The Debating House of the Mind

Book Review - A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration, by Jenny Uglow

2012-02-12T17:45:00.003Z

Charles II faced some hefty challenges when he officially become King in 1660. The country had just spent ten years ruled by parliament without any royal authority, the memory (and threat) of civil war was still fresh and Charles himself was returning from ten years of exile with a court keen for revenge and a restoration of their former lands and privilege.

After the execution of his father, King Charles I, in 1649, Charles II was more aware than most of our kings that ruling a nation is a balancing act between different parties. Push one of them too far, or refuse to give way enough, and the whole system can erupt in your face. Charles I found this to his cost, when parliament tried and executed him for crimes against his people. The idea of a king entering into a contract with his people, a two-way agreement, became current and much more accepted – there was currency in the idea that a king only ruled with the permission of his people, as represented by parliament, and after 1649 a king had increasingly limited power without his parliament.

This balancing act is explored by Jenny Uglow in her book covering the first decade of Charles II's reign (1660-1670), A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration. The infamous Merry Monarch of folk legend is shown as a human being, made wary of others by his years traipsing around European courts. Uglow shows him as an expert poker player; inscrutable, calculating and forever keeping cards close to his chest despite his outward shows of merriment. It's a concept running through the book's design, with the six sections named The Deal, Clubs, Diamonds, Hearts, Spades and The Clearance.

It is this gambler's calculation that Uglow strives to bring to the fore, highlighting Charles' secret deals or risk-taking again and again. In this story, the court's habit of gambling vast sums begins to look like a symptom of following an easygoing, faintly irresponsible king, and not the other way around. For all of Uglow's striving, though, her Charles never quite comes across as a consummate gambler; it's an interpretation that is valuable, certainly, but seems to be missing something.

That's not to say that Uglow makes Charles look carefree; quite the opposite. His merry-making and pleasure-taking is merely a diversion from the many hours he puts into the work of state. Uglow's Merry Monarch is a man seriously engaged and concerned with the running of his country, a genuine public servant, aware of the new importance of the parliament – and constantly feeling its purse strings like a noose. But he can also enjoy his life and can be seen to enjoy it (special attention is paid to several of Charles' mistresses, and the eldest of his illegitimate children, the Duke of Monmouth). He works hard and plays hard, sometimes using his play as a means to arrange secret treaties and affairs of state.

Charles' method of rule – that balancing act – was in contrast with that of his cousin, Louis XIV, who, during the course of this book, manages to establish an absolute monarchy over France and becomes the dominant power in Europe. Louis acts as a weight in the grand scales of Europe, to be weighed against Holland (including the future William III) and England, but also as an example of what the people and parliament of England fear – a tyrant on the throne, with no representatives of popular opinion. It's what the people fear, but also a leadership style preferred by Charles I, and Charles II's struggles with parliament (mostly over funding his costly wars with the Dutch) indicate how attractive the concept must also have been to him.

Louis XIV wouldn't have tolerated the scheming and factionalism that is rife in Charles II's court. But this courtly intrigue, and its overspill into the parliament, makes A Gambling Man that much more fascinating – not only is this a biography of a king's reign, it's an insight into the politics of a decade, delving into the birth of modern party politics and the gradual demise of individual royal authority.

Uglow's book colourfully illustrates the the first decade of Charles II's reign, balancing the risks taken by a monarch holding onto power with documenting the rise of parliamentary politics and the gradual transfer of power.

Hard Times: For These Hard Times - my Charles Dickens 12in12

2012-02-05T21:35:00.006Z

Hard Times: For These Hard Times (1854), Charles Dickens

More commonly known simply as Hard Times, Charles Dickens' shortest novel, Hard Times: For These Hard Times (1854), seems an especially fitting novel for Britain in 2012. The themes and ideas of Dickens' most socially-aware work resonate with a nation in the grip of austerity measures and tough economic decisions, knowing that the times ahead are likely to be even harder.

If you've read or seen Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1855), you won't be surprised that both novels were published in weekly installments in Household Words – a serial edited by our own Charles Dickens – before being published in novel format. Hard Times came from earlier in the year (April to August), while Gaskell's story ran through the later months (September – January 1855). Both are set in fictional northern English towns; grime-smeared and smoke-obscured, heaving with the belches of industrial productivity, busy with the bustle of faceless hordes of generic workers. The one, Gaskell's Milton-Northern, probably based on Manchester; the other, Dickens' Coketown, most likely to be Preston – both with names indicating their lack of individual character, functional natures and industrial purposes.

Hard Times is very much about that functional nature and the effects of the Industrial Revolution upon working people. From the very opening, the reader is accosted with the educational system (you'd call it a 'life philosophy', except that sounds a bit too fluffy and friendly) of Thomas Gradgrind Snr. This is a system he applies to his own children's upbringing, and to the children attending the school he pays for – a system perfectly suited to a town whose every movement is geared toward industrial manufacture and commerce, where people are expected to buy for the lowest price and sell elsewhere at the highest. It's a society that knows the price of everything, but has lost sight of the value of anything (sound familiar?): Gradgrind is ever-ready to 'weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to'.

Gradgrind's 'system' relies on fact: 'In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but facts!', a schoolboy is told. Fancy, imagination, wonder and other 'nonsense' are to be excluded from thought. Hard Times charts the failure of this system in two of Gradgrind's children – I say 'children', to him they're 'models of his system', but to anyone else they're his eldest son and daughter: Tom (Jnr) and Louisa.

Bustling around these children, and equally deprived of imagination, wonder and fancy, are the workers of Coketown. In referring to these people as 'Hands', Dickens simply highlights both the way the workers are regarded by their masters and the idea that the workers have lost any sense of individuality. In losing fancy (the sworn enemy of fact) to join the horde of workers, forced to work in order to live and scraping by on a wage thought too generous by their wealthy masters, they have lost that which made them human.

In writing Hard Times, Dickens didn't try very hard to make his point subtle or well-hidden. The cry for social reform and better treatment of the poor calls from every page, and readers should be left in no doubt as to the sorry state of the working class of Coketown. This is Dickens' sledgehammer to the dehumanising rock face of industrialisation and capitalism. Unlike the poor, the wealthy are individuals and their seemingly unbreakable influence over events (and the lives of the poor) is similarly under attack in Hard Times.

That's not to say Hard Times is unrelentingly bleak or, er, hard. Many of the characters have become hardened by circumstances, but humanity is not without redemption. There is at least one Hand, Rachel, who shines as a beacon of compassion and love – along with Sissy, one of the children from Gradgrind's school, she serves as the impossibly good-natured and loving women in an otherwise harsh, masculine world.

On top of that, never let it be said that Dickens isn't funny. Hard Times has some wonderful moments of light and dry humour. Josiah Bounderby, the 'bully of humility', owner of banks and factories, is a case in point. He is the book's self-made man, a much-vaunted claim which Bounderby spends most of Hard Times vaunting, his pride at having improved himself from a situation far worse than that of the Hands is palpable and unbounded. It's also hilariously exposed as a lie, displaying and enhancing the disgraceful hypocrisy of the wealthy masters of industrialised Britain (and who says that ends in 1854?).

Hard Times is a plea for the human spirit, a warning against crushing the innate and vital spark of human existence. Even though it was written nearly 160 years ago, Hard Times: For These Hard Times is still pertinent, and has a perennial relevance to all post-Industrial Revolution societies.

The image of Josiah Bounderby comes from this site, which features a few comic extracts from Dickens' work.

The Chimes - my Charles Dickens 12in12

2012-01-29T14:37:00.003Z

The Chimes (1844), Charles Dickens

You've probably heard of A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens; it's among his most famous works, and one of the most adapted. So even if you haven't read it, you probably know what happens. Just in case you don't, here's the basic story...in poor cartoon form.

This isn't a chance for me to write about A Christmas Carol – instead I'm going to write about Dickens' second Christmas story: the lesser-known The Chimes. Dickens wrote five short stories for the festive period, between 1843 and 1848, with A Christmas Carol being only the first. The Chimes is the second (1844), and although they aren't connected, it has some features in common with A Christmas Carol.

There are no ghosts, such a significant part of A Christmas Carol – and haven't ghosts always been an important part of Christmas? But even though it isn't the dead returning to life, The Chimes does involve some supernatural interference in the lives of mortals, and if that's not Christmas-y, I don't know what is. Rather like the earlier book, Dickens uses supernatural intervention to alter the attitudes of humans who've got the wrong idea about something. You can call it a cheap trick if you like, a failure to find sufficient psychological reason for his characters' actions, I'm saying nothing.

Our central character in The Chimes, Trotty Veck, unlike Carol's Scrooge, is poor and fairly sympathetic. He's a porter, who hangs around outside a church waiting for work carrying things – anything, really, but mostly boxes and messages. His two comforts while waiting and being bashed about by the wind are the friendly chimes of the bells and the thought that his daughter will be bringing his lunch later.

Already – nothing much has happened yet – Dickens has made his sympathies pretty clear. Here's a working-class, widower father struggling to claw together enough money for himself and his daughter, in contrast with the money-hoarding, bachelor Scrooge of Carol. What follows is hardly a hymn to the working classes, nor an outright attack on those wealthier than them, but instead something rather more subtle. More subtle and, of course, more supernatural.

The first two chapters (or Quarters, as Dickens names them) read as a satire of an upper-middle class that believes it knows both the working class and what is good for that class. The paternalistic (and, by modern standards, patronising) MP declares himself a 'Friend and Father of the Poor', while agreeing a harsh jail sentence for a poor man caught stealing bread for his infant daughter. The Alderman lists the things he is in favour of 'putting down', including the 'cant in vogue about Starvation'. He doesn't want to 'put down' starvation, of course, but the nonsense that the poor are anywhere near starving. These are powerful men, keen to show that they understand the sort of people they are dealing with, and have the power/ability to solve the problems of their lives. Alderman Cute is even at pains to appear to speak to the poor in their own language, or at least in a vernacular to which he has special access among the privileged classes. The MP (a baronet) criticises Trotty for owing a small sum at his local shop – it being bad form to owe debts into the New Year – while he goes about paying off his own rather larger debts. Both men make themselves increasingly ridiculous with their self-importance (accompanied by a failure to make a beneficial difference to any poor person's life).

In fact, 'the poor' take a bit of a battering in The Chimes, with Trotty left bewildered and confused by fast-talking rich men, and persuaded (by them) of his and his class' inferiority. He spends most of the book being told off by somebody, poor bloke. Here's something that I suspect is going to crop up fairly often in this 12in12 project; Dickens' support for the working classes and social reform, using his writing as his most powerful weapon.

Dickens' final two chapters/Quarters begin with that Christmas supernatural intervention, when the spirits of the church bells appear to Trotty and also tell him off. Trotty's failing is that he's lost faith in humanity and questioned Nature (by wondering what the point was in life, if people were so hopeless as he has been led to believe).

The lesson he has learnt – a little different to Scrooge's 'I should enjoy Christmas' – is:

'I know that our inheritance is held in store for us by Time. I know there is a sea of Time to rise one day, before which all who wrong us or oppress us will be swept away like leaves. I see it, on the flow! I know we must trust and hope, and neither doubt ourselves, nor doubt the good in one another.'

I can't help finding this message problematic. As he says this, Trotty is seeing his daughter standing by the Thames, ready to throw herself and/or her infant child into the murky waters and end their suffering. Trotty has been forced to watch this by the Spirits of the Chimes, to teach him a lesson for questioning Nature. But the lesson he's learnt seems to be much the same as the message handed down by Alderman Cute and his set: listen to us, don't question us and do as we instruct you. The Chimes are giving Trotty an injunction to keep quiet and accept the difficulties life throws at him, to acquiesce in his own oppression. That they have forced him, an old man, to his knees, weeping, to say this while seeing the suffering of his daughter and granddaughter is far more brutal than anything Alderman Cute says or does.

It's the poor taking a battering again; Trotty is as guilty of these wrongs as Alderman Cute and his set – in fact, he only fell into them because of Alderman Cute in the first place. And it's no wonder Trotty is so easily swayed, when he comes up against Baronets telling him that they will do the thinking for him. By rights, the Spirits of the Chimes should be going after the Aldermen and MPs with their warnings to stop harkening back to a supposed Golden Age.

Perhaps this serves to show us the wickedness of human actions in the story – they aren't as bad as the spirits' actions, but they could still be modified. That's what the MPs, Baronets, judges and Aldermen should be taking from Dickens' writing: modify your actions, and be more forgiving of the poor among us.

But Dickens' world was a world favouring the wealthy, the influential, over the hard-pressed, ill-educated and underfed. Can we really say that the world two hundred years later is much better?

12in12 - My Charles Dickens Birthday Project

2012-01-24T10:07:00.012Z

Charles Dickens' books have been adapted so often we don't need to read them any more. Discuss.

Next month, February 2012, is a big birthday for Charles Dickens. How big? Two hundred. Two centuries since the birth of Charles Dickens. He won't be around for it, of course; he's been dead for most of those two hundred years. So we'll have celebrate the day without him (again). It's February 7th, since you ask.

Dickens has spent nearly two hundred years as one of Britain's foremost writers, Well, one of the English-speaking world's foremost writers, certainly of those last two hundred years. That's quite an achievement, and he's left a wide-ranging legacy, second only really to Shakespeare in the English language. What makes it more impressive is that Dickens wrote in so many genres, not just the novels he's famous for: short stories, travel writing, journalism, plays, poetry and general non-fiction.

His work has been adapted and reworked over and over again, working its way into the collective consciousness of the English-speaking world, again rather like Shakespeare. Dickens' Christmas stories have come to define the Victorian Christmas for those of us too young to remember the reality, made the festive season the popular holiday it now is, and still strongly influences our modern perception of Christmas. Adaptations of A Christmas Carol abound toward the end of every year, and Scrooge has come to be a widely-recognised term for someone like Dickens' infamous character.

Even before the BBC started rummaging through the Dickensian back catalogue for their current season of work devoted to Charles (or Boz, as he sometimes preferred), he was frequently the subject of adaptations. Not only have Dickens' books been adapted, but he himself often appears for public readings (as the man himself did while still alive) – the most famous perhaps being Simon Callow's portrayal alongside Christopher Eccleston in the new Doctor Who.

In fact, Dickens seems to have been adapted so often that it seems we don't really need to read his books any more. I've certainly seen A Christmas Carol on stage enough times that I know the story and characters as well as if I'd read it. And that's the curse of the writer of 'classics', of members of the canon of 'great' writers; people don't actually read their books any more. As Mark Twain quoted a Professor Winchester: a classic is something everybody wants to have read, but nobody wants to read. Mind you, I'm always wary of Mark Twain quotes; they're prone to being greatly exaggerated.

I thought I'd celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of Dickens' birth by actually reading some of these books that made his name and legacy. My birthday present to him will be to read twelve of Dickens' books in a year (I'm aiming for one in each month, of course). That's roughly eleven more Dickens books than I've managed to read in my life to date (1988-2011). For someone with an English Literature degree, I consider that a pretty poor effort.

To kick off my Dickensian effort (see what I mean? Dickens is sufficiently well-established that we have an adjective for him and his work which immediately conjours up a certain type of character and location, usually something Victorian and in London), I'll be starting with a Christmas short story: The Chimes.

So, welcome to my Dickensian sort-of extravaganza (can an extravaganza take place over twelve months? is that over doing it?). I call it 12in12, and I hope you stick around until the (bitter?) end.

Thanks to Will Clayton for the birthday cake image.

The other images depict Dickens at a reading of his own, and Fringe Festival stalwart Pip Utton playing Dickens.

Then we've got the cover of the Complete Dickens Kindle edition, 99p from Amazon.

Protesting the Proms: Israel's Philharmonic Orchestra and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign

2011-09-02T11:57:00.008+01:00

Last night, for the first time in its 117-year history, BBC Radio 3 stopped its Royal Albert Hall broadcast of a Proms concert because of a politically-motivated protest. Just like that. Mid-performance (Bruch's Violin Concerto, since you ask), taken off the air.

The broadcast started at 7:30pm, which is nothing unusual. Outside the Royal Albert Hall, pro-Palestinian protesters had been vying with pro-Israeli protesters in a shouting match for some hours. Meanwhile, inside, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Zubin Mehta, was about to begin their performance. But every time their Indian-born conductor stood ready for a new movement of Bruch's work, the IPO found they couldn't start – protesters inside the hall were making too much noise. The BBC broadcast was taken off-air twice, and radio listeners didn't get to the end of the concert.

The BBC Proms are hardly the place you'd expect to get heckling and disruption so serious it causes an early end to radio broadcasting. This is supposed to be a civilised event, attended by civilised, cultured people. That makes the reasons behind this protest all the more worthy of examination.

A few years ago I was in Birmingham when the REP Theatre staged Behzti (Dishonour), a play featuring rape in a Sikh temple. Local Sikhs found this distressing, understandably, and a couple of hundred of them protested outside the theatre, eventually resulting in the play's run being cut short. But that – and several other disrupted performances that come to mind – had some pretty controversial subject matter, which is what protesters were complaining about. Bruch's Violin Concerto contains nothing especially objectionable; the issue this time was the orchestra itself.

The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra is proud of its status as one of the leading cultural ambassadors of the state of Israel, as well as happily recruiting non-Jews to its ranks. Before the 1967 Six-Day War (the one where Israel grabbed a whole load of land while fighting a range of Arab nations), that was fine; Israel was the under-dog surrounded by powerful adversaries, still a young nation defending its right to existence.

But since 1967 and the increasing Israeli expansion into its newly-occupied territories (the West Bank, Gaza), with Israel's reluctance to give up control of the contested Golan Heights, it's rather harder to sympathise with Israel. These days, they're the ones risking international condemnation through their treatment of different ethnic groups, as Palestinian Arabs did in the decades before Israel's declaration of independence in 1948. Since occupying regions such as the West Bank, Israel has been expanding its settlements (of, at best, dubious legal standing) and getting involved in conflicts that do nothing for stability in a troubled region (conflicts that aren't really about Israeli self-defence any more).

In a statement on their website, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign – responsible for the protests outside last night's Proms – argue that the IPO has 'lent itself to the official Israeli propaganda campaign titled Brand Israel, which aims to divert attention from Israel's violations of international law and Palestinian rights to its artistic and scientific achievements'. I'm all for promoting the scientific and artistic achievements of Israel (or any other group of people, for that matter), but the IPO's alignment with the Israeli Defence Force is a worrying example of artists getting (perhaps too?) closely involved in politics. I grant you, art and politics can't and shouldn't be entirely separated, but artists lose their ability (maybe even their right) to comment on politics when they get too closely involved. The IPO is quite right to promote Israel's artistic achievements internationally, but performing morale-boosting concerts for the troops (as the IPO has been doing since 1942) implies a condoning of the actions of those troops. Much as I'd like to keep this performance of Bruch's Violin Concerto separate from Israel's encroachment of the West Bank, the IPO itself has made that difficult with their IDF concerts. The Palestinian protest last night has at least been successful in bringing the connection between the two to light.

When I say the Proms is an event for cultured, civilised people, it's worth pointing out that those protesting against the performance aren't themselves uncultured. Far from it; their in-hall protest included what one audience member described as 'singing to the tune of Beethoven's Ode to Joy' – Beethoven's Ninth Symphony features the words of Schiller's poem, To Joy, in its fourth movement. While I can't help thinking that disrupting a classical music concert inside the hall itself runs the risk of making your protest look churlish (dare I say philistine?), using Beethoven's Ninth – with its overarching theme of brotherly love and the constant struggle to improve the human condition – redeems that cause immeasurably.

Thanks to Boeke, for the image of the Royal Albert Hall on Flickr.

Some advice for journalists in the post-News of the World world

2011-07-09T19:24:00.004+01:00

Some advice to journalists in the post-News of the World world; To Hack or not to Hack

Dear Journalists,

so, phone-hacking, eh? News of the World, huh? Well, that all blew up in their faces a bit. Or someone's faces anyway, I gather the actual culprits had already left (of course they had, of course). But, look, there are lessons to be learned here – just listen to Ed Miliband bang on about the lessons for everyone to learn when he was on Newsnight on Friday. And if Miliband Jnr's spotted them...

Where journalists went wrong here was in their choice of target (aside from the phone-hacking thing being illegal at the best of times). I mean, we hardly cared about an actor or Deputy Prime Minister getting hacked, but you go for a missing schoolgirl's phone and the nation's up in arms. It may be a cliché, but we do seem to love an underdog in this country. Target the powerful and we'll let you off. Target the vulnerable and we'll bite your hand off...or at least write strongly worded letters to rival newspapers.

Thing is, there are three types of people whose stories sell newspapers (and yep, because newspapers – especially tabloids – are driven by what we'll pay to read, it's kind of the public's fault too, a bit). I turn to our old friend William Shakespeare to explain them.

“Some are born to publicity. Some achieve publicity, and some have publicity thrust upon them.”

To take that one at a time...

“Some are born to publicity”
For example, the Royal Family. It's not their fault (honest) and they can't help it (really); if your mum is the head of state, your every move will be of interest to someone. These people have no choice about the public spotlight, and we can only hope that through a lifetime's exposure to it, they'll learn to handle it (there's still time for Prince Philip, fingers crossed).
These people probably have stories worth telling, so go ahead and get them (legally), but tread carefully; they are influential and know powerful people...not for nothing has that family been 'in charge' for centuries.

“Some achieve publicity”
For example, actors or politicians. It is very much their fault that they're in the limelight; they've sought it. They're either performers (of some kind or another) who've actively pursued public interest for the sake of their careers, or they're politicians who've gone out of their way to get noticed and elected to public office. Once in public office or on stage/screen/radio/print, they are of course interesting to the public.
Reporting stories about those in public may well serve the public good, and those should be encouraged. If you've a story about a celebrity, great, go for it, they'll probably help you out because they think any publicity is good publicity (unless they try to gag you, in which case you know you're into something).

“Some have publicity thrust upon them”
For example, people caught up in national tragedies, disasters or victims of crime. These are people like the families bereaved after the July 7th terror attacks. They've got a story, certainly, but if they don't want to tell it you, tough. They haven't gone looking for publicity, it's come to find them (along with something horrible in their lives), and the last thing they need is some journalist poking around their inboxes.
Stories about these people are fair enough, but don't be insensitive about them.

