorial note - 8 May 2009
Agnosticism, genetics, reason and rationality and public art
CW editorial note - 1 May 2009
Obama poetry, materialist spirituality, the baroque at the V&A and London theatre.
CW editorial note - 24 April 2009
Feelbad Britain, Kneehigh’s Don John, Juan Mayorga’s Nocturnal and El Sistema in the UK.
CW editorial note - 19 April 2009
Maggie’s End, the Whitechapel Gallery, and a new cultural paradigm in the US.
CW editorial note - 10 April 2009
Modern liberty, the idea of communism, sex education and poetry performed.
CW editorial note - 3 April 2009
Alain de Botton, the state of the arts and Lorca’s remains
CW editorial note - 27 March 2009
Reclaiming Childhood, deradicalisation, London theatre, John Adams’ Dr Atomic and more.
CW editorial note - 20 March 2009
Le Corbusier, Ashok Sukumaran, kindess, the YBAs and the Format International Photography Festival.
CW editorial note - 13 March 2009
Terry Eagleton’s Trouble with Strangers, Conor Foley’s humanitarian blues and Generation Kill on DVD.
CW editorial note - 6 March 2009
Uncultured Wars, propaganda, and credit and blame.
CW editorial note - 27 February 2009
Neuroscience and subjectivity, South Africa, ‘real’ Marxists, David Hare and The Taming of the Shrew.
CW editorial note - 20 February 2009
Clothes (The Art of Living), the history of light entertainment, and contemporary Muslim identity.
CW editorial note - 13 February 2009
The international well-being agenda, Middle Eastern art, Bill Viola and London theatre
CW editorial note - 6 February 2009
What Confucius said about personal liberty, the role of subversion in film noir, therapy in a play and two paths to radicalism.
CW editorial note - 30 January 2009
Bauman’s ethics, Mendes’ and Yates’ Revolutionary Road, Intentism and Eunoia.
Film Focus Alfred Hitchcock, -Jan
Culture Wars writers take a closer look at some of Hitchcock’s key works in order to understand both his artistic methods, but also the impact these films have on the modern audiences.
CW editorial note - 23 January 2009
What happened to the ‘wrecking crew’? A ‘new cultural paradigm’? Obama: President of the World?
CW editorial note - 16 January 2009
The future of community, ‘well-being’ in schools and more Alfred Hitchcock.
CW editorial note - 7 January 2009
Liberalism and Protestantism, Che, Alfred Hitchcock and new fiction.
CW editorial note - 19 December 2008
European cinema, Haitian politics, artistic integrity and emotion in theatre.
CW editorial note - 12 December 2008
English Civil War drama The Devil’s Whore, London theatre and the Turner Prize 2008.
CW editorial note - 5 December 2008
The Relevance of Marxism, anti-Maoist revisionism, Obamanomics and The Fall.
CW editorial note - 28 November 2008
Nam Le’s The Boat and Byzantium at the Royal Academy
CW editorial note - 21 November 2008
The ‘New Blue Media’ in the US, science documentaries and discipline and participation in music.
CW editorial note - 13 November 2008
Kathryn Ecclestone and Dennis Hayes respond to Lee Jones’ review of their book, The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education, plus James Bond, Andy Warhol, Annie Leibowitz and Francis Bacon.
CW editorial note - 7 November 2008
The week after the Battle of Ideas sees the election of Obama, and CW looks at negativity in supercapitalism, the ploys of fame and the implications of a puppy in the White House.
CW editorial note - 31 October 2008
Community art, inter-generational anxiety and keynote Battles in Print.
CW editorial note - 24 October 2008
2008 Man Booker Prize winner The White Tiger, plus celebrity culture, ethical realism in American foreign policy, death in literature and more.
CW editorial note - 17 October 2008
Reviews of the 2008 Man Booker shortlist, and new novels by Zoë Heller and Lee Siegel. Plus Documenting Live Art, and Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon.
CW editorial note - 10 October 2008
The launch of a new blog on the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, plus coverage of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, and the Raindance Independent Film Festival.
CW editorial note - 2 October 2008
A critical take on The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education, by Kathryn Ecclestone and Dennis Hayes; Natsuo Kirino’s Real World; CERN and the Current Affairs Forum
CW editorial note - 25 September 2008
Sartre as a popular philosopher, the US elections, and London theatre
CW editorial note - 18 September 2008
Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, a response from Steve Fuller and new productions of Timon of Athens and Six Characters in Search of an Author.
CW editorial note - 12 September 2008
Hildegart Rodriguez, Clay Shirky, Sudhir Venkatesh, Peter Moskos
CW editorial note - 4 September 2008
Steve Fuller’s Dissent over Descent, Paul Ginsborg’s Democracy, more from the Edinburgh Fringe and a eulogy for Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.
CW editorial note - 28 August 2008
Coverage of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and a restrospective look at Lebanon, Hadrian, Monument Park in Budapest and The Curse of History.
What we must do better
The political imperative to use schools to make society look fairer without doing anything to change real social inequality is turning education into an Orwellian nightmare for pupils, teachers and parents.
It’s the end of the world (and I feel fine)
The ease with which crackpot theories about black holes eating the Earth from the inside have found a purchase on our collective psyche tell us we are very uneasy about the use of science to explore nature. Prophesying the end of the world has become respectable even among scientists, who seem to believe this is the way to secure public support for science – or at least ’useful’ science.