Thing is, the British public – as journalists can't have failed to notice over the last few years – always need a hate figure, some group of people to target all our latent anger and aggression at. Maybe it's because we're so reserved and/or apathetic most of the time and we need to vent a bit. Not so long ago, it was bankers for screwing up the economy. Before that it was MPs for...well, various things – cash for honours, fiddling their expenses, generally getting things wrong etc etc.

This week, it's your turn. Take it on the chin. Have a look at Shakespeare's contribution above, then go and dig some dirt on people worth doing it over. Or find another hate figure...we'll lap up a good hate figure.

Tour de France 2011 Stage Eight

2011-07-09T19:23:00.002+01:00

2011 Tour De France Stage Seven

2011-07-08T20:00:00.001+01:00

Incendies [film review]

2011-07-07T23:11:00.005+01:00

There are two stories running through Denis Villeneuve's award-winning French-Canadian film, Incendies. But, as is pointed out in a slightly strained mathematical analogy, one plus one sometimes equals one.

Based on a earlier play, Scorched by Wajdi Mouawad, Incendies takes its central characters, twins Jeanne and Simon Marwan (Mélissa Désormaeux-Poulin and Maxim Gaudette), from Canada to Lebanon, following a quest set by their mother's Will in 2009. She, Nawal Marwan (Lubna Azabal - also seen in the BBC's Occupation) has insisted her grave remains unmarked until they find the father and brother whose existence they've only just discovered.

Meanwhile – as it were – the young Nawal, in 1970s Lebanon, is living through the upheaval and religious warfare rampant in the Middle East. Her brother kills her lover, before her newborn son is taken away for adoption. Azabal gives us a spirited heroine, contrasting with the shellshocked woman we've already seen her become in contemporary Canada at the shattering moment when those two stories collide. It's a powerful and moving story of ugly actions across a divided nation. Seriously, this is a period of history well worth reading up on in light of Incendies.

The twins uncover more and more of their mother's story, and inevitably discover more about their own origins than they're comfortable with. There's a human drive for knowledge, a curiosity in the face of a conundrum which keeps pushing the twins inexorably onwards. They don't know it, but it's a quest for self-knowledge as much as it is a quest for their father and brother. The tight plotting and human thirst for knowledge in Incendies wouldn't be out of place in a Greek tragedy, and here it lends Incendies a throbbing ache in its heart; humans can be so curious they'll find things they don't want to know.

In fact, there's definitely something Oedipal about that missing brother, taken as he is just after having his ankle tattooed. The tattoo is one marker allowing us to follow his life in snapshots through the same war that his mother survives. It's a war that hardens him, and Incendies doesn't shy away from the acts of brutality committed, though always leaving just enough unseen and unsaid for the blanks to be filled in. That said, the order of events is masterfully handled in a way to make Greek tragedians spin in their graves, but to deliver a full-on shock to the modern audience.

A film that starts as powerfully as Incendies could build to something angry, something bereft of hope. The first five minutes leave the viewer fixed firmly in the gaze of a young boy (with a tattooed ankle) whose hair is being shaved by soldiers conscripting an orphanage. His eyes appeal for outside help even while defiance shines from them – how like his mother, later imprisoned and raped by the militia.

But what finally comes out of Incendies is forgiveness and the unbreakable love of family. Incendies teaches us that humanity can somehow overcome the ugliness it creates. Or at least that a family may do so.

BBC Question Time and Victoria Wood with Chris Evans

2011-06-24T09:21:00.007+01:00

BBC Question Time from Huddersfield on BBC One (23rd June 2011)

As always, David Dimbley's high-brow panel show depends upon its guests and audience questions. This week the panel included Tory backbencher John Redwood, economist-turned-Labour MP Rachel Reeves, Lib Dem Transport Minister Norman Baker, David Mitchell and – increasingly inexplicably – Fern Britton. Oh, and Dimbleby's lurid green tie, always something to watch for in itself. Redwood got off to a shaky start, but once into his stride became a remarkably calm and patient panellist in an increasingly heated debate (Thatcher got some praise, which in the north was never going to get a positive response). Reeves had a habit of addressing her answers directly to one person – her gaze unwavering and unblinking, terrifyingly like an automaton. But the three politicians kept up a lively and interesting debate through the hour, but Mitchell and Britton...well, someone must have thought it was going to be a good idea for them to appear on BBC Question Time. Comedians on this show usually just throw out digs at politicians and do a bit of low-level rabble-rousing, but Mitchell – who could be expected to make sensible points – was lost without a script and toed a disappointingly careful line. Britton, meanwhile, worried that she sounded 'wishy-washy'. She was right to worry.

Victoria Wood and Chris Evans on Radio 2 (24th June 2011)

This should have been great. Chris Evans interviewing Victoria Wood (CBE) on his Radio 2 Breakfast Show really should have been great. Wood's funny, and Evans is experienced as an interviewer usually able to get on well with guests. But today, he sounded out of his depth, despite his usual boyish enthusiasm for life and his guest. Wood sounded like she didn't want to be there, and was talking to someone who just didn't get her. “Why would you start writing a play?” Evans yapped, joyously. “Well, first of all, because someone asks you to. I don't think you would otherwise” Wood replied (woodenly – sorry for the pun). He asked if she had been the first to write funny songs, leading Wood to patiently explain about a few people who'd been doing the same thing earlier (like the wonderful Jake Thackray). They ended awkwardly with a discussion about how she treated interviewers, but the worst moment was when Evans asked if she'd ever work with Richard Stilgoe. She told him that he'd not understood her at all if he thought she'd enjoy doing that...

I leave you with Victoria Wood and Jake Thackray: The Ballad of Barry and Freda and Pass Milord the Rooster Juice.

Artistic Director's Note to Merge 2011

2011-06-07T14:21:00.011+01:00

They say that a band's second album is always the hardest, the 'difficult second album', so I like to think of Merge 2011 as the 'difficult second Festival'. Once we've got through that, we should be ready to take over the world and be as all-conquering as [insert your favourite band's name here].

Last year's Festival involved just over one hundred students as participants, and this year we've been even more ambitious. The Festival is split across several host venues and now happens over four days. It's all been designed to allow any audience member to see just about everything on offer. You could also look at our lovely little website, www.mergearts.org.uk.

There's a lot of stuff, so have a look around. We've got theatre, jazz, classical music, poetry, dance, performance art, workshops, burlesque, visual art...and it's all about showing off Hull's artistic scene.

Like any good band leader, I should thank the band. The Festival needs several people working hard on it through the year, and those people are listed below. I'm grateful to all of them. Once again, the University's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences has funded the Festival, and we're again grateful for their generosity in doing so.

The Merge band has also relied on our host venues for somewhere to put our second album; this year they are the Albemarle Music Centre, Fruit and the Ringside. We'd like to thank staff at each for their hard work and patience over the last year.

For Merge 2011 we experimented with some run-up events called EarlyMerge, which were hosted by the Haworth Arms, Pave, Hull's History Centre and the Ringside, while workshops have been hosted by Hull College – so we extend our thanks to them too.

Finally, can I thank you for coming along? I hope you find at least one performance or artwork that really makes you think and shows that Hull has artistic talent to be proud of. That would be a good legacy for this year's Festival.

Once again, thank you for coming – have a look around, see some shows, and I hope to see you for next year's Festival.

Richard T. Watson, Artistic Director

PS. Enjoy the album!

The Merge Arts Festival is:

Artistic Director: Richard T. Watson

Finance Director/Co-Producer: Alison Best

Technical Directors: Jon Cole & Adam Foley

Publicity Director: Rachael Abbey

Education Director: Zoe Hughes

Designer: Will Langdale

With special thanks to:

Professor Valerie Sanders and the University of Hull's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

Sarah-Jane Dickenson and staff at the University's Department of Music and Drama

Chris Maynard and staff at the Albemarle Music Centre

Dean Shakespeare and staff at Fruit

Darren Bunting, Anna Fox and staff at the Ringside

Arike Oke and staff at the Hull History Centre

Staff at the Haworth Arms and Pave bar

Jamie McGarry

Lucy Thurlow, Hayley Nikolay and staff at Hull College

Simon Bedford and Hoipolloi Theatre

Keira Walker

Janet Pearce and Marianne Lewsley-Stier

Jonno Witts

Elizabeth Coombs

The Tricycle Theatre, Kilburn

Mapping The City in Hull (starting at Hull Truck)

2011-05-07T16:12:00.003+01:00

I'm walking down a street, holding a book. The book's about the paradoxes of logic, and the street is one I've walked along several times, but it's never looked like this before. It's never sparked these particular thoughts before.

That's the beauty of SlungLow's Mapping The City project for the city of Hull. It takes spaces within the city and transforms them, largely in the minds of the spectators, into wholly different spaces. Twenty minutes later, those same people are in the same space, and it means something new again. Mapping The City presents its audience with three connected stories, dotted around Hull, and the first lays the groundwork well by introducing the idea of memories ambushing a man in the street. Think of all those times that something seen in the street has triggered an old memory, one with no relevance to the rest of your day. SlungLow's Mapping The City is full of moments like these, moments when the place you're in, the 'here', influences thought and when thought influences and changes your 'here'.

A small audience troops around Hull's streets, marked out by the earphones clamped on their heads and relaying the speech of the actors they follow. Occasionally, down side streets they catch glimpses of someone carrying an oil lantern, or of a suited man watching, waiting, biding his time. In the company of a guiding figure, the intrepid audience is mapping the city of Hull in their own minds. We criss-cross over the same few streets, in Hull's old fruit market area, each time investing what we see with our special meaning. As one guide tells us, the tools we apply to people-watching ('trainspotting for the soul') are from our own experiences.

Those people with the lanterns should serve as a reminder that our journey around Hull's streets, mapping that city, are part of something much larger, something difficult to understand from our own limited perspective. The second of the three scripts that make up Mapping The City stresses this point when its professorial guide tells his audience about the human habit of thinking of ourselves as being at the centre of a universe that is infinitely complex – it's helpful in small things, like walking, but much less helpful for understanding how the universe actually works.

The same is true of SlungLow's sprawling production. Though it rarely strays from roughly the same geographical area (Hull's old fruit market and marina) it's a huge logistical challenge, and one that's impossible to fully grasp from an audience perspective. SlungLow make it all look so fiendishly easy. Little moments happen that seem almost accidental – a girl passes a bus at just the right moment – but have been planned well in advance, the whole coincidence stage-managed. There is much more going on than meets the eye. Smoothly, ushers display signs advising us to remove our headphones and 'enter the vehicle', which turns out to be a line of taxis, parked silently waiting and perfectly subtle in their transportation of the audience to the soup caravan. (Yes, there's a soup caravan – isn't that brilliant?)

Whether travelling on foot, by bus or in a fleet of taxis, the audience's attention is almost entirely centred on the performers whose words come direct to their ears. Sometimes that's to the detriment of things like balance and walking on cobblestones becomes especially tricky, because you aren't really looking where you're going. Instead, audiences almost blindly follow the voices, sometimes down the same street as the last performer, but a street this time endowed with an entirely different set of meanings.

Bemused local Hullians watch, taking photos and videos, as a united group walks past, headphones on, focus intently on the couple arguing ahead of them. The audience becomes as worthy of spectator interest as the actors, and sometimes we get more attention. Mapping The City really is theatre for the city, and Hull doesn't know how lucky it is to have this going on.

SlungLow have also been disarmingly open about the process of setting up Mapping The City, and their conversion of some of Hull's warehouse space. See their blog, photos and tweets on @SlungLow.

RashDash Theatre Interview for Noises Off 2011

2011-04-22T23:27:00.004+01:00

In which Abbi and Helen from RashDash answered my questions in an interview for NSDF's magazine, Noises Off.

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'We’ve set up an installation in Scarborough college,' says Abbi Greenland, of visiting artists RashDash Theatre. 'It’s essentially a play den where you can come and have fun for half an hour. Letting yourself go and finding an unleashed physicality is an essential aspect of our work. The space we’ve created gives everyone a chance to do that in a non-threatening un-scary way. There's also a film showing on Friday at 5pm for those who’ve come along during the week.'

RashDash Theatre (Greenland and Helen Goalen, as well as collaborators including Marc Graham and various musicians) was formed by students at the University of Hull's Drama Department, who have been producing and touring their own work since 2008. The company shares a ' desire to make work that formally encompasses music, physicality, drama and story'. They're also visiting artists at this year's Festival; their recent Fringe First award-winning show, Another Someone, will be performed on Thursday in the Spa Theatre at 10pm.

RashDash first came to NSDF in 2008 with their selected show Strict Machine (which 'wasn’t sophisticated thematically or formally') and then again with another selected show in 2009, Never Enough ('a development of what Strict Machine had been').

Their work has been described as feminist and funny, a description they are perfectly happy with: 'A show should always have at least one laugh, no? We’re both happy to be labelled feminist, although sometimes it puts people off... Being funny is a good way of getting round that. Our new show is feminist and funny, we hope. And whether it’s feminist or not – our stories are always told from a female perspective - because that’s who we are and that’s what we know. Our new show [Scary Gorgeous] is political, Another Someone isn't. We make shows about things that we care about at the time, and if that’s political, then the show is political.'

None of RashDash's shows are easily pinned down to one performance genre, often including dance and live music as well as theatre. 'We’ve never had a finished script before entering the rehearsal room so we’ll often switch between writing, choreographing and rehearsing scenes in one session. The musical side of our work is probably the most enjoyable element, having a group of people jamming out harmonies/parts is just a lot of fun and always a welcome break'.

The last few months have been busy for RashDash, and the future doesn't involve much slowing down. They're touring Another Someone across the UK, and previewing their new show, Scary Gorgeous. It's 'about raunch culture and porn. We wanted to know what people find sexy because we have a sneaky suspicion that the ways in which we try to be sexy and the things we find sexy often have very little to do with pleasurable sex.'

One thing NSDF is so good at is promoting and assisting upcoming new companies, and RashDash is one such company. 'it was great to meet the selectors and the visiting artists, who were encouraging and lovely, but the best bit was seeing other student shows. There was some great stuff going on, really different kinds of shows to those we’d seen before and really different to the kind of thing we were seeing at Uni. It made us hungry to make something better and different'. But selected performers aren't the only ones to benefit from the opportunities the Festival offers; anyone who's here has a chance to meet those people and see those shows.

For companies hoping to follow a similar route to them, RashDash have this advice:

'Keep going. It is difficult and at times you may feel ridiculous and like you shouldn’t be doing it, but if you’re passionate enough about making shows you will make it work.

Be honest with yourself about what you’re good at and what you’re not. Find people who are better than you at the stuff you’re not good at. This is a big lesson we are currently learning.
Work with people you like. If they’re brilliant but you don’t like them, it probably won’t work. '

I asked Abbi and Helen if there was any one thing they would recommend doing while in Scarborough. Their suggestion was 'paddling'...so go and enjoy some paddling.

Line at NSDF11 (from Noises Off)

2011-04-18T22:23:00.002+01:00

The West is an impatient society. Increasingly it's also a highly individualistic society, with a rising determination to be first, to get to places quickly and to do so ahead of anyone else. It's a society where many do in fact want their fifteen minutes of fame – a society where the phrase 'me me me' really applies.

Each of the five characters (six, if you count Mozart) in Israel Horovitz's play Line are trying to get to the front of their eponymous line. It's not quite a bus queue (unless it's an especially cosmic bus), and must be a particularly significant opening of Ikea if it is one of those events that people queue for en masse. Whatever it is, these five Americans are really eager to be first. Second is apparently alright, but only as a springboard to first.

When a character reaches the front of the queue (doesn't really matter which one; their reactions are fairly similar), it tends to result in euphoria and gloating. So the front of that queue is clearly pretty important, and characters' attempts to reach the hallowed end of the gaffer tape provide the impetus to what passes for a plot in Horovitz's script.

When Dan Wood (playing Fleming) is hanging about in first place before anyone else gets there, Line looks like it's going to give us an examination of human behaviour while waiting. Maybe an exploration of human social interaction and how concepts of personal/mental space are affected by the arrival of new people to their territory (for want of a better word).

And – in a way – that is what York's students do give us. But Line is an inflated version of that, an overblown depiction with a set of overblown characters. It's no incisive dissection of human attitudes or interaction, if only because everything is so over the top; there is no reason given for why first place is so important to these five people.

But that implies there's a bigger picture that we as an audience aren't being made aware of (and to be honest, the characters don't seem too sure of exactly what they're waiting for, other than that it is not only important but also just that they be first). The line becomes much more than just a strip of gaffer, and the struggle for first place becomes a struggle for success in life.

Soft Target? Preview piece for Noises Off 2011

2011-04-18T21:55:00.005+01:00

If you look at the first page of your Festival program, you'll find a welcoming note from the Festival's patron Sir Alan Ayckbourn, former Artistic Director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre (by the train station, don't worry, you'll get to know it).

As well as welcoming us all to Scarborough for the week, he tells us that "publicly funded theatre is in crisis." He says this is because "inevitably the arts are a soft target" in times of financial cutbacks.

In a way he's got a point; it's easy to decide that the arts have limited practical value when you're struggling to fund the nation's schools, hospitals and defence. I'm not going to go back over the arguments about the arts being more than the sum of their parts, and a value greater than its up-front cost. At a National Student Drama Festival, rehearsing those arguments would (I hope) be preaching to the choir. (Anyway, Sir Alan goes through some of the points in his welcome - go read it).

But is Sir Alan in danger of writing off the arts as unable to defend themselves? Is he right to say that they (and by extension the artists) are undefended? Are our artists push-overs, so reliant on the dripfeeding of public subsidy that they'll all wither away once that invigorating nectar is withdrawn? Are we really Samson once Deliah had cut his hair off ?

If anything, the arts is the area of society that is most able to speak up for itself. We're the ones with the public stage to speak from (literally, in the case of theatre organisations). The Southwark Playhouse's Theatre Uncut performances have demonstrated that theatre - even if not the rest of the arts world - can become organised in anti-cuts activity that raises our voices in opposition.

Recently, Alexander Wright from Belt Up Theatre (NSDF selected company in 2008, NSDF visiting artists 2010) wrote a blog in which he says that "The very act of [...] putting on a show like The Beggar's Opera [...] is for me, an act of protest" - he wants the show to say: ''Look at what we are doing. We are young and able to do this because all the people around us have made it possible. And you, Mr Cameron, and you, Mr Clegg, are going to slowly burn us to the ground.

Well, if you do, we're are going to go down kicking and screaming and making a bloody big fuss."

That's not an arts scene withering away when the tap of the public funding is turned off. Wright says that it will be "very, very sad" if spending cuts kill off upcoming artists. He's right, but spending cuts will be so much more damaging if we as artists allow that attitude of "it's very sad" to take hold.

I want to see young theatre companies, young dance companies, young artists doing more than bemoaning their undersubsidised fate. Let's not see the whole "ConDem" thing as a problem, but as an opportunity. Now is the time for young companies to show off their great strengths: imagination, adaptability, resilience, flexibility, vigour.

Reduced funding should make us try harder for other types of funding, and should force us to

use our imaginations for that as well as in our art. Keep costs down (easier for us than for bigger, older organisations) and stay nimble financially We have something to make us angry (instead of sad, please), something to respond to, something to fire us up - and we've got the imaginative and artistic firepower to say something about it.

I agree when Sir Alan says that "theatre is important" and perhaps I even agree when he says "publicly funded theatre is in crisis" - but he shouldn't write off the arts as defenceless quite so easily.

Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think Of You @ The Junction

2011-03-19T21:35:00.007Z

It’s not a show about a déjà vu victim experiencing an explosion again and again. Honestly. The title might make it sound like that, but honestly, Molly Naylor’s Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think Of You is a richer performance than that. Strictly speaking, it’s a spoken word performance, but so much emphasis is there on the performance aspect that it feels much more like a one-woman play than anything else.

Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think Of You is a story about being blown up, certainly. In fact, that’s pretty much all you get. The staging is stripped back so far that you’ve only got that story on stage – barely any clutter, one performer and maybe three projections. So the story is paramount, and its environment lends itself to the art of listening, the art of really paying attention to the words (perhaps not surprising for a poem presented as drama).

Molly Naylor, speaking those words, tells her audience about the seventh day in July, 2005, when she got blown up on the Tube at Aldgate station. She was actually relatively unscathed – physically – and instead picked up the glamour of the survivor, the terrorist victim who walked away. Frankly, it’s the glamour she’d been craving up until that point, and maybe this is representative of a generation; not deliberately perhaps, but this idea of a generation seeking the glamour of Hollywood, then allowing a traumatic event to serve as scapegoat for all that’s wrong in their lives, certainly strikes a chord.

Alright, so ‘scapegoat’ is perhaps a little unfair. It’s not as though Naylor blames all her failings (lack of ambition, apathy, selfishness) on the bombings of July 7th. Rather, the bombing becomes a filter through which she (and we) can see things differently. The bombing shines light on aspects of her life that we could already see, but maybe not clearly. So, sure, she’s drifting through life in a happy-go-lucky way before the bombing, but this is only really obvious once the ‘happy’ has been removed and we can all question the ‘lucky’. Her lack of ambition comes strikingly forward when she flees London to rural Wales, but her dead-end jobs before then should have been giveaways.

But what I came back to time and again in Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think Of You was those words. Molly Naylor keeps up a steady stream of them and they fill the black box space. Maybe she doesn’t need the projections to set her locations; the words are enough. This script (really a poem) sings with the rhythmic power of poetry, it’s highly lyrical and sometimes self-consciously so. The fact that it’s a poem being performed like a monologue (it’s not staged like a spoken word performance) means that Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think Of You suffers slightly in a theatre – these words have to spoken in a certain way for the poetry to work – because there’s a certain lack of spontaneity. Naylor’s easy-going, improvised opening few words of greeting (and closing words, to plug her book of the show) serve only to make her rehearsed, scripted tone of voice even more obvious.

Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think Of You is a self-consciously theatrical staging of a highly lyrical rendition of the July 7th bombings and their aftermath. It’s touching, certainly, occasionally funny, sometimes awkward but always poetic and heartfelt.

Howl [film review]

2011-03-18T11:07:00.006Z

What is great art? How are you going to define literary merit? What things do you look for to decide that a piece of art is good, great, indifferent or simply bad? You had better be ready with a least an idea of answers to those questions.

Rob Epstein’s and Jeffrey Friedman’s film Howl focuses on and takes its title from Allen Ginsberg’s four part poem, Howl, in which Ginsberg articulates his vision of the world in 1955. It’s not an especially positive vision, following the travels of Carl Solomon, whom Ginsberg met when both men were patients in a mental health institute. You should probably read it yourself, but in Allen Ginsberg’s nasal, drawn-out voice with its curious cadences; it sounds better that way, and Ginsberg’s poetry is very aural. A lot of poetry works best when performed rather than read silently (some might say a poem stands or falls on its performance – and maybe that’s a way of defining great art in poetry), but this is especially true of Ginsberg’s work.

Howl brought Ginsberg to public attention, and even more so when it landed the publisher in court two years later for breaching obscenity laws. It was Howl that launched Ginsberg onto his journey to becoming, as the film Howl claims, one of the most celebrated poets of the Twentieth Century.

Obscenity trials are great for getting the debating juices flowing. The arguments involved are usually much bigger than the works of art that initially sparked them off. The trial – perhaps very publicly – becomes a verbal battlefield for two sides in wars between conservative and liberal thinking, between upholding moral standards and freedom of speech, between adult seriousness and youthful artistic expression.

The film Howl documents the poem Howl’s trial on grounds of obscenity, interspersed with an interview with Allen Ginsberg (James Franco) and animated renderings of the poem itself. Jon Hamm (he of Mad Men fame) defends the literary merit of Ginsberg’s poem (as well as arguing over what constitutes literary merit) accusations that the poem is puerile and lacks the redeeming qualities found in ‘great’ art.

I put it to you that great art creates its own form and is original in that respect. It should have no precursor, no obvious inspiration that has been altered to suit the writer’s purpose (we’re talking about literature, even though we say ‘art’).

But doesn’t that view overlook the fact that great art is often great because it nods to the formal rules, then breaks or twists them, and experiments with them creatively? Isn’t it true that individual works of art are rarely entirely unique, but often borrow from others? And isn’t literary merit fairly subjective anyway? Isn’t art something that can be appreciated by one person even if not by the next? Answers on a postcard please.

Poetry – and I don’t just mean Allen Ginsberg’s poetry – is all about the words creating images for an audience (of readers or listeners). It’s painting pictures with sound , rhythm and cadence, in a way that prose can’t quite manage (as one of Howl’s advocates explains in the trial). By animating Ginsberg’s words, Howl the film seems to miss the point of poetry. Epstein and Friedman imply that Ginsberg’s words alone – ably performed by Franco – aren’t enough to conjure images of the god Moloch, or of the thousand blind windows of his eyes, or of the best minds of Ginsberg’s generation drifting through life and reeling from the effects of World War Two. It seems only animation can convey the epic scope of Ginsberg’s Howl. The sexual exploits of his friend (the cocksman, the Adonis of Denver) and the cosmic search for meaning undergone by Solomon and humanity can apparently not be appreciated in words without us having them visualised for us. Stunning as the animation is, it is reductive and undermines the power of Ginsberg’s howl.

I leave you with another question: is the literary critic a better judge of whether art is obscene, or is the average reader (whoever that is) a better judge? That’s a question thrown up late on in Howl, and not really covered.

One more: is a film a great piece of art if it raises more questions than it answers, eloquently defends free speech, probes at our definitions of what constitutes ‘merit’ and ‘great’ and also fires up the imagination through poetry and imagery? That’s Howl, helped out by Allen Ginsberg – make up your own mind (it’d be in line with Ginsberg’s approval of free thought and individual expression).

An Open Letter to Hull City Council about Arts Funding and their Proposed Budget

2011-01-30T17:35:00.009Z

Dear Hull City Council,

Please consider this an open letter in response to the Revenue Proposed Budget 2011-12 you are currently considering.

There are huge savings to be made, in many areas, and I would encourage the Council to extend and enhance links with the local Voluntary and Community Sector. Helping newer organisations to 'be better placed to bid for new services' could be especially helpful in the coming years, particularly if Hull is to be a city that retains and attracts young professionals (the key demographic group for a 'thriving city centre economy' – as mentioned in your proposed Priority C). It is these groups and these people that are the partners most able to bring the 'best and most cost effective ways to improve the lives of the people of Hull' (Hull City Council's vision over the next three years).

On the subject of Priority C ('Making Hull a place where people are proud to live and work'), mainly on the point about making Hull a place to visit, I do feel that the proposed budget neglects provision for the arts and culture of Hull. As someone who has lived in Hull and Cambridge, I'd like to draw your attention to the attitude taken by Cambridge City Council toward their arts provision. I admit there are significant differences between the two cities, but some statements in the proposed Cambridge budget carry weight for Hull too. For example: 'The arts provide experiences that bring people together and inspire them. Without them Cambridge would be a less desirable place to live, work and visit.' [my emphasis] – the proposal goes on to state that 'The arts provide a platform to celebrate and showcase our local cultural diversity and create a sense of excitement and pride in our city'. If Hull City Council wants to instil a sense of pride in Hull – making people 'proud to live and work' here – then they cannot overlook the contribution made by the arts in Hull.

But, as Cambridge City Council has recognised, the arts offer more than civic pride; they provide experiences too, experiences that bind communities together (the Freedom and Vista Festivals comes to mind) and that inspire people and help them to reach their potential. This is especially true with children and young people – those saddled with the debts passed on in this spending review, and I would urge the Council to hold young people's interests very much at heart when implementing cuts to their inheritance. The Council rightly identifies 'Giving children and young people the best start, and everyone the opportunity to achieve their potential' as Priority B of their proposed budget.

The Council is no doubt already aware of various pieces of research demonstrating the benefit of children having an active engagement in culture and their surroundings. They must also be aware of the DCMS Taking Part survey which found that 'in inner city areas those who participated in culture were 10% more likely to be satisfied with where they live' – linking culture with civic pride again.

The Council has been already been involved with projects that have helped children's cultural engagement from an early age, and it is achievements like that – and other signs of Hull's regeneration – that are likely to suffer from cuts. Equally, they are precisely the achievements that should be safeguarded and built upon. A city's children are its future, and without the young people the city has no future. If Hull is to be an aspiring city, a city worthy of pride, its youth has to be stimulated, involved and engaged in the arts and in culture and in sport and in education. These are the things worth building on, for the sake of our youth and for their future (which is, after all, our future).

I don't see this letter as a call for greater investment in Hull's culture, nor as a cry for ring-fencing of cultural spending; maybe it's a point in a larger debate about arts funding and public service cuts in general. What I'm really asking is that the Council strengthens its bonds with charities, the Voluntary and Communities Sector, cultural organisations, the education sector and local artists. Ask us what we can do and how we want to help (I admit to a vested interest here...). Encourage and support the newer organisations, work with the established ones, help them to help each other. Deliver on the budget's commitment to 'support areas of the community who wish to develop services and activities'. In these difficult economic times, it is only by working together that we can hope to secure a decent future for this city and for the young people in it.

Thank you for reading,

Richard T. Watson,

Artistic Director, Merge Arts Festival

twitter.com/merge_arts_fest

artisticdirector@mergearts.org.uk

The arts inspire us and lead us to a deeper engagement with each other and the world we live in. They are not the icing on the cake of a community; they are one of the critical ingredients that binds it together.
Rod Cantrill, Executive Councillor for Arts & Recreation, Cambridge City Council

Why Burlesque isn't just stripping for posh people

2011-01-28T14:49:00.009Z

Thought dead for the last half century or so, burlesque as an artform has been undergoing a revival in recent years. That's probably most noticeable in 2010's Cher and Christina Aguilera film, Burlesque, though that's only the most recent outbreak of burlesque into mainstream culture.

I realise I'm a bit late on this, but it's been a thought bubbling away for a while. I blame these Guardian articles: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2010/dec/13/burlesque-stripping-posh-empowering and http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/dec/13/burlesque-dita-von-teese-christina-aguilera

Burlesque has caused controversy – most recently in Cambridge – mainly on the grounds that women taking their clothes off for money from dirty old men is distasteful and a regressive step for the feminist movement. That's no doubt true; attaching commercial value to displays of a woman's body is a clear case of objectifying women. There's a feeling that burlesque bars are simply upmarket strip joints, exploiting young women in much the same way as a brothel would.

But to accuse burlesque performances of committing this act is to miss the point of burlesque, in both its earlier and its modern form. As various opponents and insiders have pointed out, early burlesque was satirical, a light relief that used things like cross-dressing as a way of bursting the pomposity of the ruling classes. In its more modern form, burlesque can be easily confused with striptease, but there are significant differences. It's also a misinformed approach to associate all burlesque with nudity; burlesque embraces a variety of artforms, and provocative dance is only one of those.

The satire element may not be so prominent in modern burlesque, but the idea of treating the performance as an art form certainly is. For a start, the amateur nature of many burlesque performers contrasts them with the strippers that Laura Barnett reckons are getting money furtively stuffed into their garters. But, deep down, burlesque is a different activity to stripping – even the acts that involve some clothes coming off. The two activities have different objectives and different approaches, even different audiences.

A striptrease in a strip joint is a commercial venture, where the stripper is earning money (not necessarily for herself), in exchange for stripping. The point is to make her male audience want to sleep with her, and pay more money to gain visual material for their own imaginings. The striptease offers the male audience member the hope that he could sleep with the stripper – or at least get a good idea of what it would look like (and in some cases, paying enough means that his dream comes true). The stripper has to offer everything up before the audience gets bored, give them what they want and get to the point. It falls apart if the audience doesn't believe she'd go all the way.

The art of a burlesque erotic dance lies in the restraint and the control, the titillation and

knowing when enough is enough.

Amateur performers aim to entertain, rather than arouse.

Their mixed-gender audience doesn't need to be attracted to the performer, and that's where the empowerment can come in; performers needn't be svelte paragons of beauty (however you define beauty). More importantly, the burlesque erotic dance is about giving the audience a little bit of what they want – in a light-hearted way, without the earnestness of the striptease – gradually. The performer plays with the audience, working them up, and then judges the right moment to withdraw leaving them wanting more without feeling that they've missed out. Unlike stripping, a burlesque performance doesn't need the audience's gratification.

The two performances have superficial similarities, but the underlying intentions and outcomes are different; it's a bit like the difference between having sex and making love.

Images courtesy of No Saints and Anna Fox, The Ringside

Others @ The Junction, Cambridge

2010-11-11T13:23:00.006Z

Jemma invites you to be part of her project over the next six months. She's interested in you because, basically, you're not like her. She's looking for someone other than her, someone different to her, someone 'other'. Don't ask how she knows you're different; she just assumes you are. Thus begins Others, presented by The Paper Birds at The Junction, Cambridge.

Although, it's not actually you she's asking: that's just a letter Jemma (one of The Paper Birds) has written to other women asking them to share stories for Others. The three women featured are an Iranian artist, a prisoner in a British jail and a celebrity (Heather Mills, who seems not to have replied to her letter). That's one for each of the three women who form The Paper Birds and present their work at The Junction in a simple style, speaking directly to their audience, voices sometimes overlapping, contradicting or supporting each other. Meanwhile, music is occasionally provided by a meek male figure who hangs forlornly about the edge of the stage, speaking only to tell us his name (Jonathan).

There's a certain forced attempt at audience interaction as The Paper Birds wait for their front of house clearance. Others becomes a long interruption of their conversation with the audience, the show is what happens while they try and do other things, seemingly distracted by offstage sounds. The Paper Birds tease at the fourth wall in the opening of their show, but never actually do anything with it (not until a suddenly startling moment later on, when their Iranian correspondent blames the West for her troubles, which is all the more powerful for being so sudden).

The Paper Birds' dramatisation of the Iranian artist's story punctures our Western generalisations about Iran and the Middle East. It makes our Western perceptions seem ludicrous and questions our ability to ever really understand the 'other', not just in this case but in all cases. That's the heart of Others: perception and understanding of people who are different, people who are 'other'. The difficulty in understanding is also conveyed far more subtly by undermining Western generalisations than by having Shani Erez (another of The Paper Birds) repeatedly insist that English speakers don't understand people from the Middle East.

The project to find 'others' also leads to a northern UK prison and a woman serving a life sentence for manslaughter. Despite repeated claims of 'It's not about us [The Paper Birds]', this woman's life is seen through the curiosity (read: barely-disguised voyeurism) of those same Paper Birds. Again, the character is purely 'other' and the focus of narrative slant is on the audience/narrators' perception of that 'other'.

Nowhere is this more clear than with the case of the third 'other': Heather Mills. Her entire life appears to have become a media circus, with everyone's perception of her filtered through a hostile press. In Others, she isn't even allowed to answer questions herself (possibly because she hasn't given The Paper Birds any answers). Instead The Paper Birds answer questions for her, increasingly diverging from the facts about Mills' life and into personal speculation. Such is our treatment of celebrities (and often non-celebrities).

Mills and The Paper Birds seem to be part of a group of women (ie. all women) who've suffered at the hands of men. In fact, men come out of Others pretty badly. At best, they heartlessly break up with devoted and devastated women, leaving emotional wreaks behind. At worst, they're serial abusers who father multiple children without a second thought. Could this be the real 'other'? Violent masculinity that that somehow ensnares devoted affection?

Maybe that's what The Paper Birds are somehow really trying to understand, as much as the 'other' women they claim to seek. Or maybe I think that because, as a man, all of these women are my 'other'; that's the kind of thinking sparked off by Others. The Paper Birds do genuinely question perceptions of the 'other' and handle their material in a thought-provoking manner. But it might be interesting to see who Jonathan would find as his 'other'.

Thanks to The Junction, Cambridge's website and jeckman for the images.

Single Father [Episode Four] on BBC One

2010-11-01T21:51:00.008Z

When the BBC continuity announcer described an emotional climax for David Tennant's single father, she wasn't lying.

Not to say that the previous three episodes of the BBC's Single Father had been less than emotional, but this final one rather went for it. Fair enough, if you've got David Tennant onboard, you'd want to use him, right? Helped on by various chemical imbalances, pregnancies, alcohol and that interfering sister Anna (Neve McIntosh), the series rolled on to its relatively cheerful ending last night.

The competition between Matt (Warren Brown) and Dave (David Tennant) may have fizzled out disappointingly, but the competition between Dave and Stuart (Rupert Graves) is racked up a few notches for this concluding episode. As relationships go, that's probably where Single Father suddenly really hits the mark; a fiercely polite tug-of-love between two fathers. It just needs them to be the same age to have an extra kick; is Graves too grey-haired to have been at college with Rita (the underused Laura Fraser)?

On the relationship front, the final episode ties up one of the niggling worries in my mind over Single Father. There's a small moment in which we can finally get some idea about why on earth Mark Heap's Robin married Anna – look at that cheeky little grin, that puckering up that serves as both apology and forgiveness. Heap may have only had brief moments through Single Father, but they've often been the best bits; finely observed and neatly judged, Heap is highly watchable and a tad underused.

It's just a shame that, as ever, Single Father seems to have neglected plausible storyline in favour of hitting its audience where it hurts. If Heap and Fraser are underused, Dave's eldest daughter, Tanya (Sophie Kennedy Clark), is probably overused in this episode – especially in the almost entirely unnecessary (and fairly implausible) event with Brown's Matt. Sure, it leads her into a violent outburst that lets the proverbial cat out of the bag in a loud manner, which needed to happen. But there are no doubt easier (read: more plausible) ways of doing so, without resorting to plot devices that smack of Jacobean tragedy. That incident aside, Brown is finally allowed to shine in this final episode, which is good, and gives a glimpse of what he can do given chance.

So those Single Father plot threads are fairly neatly wound up (don't ask what Matt decides to do with himself after not finding and confronting Dave). Lucy's happily chosen a father (for now) while even Dave and Anna are managing to get along. Which just leaves us with the main plot – you know, Sarah (Suranne Jones) and Dave? Alas, that's where it falls apart a bit. Never mind the chunk of plot missing during which Dave decided to go ahead with the paternity test she suggested last week – what's going on with the bump she has herself? Are we expected to believe that she was as manipulative as Rita in not telling Dave that she was going to get herself pregnant (and that he fell for it again!), decided to leave Dave afterwards, and then was persuaded to change her mind once again simply because Dave looked imploring and told her he reckoned it could work? Forgive me for sounding incredulous. I mean, sure, women look for good father material in their partners, but two consecutive women wanting Dave's children despite needing persuading that a relationship with him is a good idea? No wonder he's ended up as a single father.

To be honest, if you're watching Single Father for support in a similar situation, you're probably better checking out the links on the show's page on the BBC website.

Image curtesy of the BBC.

This episode of Single Father may still be available to view via BBC iPlayer here.

Single Father [Episode Three] on BBC One

2010-10-24T17:53:00.004+01:00

Given the choice, would you have David Tennant or Warren Brown? Or Rupert Graves, for that matter?

The BBC's newest David Tennant-drama, Single Father, has become a tug-of-love between those three men, albeit with varying prizes. Stuart (Graves) wants to look after Lucy, so does Dave (Tennant). Dave wants Sarah (Suranne Jones), so does Matt (Brown). The competition with Stuart may exist primarily in Dave's head, but the competition with Matt is very real. It's real because Dave's making Sarah doing the same sort of thing she did when she went to see Stuart without telling Dave. Oh, and they're actually having an affair.

Single father Dave's increasingly getting left behind in the middle of whirlwind of changes, which seems to be leaving him with just the one child. Still, she's easier to handle than the five he had at the start of Single Father. Hey, legally, only Tanya is his as things stand.

Somehow Dave's relationship with Sarah has been kept under wraps – despite Evie's witnessing them in the act – even as other relationships fall apart. At the same time, the layers of Rita's (Laura Fraser) family are being peeled away; turns out her mum's not really her mum after all. More dirty washing for public consumption?

So all that remains to be seen is how Dave and Sarah work their new relationship out, how long it'll be before Lucy moves in with the creepy, French-speaking Quinlan girls and whether or not Matt is going to go on the warpath over Sarah. Oh, and someone ought to find out where Mark Heap's Robin has gone with that dog...

On the plus side, my question about how photographer Dave has been earning money has finally been answered – ie. he isn't. It's probably about time the complete lack of work plus supporting a large family caught up with him.

Image courtesy of the BBC

Single Father may still be available to view via BBC iPlayer here.

Why the Smart Car fortwo TV ad makes me want to never buy a Smart Car

2010-10-24T14:08:00.010+01:00

This is not how advertising is supposed to work. The TV advert for Smart Car's fortwo is not supposed to make me want to avoid Smart Cars at all costs.

Adverts (commercials, whatever you chose to call them) are supposed to make me want to spend money on the product in question. This one really doesn't. The message I'm getting: the new fortwo is incredibly destructive.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjOvwG2SA9o

The Smart Car fortwo is driven around an impossibly empty city at night, and leaves carnage in its wake. Somehow, through its admittedly cool music player, the fortwo manipulates power lines and makes office lights turn on and off. Not eco-friendly.

While making a vending machine spew out cans (in effect stealing from the manufacturer), the fortwo also wreaks havoc with the traffic lights...good job there's only this one guy on the roads, eh?

It's also lucky that this is happening at night, because in the day this car would be a death trap.

At the same time as switching office lights on and off, the passing fortwo also switches computers on and off. I hope they're set to autosave pretty frequently, because random power fluctuations could become frequent if this ad campaign takes off.

It disrupts everything - including a bloke in the bath, which is just rude, frankly - and causes untold damage. Somehow, the fortwo also manages to set off a load of fire extinguishers. Would someone like to explain that one?

Then, the best bit by far - or worse bit if you happen to be, er, human...which accounts for most of Smart Car's target market - the windows. Every piece of glass anywhere near the fortwo shatters, and you might notice the fine spray of glass (or fine spray of death, as I like to call it) that suddenly descends to ground level. Ground level, in case car designers weren't aware, is where pedestrians walk. Apparently, it's okay to cover this in glass shards, which is what will happen every time someone drives past in a fortwo. Oh good.

Don't worry though folks, it's okay. When he locks the fortwo, everything gets fixed. It's a miracle. Everything is put back exactly how it was.

It's basically a deluxe, suped-up version of the Nissan Juke (watch especially for the electric robots), seen below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSOgGhZL9t4

The difference here is that the Nissan Juke doesn't absolutely destroy everything (what's with the washing machines?). It seems to make electricity work in its immediate vicinity, which might be useful, but that's about it. Oh, and it exposes a diamond thief. While the effects are destructive when it parks, they are at least localised - it's only that sign that goes crazy, and we're talking a small-scale fireworks display rather than an entire commercial sector needing to be put back together.

Still, not sure I fancy driving a Nissan Juke either.

But the Smart Car fortwo advert raises all sorts of questions in my mind. For a start, when they construct these catastrophic killing-machines, how do the factories cope? At some point during construction, the fortwo's killer instinct must kick in. Why don't the factories get smashed to bits? How many Smart Car staff die every month when the factory gets ripped to shreds and then needs putting back together? Does the line manager give a slightly cute, slightly guilty blue-eyed glance at the bodies, and coyly lock the car, magically replacing the factory walls...but not his staff?

Worse, if several people buy these destruct-o-cars, what happens if two of them meet? I don't just mean in a crash, I mean passing in the same city? Not even the same street; let's face it, the fortwo in the advert does untold damage in streets it's not even in (unlike the relatively sober Nissan Juke). If a fortwo meets another fortwo coming the other way, what happens? Does the universe implode? Do we get a new Big Bang? Think how much money and time CERN could have saved if they just crashed two fortwos into each other, rather than building a Large Hadron Collider.

Actually, let's not let this happen. Everyone must avoid the Smart Car fortwo - this may be the secret message coming from their marketing campaign. Someone in Smart Car marketing knows how potentially destructive the fortwo is, and wants us to know so that we don't buy it. Someone high up at Smart Car is planning to destroy the universe. Don't let them.

This advert, on the other hand...yes, yes and yes again. Simple, effective - it makes me want to buy the product, and no one gets hurt.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQzc2hRAjcc

With thanks to Keira Walker.

The Taking of Prince Harry on Channel Four

2010-10-21T23:25:00.004+01:00

Who has been more irresponsible here – Channel 4 or Prince Harry? Channel 4 fakeumentary The Taking of Prince Harry has been controversial long before broadcast, with Channel 4 accused of placing Prince Harry in danger as well as jeopardising the way hostage situations are handled by the British government and secret services. But, as the narrative of this makes implicit, the Prince himself places British servicemen and women in (increased) danger by his presence in Afghanistan. His grandmother may appreciate him serving his country, but how much should Prince Harry be allowed to risk?