The humble agnostic shrugs
Agnosticism, properly understood, and not atheism, represents the sceptical attitude, and also the most rationally justified position with respect to the question of the existence of God (or gods) as the ultimate creator(s) and/or designer(s) of our universe.
Chigurh’s coin
The film seems to offer a portrait of a man with robust, though imperfect, control over external events and persons that he encounters, but leaves an ambiguous accounting of that same man’s control over his own internal drives and actions.
A tantrum thrown or a tantrum shown?
Essentially, Belgian collective Ontroerend Goed have done a Duchamp. They have framed a piece of theatre and presented it as a living artefact. Unlike Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’, however, the thing presented remains in the same context. There is no signification about its status. Presenting a piece of theatre – warts and all – in a theatre is like showing us a urinal on the wall of the Gents. How are we supposed to know to look differently?
Fragile fiction
You are aware that this is not just your experience, but our experience. Who am I to intervene in the experience of other paying participants? They’ve come to see the company, not the heckler.
No trace of the token
While it flows efficiently, thanks to diligently executed transitions as four screens slide into positions to create all manner of landscapes, it can still stutter. You’re always aware of the process of application that must, at one point, have asked, ‘OK, how can we stage this?’
Seeing stars
In the main, Bryony Lavery sticks to the rules in her treatment of five aspiring Scottish boxers, subverting proceedings with a final sucker punch that, though well concealed, isn’t quite the knockout blow that’s needed.
No mere monorail
There are some stunning vantage points and some intriguing moments within En Route. The sense you get of Edinburgh as a particular and a universal, the deeper exploration of what cities are for and how they function, is strong.
When improv goes wrong
There’s a relentlessness to Big Wow’s style that just tips the scales. For all that their exasperated straight man and downtrodden goof formula is perfectly honed, we’re never given a chance to breath under a barrage of chaotic gags.
Crying out for cuts
Their words, scattergun non-sequiturs, are all doubting caution; their bodies are squirming contortions. Rather wonderfully, the rhythm of their movements recalls the stuttering animation of early arcade games, lending a dated quality to proceedings.
‘There’s a show in this’
While Kimmings parades in a series of ridiculously extravagant costumes, from lederhosen to feathered headdresses, the bra and knickers to which she strips are comparatively demure and classy. Underneath it all, there’s a vanity that belies her clowning and public disgrace.
The world rotating around them
There’s real smoothness to Hickson’s dialogue as well. It’s entirely apt, for example, that the quixotic Twitch is quick to translate life into metaphors and similes, where Polo snaps forth blunt realities best left unspoken.
Grey old Luton
Wyatt relates events, amongst a cyclone of tangential offshoots, in relentless jabber of information. Her tone swings between warped pride, defensiveness and borderline self-loathing.
Fruitless indignity
As an argument – even as a metaphor – it’s as familiar as a proverb: ‘We work for money for stuff for appearances for what exactly?’ You’ve heard it before, I’ve heard it before and, yet, on we all cycle.
A reluctance to detonate
Once you’ve settled into the pace, which draws out the longueurs of sobriety into slow drawls, things become more imaginative. Life looks and sounds better when under the influence. The lights soften the pallor and glisten off bottles.
Almost onto something
More often they bicker; each desperate to prove themselves committed to the cause. Only they can’t even agree on its nature: radical activism or calm subversion. Is it about holistic sustainability, egalitarian meritocracy or simply settling grudges?
More National Trust than National Theatre
After a handful of ends, both loose and dead, it becomes quite clear that the young company doesn’t have the answers. It’s all too symptomatic that the bolted cellar door conceals an empty room and that the wicked father fails to appear.
An oversized, aristocratic goldfish
As he recounts a recurring dream, Wainwright’s feet click-clack on the spot, while on a screen behind him a cobbled street sweeps towards the vanishing point. It’s like Stephen Berkoff’s take on ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ by The Verve.
A cyclone of self-references
In lacking an eloquent conceit, it lacks anything resembling an argument. By the time she attempts to shatter the show entirely, introducing the usher as an intruding fiction-cum-reality, she has tangled herself in knots.
A chrysalis in reverse
At one point, as the onstage technician-cum-musician repeatedly strikes up the familiar piano overture, he gets berated: It’s too much. It’s not right. It’s manipulative and it’s sentimental and it’s patronising.
A goblin-esque hombre
At times, it’s quite the spectacular, but the haphazard, over-busy staging leaves potholes of puzzlement along the way. It flicks from the sublime to the ridiculous: one moment, you’re gobsmacked, the next, you’re giggling at the OTT absurdity of it all.
It should be the whole city
Sometimes, there’s a twang of shame. Sometimes, there’s comfort in the shared confessionals. Sometimes, those things that you prized lose their value. Almost all of us, for example, believe that we are talented. Most have been on television.
From the kneading to the sharing
At some point, as you watch them pass messages like Chinese whispers passed hand to hand – sign language functioning like moving Braille – you think of the difficulties in creating the piece in the first place. Not By Bread Alone, you come to realise, represents two years of exhaustive teamwork, and that’s inspirational.
Sheer head-rush
That’s a brilliant fairground ride, not brilliant interactive theatre. If I’m honest, I really missed the bite. YMBBT is best when we’re not acting, but reacting. In this version too many scenarios indulge us, pandering to our egos by casting us in leading roles without having to cope with the stresses of an audience.