The Taking of Prince Harry poses the hypothetical – though not entirely implausible – question: what would happen if Prince Harry were to be captured while on active service in Afghanistan? It then unfolds the sensitive and potentially disastrous situation of a British royal held by Afghan terrorists. The idea isn't implausible, as the documentary footage comprising most of the beginning of The Taking of Prince Harry explains. The son of the Prince of Wales and third in line to the British throne has been on active service in Afghanistan before now, amid a media blackout. What seems less plausible is the very noble way this smallscreen Prince Harry reacts, forever asking about his fellow pilot and telling Scotland Yard not to treat him differently.

It's television that falls between the two stools of gripping drama and fascinating documentary. But the drama is never allowed to run at full pace and the documentary pales away next to the possibility of a Prince (even if he is only a spare and not the heir) as a hostage. The stories of foreign film-makers and journalists are drafted in alongside scenes of Prince Harry at Taliban gunpoint. But the drama eventually manages to get the upper hand, with the talking heads sounding like experts talking about the actual event in hindsight – defending the actions of those involved (in the West, obviously, not the Taliban).

What makes The Taking of Prince Harry controversial is also partly its strength. It's a drama-cum-documentary produced with advice from members of MI6, the CIA and people like that. These are people who know what they're talking about in terms of the authorities and how they react. Does that mean that the Taliban could be watching The Taking of Prince Harry to pick up tips? Or maybe someone from Al-Quaeda might be watching in Europe, hoping to lean how the West handles hostage situations? Or do they already know how it works? Fifteen hostage-takings a day in Afghanistan makes you wonder...

Just try to overlook the laughable Photoshopping done to make it look like the Prince Harry actor (Sebastian Reid) was at a football match with the real Prince's girlfriend. Can you even get internet in the Taliban hideouts near the Pakistan border?

Image courtesy of Channel 4.

Single Father [Episode 2] on BBC One

2010-10-17T22:44:00.006+01:00

Now – two weeks in – Single Father is getting a bit seedy and distasteful. David Tennant is still valiantly plugging away at being a single father for the BBC, but the family seems to be splintering around him and suddenly the whole thing has become a digging-up of dead Rita's past life.

Thank goodness the grief-fest of the first episode is over, and we can get on with examining the situation writer Mick Ford was originally interested in: a single father raising several children. Dave is doing a better job than last week, with the help of various other family members (including Tanya's mother, his ex-wife). He does less well at fighting off Rita's sister, Anna (Neve McIntosh) who seems both childless and determined to take her sister's children for herself. Her brother-in-law (Mark Heap) can only watch and apologise as she goes off on another rant about Dave not being up to fatherhood. In fairness to Heap, he's got the disgruntled look of a man not quite able to interrupt down perfectly, and at other times brightens up scenes wonderfully (see him and Tennant discuss a possible father of Rita's daughter...lovely).

Except we can't really get through the heavy-handed emotion into Ford's proposed situation. Single Father still insists on giving misleading flashbacks, that aren't really flashbacks at all because some details have changed – it happened last week when Rita died and Dave said different things depending on which occasion you were watching it. Again this week, the flashbacks don't quite match the events (that kiss, say) as seen first time around. As for the sentimental soundtrack occasionally layered over shots of David Tennant brooding...

But worse is the way that Single Father insists on doing Rita's dirty washing in public. Alright, we get that Dave wasn't her first lover (by a long way), but does it need rubbing in so much? The (remarkably easy) search for Lucy's real father also obscures the story and makes it seem more about a search for a natural father than about Tennant's Dave raising his brood. It's a search that diverts Dave (and us as an audience) away from problems like his son's smashed ankle (surely a cause for concern?), his youngest daughter's illness (Evie), and the way that his eldest (Tanya) has suddenly become far less reliable as a babysitter/employee. These are the issues that tie in with that original single father idea.

Also tying in with that idea is Dave's growing relationship with Rita's friend and Evie's schoolteacher, Sarah (Suranne Jones). That got a lot steamier recently, and I suspect Evie's lessons are going to get more interesting soon...”Miss, are you my new mommy?”

Single Father may still be available via BBC iPlayer here.

Picture courtesy of the BBC.

Single Father [Episode 1] on BBC One

2010-10-11T23:33:00.007+01:00

Single Father, Sunday night's much-publicised return to the UK small screen for David Tennant, certainly packs an emotional punch. But then what could we expect from a four-part series about a man whose wife is suddenly killed within the first four minutes?

It may be useful to introduce the family of the single father (Dave, played by David Tennant, who is a photographer) so that, without the distraction of trying to work out who they are, you can get on with appreciating the difficulties Dave has – and maybe cry along with him. Dave's married to Rita (Laura Fraser), with three children: Paul (11), Ewan (9) and Evie (5). Then there's Lucy, fifteen, Rita's daughter (not Dave's), and Tanya, eighteen, Dave's daughter (not Rita's). Got that? Then there's his sister-in-law Anna (Neve McIntosh), hurrying in to mark territory after her sister's death, followed by Rita's family (Mark Heap and Isla Blair). Right, now that's out of the way, we can get on with appreciating David Tennant's moving masterclass in grief.

That said, you'll have to overlook the juddering narrative as well. Single Father starts admirably in the midst of things (like I say, Fraser's Rita gets killed pretty sharpish) with a beautifully-pitched and attractively-shot first three and a half minutes. Then we go back a day, which is all well and good; Single Father manages to avoid making the whole thing seem like a situation that's too good to be true and will soon end – the accident's a shock to everyone. But then, for some reason, the BBC seems to think that, just fifteen minutes later, we'll have forgotten what happened and need to see it again (with ever-so-slightly different dialogue). The tense inevitability of the first time round has gone, replaced with a tedious certainty that Rita is not long for this happy life. Which rather spoils the fine work put in by Tennant and Fraser (with Suranne Jones and Warren Brown) up to that point.

As if that weren't enough, the next ten weeks are skipped out altogether. While I appreciate we don't need to see the immediate few hours in detail, I can't help thinking the interesting bits of the premise (a single father, remember?) occur in those first few days/weeks. If, as writer Mick Ford claims, the focus is on a man dealing with the kids once their mother is dead, then surely this is when it's at the most raw? Surely this is the time for Dave's struggles with getting the right lunchboxes and getting swimming trunks washed in time? Two and a half months later – call me a sadist if you like – just isn't as interesting.

But you can't take away from Tennant the fact that he knows where to hit his audience emotionally. It's worth watching out as well for Mark Heap's quietly assured turn as the brother-in-law.

Single Father may still be available to watch via BBC iPlayer here.
Picture courtesy of the BBC.

The Song of Lunch on BBC Two

2010-10-09T14:00:00.008+01:00

When Christopher Reid, writer of The Song of Lunch recently dramatised by the BBC, was teaching at my University he always came across as an advocate of the idea that poetry had to be read aloud to be fully appreciated. The BBC's staging of his long poem The Song of Lunch does great service in defence of this idea (but don't be put off reading it aloud yourself – like radio, the pictures may be better and/or more personal that way). Interestingly, it was Reid's successor at the University of Hull, Martin Goodman, who suggested The Song of Lunch be dramatised in the first place.

While the thought of putting a long poem about a lunch onto the small screen may not sound thrilling, this reading by Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson (talk about casting big guns) brings the work to life in a way you just wouldn't get if you read The Song of Lunch to yourself in your head. It comes as no surprise that Reid took James Joyce's Ulysses as an inspiration for The Song of Lunch, as that's another long piece of writing that gains immensely from being read aloud. The original poem The Song of Lunch has been praised for its cinematic quality, a quality which is plain even without watching Rickman acting out the words being intoned by his own voiceover.

What we have in The Song of Lunch is a slightly mournful reminiscing about past love, the fading of youthful promise and the remorseless march of time. Alan Rickman is beautifully cast as a failed writer stuck in a job editing other people's (in his opinion, worthless) prose. The lunch is question is with his old flame, Emma Thompson, now happily married (to a successful author, the agony!) with children yet still curiously affectionate toward a man she chastises for being overly fond of her. They're having lunch to catch up after fifteen (or so) years, and this is where the combination of small screen dramatisation and poetry really comes into its own. Aching moments are slowed down to allow for the poetic interior monologue of Rickman's thoughts and narration to pour out and colour the scene, filling in the blanks pulsing with heart-saddened meaning.

But The Song of Lunch is about more than just the lunch, and more than Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson. Okay, so it's a bit of an obvious metaphor that Reid goes for, but the restaurant itself encapsulates the overriding theme at work here. Remembered by Rickman's character as a niche and proudly Italian restaurant fifteen years ago, Zanzotti's is under new management...new waiters, new tablecloths, new menu (content and printing material), less satisfying wine (but, boy, does Rickman get through the stuff) and less impressive food. He's as disappointed by that as he is with his life since he last saw Thompson's character. Yet she is pleasantly surprised at the 'improvement', as she calls it. For her, none of Rickman's (gloriously expressed) contempt of white tablecloths – another case of Reid taking a leaf from Joyce and examining the minutiae of the mundane – and far less of the wine used as a coping mechanism. Thompson is assured and comfortable (both actress and character), humouring her old lover but reminding him of the boundaries; unlike him, she has moved on, thanks in part to that remorseless march of time thing.

Most impressive about the BBC's The Song of Lunch is the way in which dedicated acting brings to dramatic life a poem already vividly cinematic in quality. Although the final message does seem to be that, when meeting an old flame, drinking too much wine is unwise...you might end up sleeping it off on the roof.

The Song of Lunch may still be available via BBC iPlayer here.

Photos courtesy of the BBC and Digimist (weekends mostly).

The Catholic Church is missing a trick

2010-09-19T22:29:00.006+01:00

Before and during his state visit to Britain Pope Benedict XVI – as you probably noticed – was under a lot of criticism. While the media focused on the historic ties being reconnected between the Vatican and Lambeth Palace, non-media voices tended to focus on the negative side of the current Pope, his Church and religion as a whole. But most of the recent criticism concern the sex abuse scandal which implicates his Holiness in official cover-ups. While that is undeniably A Bad Thing, it's only the most recent issue to cause problems for the Papacy.

What really irked me during Pope Benedict's speech at Westminster was his assertion that democracy and reason were under threat because secular societies no longer underpinned those values with the moral code of religion (ie. Catholicism). This coming from the man considered infallible by himself and his followers (no room for reasoning that one out, nor even any need to think about it), who not long ago banned any discussion in his worldwide Church on the subject of female ordination. So, no chance to think or argue about that either. The reason women can't be Catholic priests is tied into that moral code of religion that Pope Benedict insists should underpin reason and democracy. I for one can't see the logical reasoning behind (not even a discussion on) prohibiting female ordination.

Thing is, I've seen enough women leaders (both in churches and the secular world) to know that they can do just as good a job as men. In the pastoral role required of priests, they're often better than men – it's the maternal instinct. In fact, lads of the Catholic clergy, women are – whisper it – actually good at stuff sometimes. I know, I know, hard to believe. A quick look back through English history (not worldwide, nor Catholic, admittedly) shows that the periods commonly regarded as golden ages were presided over by women: Queens Elizabeth I and Victoria come to mind...it's probably too early to pass comment on the current Queen Elizabeth and the jury's still out on Thatcher, I know.

The Catholic Church is really missing a trick in not allowing women into the priesthood. I say this partly as a result of watching Peter Tatchell's The Trouble with the Pope on Channel 4, in which the one person Tatchell found to defend the Church and its policies was a woman. Fiona O'Reilly is an eloquent and non-judgemental defender of the Church (despite Tatchell's repeated efforts to trip her into calling him an evil person because he's gay), and her defence would have carried more weight had the Church taken her seriously (she clearly takes the Church and her faith seriously) and given her a dog collar. From what Tatchell says on Channel 4's website, O'Reilly sounds like she was put up by the Church as a low-level minion willing to parrot the Church's teachings without dragging the (male) hierarchy into a documentary they had no desire to be involved with. Most disappointing was that Tatchell didn't ask her about female ordination, because he was too wrapped up in the Church's apparent homophobia (though there were plenty of other disappointments in Tatchell's documentary).

As some of the strongest advocates for faith, healing and understanding, women deserve a place in the Vatican's priesthood – and should certainly not be denied ordination merely on the basis of gender. But now I'm just tripping out old feminist arguments. My point is that the Church is backward-looking and conservative on so many issues as to be radically out of step with the secular world. Its attitude to women is one major part of this; how can the Church hope to maintain its followers, or even expand, when it subjects half of the world's population to an inferior status? I don't ask the Church to change its opinion on homosexuality (not just yet) or contraception (not just yet), but the attitude to women – God's children as much as men, and surely able to hear God's word as much as men (the Virgin Mary comes to mind) – has to be re-examined.

Photo of the Vatican by Diliff.

Is it time for a new Pope?

2010-09-19T21:59:00.011+01:00

Not all that long ago, the Pope was a widely-respected and much-loved leader of the world's billion or so Catholics as well as the Vatican City's head of state. His word carried a certain moral and ethical authority even for non-Catholics. What went so badly wrong?

Well, all of that was Pope John Paul II, the Polish Pope known for his warm public receptions and charismatic appearances. His successor, Pope Benedict XVI, is a German with a far colder public image, positively lacking in charm or charisma. Worse, he brings the reputation of 'God's Rottweiler' to the role, from his time as Cardinal Ratzinger and has gradually undermined that moral and ethical authority carried by the title Bishop of Rome.

Without wanting to understate the conservatism of John Paul II's papacy, Pope Benedict's conservative direction is one of the principle damaging factors in the Catholic Church's recent history. Yes, the sex abuse scandal is serious and damaging, but it is one in a series of incidents that show this conservative trend to be distancing the Church from the people. The scandal's personal implications for the man at the top – Ratzinger being the Cardinal blamed for earlier alleged cover-ups – tarnish the Papacy itself and the entire Church by implication. Worse, the conservative thinking of the current Papacy – in danger of taking the Bible literally – is out of touch with the secular society Pope Benedict is concerned to re-establish religion within; the two are incompatible.

That incompatibility is down to the Church's inability to move with the times. Secular society has advanced into the modern age, but the conservatism of Pope Benedict holds the Church back, restraining it in the race of human progress. This is the Church that refuses to even discuss the possibility of ordaining women because there are no female preachers in the Bible. It's funny, there's no electricity in the Bible but I don't hear of many priests refusing to have their churches re-wired.

But the Bible was written (if you take a non-Christian or cynical view) by men in a patriarchal society roughly two thousand years ago. If you take a Christian, theistic view, it was written by God, via men in a patriarchal society roughly two thousand years ago to be read by that same patriarchal society. Of course there are no women preachers!

The worldwide church (not just the Catholic one) does a great deal of good in the world, as do other organisations in the name of their faith. So let's not go lambasting religion and arguing that anyone willing to listen to the Pope is somehow evil or misinformed. Religion has the power to help as well as harm – it's much more about how people interpret it – and I'm not for one minute arguing that religion is necessarily a bad thing. I just question whether Joseph Ratzinger is the best man to be leading the Catholic Church right now. Someone so embroiled in the biggest scandal the Church has faced in living memory, and generating such opposition in other areas is perhaps not the best spokesperson for the world's billion or so Catholics.

The Catholic Church needs to accept that the march of history has advanced, and they have to adapt or get left behind in their medieval theology. The Church is still stuck in the past, and that, your Holiness, is why secular society has marginalised religion.

Fringe Review 2010

2010-08-25T14:44:00.006+01:00

The Festival of Swing @ The Edinburgh International Jazz & Blues Festival

2010-08-25T14:41:00.005+01:00

The ThreeWeeks review of the Edinburgh International Jazz & Blues Festival's Festival Of Swing:

On brass were Bob Wilber, Joe Temperley, Scott Hamilton, Alan Barnes, Duke Heitger and Howard Alden, and the evening's compère introduced the all-star line-up as the most 'unruly' bunch he's ever come across, but despite the occasional flashes of 'fooling around' it's difficult to see these mostly elderly gentleman causing much trouble. They and their audience grew old with jazz, and the reception the musicians received was as full-blooded as any young band might enjoy as the nine-piece celebrated the era of swinging Jazz centered on Duke Ellington; it was fitting that Joe Temperley, a veteran who actually played alongside Ellington, was there. Highlights included 'Creole Love Song', Heitger's trumpet solos and Alden spicing things up with some Brazilian swing. A gently foot-tapping evening.

Queens Hall, 3 Aug, 8.00pm, £17.50 - £22.50

tw rating: 3/5

The original review is here.

The Man Who Was Hamlet @ The Edinburgh Fringe

2010-08-25T14:34:00.003+01:00

The ThreeWeeks review of The Man Who Was Hamlet:

Several people have been proposed as the 'real' author of Shakespeare's works (a lowly glover's son couldn't have written such works of genius, surely?) So who was William Shakespeare? George Dillon's masterful one-man show puts forth a strong case that 'Shakespeare' was actually Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. Resurrected for an hour's stage time, Oxford's Elizabethan ghost recounts his life story in a biography similar to Shakespeare's own, and Dillon's voice is deliciously versatile, though sometimes his characters need more differentiation. My advice is, make a bingo card with Shakespeare's plays on it, and tick them off as you spot references to them; should you get a full house, after the play has finished, you can run out into the street and shout "I'm Shakespeare!"

Hill Street Theatre, 5 - 30 Aug (not 10, 17, 24), 7.10pm , £7.00 - £9.00, fpp 269

tw rating: 4/5

The original review is here.

Potato Country @ The Edinburgh Fringe

2010-08-25T14:30:00.005+01:00

The ThreeWeeks review of Potato Country:

What do you think about China? What makes you happy? What do you think of women's rights? These are three questions that you will be asked by the dancers of 'Potato Country', so bear them in mind. They probably define you as a person, or at least Gunilla Heilborn would have you think so, as the cast eye you directly, dancing, marching and firing off questions. Their disjointed dance piece aims to explore what makes happiness, perhaps by looking at the Swedish love of melancholy (as they phrase it). They do this by presenting a bunch of hopeless-looking people whose awkwardness at dancing is probably intentional. But ultimately, there's too much of that and not enough of the happiness.

Dance Base - National Centre for Dance, 13 - 20 Aug, times vary, £5.00, fpp 152

tw rating: 2/5

The original review is here.

The Timothy Bile Show @The Edinburgh Fringe

2010-08-25T14:21:00.003+01:00

The ThreeWeeks review of The Timothy Bile Show:

This attempted spoof of Jeremy Kyle et al starts off well, with an accurate portrayal of the sort of stuff that fills such programs; abusive boyfriends, girlfriends sleeping around, unexpected pregnancy and girls getting outrageously drunk. The best actor is the lead, but no one else shines. Too much emphasis is placed on the anger of the guests (telling each other to shut up at frequent intervals) and not enough on the public's need to watch such interactions, nor on the reasons for the host's involvement, It's a shame, because these are more interesting and are also the things the play had intended to explore. It's no satire of popular culture, however much shouting there is.

theSpaces on the Mile@the Radisson, 6 - 21 Aug (not 8, 15), 7.05pm, £6.00 - £7.00, fpp 297

tw rating: 1/5

The original review is here.

The Merry Wives of Henry VIII @ The Edinburgh Fringe

2010-08-25T14:10:00.004+01:00

The ThreeWeeks review of The Merry Wives of Henry VIII:

There's always a danger that we'll forget the real people in history and will reduce them to easily remembered basics. Richard III was a hunchback, Henry VIII was a fickle playboy. That's exactly what happens in this (deliberately?) overblown destruction of real events. The caricatures are cartoonish and basic, the Tudor court's political scheming (familiar now thanks to Philippa Gregory, Hilary Mantel and HBO's "The Tudors") is non-existent; audiences are familiar enough with the period to deserve better than this. However, the production is a pleasing enough jaunt, which makes villains out of pawns, especially for audiences less familiar with the period. However, there's some painfully OTT acting and atrocious lighting choices. Diverting, but ultimately frustrating.

Augustine's, 11 - 26 Aug (not 18, 23), 6.45pm, £7.00 - £9.00, fpp 271

tw rating: 2/5

The original review is here.

Pip Utton is Charles Dickens @ the Edinburgh Fringe

2010-08-25T13:57:00.007+01:00

The ThreeWeeks review of Pip Utton Is Charles Dickens:

Few actors seem as fresh and unscripted as Pip Utton, who has a talent for sounding like he's chatting to a mate: you could almost think he's out of character, were it not for the Dickensian beard. Charles Dickens is the focus of this show, in which he candidly recounts his own death and the previous few months. Utton uses some of the famous readings from Dickens' tours of Britain, and focuses on the author as social reformer, highlighting the social conscience underlining much of his work, and it makes for an absorbing 70 minutes. Utton is an expert at creating an intimate connection with his audience, and as he closes, one gets the sense of being in the hands of a master at work.

New Town Theatre, 5 - 29 Aug (not 17), 6.45pm , £8.00 - £10.00, fpp 279

tw rating: 4/5

The original review is here.

The Jewish Wife @ the BAC and some news...

2010-07-29T13:52:00.006+01:00

Brecht's little play – more of an extended scene, really – doesn't get many outings. It's one in a series of snapshots called Fear & Misery in the Third Reich. Each shows Nazi policies affecting ordinary Germans in different ways – none of them positive. Here, the Jewish wife of the title is packing before leaving her German (Aryan) husband so that he doesn't lose his job for being married to a Jew. This is an intimate production at the Battersea Arts Centre, hinting at – then laying bare – the frustration of a woman whose world has suddenly turned against her. Matthew Evans – winner of the JMK Director's Award – directs a production in tune with its time and the burning issues of the text.

Meanwhile...

I've recently started working for Hoipolloi Theatre Company, a lovely bunch of people who are based in Cambridge and are about to enjoy a residency at (probably my favourite performance venue ever) the Barbican, in September. They have a blog and everything. Their shows have won a clutch of awards and I highly recommend the one that I've seen, so get to the Barbican for those if you can.

One of those awards was a ThreeWeeks Editors' Award at the 2009 Edinburgh Fringe (it had nothing to do with me, though my five-star review of The Bone House may well have helped Canada's Village Theatre to their Editors' Award), and I'll be covering the Fringe for ThreeWeeks again this year.

They're a great outlet for Fringe coverage, reviewing more than anyone else, and it's also worth keeping an eye on FringeReview who tend to review as industry professionals delving more deeply.

The Fringe is less than a week away, and is naturally quite exciting. Let me know if there are any shows/venues you can recommend.