A portal to Sri Lanka
Where it really comes into itself is in its investigation of its own format. What does it mean, Verhoeven probes, for us (Hansika & I as well as the human collective) to communicate in this way? He begs the effect of distance and the distorting effect of mediatisation, ensuring an awareness of the incompleteness of one’s knowledge of the other person and the manipulation that can occur accordingly.
Manicured misrule
The implication is that genuine revolution has become impossible in a world governed by its media. Perhaps the best any public outrage can hope to muster is a Twitter campaign or a Facebook petition. And what do they choose to achieve? A festive chart-topper for Rage Against the Machine. It’s hardly Tiananmen Square.
Fissures in the world at large
There is something hypocritical about dismissing communication via technology as a newfangled novelty whilst relying on its allure to do so. In other words, Continuous City is crying out for something more present.
(comp[lex-simp]licity?)
Really one watches Food Court by watching oneself watching it. Its chief success is to enforce self-reflection, to make us monitor and interrogate our own responses to its individual elements. The thing is, I suppose – and there is probably a certain bourgeois desire for guilty self-flagellation in this – I don’t feel complicit in or responsible for the assumptions in question.
A raging eulogy
To me – and I should, at this point, admit to being in a minority that remained seated at her curtain call – Fredricksson has created the mixed-media equivalent of a ‘World’s Greatest Dad’ mug.
Perfectly trashy
The result is a wealth of cultural resonances. In its amplification of monotony, there’s David Lynch. In the compartmentalisation of individual narratives, there’s Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual. There’s Charlie Kaufman in the fantastical, physics defying landscapes and Harold Pinter in the menace of the unexplained
Frustration, resentment and insecurity
It’s struggling to adjust to adulthood and the Real World (capitals strictly necessary). It’s adamant that it should be easier. It looks around at others and feels a little bit shit about itself. It’s hopelessly romantic and naively nostalgic. It’s a confidence thing, a beta-male thing. It’s all a bit pathetic, no?
Exciting, ticklish, titillating
This is not serendipity, but the work of a skilled puppeteer. What seems to materialise in the moment is, in fact, meant to be, mechanised – to the extent that you recognise your responsibility to the experiences of others.
As playful as a wink
Here, we spot the exhilaration behind the German wheel, the way it traps the performer in a seductive pas de deux, the downwards spiral, the speed, the blur, the headrush. Or else we spot the simple pleasure of seeing objects anew, detached from purpose, as the juggling amnesiac picks up his clubs and starts to play.
Giggling and gutsy
Best of all – and it truly is a pleasure to watch her – is Anita Reeves. Her Kay is a rosy-cheeked rascal, permanently puckish and buoyant. Life, for Kay, has become a laugh; modernity a mystery, as hilarious as it is perplexing. Dithering over her vibrator, Kay tosses us camp, gleeful ‘Carry On, Vicar’ glances, creasing up at the thought.
Night Nurse
Delusion is a relaxation chamber. It massages the mind as a muscle that can achieve total relaxation and, once that state is achieved, Laurie Anderson’s words jangle around inside your head. They are graspable only by the subconscious, chiming and resonating, but never slotting into a recognisable pattern or registering their presence.
Kay’s affliction
As Kay, Jodhi May is superb: she wears the swelling tides of personality just beneath the surface of her skin. When warm and attractive, she finds a hollowness; when slumped on the floor, a fervent passion.
Totally hollow
The whole affair smacks of masculine fantasies: man as overlord, women at his bidding call. All is titillation, a counterculture emptied of its subversion or radicalism and instead presented as little more than a harem dancing for we sultans gathered below.
The ever-absent middle ground
The thing is that you’re never quite sure what you’re projecting and what’s there to be read. Such is the presence of age – when you watch one, you can’t help but imagine or recall the other as comparison – that it can obscure anything else. It’s hard to see the work for the teens, as it were.
Synesthetes of us all
The mode is rigorously spare and yet never sparse. Each piece has a huge depth of tone, thanks to precise attention to atmosphere and, most importantly, rhythm. Lone Twin pitch their pacing deliberately out of sync with the world and, through repetition, force us to abandon everyday timeframes. They draw out sonic textures from movement – footfalls and breath, claps and clicks – and stretch them until you snuggle in and your blood pumps in time.
A man most notoriously absolved
This is a production driven by canny characterisation rather than design. What it offers, even where some are less persuasive than others, are interesting subversions of classic roles.
‘A slumber-party vibe’
Indiscriminate and meandering it may be, but Sweet just about manages to pull it together somehow. Perched firmly on the spectrum, he fidgets his way around the stage, shattering social conventions and manhandling his audience like a safari chimpanzee.
Roundabout cabaret
In an assortment of petite poems and mumbled musings, Key offers a pointillist portrait of modern, urban existence. ‘Tanya googled herself / Still nothing,’ reads one. Others cover thrill-seeking colleagues skinning eels in their lunch-break, the moments in which relationships crack, and ‘the thorny issue of dew’.
Pulsating with pluralism
I found the particularities of less import than the abstract archetypes underpinning them. To exert too much effort into the narrative is almost to lose sight of the pointed philosophy beneath. The preaching, in other words, has more resonance than the preachers.
Ethical striptease
Does one wrong turn really deserve another? Martinez is clearly not driven by a thirst for vengeance, but at the centre of My Stories, Your Emails is a nasty streak, not dissimilar to the impulse to share viral quirks and spread shame.