Identity Episode Three on ITV1

2010-07-22T14:09:00.004+01:00

Aiden Gillen continues to be both the most watch-able part of this series, and the person with the worst dialogue. So much of what he says sounds wooden, but his on-screen charisma is enough to mean it doesn't matter too much.

This week a false identity on the witness protection scheme is breached – and some poor lad has bricks thrown through his bedroom window. It's not his fault; his dad abducted and murdered a little girl a few years back. Someone's after payback, and there's a £3m reward floating around while Gillen chases a man on a motorbike and trying to find the little boy. Meanwhile, Gillen's also checking into a prison as Brendan Shea (to see his Turkish mafia boss) and – the same day? – as DI John Bloom (to see the child-abductor)...this seems bad practice from a copper who's been undercover for fifteen years.

On the plus side, this third episode finally burrows under the skin of the identity theft team and gives them some depth. Tessa (Holly Aird) and Martha (Keeley Hawes) snarl at each other in a pre-cat fight stand-off, and finally there's some tension. It's good to see, but should have been there much earlier. Before that, the (frankly awful interview team) pairing of Wareing (Shaun Parkes) and Rodriguez (Elyes Gabel) swap roles after their last judgemental interview with a possible suspect. This time it's Rodriguez' turn to dish out the accusatory comments, but once again their technique is terrible. They're nearly as bad the stupendously insensitive police interview teams in the BBC's recent The Silence.

On the down side, Bloom still needs to get the hang of office wear and stop turning up to work in his jogging outfits.

Best bit:
Right at the end when a suspicious prison guard gets pictures of Brendan Shea (Aiden Gillen) and John Bloom (Aiden Gillen) on the same computer screen. Ooh, don't they look similar? Like they could be the same man...except that one of them's snarling a bit more.

The episode may still be available to view on itv Player here.

Identity Episode Two in ITV1

2010-07-15T20:16:00.005+01:00

Well, at least we know who the woman in the green dress is now. And we know that DSI Martha Lawson (Keeley Hawes) had a point when, last week, she asked DI John Bloom (Aiden Gillen) if he was speaking to his girlfriend on the phone.

Though to be honest, it's not as though Bloom's life really works in terms of a girlfriend, as such. Sure, he's sleeping with the sister of a Turkish Mafia boss (who think he's called Brendan) – but she presumably doesn't know where he dashes off to in the morning...New Scotland Yard. You've got to wonder how undercover this man still is.

This week, Bloom's 9-5 life (which he decides to grace with his presence after disappearing for three days) involves a case of a young woman wanting to be a bit too much like her friend. Fatally so. British Olivia (Laura Aikman) has it all, living in Sydney and enjoying beach parties out of the reach of her parents(and step-mother) in Chelsea. She's also – according to Bloom – stunningly beautiful. No wonder then that her friend, Jane (Joanne Frogatt) wants to be her. One bottle of hair dye and a few seconds with a penknife later, and Jane has a new passport...a new identity.

But again – and this was a problem last time – Identity spends too long on the crime of the week (murder, identity theft) and not long enough on the team investigating it. Again, we see Lawson is under pressure from above regarding her tempestuous recruit, Bloom, but no real sense that anyone (bar Bloom) has a life outside the office. Ignoring (and it might be best ignored) that bizarre moment when DC Jose Rodriguez (Elyes Gabel) and (curiously unranked) Tessa Stein (Holly Aird) discuss previous lovers – Rodriguez really is a rather strange character. It seems any series-long arc is limited to the beginning and end of episodes, which doesn't give us much idea about the people we're watching each week.

Perhaps the seeds to watch for are DS Anthony Wareing's increasing dislike of Bloom, and the shark-faced Atif (Aleksandar Mikic) of the Mafia as he works his way toward the mole responsible for selling out his boss.

Best moment:
Either Anthony (Shaun Parkes, inexplicably billed lower than Gabel) hinting mysteriously that Bloom might be around for much longer, then telling Lawson not to worry about it, or when he asks to photograph the mysteriously cut-free hands of a stab victim...clearly, someone's got an issue with Bloom's unconventional methods.

The episode may still be available to view on itv Player here.

Dive: Lindey's Story on BBC Two

2010-07-09T12:02:00.008+01:00

With British teen pregnancy on the rise, there's an increasing scrutiny on exactly what it is we're telling kids about all that stuff. Sex education lessons seem to be starting younger and younger, but it also seems that the mums are getting younger and younger. Dominic Savage's two-part drama, Dive, indicates that the problem doesn't lie so much with the kids' education as with their attitude.

Co-written by Savage and Simon Stephens (Punk Rock, Herons, Pornography), Dive opens up a group of teenagers who know how sex works – they've had the lessons, seen (and laughed at) the videos, got the T-shirt and avoided parents' questions. There's a brilliantly subtle moment to watch out for, when the biology class pair off to practice putting condoms on ominously-entitled 'demonstrators'. Main character Lindsey (Aisling Loftus) contemplates hers for a moment – over her shoulder, and just out of focus, her friend (Chanel Cresswell) slips one on in seconds and proudly announces “Perfect”. Someone's done this before...

So, they know what they're doing. It's their casual, carefree attitude that's the problem. Watch as Robert (Jack O'Connell) dashes off into the sea, telling his (girl)friend to leave her clothes on the beach – pregnant and likely to catch her death of cold. And not long before that, he'd been diving into a pool with just boxers on...what an irresponsible young man, no wonder he got her pregnant. Call me old-fashioned, but teenagers having a quickie up against a tree with someone they've just met doesn't seem to indicate that sex education is encouraging responsible or safe sex.

We're probably going to see an increasing amount of drama with some focus on the 2012 Olympics in the next two years. This is one that's been put together really well, with some beautiful shots and a careful balance between Lindsey's dreams of representing Britain at the Olympics (as a diver...obviously) and her life at home – watch out for Gina McKee, sensitive as ever, and Joseph Mawle as the resented-yet-caring step-father, to say nothing of Ewen Bremner's sweet turn as Lindsey's dad. There's plenty of 'mood' all round, with lots of lingering shots of diving bodies, sparkling lights and brooding teens, all with gently sentimental music layered over it.

We'll have to wait for Robert's side of it in the next episode, but somehow I don't think a baby is quite the Olympic legacy either of these two wants.

This episode might still be available to view here.

Identity Episode One on ITV1

2010-07-06T12:30:00.008+01:00

Identity fraud's a bit of a hot topic these days, as more and more of our lives goes into electronic (traceable) transactions and we're increasingly encouraged to shred documents with personal details on them, just in case. As buying and selling becomes more impersonal, thanks to the rise of the internet and the credit card, so it becomes easier to interfere with the process and remove a person's humanity.

So ITV's drama about a new police unit tracking down identity thieves feels quite pertinent. Modern and highly relevant, in fact. DSI Martha Lawson (Keeley Hawes, taking another high-powered policewoman role focusing on the psychology of criminals, cf. Ashes to Ashes) leads a team that, to be honest, is in danger of merely following a paper trail. In this first episode, they're dealing with a former soldier who claims to have had his identity stolen by a mysterious man known only as Smith. But to be honest, that's not the interesting bit – the episode really gets going about halfway through when the team start to uncover previous victims and the chase hots up. Until then, they're basically following an electronic paper trail, and there's only so much dramatic interest that can be mustered by the coincidence of two people using a Nectar card in the same shop ten minutes apart.

Aiden Gillen (Queer as Folk, The Wire) is on Lawson's team, as John Bloom (yes, he's Irish and called Bloom, get over it Joyce-fans), an ex-undercover copper – see what they did there? He knows all about pretending to be someone else. Hopefully, that explains why he's able to make so many sharp remarks that cut straight through any psychological barriers people try to build up. And why he's so rude... The beginning of this episode sets up a nice tension between him and his new boss (ie. as an undercover copper, he's not used to having a boss), but their relationship takes a bit of a back burner. It's a shame, because this first episode – our first chance to meet the team – doesn't quite make them seem human for a long time. Bloom is also by far the most interesting of the team, and you'll see why in the last four minutes of this first episode. Apart from the fact that he's the only one with a history (undercover with drug smugglers) and something resembling a personality, there's definitely something shifty going on. Whose birthday is he turning up to, and who is that woman in the green dress?

The rest of them, ironically, don't seem to have much in the way of individual identities. Watch out for Shaun Parkes (Small Island, Moses Jones) and Elyes Gabel (Casualty, Apparitions), as the DS and DC respectively, when the younger rebels against this impersonal attitude – it's the first time (hopefully the first of more) that the show opens up the debate around identity theft, justice and the way the state handles such things. More, ITV, more.

Best moment:
Ex-squaddie Curtis: Are you calling me a coward?
Ex-undercover copper Bloom: I'm calling you a big...fat...girl's blouse.

The episode may still be available to view on itv Player here.

Gazza's Tears: The Night that Changed Football on ITV1

2010-07-05T22:39:00.009+01:00

According to this wobbly tear-jerker of a documentary, the moment when Paul Gascoigne burst into tears in 1990's World Cup changed the nature of English football forever. No, really – forever.

Just look at that title; football changed. Overnight. Completely. Forever. Which you'd think this documentary would then go on to prove. You could be forgiven for expecting an hour's program that tells its viewers about a) the state of English football before that infamous match (England vs. West Germany, World Cup semi-final, 1990, if you're interested), b) the state of English football after that match (when Gazza's tears had changed it) and c) exactly how the aforementioned tears changed anything.

That isn't what happens. Instead, viewers are presented with a lengthy description of England's campaign in 1990's World Cup – one that doesn't stint on emotional intensity, patriotic optimism, talking heads and assumptions that its audience knows how the campaign ended. There's a certain air of nostalgia to all this; those that remember Italia '90, before English football became a multi-million pound business, get a glimpse of the good old days. Days when England's team were more interested in drinking than playing, when a defeat resulted in the team and manager being savaged by the press, and the fans were almost synonymous with hooligans...actually, not that much different from today. In fact, the rash optimism (phrases like 'we can go all the way') of fans has been echoed – despite England's poor performances against the USA, Algeria and Slovenia – in the 2010 World Cup. So, twenty years later the sense of disappointment felt when the team crashes out (despite this being fairly predictable from the start) is still present. What exactly did Gazza change when he cried in the semi-final against West Germany?

It's a question this documentary resolutely fails to answer. In fact, it poses the question in its title, then promptly ignores it. Its interest lies in reminding viewers about how close England came back in 1990. The film-makers aren't afraid to over-egg the pudding (but then that's often the problem with England's national side); with West Germany victorious (4-3 on penalties), England fans felt 'grief', apparently...they were disappointed, yes, fair enough, but to compare it to a death in the family seems a bit strong. Worse is when one former player laments how close England came to winning the Cup...then corrects himself when he remembers that they were only playing for a place in the final. It's not the same thing as winning the tournament; there's another 90 minutes (at least) after that.

Once viewers have been walked down the familiar path to defeat (and the tour bus that greeted the defeated team in England), this documentary almost goes back to its opening section – which was a cursory nod to the modern nature of English football, all glamour, big spending and high ticket prices. But no. Instead, some more emotional overkill, wheeling out Sir Bobby to watch a match played as a tribute to him and his long career just before he lost his battle with cancer. Touching as it all is, and undoubtedly genuine as more tears from Gazza are, it tells viewers nothing about the new nature of English football, or how that may have changed since 1990. The film merely asserts that such a change has taken place. Repeating a fact does not make it more true.

Is it so much to ask that ITV documentaries have some facts, or even some investigation, to back up their statements? Or that those documentaries have titles that reflect their content? Sure, the title grabs attention, makes it sound like the film examines a turning-point in sporting history...but that's not true. It's an examination (and an emotional, subjective one at that) of Bobby Robson's 1990 World Cup and later tribute. So why not call it that?

The show may still be available to view on ITVPlayer here.

'Star Trek' is Inept Science-Fiction. Discuss

2010-04-07T21:04:00.008+01:00

Watching 'Fair Haven' has made me realise how inept a piece of science-fiction Star Trek is. Now, I've watched Star Trek for years, and enjoyed it when I was younger – but the opportunities it passes over have only recently struck me.

'Fair Haven' is an episode of the fourth set of Trek shows, Star Trek: Voyager, in which the ship's captain falls for a man created on the holodeck (he's a hologram, a being made of light energy, forcefields and computer subroutines). What has always been the strength of Voyager against other series was the way it had taken that 'Boldly Go...' idea, the outward exploration idea, and turned it on its head; the Voyager crew are stranded on the other side of the galaxy and are returning to Earth, rather than heading away (or being rooted somewhere familiar) like previous series. In a similar revolutionary move, the captain is a woman and her second-in-command is a former guerilla terrorist whose crew have been absorbed into Captain Janeway's regulars.

Let's worry about the holodeck first. It's basically a big fantasy arena, a room that can create virtual reality simulations of pretty much anything imaginable. The show's writers often use it as a means of having bits of story outside of the ship, without requiring that Voyager is near a convenient planet, or so that the crew can indulge in recreation without consequences – it's okay to treat holodeck creations as unpaid labour or disposable villains (in a shoot-'em-up) because they're not real. In this way, the holodeck can be used to examine exactly what makes humans human, by contrasting us with what is essentially not human and forcing us (the audience) to define the boundaries between human and holodeck creation. It's the same reason that aliens exist in sci-fi; they are non-humans we can use as examples to self-define against.

All well and good. Trek also tends to play with the convention of a fantasy realm by having something go wrong. For example, in a Next Generation episode, the Moriarty character from a Sherlock Holmes holodeck program gains sentience – becoming more than a hologram – and tries to take over the ship. More recently, the Doctor onboard Voyager is a hologram – he is all the medical textbooks ever written, but with a personality (of sorts) and a bedside manner (of sorts). He's an emergency replacement for the 'real' doctor, who died when the ship got stranded all those trillions of miles away. There have also been episodes – a specific Voyager one comes to mind – in which crew members have fallen in love with holograms (and vice versa).

So, when Janeway fell for the barman in the holographic Irish town of Fair Haven, I remembered with some unease that earlier episode. On that occasion, an Ensign fell in love with a young holographic lady and the potential relationship was treated with concern by his friends. His love interest was fictitious! Appalling! It turned out they were justified in their fears; the holodeck had been hacked by an alien who wanted to keep the ship near to her for company.

So when a real man falls for a holo-woman, it's bad because she's an ugly, lonely alien who needs help from the enlightened (male) crew members to avoid her holding up the ship's journey (forever) or destroying it. But when Janeway falls for a holo-man, everyone thinks it's a bit of a laugh and she can carry on. Is that because she's the captain, or because her woman's love affairs are trivial and don't matter?

Anyway, that's not the main problem with 'Fair Haven'. The problem is the conversation Janeway has with the Doctor (he's a hologram too, remember) after she deserts her new lover in the holodeck. It's the scene [3:50 on the YouTube clip] that should be the crux of the episode (which it is) while developing themes of romance, interpersonal relationships, a leader's responsibilities and what it means to be human and to be in love (which it doesn't, really). The Doctor has taken his role as the Irish priest, and is talking to Janeway as a friend, but it takes far too long for either of them to point out the irony that he too is a hologram.

Thing is, this conversation shouldn't take up a scene; it should be the episode. A lot of time is taken up establishing that Janeway likes the barman, changes his specifications (see where the sci-fi comes in?) and that he goes crazy when she leaves him. Too long is taken on the reason why the crew is retreating to the holodeck (there's a space storm of some kind, so the ship can't move for a few days) for distraction. Then, too long is taken on getting free from that storm. The human dilemma – the issue of a strong woman in a leadership role falling for a man she can't have – is almost entirely missed.

This is where Trek really falls down. It doesn't get under the surface of the problems its raises, and gets bogged down in technobabble. We as audience really don't need all this guff about the storm or inverting the warp core to avoid neutrino radiation (or something). Of much more interest is the human story. Sci-fi can be many things, but what it should always try and do – or at least, good sci-fi tries to do – is take recognisable situations and examine them in different contexts – then we can re-examine what we thought was certain, and/or see it from a new perspective. Sci-fi maintains the human interest amid the science and technology, and keeps that interest paramount. 'Fair Haven' makes too much of the argument that the barman is all protons and forcefields, and not enough of the fact that the captain has fallen in love. Yes, the Doctor makes a stab at this, but the irony – which should have been capitalised on earlier – is that he too is holographic; he's not 'real' either, and it takes an unreal man to give the captain this lesson of the heart (how lonely is command – another issue avoided by this episode).

This episode should be making its audience reassess what it is to be human, to be in love, and what is and isn't acceptable behaviour for a commanding officer isolated from her home port. If you want intelligent sci-fi that keeps human issues central, and paramount over the technobabble, check out Babylon 5. I hear the reboot of Battlestar Galactica is good for political sci-fi too.

Whitehouse Institute at NSDF10 (from Noises Off)

2010-04-05T21:28:00.004+01:00

When a vicar stands up to give a sermon to a congregation, it doesn't usually get classed as drama. The drama lies outside of what the vicar says and outside of where it's said; out in the supernatural world.

When a tour rep stands up to greet their latest batch of tourists, it doesn't usually get classed as drama. The drama lies in the proposed holiday, the land waiting to be explored – the world outside of the tour rep's speech.

Both vicar and tour rep have learnt a set of words, ready to present to those listening to them. Their listeners hope to gain something from what they hear. The crowd has gathered to listen to them, and though the division between them is more informal than a theatre's normal fourth wall, there is still a noticeable degree of separation between them. It's not any different to a guided tour in an art gallery – like the one on offer at the Holbeck recently. As drama or theatre, the speeches given by curator Neil Bailey-Jones are barely different to those given by a vicar in church.

Such people are also less keen on witholding the secrets of their craft; in fact, conveying information is vital to their occupations. But the Manchester team behind Whitehouse Institute have been trying – with varying degrees of success – to impose a blanket of silence over their show. There's a big twist, that they'd like to keep from the Fest-going body – us lot, their audience. How they expect people not to talk about the show – at NSDF – is hard to grasp. By the way, the twist is the new artwork being replaced by a stark naked woman.

In some ways, it's a tired and worn-out idea that modern art as a movement is pointless and/or pretentious while its artists are too far up themselves to know anything of the outside world. Whitehouse Institute exposes this truism by parading it with glee. The curators of modern galleries also get gently satirised as people stuffed full of commonplace fact – this one leads a tour of the bleedingly obvious around the Uni campus – but that's another shallow idea, one that loses its humour value after being used more than twice. So at over an hour, that joke wore very thin.

Whitehouse Institute almost goes one better than these tired old art debates by giving protesters a voice – but absolutely no attempt at giving a clear, unified reason for the protest. It manages to expose that those oppose modern art as having no valid alternative to that which so aggravates them. There isn't exactly any original or interesting insight on these themes; merely a presentation of them that claims to be drama but fails to scale any such heights.

In fact, any audience member (and, yes, we punters were 'audience members', not 'gallery viewers' or any other such term) who wanted some drama out of their National Student Drama Festival's offering would have had more luck attending happenings outside of the event to which their paid-for ticket entitles them entry. By far the most interesting things happened outside of the gallery (protesters rattling the doors) and indeed outside of the event itself (the protests staged outside of the SJT). The Manchester team is to be commended on their marketing and publicity campaign (including articles – tying into the fiction of Tracey Hutcheson – in our own NOFF), which has become bigger than the performance itself. Or, then again, has the publicity become (part of?) the event?

On the down-side, such hype meant that the only way that Whitehouse Institute could have not been an anti-climax was if the protesters had burnt the gallery to the ground. Now that would have been a twist worth keeping hidden.

The Pillowman at NSDF10 (from Noises Off)

2010-04-05T21:20:00.003+01:00

You know, high art and culture are actually the most dangerous and subversive things in modern society. All of this art malarkey seems just as likely to inspire virtue, charity etc. in a person as it does hatred and violence.

A few months ago, a student at my University declared in print that World of Warcraft is notorious for turning players into social pariahs and slovenly wretches – but that's not the only negative effect has on its viewers. More frequently shoot-'em-up games that allow the player to inhabit a violent persona have been linked to an increase in violent crime (as has Hip-Hop, with its glorification of gang turf and guns, cf. In Loving Memory).

In The Pillowman, the idea is that the high artform of the short story is responsible for encouraging horrific crimes. That same student claimed that chess had resulted in more 20th-century deaths than any computer game – which goes to show that you shouldn't believe everything you read. Unfortunately, some people are more susceptible than others to the malign power of art and literature.

It's a malign power that disguises itself in a softer guise (ie. a man made of pillows); appearances are deeply deceptive in this totalitarian world. For a play so obsessed with story-telling (cf. Bad House), there is a surprisingly high number of untrustworthy narrators on display. It's not just the Police that are untrustworthy, but also the supposedly innocent and those that haven't done anything they think is wrong (let's be honest, not a one of them is really innocent).

Martin McDonagh's play might over-state art's prosecution case by making the victim of art's influence a mentally-handicapped person, but James Gamage's sensitive performance keeps this plausible. Undeniably, the dependence Gamage's character has on his brother invests an even heavier moral burden on Chris Cains' Katurian – the artist whose graphic and gruesome words instigate crime, and the brother who must protect and nurture his mentally-handicapped sibling. He is more responsible than most artists accused of inspiring crime, and his plight is so much more interesting for that.

McDonagh's richly dark comic play is a terrifying portrayal of a totalitarian state that refuses to afford rights to its citizens. Its citizens have a twisted set of morals – a world where it's okay for parents to torture their children for years without their other children noticing, and for that to be reflected in the short stories written by the survivors.

Tell Tale at NSDF10 (from Noises Off)

2010-04-05T21:11:00.003+01:00

Children play. They like to play. The inner child. The nine-year old expressed in a poetic limbo space before our eyes. In our minds.

Child's play is at the heart of Hull Uni's Tell Tale – the stage is filled with innocent naifs, who have just discovered the space they're in. At the same time as us. Or has the space discovered them? Either way, Sarah Davies' cast then give guided tours for some of the audience – those that brave the parachute game – around the space they themselves have only just discovered.
Each of these children have tales to tell – spot the title. Why: no one knows. Where: no one knows. But they're too adult, too knowledgeable, too worldy-wise, to be children.

They tell stories about animals. About butterflies and kangaroos, about hedgehogs and tortoises, about leopards and moths. They let dingoes loose in the daring dark, and their women wash in the wettest waters of the Wollgongilong River. Their butterflies perch on the fingers of kings. For no readily-apparent reason, they serve squash and biscuits. Don't ask why; your inner child doesn't. It's a children's party for all of the children in the theatre – bring your inner child if you want an invitation.