A gentle tickle and a reluctant smile
UK circus trio Mimbre are oversweet and underseasoned. After a while, I couldn’t shake off the comparison with advertising for pro-biotic yoghurts, in which the demonstration of enjoyment never rings true.
The mind left hanging
We come close to whiplash each time he drops twenty feet, stopping himself just before smacking the floor. Such is his skill – shown in the collectedness demonstrated by the careful dropping of a marble to match its descent and catch it softly at the bottom – that we come to trust him over time, settling in to a calm admiration. His precision, even when holding himself stiffly parallel to the stage, is phenomenal.
Brave New World
The impulse to zoomorphise, or further still anthropomorphise, is here turned in on itself, such that we become caught up between the illusion and its actual component counterparts. In the former, Nicole Massoux creates an entire alien ecosystem out of a jumble sale’s worth of junk, animating allsorts into peculiar lifeforms. Johnson’s raw material, by contrast, is her body alone, which she twists and contorts.
Beckett with balls
They stare straight ahead, as if they are overlooking a landscape; simultaneously seers and fools on a hill. As for their juggling itself, it embodies the governing qualities of Kantian aesthetics, welding together the sublime and the ridiculous.
Thought-provoking graft
The paradox is that we are watching work as leisure and, soothing though it may be to watch, The Mill demands too little of us. Like an overly helpful guest, it is neat, tidy and excellent company, but insists on doing all the hard work for you.
Dissociation and rupture of self
It is a story without absolute sinners and saints; one of forced hands and impossible positions. The puppeteers are simultaneously guard and guardian, enforcer and protector.
Jangle-brained ducks
Though it is the ongoing series of entrances and exits that wear you down, it remains hard to stay engaged once you realise that nothing will change or grow.
An Escheresque city of stretched possibilities
It thumps with existential enquiry, begging questions of identity, imperfection and our place within the world. Repeatedly – and often quite literally – human forms become objects and what was inanimate becomes oppositely anthropomorphised. Actions and reactions ripple around the space as if the Butterfly effect were the sole governing principle.
More mirage than miracle
The real criminal in all this is the space itself, which simply won’t allow for our presence to go unacknowledged. Belle Mundi’s design, serviceable though it is, feels like a museum approximation with its clutter of vague gothic crap and painted on stones.
Quixotic sighs and beery banter
Golaszewski understands love. Or, at least, he makes you understand love. The absence of those around him – perfect Betty, with her FHM arse and toothy smile, and near-perfect life-partner Pudding – means that we fall for his partners too. They exist as our ideals. His words leap through our ears, swish around our brains and set our hearts aflicker.
Aching frustration
I must admit to being adrift in an enthusiastic audience with a heavy contingent of youth. I can see that 1984 would work as an introduction to theatre that dares to defy fourth-wall realism without resorting to pantomime, but it sorely lacks the self-reflexivity and all-questioning attitude that has helped the BAC to thrive.
Woolly wonderland
The language tossed between the twins retains the oversimplicity of children’s theatre. At times, it purifies, as, for example, when they say of their dead mother, ‘her skin is the colour of peeled apple’. Elsewhere, it becomes a cloying, babyish gargle, as in, ‘this book was once a tree’.
Approach gently
The size of the site and the logistics entailed have clearly derailed the attention to detail, and we are politely requested to turn a blind eye. The audio-guide orders your gaze one way in order that the mechanics of the piece can slip by unnoticed behind you. Only, of course, they don’t.
Unexpected death right on cue
Essentially, it’s a puppetry mash-up of The Mutant Chronicles and The Boat that Rocked with a dash of the socio-political setting of The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
Fake fangs
That the joins between fiction and reality, the mechanics of the piece, are so evident, so clunky, prevents any real commitment to the fiction spun. Resistance is not so much futile as inevitable.
Not Made in Russia
The show subverts the very notion of cross-cultural identity against itself, undermining international presentation as a pretentious, even bourgeois, cultural practice. The need to label according to nationality or origin is, they suggest, preposterous and in doing so we seek only to confirm our own preconceptions about other cultures.
Death in Berlin
Gob Squad’s twenty-minute film remakes seven cinematic death sequences in and around Berlin’s public spaces. Playing on two screens, allowing comparison between the original and its everyday echo, it captures the sentiment and simultaneously sends it up: emotion marinated in ridicule.
Bezzie mates
Eleni Edipidi and Bethanie Harrison make a clownish double act. Sharing stark Frida Karlo monobrows drawn on in marker pen, they create flashes of touching comedy but lack a strictly defined hierarchy that would allow their routines to gain momentum.
Because I can
Yet, this is no Murder Mystery party; there is no sense of acting. You, yourself, are very much present in the small town. Your decisions remain yours, not those that your character might make. Not only does this remove awkward inhibitions, it allows the piece an ethical and political dimension beyond the bounds of the small town. You feel the weight of betrayals as much as the excitement of transgressions.
Chameleonic larynx
As an X Factor graduate herself, we cannot but associate Diana Vickers with Little Voice, as a young girl used to singing into hairbrushes, plucked from everyday life and bunged on a stage. We marvel at the actress, Little Voice and Diana Vickers all at once. The conflated whole strengthened by the mutual support of its constituent parts.
A circus of the self
There is a certain tragedy about this first Raoul. He is a man always at odds with himself; a hapless figure forever tying himself in knots. He tries to cross his legs only for them to slip off one another. He tries to play music, but gets only the grainy crackle of scratched vinyl or the final combative blasts of an elusive symphony.