These children wander and wonder. The audience wonder. They have a chance to wander. Questions are asked: answers remain hidden somewhere off-stage – in some metaphysical, existential game of hide-and-seek. The children never dwell on a question; five more queue in the wings. Neither should you. Let your wonder wander.

It's about saying 'yes' to new questions and ideas. Giving free reign to that inner child.

Phaedra's Love at NSDF10 (from Noises Off)

2010-04-05T21:06:00.003+01:00

The state of British society is appalling. There are arrogant, ignorant chavs at the bottom and repulsive, depraved aristocrats at the top – and we'll all be better off without them.

This is a problem exposed in Sarah Kane's Phaedra's Love, where it is picked at like an angry scab. At the heart is the spoilt brat of a prince, Hippolytus. You may have seen messier living rooms in student houses (I have), but you've probably not met someone quite so unpleasantly repellent as this slob. Yet women – and men – still want him! What is there attractive about him? Sure, he's not physically unattractive, but it's hard to see anything likeable. Rupert Lazarus gives the arrogant sneer and charisma needed for such a wastrel with an assured charm – damn him. His Hippolytus is almost a sympathetic character, and it's that which makes the play hang together.

What of that play? Phaedra's Love is based on a Greek Tragedy which takes Hippolytus as its main character, but in Kane's hands it becomes a brutal attack firstly on medical science and then on religion. The shrinks are as flawed as their patients, incapable of giving any help beyond saying that Hippolytus needs to lose weight. Not helpful in the slightest. And as for religion! Kane's Hippolytus is a violently, self-righteously Atheist in a world that seems utterly devoid of any divinity. The Catholic Church – seen in Jamie Askill's Priest – is yet another institution that lets down those most in need of it. Kane shows both medical science and religion to be a disgrace and a let-down.

Racheal Shaw's giggly Phaedra burns on a pyre along with any shred of decency in the world, and the firestorm caused is only the beginning of the end. While Edmund Jones' Theseus tears himself apart in grief, the world goes to Hell and will never come back.

But that gang of chavs at the doors when the audience enters prove that the world is already in a dire state. These floatsam place themselves inside the audience before they pour their filthy presences onto the stage and form the mob at the climax. Their rage at so public a criminal is palpable and has been in some form for much of the play. While the mob is undeniably necessary, it might not need to be chavs – nor do they need to come amongst the audience. They personify the play's rage with unnerving power in the final moments, so much so that I was willing them to their unspeakable acts of violence. So well done to them, the horrible little scumbags.

Doesn't it just make you mad?

Our Country's Good at NSDF10 (from Noises Off)

2010-04-05T20:56:00.005+01:00

What's the best way to deal with a person who steals a loaf of bread to feed their family?

If you gave 'hanging' as an answer, you'd be right. Well, according to the legal system established within the British colony of New South Wales in Timberlake Wertenberger's Our Country's Good. It may seem a harsh penalty, but we're dealing with a colony of the British Empire peopled largely by convicts and their soldier guards, and the man enforcing the laws is a General.

He's torn between setting a harsh example in defence of the British laws made in a faraway and his sympathy for the human suffering he sees in the people he governs. In fact, it's deeper than that; many of the play's debates aren't simply about capital punishment. They're about a much bigger debate that relates not only the British colonists/convicts, but also to the native peoples whose voice has no expression in the text though they are physically present in this production's many interludes. The debate Wertenbaker returns to again and again is that between cultivating and civilising (thus bettering) mankind or accepting that mankind will fail, make mistakes and never be corrected. It's a debate still relevant today, when stories about Jon Venables crop up: should we be rehabilitating law-breakers or punishing them? Is it worth elevating such people (criminals, colonised peoples) knowing that their nature is not suited to the ideal of mainstream Europe, and their fall from it is almost inevitable?

Naturally, there's no easy answer to those questions. Nor is there one that applies to all (not even most) cases, and Wertenbaker never pretends such an answer exists. Her play is rather more certain about the means of elevating the criminals or colonised peoples: art. Specifically drama, unsurprising in a dramatist, and particularly relevant to those of us here at NSDF intending to learn about drama. So there are links between the cast of the play-within-a-play of OCG and the audience of OCG; we are people expected to learn, mature and grow as individuals through the practice and application of drama as an artform and agent of culture.

Wertenbaker's ending leaves her audience guessing. We've no idea how the play-within-a-play is received, after its painful and shaky rehearsals. In a way, it leaves the metaphorical ball very much in our court – we're the ones that must take the learning from drama and culture then run with it into the future, in a way that we don't get to see the fictional cast doing. It's our move.

Guidelines for Measures to Cope at NSDF10 (from Noises Off)

2010-04-05T20:45:00.004+01:00

What happens when science meets performance – as with any clash of titans – is that one or both of them must sacrifice something to the other. After the tender and beautiful opening minute of Guidelines for Measures to Cope, it becomes clear that science has gained the upper hand.

In a massive information overload, a textbook definition of Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) is given via voiceover – no doubt interesting and informative in itself, especially considering the disorder's low profile in the UK. What BDD boils down to – and do take note, as this is is what Guidelines... is all about – is a disorder that makes (mainly young) people think their bodies look different to the way they actually are – too fat, too small, wrong colour, say. Think of all the time you spend in getting ready to go out and checking your appearance in shop or car windows – imagine having to do that all the time because had no choice. BDD can be like that, without the fun, forever. There are more sufferers than you might think, and it's a very private, introvert disorder that rarely gets reported.

If anyone missed the details of the definition (they probably did), then the cast helpfully chalk notes up on the wall as they go. Like lecture notes, these might mean something in the immediate aftermath of being written, but won't do so later. Every now and then they mark up individual rules HDD sufferers have adopted in order to cope – this is the individual, human story behind the condition if ever you want one. But in some cases, a straightforward narrative isn't strictly necessary (maybe definitive plotlines are over-rated?) and it's interesting that other shows this year also have plots that refuse to be categorical yet this is considered part of their charm.

Avoiding emphasis on a single character, the cast spend the rest of the show enacting and dramatising – in verbatim form – the condition itself. Their stories and monologues of confession are real people's words and between them build a portrait of BDD, not of individual sufferers. But the piece is intended as an educational device, and as such its concern is to teach and educate, to raise our awareness of BDD in the world. In pursuit of that end, it can sometimes be helpful to think in terms of individual faces and stories (an anonymous mass of Holocaust victims tends to arouse far less sympathy than individual Anne Frank – bigger scale, but you get my point) – but Electric Shadows don't worry too much about that.

Instead they layer up experiences of BDD in a non-linear fashion, to demonstrate and dramatise that definition they had at the start. They don't dramatise a character, which could become implausible and suffer inhuman levels of stress, but dramatise instead the condition – as such, the piece speaks to each of us about an experience broader than ourselves.

Bad House at NSDF10 (from Noises Off)

2010-04-05T20:38:00.002+01:00

In somewhere fairly unpleasant not too far from here, there's a disreputable bar called the Bawd House (or maybe the Bad House). It's a place where the stained walls are soaked in grim stories to set the teeth on edge and turn the stomach.

Of course you're more than welcome to visit this Bawd House – assuming it's still standing – and partake of its dubious delights...good ale (apparently), spit in the tankards and a leery, one-eyed Landlord who regales his assembled customers with provincial fairy tales.

Tom Gill is that Landlord, and he relishes his role, the vowels and gruesome details rolling round his mouth and out into open, echoey space before him. Beside him, alternately leering and lowering outwards, are his regular chorus of customers – somehow, they're also his audience, yet are more informed than us about the dark history of this place.

And what a history. Ravenous, glutting crows devastating farmland until supernatural forces intervene; a wealthy orphan pursued by (and pursuing) lusty young suitors-turned-grave-robbers beyond death, and finally a series of unexplained child vanishings culminating in a tense chase through churchyards. The Bawd House's pivotal role in this history underlines its distinctly unsavoury character, being the point at which the Landlord's trio of tales come full circle.

The last is probably the strongest, especially as the cast's storytelling enters a whole new dimension. Strong as Tom Gill's monologue performance is, the story-telling premise really takes off when the other cast members are allowed a voice too and the pace rattles along twice as fast. Their new tight focus on a solitary spot, coupled with the refreshing movement around it, gives a whole new level of tension to Bad House.

But ultimately, though it may scare, Bad House is about telling stories. They are tales that inspire fear and then purge it with the relief and reassurance that are – at the end of the day – just stories.

Angel at NSDF10 (from Noises Off)

2010-04-05T20:22:00.002+01:00

I don't use the term 'mind-fuck' lightly. Certainly not this time, anyway, considering that DeMontford University's Angel won't necessarily leave you reeling.

The five performers give an ostentatious triumph for the theatre approach that doesn't rely upon (or even need) a narrative. You remember the folk (well, Anthony Mamos) who wrote in Monday's NOFF that: 'I don't like stories'.

So now we can behold the results of the artistic policy that is so opposed to narrative. And how oppositional it is. Watch as Angel takes apart many of the rules associated with theatre. Their space, divided vertically by string and horizontally by tape, is a crazy paving web of controlled anarchy – populated by figures that I'd like to relate to board games and games of chance. I'd like to, but I'm not convinced.

What we get presented with appears to be a 3D exploration of the effect of music on individuals. A certain operatic aria creates a frenetic lucidity prompting the declaration from the angel-man that he keeps going around in circles. Work-out music gets him onto the exercise bike, other styles get him and his companions typing or applauding. It's not strictly about a specific man; it seems to be more a means of conveying the relationship between human behaviour and music. Alas, this is something that needs experiencing (hearing and seeing) to be full grasped.

At the centre is Mamos himself – the man who dresses as an angel. And why not? Why shouldn't a man be free to dress and express himself as he likes? Within reason, of course – but if he's not hurting anyone else, then he can do as he likes. And frankly, his outfit is almost as entertaining as it is disturbing. Though it's the muscular tics that cause the disturbing effect.

The non-linear approach of Angel is brought brazenly to the fore when, after hopelessly flicking through a gigantic book, a character announces that 'it's no story, this, here' and kills the lights. So any attempt to impose meaning on this eclectic piece via plotline is confounded (no doubt to the delight of Mamos' anti-plot school of thought). The irony is that the phrase is placed at the closing of the piece, and so is bound to be seen as a conclusion or definitive statement by those trying to impose a story structure.

4 Bar and Rising at NSDF10 (from Noises Off)

2010-04-05T20:11:00.003+01:00

The poor common man at the centre of 4 Bar and Rising is under a lot of pressure: mounting paperwork and networks of dependency have reduced him to a human pinball. The boiler in my house rarely gets up to one bar, and that heats the house fine – these days it's too much. So I dread to think what four bars must be like. This man's plight, as he is pinged around the stage while trying to shrug off the burdens of his world, is one that taps into the essence of modern life. It speaks to each of us living in a society with dress codes and a reliance on exam results as a means of determining worth.

4 Bar... speaks most strongly against the society it finds itself in when Adrian Spring finds himself forced to bear with him a wad of important papers, which between them determine and rigidly classify his life. His birth certificate, exam results, CV, marriage and divorce certificates and all that tiresome bureaucracy that has turned him into the dazed, confused and pressured individual he is. They are all things expressing an obligation on his part (even that of registering his birth) – yet not one demonstrates any benefit he gains, like a wage or food. Most explicitly, a final – unidentified – piece of paper is dangled in front of him and placed just out of his reach. As he strains against the elasticated rope holding him back, struggling to keep hold of the other papers (ie. his entire life, in this society's value-structure), desperate to reach the piece of paper (clearly representing the wages/benefits for the generic proletariat) denied to him, the tension builds and the anti-capitalist allegory becomes very clear. Then the tension snaps – and of course the working man had been denied his rights.

His final act is a liberation not only of mind and body but of the individual from the strictures of a capitalist society that categorises and codifies its citizens amid swathes of bureaucracy.
Alternatively, it may be about something entirely different. To be honest, I really wanted 4 Bar and Rising to be about weather reports. I hoped for some Met Office experts to be pointing to colourful maps of the UK as isobars swept across the Pennines and deposited buckets of rain over Scarborough. Ideally, there would be four isobars, although I don't think that means very much pressure – I'm not a weather forecaster.

There was a man who struggles to cross roads because he worries that some other people will throw sheets of paper at him. They might also tie an elastic rope to him and ping him about like a human pinball. It becomes a live essay on the dangers of bullying. But don't worry; there's a nice ending. Our dazed, confused and abused young man remembers a Christmas or birthday, when his dad gave him a skateboard (represented here by a long metal bar). It's a touching tribute to the power of interpersonal relationships, especially within families.

Actually, neither of those really works and everything I've thought about 4 Bar... has been at best incomplete and at worst flawed. It's the sort of piece that ought to be played about with in an audience's collective imagination for long after the applause dies down. There are a myriad ways of looking at it.

Each member of the cast has a clear idea of what their piece means, and appear to want each audience member to feel that too: an individual interpretation that doesn't depend on any prescribed meaning from elsewhere. So, for those of you that had a meaning worked out – however incomplete – that's great, don't worry about it matching up with any other view, least of all that held by the cast. For the rest of us, 4 Bar... raises questions about how important it is that we pin down the exact meaning of a performance.

In the end, almost any interpretation is equally as valid as another: so said cast member Sam Powell in yesterday's discussion.

National Student Drama Festival 2010

2010-04-05T19:03:00.004+01:00

So I've spent the last week or so in Scarborough working on the editorial team of the National Student Drama Festival's magazine, Noises Off.

The magazine is an open-access affair that caters for almost any writerly whim that chances across Fest-goers' minds - though it's mainly used for reviewing the twelve shows selected from across the country and presented in Scarborough. Thrown in there as well tends to be some comment and debate about the Festival, theatre, drama and anything else that happens to get brought up, as well as jokes, poems cartoons etc etc. All good stuff.

There were twelve shows, but this year I didn't review them all; I like to think it was because I was busy being all editorial and helping other people write things and keeping an eye on what was going in to NOFF content-wise. But it's possible I just spent a lot longer than usual thinking about stuff, so missed copy deadline.

Anyway, the next few posts are the reviews I did write. There's no Overview piece this year, I just didn't have time, and anyway Robert Hewison writes one in The Sunday Times which ought to give a good view of the Festival as a whole. That's out on April 11th.

Alice in Wonderland

2010-03-06T16:59:00.007Z

It was once just the dream of design students in Liverpool, but now – after much-hyped delay – Tim Burton's film version of Alice in Wonderland has finally reached UK cinemas.

At the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts a few years ago, I saw the results of work by design students imagining what would happen if Tim Burton directed an adaptation of this classic Victorian tale. Naturally, the real thing is much more overstated and far zanier. This is Tim Burton, after all. Both Wonderland and the Victorian world which contrasts with it take flamboyance very seriously.

But let's be clear early on – Linda Woolverton's screenplay is far from faithful to the book's storyline (although certain things remain, like the drink and cake that make Alice change size, and the infamous white rabbit), and never pretends to be. From the outset, we have Alice as a young girl troubled by nightmares involving creatures vaguely recognisable from Lewis Carroll's story, but that soon changes. We zip forwards thirteen years to be shown the nineteen-year-old Alice (Mia Wasikowska) subject to the strictures of a Victorian society that insists she conform. Like so many teenagers after her, she refuses to do so, and the early hints of her mental instability (hallucinations?) come to the fore as she runs away from the pressure of an unwelcome proposal.

So, not a dream on a pleasant summer's day then. It's also much darker than the 1951 cartoon film, which established Disney's tradition (unrelated to Carroll's work) of a blonde Alice in a blue dress. Thank goodness for that, as Burton gives a much deeper, much more troubled Wonderland than earlier versions.

Burton's film may have departed from the letter of Carroll's book, but not the spirit. What has always made Alice in Wonderland so tricky to classify as a children's book is that it is so subversive. For example, Alice takes on trust the bottle marked 'Drink Me'...surely a contradiction of any parent's instruction to their child should they find a strange bottle of liquid. She takes and eats mushrooms from a caterpillar (a stranger!) who is quite clearly on drugs and not in his right mind. She rebels against the authority in Wonderland. Yet she is a children's heroine. Burton might not stick to that outline, but he does allow some very subversive stuff to creep in. His Alice is a visionary in a society of pragmatists. Tied down by other people's expectations (an audience for when Hamish (Leo Bill) proposes?), she runs away into a dream land of her own making. Like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, that dream world helps her make decisions about the real world. By the end, she – not unlike Alan Rickman's Caterpillar – has metamorphosed into an independent, determined young woman.

In fact, this radically departs from the original text, not only in its conflation of Alice in Wonderland with its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass. With the introduction of the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) as a rival to the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) and a plot taken from Carroll's poem The Jabberwocky (written as part of the Wonderland books), Burton turns this into much more of an epic film. It suddenly becomes about usurping and rightful queens, champions and monsters, insanity and bravery. That may not be a bad thing, but it doesn't quite chime with what Carroll wrote.

However – in a way that feels classically Burton, and far from classically Victorian – Burton doesn't allow us an easy good vs. evil. His White Queen is just as dubious ruler as her sister, with personal loyalty based on apparent hypnosis and a willingness to place her own pacifist vows above the lives of her followers. She's not quite likeable, despite her mixture of Aslan with the Elves of Lothlorien, never mind the fact that she doesn't deny the Red Queen's claim of being the eldest of the sisters (therefore the rightful queen).

Unfortunately, a lot of visual eccentricity has gone into this film at the expense of the verbal fun Carroll had within his text. That seems to be the greatest loss going over to the big screen. That isn't to say that humour is lacking – a lot of the visual stuff is good and funny. Burton succeeds in creating visually striking and endearing characters (especially Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter, who can never quite decide if he's Scottish or not, and Bonham Carter is wonderful).

This has the cinematic quality and hallmarks of Burton, but is also a film that has learnt from the examples of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Narnia films. The ending has become a battle of good and evil, finally decided by a single, unwilling hero facing a monster.

Another Look at Larkin - from December 2009's Hullfire

2010-03-04T20:20:00.006Z

This December marks twenty-four years since the death of internationally-renowned poet and Hull Uni librarian Philip Larkin. Which means that 2010 is the important twenty-fifth anniversary, and the University is teaming up with the Philip Larkin Society, Visit Hull and East Yorkshire and Hull City Council to celebrate.

Professor James Booth, Head of the English Department and Literary Advisor to the Philip Larkin Society, told me that Larkin “is the purest of lyric poets, he always writes about Life, Death, Love [...] That gives him his universal quality.” Larkin's string of awards from 1972-84 confirmed his international reputation, and he has recently been declared both the nation's favourite poet and the greatest post-war British writer. “He manages, and there's a certain magic to this, to choose the words of each of his poems in such a way that he copyrights ordinary words [...] when anybody now says 'they fuck you up, your mum and dad', everyone recognises it as a quote from Larkin!”

The celebrations – under the title Larkin 25: Another Look at Larkin – will run for twenty-five weeks, starting in June 2010 and ending at that twenty-fifth anniversary in December with the unveiling of a Larkin statue at the Paragon station. It's also worth looking out for the Plague of Toads that will strike Hull during Larkin 25 – dozens of huge, decorated fibreglass toads, popping up across the city – inspired by Larkin's Toads. Just imagine. Other events of interest include a series of University lectures from distinguished guests, including former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion. Elsewhere, there are plans for drama workshops at Hull Truck, jazz events (Larkin was a jazz critic for the Telegraph) and maybe a bus named after Larkin. More long-lasting will be the Larkin Trail, a tour of East Yorkshire's Larkin-related cultural spots, supported by a new History Centre which is going to house the University's archives on Larkin and Hull's history.

But what about the reputation Larkin seems to have gained as a racist, or a middle-class snob who looked down on Hull's locals? A quick trawl through the comments left on a Hull Daily Mail article about the proposed statue reveals a variety of opinion and some of it's quite hostile. But, like it or not, Larkin is an important cultural figure – for Britain, not just Hull – and he chose to spend thirty years of his life here. Midlander though he was, his is a name strongly linked with Hull and the University, and his later work is embedded firmly in the East Riding.

Quoting Larkin's poetic description of Hullians, Booth comments that “ I don't think it's accurate to say that it has any kind of middle-class condescension about it; there's a common humanity about it”. As for being racist, the Professor tells me “ If you look at his life, his actions, you realise actually he was a lifelong liberal humanist – not the right-wing bigot that he occasionally parodied himself as being”, and compares Larkin to the Roman orator Cicero, who also “ got into terrible trouble because he couldn't avoid a good joke [...] Larkin does this; when he sees the pithiest, most extreme version of putting something, he'll do it”. He was politically incorrect, but not a racist.

What's exciting about Larkin 25 (apart from those toads) is that the Steering Group, chaired by Hull Emeritus Professor Graham Chesters (g.chesters@hull.ac.uk), is keen to have new ideas suggested. Already there are various student projects (in drama, photography, art and music) across the city. As Chesters says, the list of commemorative events is 'far from closed!'.

http://twitter.com/philiplarkin25

http://www.larkin25.com/

Ruddigore (Hull University G&S Society) Interview

2010-02-25T19:08:00.005Z

Cowering in a corner whilst being tormented by the ghosts of my ancestors was hardly the way I'd expected to begin an interview with the director of Hull's Gilbert & Sullivan Society (HUGSS). It must just be what happens when you sit in on a rehearsal of this year's G&S show: Ruddigore; or, The Witch's Curse.

It was an experience – being surrounded by men jabbing fingers at me and generally tormenting me – that gave extra weight to what the show's director, Lucy Thomson-Smith, later told me about how keen the Society is on including in their activities anybody who's interested. 'I feel like it's always been quite a welcoming group. You know, if you can't sing, you can't dance, you can't act – we don't care, come and join us! We'll just have fun with it.'

That's not to say that the cast can't sing, dance or act – just that it isn't necessarily a priority of HUGSS. As Thomson-Smith says, 'it's always nice within the chorus that we have this interesting mix of people who are different ages and doing different courses and who have different abilities' and one of the challenges of HUGSS is working with a cast that doesn't necessarily have vast theatrical or musical experience.

The same is true of the show's principal roles. One of the more experienced principals is Rory Oliver, the leader of those men doing the tormenting earlier on. Near the beginning of the second half, he belts out the song that Thomson-Smith regards as the script's 'high point' – he certainly did it justice in the tiny rehearsal space in the Larkin building. 'The Night's High Noon is this fantastic song about the ghosts coming to life and enjoying themselves at night' which is crucial to the plot of Ruddigore.

Oliver plays the leader of the ancestors of the new Baronet of Ruddigore, Ruthven Murgatroyd, whose family line is cursed in such a way that means he has to commit a crime every day or be subject to more of the torments I endured in rehearsal. Understandably, Murgatroyd isn't happy about this family curse and does his best to get around it. This being a Gilbert & Sullivan show, there are several couples running around trying to get married to each other, before changing their minds and wanting to marry someone else. As Thomson-Smith explains the plot to me, I can see what she means when she says that this is 'a parody of Victorian melodrama, and it's Gilbert and Sullivan's opportunity to poke fun at that'.

Unlike previous HUGSS shows Ruddigore is far from the most well-known of G&S works. In a way, that's why Thomson-Smith has chosen to do it. 'A lot of G&S societies' she tells me, 'tend to revolve around the same productions. That's because everybody loves Pirates [HUGSS 2009 and 2005], Iolanthe [HUGSS 2008], HMS Pinafore [HUGSS 2007 and 2003] and The Mikado [HUGSS 2006].' HUGSS last performed Ruddigore in 1997. Far from being daunted, Thomson-Smith is excited because, 'it's got two fantastic songs in it already, and the more I looked into it, I thought 'this has got some really good songs in, it's got some really good creative opportunities to run with''.

Among those opportunities is the style she's chosen for Ruddigore. Following on from the last two HUGSS shows ('very successful, innovative productions [that] decided to do something different and non-traditional'), Thomson-Smith has put her own mark on the show. Believing that 'doing G&S as G&S doesn't work any more; it doesn't pull in an audience', she has exploited the fact that Ruddigore is 'quite gothic, it's got a scary edge but it's a dark comedy' and has taken an appropriate inspiration: Tim Burton.

Burton's work ties in especially well with the show's professional bridesmaids ('corpse bride figures...decaying and falling apart.') and a 'nervous and unassuming' male lead. 'Using a Tim Burton inspiration really, really works well with this and lends a modern edge to a traditional production'.

But above all, for Thomson-Smith 'HUGSS has always been about enthusiasm and the passion; people always want to turn up and want to have fun and they enjoy doing it – and I think that really comes across in the production'.

Ruddigore; or, The Witch's Curse runs in Middleton Hall on the 3rd, 5th and 6th of March at 7:30pm. Tickets are £6 for an adult, with £4 concessions.
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Iron Man

2010-02-23T16:35:00.005Z

Talk about boy's toys!

That's all anyone really needs to know about Marvel comic-book adaptation Iron Man, brought to the big screen by director Jon Favreau. Look carefully enough, though, and there's a story about technological genius and arms manufacturer Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) getting kidnapped in Afghanistan and building a supercomputer suit to bust his way out, becoming a quasi-superhero in the process. Look carefully, mind.

It's not just the massive amount of guns, rockets, jeeps and automated armour suits that make this film such an enthusiastic endorsement of boys and their toys. Tony Stark – though an adult and CEO of the company founded by his equally brilliant father – has barely grown up beyond the age of fifteen. He's a hyperactive little rich boy who has been allowed to carry on playing (and spending) without ever really having to worry. His assistant, Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), is one of only two female characters of note, the other being compulsory 'almost-unpatriotic-but-cute-journalist-asking-difficult-yet-ignored-questions'. When he tells Potts that he doesn't have anyone else to trust, it's painfully true – this man can't form relationships with other people, let alone with women; he's too busy talking to the AI robots in his workshop. I say 'workshop'...it's more of a playground.

His real workshop – the place he does actual work – turns out to be a cave in Afghanistan where he's held captive with his freedom promised in exchange for building one of his new missiles. The one rather insensitively named the Jericho (it's basically a line of clusterbombs).

It isn't exactly surprising that Stark realises he's part of an industry with no moral standpoint, that exploits the world and causes untold damage and death. While it may be ironic that his injuries are caused by one of his own weapons, it should be no surprise that the Afghan insurgents that use them – and capture him – own such devices. What is surprising is that it takes Stark so very long to realise that an arms manufacturing company will happily sell weapons to both sides in a conflict; they are probably the only businessmen not to agree that national boundaries are bad for business. Normally, arms dealers don't consider the issues Stark raises at his first press conference as a free man. Things like the impact their work has on civilians and perpetuating conflict. They avoid these because otherwise they'll get caught up in questioning their morals and won't function any more. Arms manufacturers have to be amoral and unscrupulous – Stark begins to challenge that and that's where the film really gets going.

Though it's disappointing, in a way, because up until then Stark had been refusing to conform to a stereotype; he wasn't brashly militaristic, nor delighting in local wars. He recognised soldiers and warfare as necessary evils in a world that isn't perfect, while quoting his dad's saying that peace means having a bigger stick than the other guy. A pragmatic world-view.

But Stark is actually staggeringly naïve, somehow not realising that his company is just as happy to sell to militia and extremists as they are to the US military. It's an opportunism and a business attitude personified in his partner, Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges) – who is the true study of the pragmatic underbelly of American business (not to mention shady business and military deals globally). Bridges' path to villain status is smooth and subtle, understated with just the right amount of friendliness.

But the film's focus is always Downey and that suit, regardless of qualms about his ideas being used to develop weaponry (which is what his ideas have always been about – why does it only now strike him as wrong? because he's seen that non-Americans ('bad' people) use them too?).

The suit – changed from gold (a bit 'ostentatious') to hot-rod red – is one big boy's toy to go alongside the sportscars and super intelligent computers Stark already has, to say nothing of the hi-tech computer and Malibu villa-cum-housing-complex. In fact, he only builds the thing when he's frozen out of the Board of Directors at Stark Industries and his responsibilities are relaxed. Mid-life crisis of the superhero? Even his boyish grin when admitting his identity to a room full of reporters smacks of a certain roguish immaturity.

But that's Downey's charm; he's playing a naïve, irresponsible arms dealer, yet still makes him innately likeable. Many scenes are played with rapid, almost over-lapping dialogue that feel like there was never a script, instead we're listening to actual conversation. It's just something about Downey's laid-back intensity (yep, I know) that draws the viewer in and makes it all seem fairly plausible. Although making the first suit from inside a cave still seems pretty unlikely.

While not descending to the depths of, say, Transformers 2, Iron Man is still a bit of an excuse for big metal men to blow things up and punch holes in things. Not necessarily a bad thing, but almost certainly one for the boy's toys market.

Hotel Rwanda

2010-02-18T01:00:00.003Z

Africa as a continent hasn't had it easy for some time now. Rwanda has been suffering ethnic turmoil and violence dating back even beyond its days as a Belgian colony – it's not something that flared up once and went away.

Released ten years after the events it depicts, Hotel Rwanda is based on the real-life experience of hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle) during what has become known as 'the Rwandan genocide'.

As that implies, it's no film for the faint-hearted. It's a tense two-and-a-bit hours during which Cheadle's honest and good-natured Rusesabagina defends around a thousand people from the marauding militia. He has them holed up in the luxury hotel he manages for a Belgian company, pressed together in a relative oasis of calm inside the maelstrom outside. The situation becomes a demonstration of common humanity and decency in the face of human hatred – not for nothing does Rusesabagina insist on doing up his shirt and tie properly before seeing hotel guests.

While it's a bit tricky to believe completely in Cheadle's heart of gold, it's a fascinating study in human nature to see how far he's willing to go in order to save the people who believe in him – equally interesting as trying to understand the motives of the soldiers and militia.

In 1994, that militia – made up of men of the Hutu tribe – reacted to the assassination of Rwandan President Habyarimana by going out and massacring members of Rwanda's other major tribe, the Tutsis. They killed around 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Rwanda's population was 80% Hutu, and Hutu dominance of the radio and army is clear in the film and evident from their utter destruction of order in Rwanda. The country is upended as the gangs roam free, killing as they go, and the (largely white) UN peace-keeper forces watch helplessly.

It's easy to read a post-colonial discourse into this, especially as the hotel's white residents are evacuated along with the European soldiers who arrive for that very mission. There's a definite sense of 'us', as it were, leaving the natives to get on with it and sort the conflict out amongst themselves. We even seem to have left them our religion and weather, as the camera shows trucks pulling away from Rwandan nuns sheltering from driving rain.

Of course, Rwanda's history of violence (and Africa's, for that matter) is partly the fault of the European colonial powers (Belgium, in this case). The artificial borders drawn without regard for traditional tribal territory or local input threw together different (rival) tribes and cut them apart from their fellow tribespeople. The fact that imperialists then used divide-and-rule tactics – governing Rwanda through the minority Tutsi tribe – makes it hardly surprising that Rwanda has become a tense place.

There's more to it than that though. The Hutus are reacting against the centuries in which Tutsis ruled them, which isn't justification or a defence, but goes some way to explaining the genocide. Not unlike Hitler's Germany, Hutu propaganda created an image of Tutsis as 'cockroaches', 'traitors' and 'invaders', dehumanising them to the point where it becomes acceptable – even encouraged – to destroy a whole people. Not even orphans under Red Cross care are safe.

Ultimately, Rusesabagina's instruction that the guests must shame the international community into helping the innocent is the strongest thing to take away. The lack of intervention by foreign powers is telling, and a constant complaint of those left behind in the bloodshed. But unasked is the question of what exactly intervention (coming in the year after America's disastrous intervention in Somalia cf. Black Hawk Down) would achieve (see also: Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korea etc).

Joaquin Phoenix's cameraman sums it up perfectly when he says that the world's reaction to his horrific footage of murders will be '“Oh my god, that's horrible” and carry on eating their dinner'. The lack of knowledge about this subject is astounding, but the fact that events like this continue happen with little reaction should shame the West.

http://hrrfoundation.org/reports/

'Mankind' at Hull Uni

2010-02-15T13:05:00.005Z

As an audience, we kind of knew where Hull Drama Department's Mankind was going once the first character started speaking.

As Emily Napier paced onstage, hands clasped in prayer, rosary beads knocking against the robes marking her out as a Dominican friar, the feeling grew that a message was coming to our souls. Then, she ascended the pulpit – the only notable thing on the stage, apart from the two paintings, depicting Heaven and Hell – and announced her name and intention. Okay, so to describe Napier's character as a character is a bit misleading. She's playing Mercy, and that's not her name; it's what she is.

See, Mankind is a Medieval Morality play, and they were never big on individual characters and plot lines. Instead, the Morality play depicts personifications of broader concepts usually involved in some cosmic struggle for the soul of, well, mankind. It's where the idea of an Everyman comes from. In this case, Mankind is a character – played with a curiously brazen naivete by Felicity Rankin, until her final scene when the full weight of her wrong doing is evident in every sob and shake of her shoulders – over whom Jen Clarke's leery, crooked jester Mischief fights with Mercy.

As is standard Morality practice, Mankind faces temptation to leave his work and abandon his prayers, and thus his duty to God. That God is – though never seen – present throughout, the Dominican friars' motto 'Veritas', Latin for 'truth', being emblazoned across the back of a largely bare stage. It's a bareness that really focuses attention on the battle that is essentially happening within the soul or mind of each of us: the battle between toiling for the common good and indulging in personal enjoyment. That temptation takes the form of three representatives of worldly pleasure: Andrew Fowler's Newguise, who threatens to steal the show, Harriet Entwhistle's deceptively charming Nowadays and Ami Dawson's Nought, who relishes every chance to speak filth on stage.

Don't be fooled by the idea of the Morality play being nice and clean – it's a lesson to us sinners about what we should avoid. So the three worldly pleasures get to party for most of their stage time, and even bring in Jessica Duffield's imposing Titivillus (the Devil, to you and me). That lesson makes the church's presence painfully clear. Mankind isn't quite propaganda, though it's probably a good example of the Catholic church using art to persuade people that worship (in a church, not on your own terms) is a Very Good Thing. Mischief's greatest victory seems to be in persuading Mankind not to attend morning prayers – even though an omnipotent God would surely hear a prayer wherever it was said...

In the end, that may be Mankind's failing as a modern piece of theatre. It's far from subtle, and the word 'preachy' seems dying to attach itself to every moment of the stage time – not only during Mercy's sermons. Don't get me wrong, Napier delivers some very heartfelt moments without ever being patronising, but ultimately this is a piece of theatre designed to remind the masses what they owe to their overlords in the Catholic church, who very kindly mediate between them and their God.

When Napier enters, hundreds of years of theatrical history are wiped away, and we've been taken back to the didactic, characterless drama that went out of fashion around Shakespeare's time. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but this does function as a bit of a museum piece. It's interesting as a means of looking back at where later drama came from – for example English drama's move toward representative characters in increasingly realistic settings, before making the characters increasingly realistic too. Also – crushingly, for this performance – the power of the Catholic church and an audience's fear of God aren't what they were, which takes away much of this play's sting. Pity, really.

Up in the Air

2010-02-07T16:46:00.005Z

Here's a film that – despite the solitary isolation of its main character – is all about human relationships and intimacy. No, really.

Even though Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) spends most of his time zipping across America in American Airlines jets, expenses paid, this is a film that finally emphasises the need for human contact. Bingham's life is obsessed with jumping queues and staying in Hilton rooms paid for by his boss (not for nothing does his love interest (Vera Farmiga's Alex) say that they are two people 'turned on by elite status'. It's a pretty soulless life, a fact almost mourned by the film's final shots – taken in flight – when the music underscoring Clooney's final monologue cuts out as he finishes. We are left with just the distant hum of the jet engines and the clouds, rolling away endlessly below. It's an empty, empty world.

Even in the opening credit sequence, Up in the Air manages to present America as an ugly, soulless place – using snapshot after snapshot of uniform, bland cities and open, uninteresting fields to show Clooney's vast national travelling. He's a man working his way up to the landmark ten million air miles, so naturally there's a lot of flying involved.

His job? He fires people for a living, working in one of the few industries whose workers clap their hands with glee at the first sign of a financial crisis. The global recession is their payday. Company directors that have been forced to downsize hire men like Clooney's Bingham to lay off the workforce they themselves daren't face. Again and again, as he fires another hapless worker, Bingham is asked how he can sleep at night, what should the newly-unemployed tell the people at home that rely on their pay cheque? Bingham is a smooth operator, well-rehearsed in dodging such questions and avoiding all forms of human connection with these people. Instead, he hands them a load of paperwork to help them fulfil their dreams and live up to their true potential, a way of looking at their redundancy as a positive, life-enhancing experience.

But for all Bingham's 'philosophy' of cutting lose from interpersonal connections and being a lone individual, life just keeps forcing relationships onto him. From his sister's upcoming wedding to the rookie (Natalie – Anna Kendrick) assigned to shadow him at work (in planes and offices around America) and learn the ropes, through to the woman he hooks up with when their flying schedules allow, Bingham just can't get away from human relationships. It's perhaps ironic that his dream – that air miles milestone – involves as a prize a meeting and conversation with the human face of American Airlines, chief pilot Maynard Finch (Sam Elliott). But where it really hits him hard is when he's the one asked to talk to his sister's intended (Danny McBride), who gets cold feet on the day of the wedding. Suddenly, he has to argue in favour of relationships and family and children – all of which he argues against in his motivational speeches for the touring speakers' circuit.

Crucially, the comedy lies in the personal touches. Natalie's scene or so of personal revelation after being dumped by text, for example – ironic, as she's the one keen to introduce to Bingham's company firing by videophone, thus removing what he values as a personal touch (again, a life with little interpersonal interaction) – or the easy, early flirting between Bingham and Alex.

But what Clooney's boyishly charming Bingham finally realises – and should have known all along – is that he actually quite wants to settle and that maybe, for some people at least, companionship is no bad thing. Therein lies the heart of the matter.

The Observer Review only have main articles going online

2010-01-25T21:24:00.004Z

So the little boxes added in by little people like me tend not to make it into cyberspace. Fair enough; if the whole thing was online, no one would buy the paper.

But here's a bit of how I spent the middle of January.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/jan/17/real-mo-mowlam-channel-4

Nowhere Boy

2009-12-31T15:25:00.005Z

It's a good job you don't have to be a Beatles fan to get what's going on in this biopic of John Lennon's early days, based on his half-sister's memoirs.

I say that because I've never got the fuss over the Beatles, and I'm not alone in that. So I dreaded a film soaked in Beatles references and trivia that was only going to make sense to the die-hard fans, whilst also angering half of them for not being loyal enough to the memory of the demi-god Lennon.

Thankfully, that's not the case. There are references to the Beatles, but they're not especially prominent. For example, a young Lennon cycles past a gate with a sign by it that identifies the fields on the other side as 'Strawberry Fields'. Okay, tick that 'early influence on the later music' box – but only if you happened to notice it because you weren't watching the cocky kid on the bike.

Instead of creating a sickening Beatles-fest, director Sam Taylor Wood focuses on a story about a boy growing up torn between his biological mother and the aunt who has raised him as her own. Yes, he's precocious, yes, he's cocky, but he's a teenage lad with the problems you could easily expect to face any lad of the early 1960s. The hint of coming greatness is left as just that – a hint.

Which is why Nowhere Boy is just as good as social commentary of the 1960s as a history of the early Beatles (back in their days as the Quarrymen, before they were allowed anywhere near the famous Cavern Club). Fun as it is to play 'spot the future Beatle' as more promising, fresh-faced lads join Lennon's band, that's not the point. It's a story about boys getting together and singing music. So absent is the Beatles music from the score – which features instead some undervalued, rousing hits of the late fifties and early sixties – that the arrival of the first of their tunes comes as a mild surprise.

Charisma seems to have been a large part of Lennon's appeal, something that Aaron Johnson has plenty of. While there's an awful lot of teen swaggering and surly scowls, Johnson captures the look and feel of a boy who knows that he's the object in a tug-of-love between two women. More, he's prepared to exploit that, playing up to it, knowing that he'll be alright because they both love him deep down. It's a slightly sickening display of ingratitude and unnecessary cruelty. Partially, it seems alright to blame that on teen angst – all teenage boys are like this a bit, right? - but there does seem a little too much of Lennon expecting some sort of concession or special treatment because of his mother's abandoning him.

Luckily he has Thomas Sangster alongside him, giving a measured, thoughtful and thoroughly endearing performance as a young Paul McCartney. In many ways, McCartney comes across as the stable, understanding heart of what would become the biggest (commercially, anyway) band the world had yet seen. He's demure and slight, but looks easily capable of shouldering his future knighthood.

There are strong performances too from Kristin Scott Thomas and Anne-Marie Duff as Lennon's aunt and mother respectively. Hard though it is to believe that they're sisters, they both provide a striking contrast as motherly roles for Lennon. Thomas is the epitome of middle-class respectability, refined and sensible, but heart-breaking when the ice melts a little. Duff, meanwhile, the exuberantly bubbly woman who couldn't keep her son lights up the screen as a woman far younger at heart than in body.

Nowhere Boy is a film that – helped by the quiet dedication and hard work of Sangster – goes a long way to confirming my belief that McCartney was by far the nicer man, while Lennon was – as Sangster's McCartney politely puts it – just a bit of 'a dick'. But at least it tries to explain why.

Small Island on BBC One

2009-12-20T14:00:00.007Z

Jamaica is a small island. Britain's not much bigger, thinking about it.

The discovery of that fact by two Jamaican immigrants of post-war Britain is the crux of this two-part BBC drama adapted from Andrea Levy's novel. What they also have to learn is something those of us that have lived here for a while could have told them from the start: Britain ain't all that great.

In their defence, Hortense and Gilbert (Naomie Harris and David Oyelowo), have come over as part of the SS Empire Windrush migration from a Jamaica that still recognises imperial Britain as the 'mother country' and have been told countless stories about how wonderful (though cold) the place is. Electric lights in every room! Visits to the King in Buckingham Palace! Yeah...

So partly we're watching the gradual demolition of dreams in the dreary London boarding house and streets of the late 40s/early 50s. Partly, we're trying to ignore the Desperate Housewives-style voice-over that trots of proverb-sounding bits of trite wisdom (stuff that's okay on DH because none of that show can be taken seriously anyway). Luckily, Harris and Oyelowo don't let it get too mawkish, and their early innocence is touching and plausible. They aren't exactly naïve, just unworldly and unprepared for the reality of a post-war 'mother country' that – as Gilbert says – doesn't know where her children live.

My church in Wolverhampton has several members who were onboard the SS Empire Windrush, and I think it's this familiarity with the cadence of the Jamaican accent that made me wince whenever one of the Jamaican accents here went off towards America or somewhere else. Shaun Parkes – a fine black British actor (better known for playing British-Ugandan characters) – carries it off well, but Oyelowo occasionally sounds like a caricature Jamaican. Harris has moments where she could be from America's east coast (which is odd because her mum's Jamaican) – were there no genuine Jamaican actors the BBC could call on?

The ingratitude and blatant racism of the locals is also marked, and sits rather uncomfortably with an audience reminded again and again that the male 'darkies' here are all men who served in the RAF against Nazi Germany and are now full British citizens like their paler associates. That doesn't seem to matter to the cockney postmen who subject Gilbert to a 'noble savage' moment on his knees.

But what's interesting is that, while Small Island lays stress on racial difference, the sexual discrimination of 40s/50s Britain (and Jamaica) is left largely untouched. It's all very well to pull on our heartstrings about the poor RAF men derided as monkeys by their new Royal Mail colleagues, but what of the wife they've left in the boarding house with no idea how to cope in this strange, cold land? It's a classic case of bullying when the disgraced Gilbert comes home to treat his wife to an angry outburst that she can't possibly understand, having not seen his day at work. Time and again, these Jamaican men complain of being oppressed or looked down upon, while treating their women in a strikingly similar way.

It's not all gloom though. Landlady Queenie (Ruth Wilson) gets to have her fun with the RAF and is an extremely progressive female figure. She sleeps with who she wants, she has economic independence, and she bosses her husband, Bernard (Benedict Cumberbatch), around threatening to throw him out in favour of her Carribean lodgers. Well, good for her. Sort of. It would be if she hadn't fallen for completely the wrong man.

Michael Roberts (Ashley Walters) – the Jamaican airman prone to copping off with married white women – doesn't do any favours for the stereotype of black men. As the father of Queenie's illegitimate child he lends some weight to white reservations about hiring black men in places that employ white women. What's worse is that the two thoroughly decent men (Bernard and Gilbert) are always left to pick up the pieces that he leaves behind. Gilbert is often mistaken for him, to his and everyone else's confusion/dismay – as Gilbert says, he's not the only black man in England, but everyone else seems to forget that. While Gilbert takes the reproachful looks on suspicion of impregnating Queenie (adultery twice over), the real father is swanning off to Canada, leaving the woman who has never really loved anyone else.