Paths not taken
The Factory rely on our foreknowledge of the play. We are forced to make our own sense, to complete the jigsaw for ourselves. The form itself offers no comment on the content – any text could be tackled similarly without loss. To watch is to discover anew, but also to clarify, refine and confirm ideas already held.
Absolute mutuality
There are frissons of foreplay alongside lashings of aggression.They hang off each other and collide; dance, kiss and strike; become entranced by one another; become repelled. Yet, as it churns through this assortment, there is none of the clunking awkwardness that so often drags down such broad explorations.
Cake, alcohol and a well-groomed schoolboy
With few surprises in the narrative, the interest lies in how and why the fallout occurs. As such, much of the responsibility rests with Jaime Winstone as the disruptive Sherbert and, on her stage debut, she handles it superbly. A mismatched neon nightmare with peroxide bunches sprouting from the sides of her head, Jaime Winstone resembles an unkempt, neglected Barbie caked in cosmetics to compensate.
No place like it
Having already pitched itself in town squares and docks, woodland and grassy plains, on high-streets and ferries, Home sits neatly in the musky gloom of the Southwark Playhouse.
Shambolic aplomb
Here, style is not used to compensate for content, dressing it up in order to disguise its flimsiness. Instead, the style is the content. If anything, it dresses down, allowing a relish of the tarnished performance that maintains the crucial tipsiness of atmosphere, which is initially constructed through personal welcomes and pointers to the bar.
Dipstick for a generation
On the cusp of their thirties, Sam and Anna are indicative of a generation’s fear of genuine responsibility, its disinclination to difficulties and its inability to appreciate anything with the slightest of flaws.
Fear is white
Lucy Ellinson is a phenomenon. She tears the text open as if ripping off a scab to re-expose a wound. Words clacker from her mouth with the rhythm of a typewriter, then stop; suspended mid-epiphany. Every choice she makes is elevated with detail and curiosity.
Deep-set and heartfelt
Nic Green, a 28-year-old artist based in Scotland, asks what it means to be a young woman today. In two attitude-altering hours teeming with ideas, politics and, most of all, courage, Green and her company dissect an inherited, outdated feminism to find a voice that is resolutely, powerfully their own.
Wounding-scarring-real-world nasty
Using the behavioural techniques of pick-up artists, made famous by Neil Strauss’ bestselling exposé The Game, Internal’s performers have an almost universal success rate in seduction. They extract everything they need without seeming to twist your arm.
Drink beer and eat chips
Oh, My Green Soap Box is a scatty but smart theatrical essay about good intentions and guilty consciences. We can, she says, always do more; we can always act better. There will always be polar bears that need saving.
Face the music and dance
Not only is there no evidence of careful craft, the material technology onstage becomes a concern as flat screens collide and threaten to keel over. When they go cold turkey on this habit, however, things improve immeasurably.
Lurking menace
Jittery with shock, Liam has just witnessed a young man viciously attacked by a knifeman, slashed all over rather than stabbed. He cradled the victim in his lap until, suddenly, the man leapt up and legged it; bleeding and running, running and bleeding.
Leggings and lyrca
Tumbling around the stage, they seem forged from tightly-coiled springs and slinkies. Together, they are a tight-knit and well-balanced unit. Where one is an effete and airy presence, another is an open-mouthed, fiery force; one, a louche, creeping reptile; another, an armour-plated beetle with a big appetite.
Masterful marionettes come unstrung
It’s been five years since Heap Cruziack and Pebble Adverati last laced up their skates and danced competitively, but now, in spite of the extinction of ice-rinks, the world champions are intent on a glorious comeback. Thus, dressed in glacial-grey chiffon, they take to the wooden floor and skate with polished smiles and clumsy feet.
Absolute faith in the magic of theatre
Yes, The Lamplighter’s Lament is guilty of the sort of sentimentality and slightness born of uninterrogated devised theatre, but it’s enchanting stuff nonetheless. Providing, of course, you allow it to be so.
Life and soul in the dregs of society
Keith Fleming – last seen as a perma-pissed Peer Gynt – cements his position as Scotland’s premier portrayer of alcoholics. His Henry seems to have grown around the bar like ivy, typewriter and Bud always within easy reach. In him is a vintage blend of gentleness and fire that lurks under an infantile passivity, as he is led one way and another by booze and birds.
Game over, cheerio, goodbye, next chapter
Relying on the standard formula of situation comedy, Reynolds places a range of characters into a single set of circumstances and – ta-da – conflict materialises. Beyond the equation itself, however, she manages to get nothing right. Her characters are so one-dimensional it’s a wonder that they’re even perceptible.
Smart and ticklish
Hughes greets us in the queue, remembers names and then plays perfect host, breaking the ice and spinning connections amongst his audience. Within minutes, he has transformed us into a parish and, from that point on, Hughes is preaching to the converted.
Muted barks
All is made cuddly, from the Disneyfied strays in woolly hats to Alex Bryne’s Elvis-impersonating paedophile. While the intention may be to show through childish eyes, the result is to mute the story’s drama.
A war on two fronts
Against Michael Taylor’s ever-changing sky, John Dove’s production is too reliant on the inherent nobility and tragic waste of the man in uniform. Rather than truly making us bleed for the characters presented, it tugs at our sadness of the abstract idea. These soldiers are too often manikins stilly representing a generation.
Accidentally empathetic
What Chris Goode has achieved is a story with so much to say that you needn’t notice quite how spectacularly well he’s saying it. With such gentle efficiency, heartfelt charm and modest deference, Goode could has all the makings of a ‘freelance social interventionist’ himself.
It all seems so distant
The aim, of course, is to reveal the pretence involved, but the trouble is that the simulated party never abandons its own fakeness. It feels too choreographed to become infectiously real. Its wildness seems too forced; its recklessness, too stage-managed; its ebb and flow, too inorganic.
Perplexity in perpetuity
There is a definite debt to Pinter at work, as the kindness of strangers is subverted into a menace of unknown motives. Yet, it is Pinter as wrenched out of orbit by the strength of its surrealism, which prevents the addition of its elements.
The slight peevishness of librarians
The piece makes a virtue of its simplicity, simultaneously conjuring a plethora of individual understandings about the time of your life and a universal desire to share it with another. Not necessarily The Other, nor any old other, but an other somewhere in between.
Intelligibility over intelligence
Like the citrus trees that sprout through the wooden stage, nature punctures performance and an unexpected maturity, even nobility, comes to fruition.
A whirlpool of anyways
In effect, Haynes is apologising for theatre – even art as a whole – and, more specifically, for its failure to reflect a recognisable reality with any truth. Life, he demonstrates, is not neatly packagable into an hour-long studio-based piece or any other tidy, traditional medium.
Chest-puffing aggression
The majority of the forty minutes is taken up with the tension-building and legend-forging that allows Stenhouse to stand handlebar to handlebar with Knievel. Gemma Paintin, clad in a star-spangled dress, plays commentator – cycling through a history of ‘heeee-did-it’s in a musical American accent – and partner, both professional and romantic.
Tribute to a fading England
Inspired by the insolvency of MG Rover of 2005 and the subsequent dissolution of the Longbridge car manufacturing plant in Birmingham, Stan’s Cafe mourn a past more honest, more human, before community was surpassed by communication.
The female eunuch castrates herself
Even after half of her audience has left at her behest Young continues in the same vein. There is no reward for sticking with her, only more of the same aggro-feminism. Solo is uncomfortable and challenging viewing that hits all sorts of targets with unswervingly accuracy and power, but one can’t help but think that there must be another way.
Period clothing and periwigs
It’s all, like, well fucking confrontational, yeah? Only constant confrontation becomes, at best, tiresome and tedious. The main problem – and there are many – is that Ann Liv Young’s form is so noisy it drowns out any possibility of genuine content. Her work is so nihilistic that it is devoid even of nihilism.
Personal shambles
Though the programme notes protest otherwise, Panic is not about the satyric divinity Pan. Rather, it is about McDermot himself. Indeed, he is on such personal and confessional form that you almost feel bound by audience-patient confidentially.
Breakdown Britain
Beyond intermittent powercuts and miner musicians, Rice largely assumes our understanding of the historical connotations, focussing instead on general atmosphere and aesthetic. Here, the winter of discontent – its collective anger and will-power – is reduced to mere picket chic.
He wears a showman’s hat
Neilson gets too clever in revealing a second layer of reality. As Gant’s show collapses in mutiny, it undermines itself. The supposedly real seems all the more false with its scripted spontaneity and assurances that this has never happened before.
From municipal trapezes to breathless sleep
From the very first image – a field of horizontal bodies hanging from butchers’ hooks as if a human battery farm – Tabú’s component parts demand interpretation rather than astonished applause.
A grand piano burns
As he snaps us with a Polaroid and enacts birth, pointing upwards with the accusatory finger of Death, Andy Warhol seems the recurring surveyor of this Inferno; an anthropologist of Hell.
Cutesy exteriors
Burkett channel-hops between cartoon voices to conduct conversations with himself and litters a sweet story with camp asides. Perhaps this is intentional. It certainly fits with the puppet Twinkle’s dilemma between high art and lowly entertainment: whether t’is nobler to present puppet Shakespeare or striptease.
Only the fitful survive
In Eisler’s obsessive compulsive clown there is a satisfying mix of Hitchcock, Pinter and Woody Allen with a nod to the two soups of Julie Walters thrown in for good measure. Her ceremonial laying of the table so as to stave off apocalypse verges of comic genius.
Stuck limpet-like to the past
The combination of Walsh’s expressionistic text and the gentle disco glisten of Sabine Dargent’s industrial design creates a dream-like quality that muddles with the strangely concrete setting. It is a real world, albeit one that seems controlled by a Beckettian puppet-master: sunsets fast-forward, time dissolves, nothing much happens.
Motivating the pursuit of science in neo-Darwinian times
Steve Fuller makes a pragmatic defence of Intelligent Design theory, arguing that positing an intelligent designer, God, motivates the attempt to make scientific sense of the natural world in a way Darwinism cannot.
A therapeutic Odyssey
Ryan can go home to a sparse Omaha apartment but chooses not to. He lives in hotels 322 days a year spending only ‘43 miserable days at home.’ He doesn’t want a family, preferring one night stands in hotels to any relationship. His aim is the privileges that flow from becoming number seven on the list of people who have flown ten million air miles.
Could do much better
The Institute of Ideas’ Education Forum thinks education has lost all meaning and that in the election debate politicians from all parties must do better! Professor Dennis Hayes outlines the reasoning behind the Education Forum’s forthcoming Election Statement.
No heated debate
Free speech is all about the audience, the listeners, who are there to engage in open debate. Another way of putting this is to say that free speech is about the public and the democratic right of people to make up their own minds rather than have their betters decide what is too offensive for our sensitive ears.
Too much thinking?
No play is an argument, and although one of the writers is a neuropsychologist, this play is an articulate attempt to persuade the audience of what Kathryn Ecclestone and I call the new foundational epistemology of the emotions.
Therapy culture revisited
Our view is that education is now the key to our future. This is not to revert to an archaic form of change through education but to recognise that, at the present moment, it is only by asserting subjects that we can develop subjectivity.
An Islamic Disneyland
Dennis Hayes reflects on a recent exhibition at Tate Britain, which said more about the West than the East.
Organised defeat? - here comes everybody
Shirky and other digital evangelists argue the rise of social media is actually a severe challenge to the elite’s hegemony and authority.
‘We’re never gonna survive, unless, we get a little crazy’
Life should be renamed McLife, a homogenised version of what we experience on a daily basis. Her ultimate goal is to seek ‘a way of life that was…smiles without brains, love without odour and sex without stains’.
Mama’s got a bag of her own
Harvey seems to think it’s anxiety that makes society (and women in particular) so obsessively desirous about what we wear, but I think he has missed the point. Despite the many fashion faux pas that litter our lives, put simply, clothes make us happy.
Obey the fist
Mel Raido makes a great Danny. Initially he is weak and pathetic; he gets beaten up by a thug in a pub in front of his children, and his life plunges into despair. Depicted actively self harming, Danny is ruled by his fear and depression until he learns how to use it to his advantage.
It’s hip to be square
At times, I had to stop myself from throwing the book at the wall and screaming expletives – but it’s because Dunthorne has hit the nail on the head. Perhaps I am being too cynical, but ultimately Oliver annoys me because he evokes memories of every teenage boy I had feelings for: selfish, clueless and incredibly infuriating.
Concrete schoolyard
You really feel for these boys; to live up to their dream they have to give up so much. Basketball is certainly not the answer for everything. These boys need life experience too. If they are not taught to lead a balanced life in their teens, how will they react when they start making serious money and they can afford to indulge in any temptation they want?
Yawn of the dead
Zombie Johnny looks amazing. Everything looks immaculate: from his maggot ridden fingers to his bony blackened face. My highest praise on this production goes to the make-up team. There is a fine line between gloriously gruesome gore and gratuitously garish garbage – but they get it just right.
Bittersweet symphony
He described the first half hour as ‘arduous’, something I didn’t feel at all, but he urged us to put up with it as we would find it ‘rewarding and worthwhile’. Well, he was half right. A film that could have severely overegged the pudding kept the characters believable and the story powerful.
Disposable teens
Kirino shows that the causes of Worm’s murderous outburst are identical to the key symptoms of hikikomori – or acute social withdrawal; a Japanese social phenomenon and a term popularised within the media since 1998.
Bark without bite
It can only be assumed that, much like the story, the dogs merely ran around chasing each other’s tails until they collapsed with a worn out thud.
Participation nation
As a humble citizen participating in one of these schemes, you cannot have faith that every individual will respect your views, since those who make the final decisions are not accountable to you.
Beyond the colonial us and them
By smoothly incorporating the familiarly American melodramatic romance model into the story of one man’s military enrolment, the Korean production team behind this film created a convincing, and implicit Japanese propaganda piece that challenges dichotomies between colonisers and colonised.
On the death of Darwish
The dialectic of home and exile enables a poetry, not of hope – in this case, the always-present longing for return – but of creation. Home is not the land you knew and will greet again (though Darwish would remain throughout his life a defender of the Palestinian cause), but a place impossibly unknown
The Mayor who sets his sights low
Boris Johnson has used his powers to galvanise the anti-high-rise sentiment into an object of policy. So far, he has gotten away with this unchallenged. But it is incumbent on us, those who welcome the prospect of transforming London’s skyline into an exciting scene that represents the city’s dynamism, to publicly challenge this short-sighted and un-ambitious policy.
Radical vision
Le Corbusier had summed up one of the crucial paradoxes of his age in his dictum ‘architecture or revolution’. His preference was clearly for the former. Le Corbusier presented better architecture and cities as solutions to the problems of the industrial city and the threat of disorder that it had nurtured.
Not so safe distance
Sukumaran’s mechanical pas de deux is a mesmerising work that invites a lot of thought and reminds us of so many open-ended questions that have been left in the wake of Modernism’s failure.
Individualism versus identity
It’s the first time I’ve seen Marwan Rechmaoui’s work liberated from the company of Deleuzian texts and yet another grainy video of someone’s aunt, and it is like seeing the artworks for the first time.
The illogical end of multiculturalism
Rather than seeing the problems of those countries as a result of their immediate circumstances and in particular their relationship to modernity, many writers go searching for answers in the depths of history. It has become almost obligatory for every book about Middle Eastern politics to recount tales from the early years of Islam and conclude they have an immediate presence in the mind of modern-day Arabs.
History wars
Popular and academic histories frequently capture similar views of the past, even if expressed in different terminologies. Setting them up as ‘enemies’ can caricature or erase the shared social roots and causations that genuinely split communities.
The Human Rights Olympics? - China’s Great Leap
Crucially, the improvement in information dissemination had nothing to do with the Olympics or human rights campaigners, and all to do with technological advancements. The ownership of mobile phones and access to the internet was made possible through economic gains.
‘Step off the stage’
Together, the texts collated in the Almanac cover myriad ideas and areas, some are firmly grounded in their sense of the performative and what ‘Live Art’ as a strategy includes, others cross and expand the borders of what it means to be ‘Live’ or even what it means to be ‘Art’. But happily the Almanac has much more to offer than a definition of Live Art.
Make some NOISE
In an industry where nepotism is truly rife, it seems that unless your parents are celebrities, or rich, it’s getting tougher to get a foot in the door. But for most people, art is something to be done during down-time, with the ‘McJob’ acting as an inconvenient yet altogether necessary cover for an alter-ego as a zeitgeist-defining fashionista or future Rock God.
The trouble with the grain of the brain
Yes, too often teachers fail to inspire and stimulate their pupils, but that is often because they themselves have lost faith in their own subject, and learning which neurons to stimulate is unlikely to overcome that problem.
Teaching to the test
While the mantra ‘I didn’t come into teaching for this…’ can be heard in every classroom in every school, Mansell’s book is a shockingly rare attempt to offer a comprehensive challenge to the prevailing culture.
Au revoir
The hostile reaction to the Dutch game plan is an indicator of how football has changed in the past 20 years. More and more physical aspects of the game are now penalised, such as the tackle from behind and slightly mistimed tackles, and so the Dutch approach which would have been the norm in a previous age is considered beyond the pale today.
Jumpers for goalposts
Admiring the quality of play in the semi-final between Spain and Germany, I realise that barring an act of god, it will be many years and require a complete change of footballing culture before England can hope to produce 11 players who look this comfortable in possession of a football.
The World Cup goes on
Everyone from Boris Johnson to Richard Caborn to Jeremy Clarkson and Uncle Tom Cobbley has had their say. Every issue from highly-paid players to the selling off of playing fields and the decline of competition in schools has been held up as the cause of England’s demise. Once again the England team is held up as a cause and solution of any social problem which you care to name.
Grudges die hard
Rather than blaming a myriad of extraneous factors, it would be better if the politicians kept out of it, and the relevant football authorities examined why these players play so well in the Premier League but not for France.
Introspection for England
Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil (in flashes) have shown their quality, and the outstanding players so far have been the Argentine forward line and Diego Forlan of Uruguay. There is time for this pattern to change, and the Europeans can still get their act together, but the South Americans are definitely ahead at this stage.
On yer bike, hairshirts!
In many ways, as one commentator said, this is a traditionally unconvincing England start to a tournament. The more astonishing thing was to hear ITV pundits agree that it was a good or very good England performance. True, some individual players played quite well, but it was never convincing as a whole, and a pale shadow of a team performance compared to Argentina earlier in the day.
2010 World Cups: One down, one to go
The England players were confident and determined, their fielding inspired, the batting audacious and captain Paul Collingwood seems to have matured into a tactical genius. The spirit of this England side is so unlike the plucky losers for which this country is famous, and it is a joy to behold.
Geoff Kidder’s Olympic blog - part seven
The Olymposceptics have been sheltering under a stone for the last ten days, but will now crawl back out into the light. In the coming months we will need to be vigilant to stand up for the sporting values we cherish and against those who would belittle the success of British or other athletes.
Geoff Kidder’s Olympic blog - part six
While recognising that some Olympic disciplines have more prestige than others, I have no time for those who ridicule people from any social background who have devoted their life to mastering a sporting discipline.
Geoff Kidder’s Olympic blog - part five
These days we seem to play down the creative side of humanity, and focus on the dark side of human relations. We see the child who may have been abused by his or her coach, or worry about what the person has been through to reach success, but in doing this we ignore the skill and creativity it takes to win a gold medal.
Geoff Kidder’s Olympic blog - part four
Citius, Altius, Fortius (Faster, Higher, Stronger) is the motto of the Olympic Games. Usain Bolt’s ‘Citius moment’ has set a benchmark for others to follow, and is an achievement all humanists should celebrate.
Geoff Kidder’s Olympic blog - part three
Why are these external technological aids acceptable and even celebrated, when a whole panoply of internal aids are proscribed by being labelled ‘drugs’, and hang as a constant threat over the athletes and the Olympic Games themselves?
Geoff Kidder’s Olympic blog - part two
The tennis tournament does not have the prestige of a Grand Slam and is not about to. Like the Olympic football tournament, which resembles a mini youth World Cup, it is a chance to showcase the sport but not much else. Golf now wants Olympic status and a piece of the action.
Geoff Kidder’s Olympic blog - part one
The constant carping and criticism of China in the run up to the Beijing Games has made enjoyment of the sport something of a guilty pleasure. During this month we should be celebrating the high points of human physical achievement that are taking place in Beijing. It is time to knock the critics off their lofty perch.
A thirst for the ‘other’
Amar Kanwar’s video installation ‘The Lightning Testimonies’ inhabits its own room, and thus somewhat shifts the viewer away from the hectoring curatorial excess of the exhibition as a whole.
A veneer of the carnivalesque
Kelley’s strength as an artist as highlighted by this retrospective is his position as a modern day Rabelais, refusing to romanticise the material he appropriates and the ideas he works from, any more than denigrate them.
Last week on Culture Wars
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Edinburgh festivals, Brutalism and Cognitive Surplus
16 July 2010
Culture Wars in association with the Battles in Print, specially commissioned essays for the Battle of Ideas festival, with 2010’s essays coming in September.
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