So we can learn that neither island is the idyll we may have thought it, and that you've got to work at your dreams if you want them to come about. It's not always comfortable for a white audience to hear the sorts of things said to the Jamaican people; there's a smug air of adult to child throughout, and sometimes a genuine fear of physical contact in case the black skin rubs off. But there's also the reminder that without such immigrants Britain wouldn't have made it through WWII never mind the ten years that followed.

We as a nation (a multi-ethnic nation, all of us that appreciate the freedoms won in the 1939-45 war) should be grateful to the passengers of the SS Empire Windrush and those that followed.

A Christmas Carol @ Hull Uni

2009-12-19T20:16:00.006Z

Just before Christmas, Hull's Drama Department gives us yet another production of that perennial festive favourite: A Christmas Carol.

It seems to be especially common this year, with Scarborough's SJT, London's Southwark Playhouse and Birmingham's REP (among others, probably) tackling the famous tale of Scrooge and the spirits that visit him and turn him from an anti-Christmas miser into a man whole-heartedly embracing his fellow humanity at Christmas. Oh, and there's Jim Carey and that film version. Dickens is still a popular festive choice in other cases, as Bolton Octagon's Oliver Twist shows.

Scrooge's supernatural transformation never strikes me as entirely plausible, so it's a tribute to Joel Redgrave's acting that he almost makes his Scrooge believable. Only almost though – the fault lying with Dickens' ghost story, not Redgrave. What he does do is capture the physicality of the stooped, aged man who has spent his life on building his business in Victorian London. He is warned by the ghost of his old friend (though Scrooge never appears (here or in Dickens) as the sort of man to have friends) Jacob Marley – here played by Jonathan Miles with a commanding presence despite the lights not being set to hit his face. He picks up several other roles later on with aplomb and gusto, featuring as a highlight alongside Redgrave's Scrooge, both of them sensitive to the comedy in Bryan Hodgson's script (80% of which he claims is from Dickens).

For those of you who don't know, Scrooge is visited on Christmas Eve by three Ghosts of Christmas (the Ghost of Christmas Past, Christmas Present (snigger) and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come) who show him scenes from their respective Christmasses in an effort to remove Scrooge's virulent misanthropy and hatred of the festive season. So Dickens ticks two boxes by having a ghost story that is also heart-warming and re-affirms the joy of Christmas and human companionship. Well done, Charles.

But it's hard to know if you should blame Dickens or adaptor/director Hodgson for the fat on the bone of this Christmas offering from Hull Uni. Dickens is always a bit wordy and takes his time with plots, which undermines Hodgson's stage production. Part of me wants to blame Dickens for the occasionally slow pace and slack moments, but Hodgson must take some responsibility for not cutting and trimming his source material. Adding in a whole bunch of traditional carols adds a certain nostalgic feel to the piece, but also creates several halts in the action that really aren't needed.

It's lucky that the large ensemble cast don't let the clunky revolve and scene changes slow them down nor damp their vigour too much. Their (surprisingly modern) choreography is still dashed off with skill and enthusiasm. Also coming up well out of some dubiously staged moments are the Ghosts of Christmas Past and Present (Sian Bennett and Huw Allen). Alas, Scrooge's maid is underused, played as she is by an actress (Elizabeth Perry) very much in tune with the comedy under her brief scenes – it's lucky that she gets to shine as Miles' exuberant wife Mrs Fezziwig as well.

Rather like most of Dickens' work, this is longer that it really needs to be, and the transfer to the stage hasn't done much to smooth over those imperfections. But there are some strong central performances and some of the singing is pretty good.

Treasure Island @ The SJT [for thepublicreviews.co.uk]

2009-11-27T15:22:00.002Z

The Northern Broadsides' production of Treasure Island, adapted from Robert Louis Stevenson and on tour until January.

http://www.thepublicreviews.co.uk/

Macbeth @ Hull Truck

2009-11-18T01:11:00.005Z

This is a Macbeth that's very much about the audience. No matter where they turn, Shakespeare's Scottish nobles, caught in the close press of Hull Truck's staging, can't escape the eyes fixed on them.

Mainly because Gareth Tudor-Price's adaptation is being staged in the round, which is a first for the new Hull Truck space – and a welcome one. Reducing the playing area has brought the audience closer to the actors than previous productions, serving to increase the audience's sense of involvement as well as bringing back a little of the claustrophobia of the old Spring Street venue (or tin shed).

Intimacy and claustrophobia are two things Tudor-Price and his northern cast are very keen on in this production; even the lighting rig has been lowered to compress the space.
The seven-strong cast give a fast-moving performance, rarely pausing for breath or silly things like scene changes. In a way, that's classic Truck – the reclaimed wooden board set is stripped bare, and costume changes are kept to a minimum (so much so that it can be hard to distinguish between some of the characters). It's also classically 'new Ferensway venue' to have vast amounts of haze pumping onto the stage. For once, the haze lends an incredible atmosphere to the play; murky, bleak and sinister all at once.

On the down side, involving the audience so much leads to several scenes being delivered (with not much sense of movement) out to the main seating block, as though the Truck were still in its normal arrangement. Yes, the cast is playing to the majority of the audience, but at the expense of truly playing in the round. A key advantage of staging plays in the round is that the audience can be more easily made to feel that they're eavesdropping, flies on the wall in a conversation between people unaware of their existence. Actors declaiming into the middle distance spoils that a bit.

Tudor-Price's adaptation removes the physical presence of the infamous witches and instead places them around the stage, often as whispering voices with an eerie backing track. They form another audience, always watching the action, as none of the actors ever leave the stage. It's the sort of directorial trick – Tudor-Price is aiming for a highly ritualistic portrayal of the witches – that looks promising when the show opens with the cast's only woman (Fiona Wass) drawing a tight, occult-type circle in the middle of the stage, while everyone stands around looking ominous in their long leather coats. Later, Lady Macbeth uses the same circle to summon the spirits of the night, and it's a chilling flashback to that opening moment. But other than that, there's precious little witchery. All of the supernatural messing with Macbeth's head is just that – in his head.

Don't get me wrong; James Weaver gives a very strong, solid and captivating performance as the Scottish thane promised the crown by a bunch of witches and spurred on by his wife to kill King Duncan. His relationship with Lady M sizzles, their power balance shifting in every scene, always raw with passion. A shame, then, that their supporting cast is a bit patchy, a bit hit-and-miss. Weaver is the best man onstage for listening to those around him, his face (or sometimes even his shoulders) enough to tell the way his thoughts are going. He justifies Lady M's description of his face as a book in which his thoughts can be read.

With all that haze, the lighting for Macbeth is at times genuinely beautiful, evoking different shades of night as well as the heath and castle, and even making the floorlights look like small torch fires (that probably wasn't deliberate, but looked great). The whole production fits into a sparse, brutal vision, where nobody seems to like anyone else apart from Duncan (the Macbeths like each other, of course) and everyone's on edge. The fights aren't so good to watch – too ritualistic, perhaps, a case of heavy-handed 'one-two, one-two' – but otherwise it all looks lean and mean.

Hull Truck has given the city a Macbeth they can get their teeth into, in an accessible version of Shakespeare's great tragedy.

2012

2009-11-16T22:49:00.008Z

In some ways, it'd be a blessing if the world did end in 2012. For one, we wouldn't have to sit through the shame of Britain's Olympics going really badly (over-budget, late, silly-looking designs even when complete, that kind of thing, never mind the actual performance of British athletes). We could probably also avoid getting hyped-up about a possible second Obama term, as well, with all the incumbent rhetoric of hope that may or may not ever get fulfilled.

Those aren't things that are important to the latest end-of-the-world film, 2012, which seems to try to take a more realistic view of the whole affair. Hey, they've even got scientists predicting stuff...and getting the schedule wrong! A writer whose book about the end of the world, in which people acted selflessly, is criticised for being naïve. So, the makers of 2012 probably don't want us to think that they're pulling any punches.

But...are they pulling any punches? There might be a bit too much sentimental 'we all need to pull together in the cause of common humanity' stuff (rhetoric of hope?) to avoid such an accusation, but it's still quite touching. Yes, maybe the closing scene is a bit optimistic, but only because of the things it misses out. In fact, there's a lot missing here that would make it much bleaker a film.

Now, let's be honest. The way the trailer plugs this is very much about the effects. The film's main draw is the utter (and I mean utter) destruction of the world. It seems to be the first of two (probably more) films this year to involve 'the end of the world as you know it' (the other, curiously, is Sherlock Holmes, not a subject known for its apocalyptic overtones). There may be a modicum of science thrown in – something about solar flares and neutrinos – but it's basically about watching the planet ripping itself to bits while people scramble to get out of the way. Various governments have been tipped off by science, and so have started building ships, or arks as they're known (watch out for the kid called Noah...see what they did there?).

That 2012 comes from the same director (Roland Emmerich) as he who did Stargate and Independence Day should come as no surprise. Similar sort of people – with immediate access to the US President – bustling through corridors of power, slightly incomprehensible scientific tecnhobabble...oh, and devastation on a planetary scale.

And what devastation! The rumbling, rising of Yellowstone is especially fun, and fictitious plane flights have probably never been so harrowing. There's some slightly improbable dashing away from oncoming danger – lucky then, that John Cusak's character is professional driver, able to race away from what seems like a huge, angry mole in hot (underground) pursuit.

Moments like Woody Harrelson's harmless (and spot-on) conspiracy nutter getting blasted into smithereens are rewarding, as is the one when the President's daughter gets dewy-eyed as the attractive, principled scientist makes a moral case for the sake of humanity, very much in her father's style (the way that ends up is all a bit predictable). Less rewarding are moments like the wanton destruction of a load of flashy sports cars – beautiful things, absolutely no need to trash them. Sometimes, it feels like destruction for the sake of it.

Mind, that's what the trailer advertises, so it shouldn't be a surprise. Plot: hammy. Ending: dodgy. Sense of governments dealing with difficult situations: hope-inspiring. General note of apocalypse: amazing.

These Things Take Time for Cunning Linguists - from October 2009's Hullfire (who said I had to upload in chronological order?)

2009-11-06T20:29:00.005Z

Hull's Drama Department is definitely not playing it safe this month.

There is a wealth of plays that the Drama Department could choose to perform, classics that have been tried and tested (and done to death) or well-known, safe favourites that are hard to get wrong onstage. But University is a place to learn, to develop, to be brave and daring, to innovate. Rather than take an easy option with an established writer, the Department is giving its stage to two new, young student writers who will also direct their work.

At the end of October, Samuel Lannacombe Oliver's These Things Take Time will play alongside Thomas E. Peel's Cunning Linguists [later changed to The Various Voices of a Cunning Linguist] as a double-bill. Both shows will run each night, one after the other, which presents its own set of challenges to the casts and crew. Most challenging for Oliver is condensing his full-length play down to an hour: “I'd already finished the script before I was given the slot, and it was over an hour long. so I've had to do a lot of cutting. I've got rid of bits I quite liked, but the constant re-reading does mean I've cut bits that were rubbish and put in better bits.” Sharing the performance space each night means that both shows are low on set and have a split budget – two challenges Peel highlights along with saying that “the pressure is on due to the fact that we have written the scripts - the buck stops with us as writers and directors.”

Oliver sums up his play as being about “struggling to write, girls and weird friends”. It centres on Lloyd Karamazov, a TV writer hired to spice up a show's failing second series, and earned Oliver a First in the Scriptwriting Module – so it must be good! He quotes as inspiration things like Jeffrey Brown's 'Girlfriend' trilogy, Mary Chase's Harvey, Fear of Projection, The Goon Show, High Fidelity, Brief Encounter, The Philadelphia Story, Kind Hearts and Coronets, All About Eve and Buster Keaton films. Style-wise, it's an “amalgamation of all the things that inspired me when writing the play. So I hope that the final performance will be a mix of all the styles I've enjoyed, in an exciting and accessible way. Oh, and there's some creative swearing.”

Peel's play is harder to pin down, “I think my play's called Cunning Linguists, I say 'think', as it hasn't named itself yet. My friend suggested Cunning Linguists which seemed witty enough, but perhaps one day it will stop its tantrum and tell me what it wants to be called.” As the plot revolves around not a love triangle but a 'love scribble' and manipulation of language – using language as an “art form that very few people take the trouble to master” - with healthy doses of sex and lust, that seems a very appropriate title. Say it quickly and spot the innuendo in a phrase that's about wordplay – like a pun within a pun. It's inspired by things like “ Wilde, G.B Shaw, pre-Raphealites, aestheticism, Terry Pratchett, Johnny Cooper Clarke, Morrissey, Simon Armitage and films like Rebel Without a Cause, West Side Story, Johnny Got His Gun, The Great Escape, Pygmalion/My Fair Lady.”

Both writers have drawn on a little autobiographical material for their plays – Peel describing his as “basically the two voices in my head put into a story.” One is “driven, knows not what he wants but that he wants something different from everybody else” while the other is “ racked by insecurities, he is repressed but only by himself, and feels like he is an echo inside his own skin.” Alongside such characters, it's easy to see why Peel claims his script “shits on the liberal types in the same sentence as the conservative types.” Oliver's gentler, lightly self-deprecating approach means that his play avoids being “boring and full of awkward misunderstandings and tentative accidents (like my own life)” by being “exciting and full of awkward misunderstandings and tentative accidents (unlike my own life) with amusing characters and the like.”

I asked both men why we should go and see their double bill. Peel says that one of his characters can “bring societal conventions and norms and throw them on their head - he has some odd views which are bound to cause controversy, especially with you ladies.” Then there's “seeing a monkey-hanger (a Hartlepoolian) in a thong, the best chat-up line in the world, the worst puns in the world, being able to tell me exactly what you thought about it after over a pint, and if all goes to plan the longest beer-funnel you will probably ever see” not to mention the after-show party.

Oliver answered: “a theatrical double bill is quite a unique experience. One ticket: two plays. Isn't that nice? These Things Take Time should be seen because it's good fun. a quick-paced romp through all the little trials and tribulations we face from friendly colleagues, aggravating co-workers, pretty strangers and wishful fantasies. Also, I have a very good-looking cast and there may be partial nudity...which is always a seller.”

Both shows have already been learning curves for their writers, which means they've achieved part of their purpose. The final part is for them to entertain the masses, you lot. So, an opportunity to take in some culture, to support not only the learning of fellow students but also their future careers, and some possible nudity (which always perks an evening up). Add in an after-show party on the Saturday, and this could be a perfect student night out.

London's South Bank in the Evening - from November 2009's Hullfire

2009-11-06T20:21:00.004Z

[My first foray into travel writing]:

The Houses of Parliament look splendid in the sunset. There's a metaphor in there somewhere. The politically-minded cynic might say something about the sun setting on the splendour of an institution of British democracy. By contrast, St. Paul's glows a faint, rosy pink.

Nearby on the steps of a bridge over the Thames, a tour guide has managed to attract to her tour a whole one person. To give her credit, she's going for it 100%, putting her all in as though there were a small crowd at her feet, rather than one slightly bemused Spanish man. Unfortunately, she's just coming across as his slightly patronising, know-it-all friend.

There's something especially beautiful about London in the light of the setting sun after a long Summer's day. The streets – pierced with shards of orange light and shafts of shadow – are filled with smiling people, their shoulders still a little slack after shedding the stress accumulated during the day. Couples stroll at ease, pleased with each other's company. Friends chat about the pubs they're going to and have been to on other evenings. Mothers laugh at their scampering children, or coo over the younger ones that have tired themselves out – more worryingly, a dad is seen rescuing his young daughter from dangerously close to the edge of a bridge, where her curiosity has brought her.

See how no one rushes now like they did during the day – even the trains trundle across the bridges with less urgency. Over there, by the Tube station, an immigrant languidly hands out free London newspapers. Every now and then, a white man in a suit takes one. For some reason, that always seems to be how it works: in stilted English, the vendor chants his simple sales pitch he learned parrot-fashion, and once in a while his hook catches a fish that wants to feel (and look) ever so slightly more informed about events in London and the world. This particular suit has a young blonde on his arm, and says, as he takes a paper, “No, the reason I haven't divorced her yet is -” But the rest is snatched away on the wind, carried off to some other person's ears, one more part of one more story lost in the great melting-pot of humanity that is this great, sprawling city. We'll never know.

It's certainly been a melting-pot today, the air close and the sun bright. Clothes have been light and bright, if they were there at all. Summer, in all its glory – not typical British rained-out glory, but proper sunshine-pumping, Pimm's and lemonade glory. Look, all along the South Bank, under the London Eye and between the half dozen bridges, people enjoying themselves as only young people can. Strapping lads zip past on bikes, their shirts around their waists. Women lie sunbathing while the option's still there, ready to hit the town later on. Some watch as a bunch of lads muck about in a speedboat on the Thames. One of them's fallen in and is splashing about up to his waist – he and everyone else have a laugh – naturally he gets heckled mercilessly by his mates when they pick him up and pull away. In the distance a woman starts to sing an Italian operatic aria, her voice carrying beautifully through the streets and across the tiny waves of the river. It's all good, clean fun (except for the chap who fell into the Thames, that wasn't very clean).

It's easy to see why so many poets and arty-types love and have loved this city.

A History of Opposition - from November 2009's Hullfire

2009-11-06T19:58:00.009Z

Art has a long history of undermining the more assertive aspects of state control. Partly, that's because the artist is often in an ideal position to observe the workings of a state system and is the sort of person most able and likely to articulate their opinions. An artist is often on the fringes of society, while members of the government support the status quo because it places them in prominent positions. Naturally, if the state's leaders benefit from the way things work, they won't be keen on supporting external reformers. Partly, art that disagrees has much more to say than art that complies with the status quo.

Partly though, that undermining attitude springs from the fact that art and state authority are fundamentally opposed, even in fairly liberal societies. A state system, by its very nature, likes conformity – it prefers all its subjects to be just that: subjects. If everybody does as they're told, a state's job is made much easier. So state systems tend to encourage rigidity and fixed ways of working. Art, on the other hand, likes individuality – it prefers flair and originality. Art aims to liberate people, freeing their minds and encouraging new ideas and new thoughts. It inspires a level of personal freedom that not all state systems are comfortable with. Notoriously 'difficult' playwright Howard Barker described this in 1986 when he wrote in The Guardian that 'Art is a problem. The man or woman who exposes himself to art exposes himself to another problem.' - and state systems try to avoid and/or suppress problems when they can.

Few states provide a better example of this than the old USSR, which cracked down on any form of dissent. Artists came under especially heavy fire, many facing long prison stretches for criticising the government. Those that collaborated had to conform to Stalin's brand of social realism, those that didn't could expect severe treatment.

It's only a few months since the theatre world mourned the passing of one of its most active political campaigners, Augusto Boal. He became famous for developing a type of theatre called the Theatre of the Oppressed, which aimed to involve the ordinary people far more than anything that had gone before. Boal disliked the term 'spectator', and didn't want anyone to passively watch his theatre – instead, he wanted the audience to get up and be involved, taking the part of the actors and making decisions for themselves about the course of the show. These so-called 'spectactors' were allowed great freedom of thought and expression.

Another politically-active theatre practitioner who aimed to challenge authoritarian systems was the Marxist Bertolt Brecht. Like Boal, he formulated a new style of theatre to fire up the minds of his audience and to liberate his art from the standards imposed by the past. His 'epic theatre' stripped away all the conventions of traditional acting and encouraged an intellectual rather than emotional connection between audience and performer. Meanwhile the stories of his plays criticised and satirised the state of politics in his native Germany (especially the rise of Nazism) and promoted much more socialist ideals. Interestingly, both men were politically left-wing and did their most famous work in exile – more evidence of states favouring the status quo over reformers.

Art also performs an important public service in providing a chance for us, the people, to laugh at our leaders (a service performed by playwrights from ancient Greece through to the modern day), even (especially) in legitimate, non-authoritarian states. Recently, someone told me it was scary that people laughed so much at George W. Bush, considering that he was the leader of the free world and so on. But actually, it would be scarier if we weren't allowed to laugh at him. Under Elizabeth I satirical poetry was made illegal, and many playwrights sailed very close to the wind with their writing – some even facing execution. When we're no longer allowed to laugh at our leaders, they have too much power – and leaders who ban mockery can easily extend that ban to criticism and all forms of opposition; Barker's Guardian article goes on to say that 'Nothing can be satirised in the authoritarian state'. As such, satire like Bremner, Bird & Fortune and Spitting Image function as barometers of public opinion and a means of holding politicians to account, venting the anger of the satirist (and the public) in non-violent ways.

The USSR was right to worry about oppositional writers; one oft-imprisoned Czech writer, Vaclav Havel, became a leading light in the 'Velvet Revolution', which eventually brought about an independent Czechoslovakia with Havel as its first democratically-elected President. Art isn't merely a voice for freedom, but a force of liberation.

Book Review - Dragon's Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution, by Michael Wilding

2009-11-06T19:34:00.003Z

Michael Wilding's opening sentence sets the scene early on – a reference to a cannonball from the seventeenth century Civil War Battle of Worcester makes it clear that Wilding's brand of criticism is going to be rooted in the events surrounding Milton, Browne, Butler and Marvell. Having told us that critics like T S Eliot have dehistoricised and depoliticised Milton, Wilding aims to restore the poet to his rightful place. He does this by re-examining Milton's poetry through the filter of his earlier, pre-Republic, prose. By re-applying the historical and political contexts to Milton, a political radical very much of his time, Wilding fulfils the brief of his final chapter heading and reclaims the radical Milton.

Abigail's Party @ Hull Truck

2009-10-21T16:49:00.005+01:00

Talk about onstage drug-taking!

Mike Leigh's 1977 play contains copious amounts of drug consumption – all legal, I hasten to add. What really stands out is the cloud of tobacco smoke that settles over the stage during the two hours or so of this very suburban comedy of manners.

It's not just the seventies outfits and obsession with social one-upmanship with house prices that date this play. For some reason, the bygone age is irresistibly conjured by the mere fact of people smoking indoors so very casually. Nothing brings home a public smoking ban quite like several people coolly and deliberately flouting it (the actors, not the characters, of course; they've no concept of any harm from (passive or active) smoking).

But, though the most noticeable, the fags aren't the only drugs onstage. It's the fags that warrant the warnings in the theatre's foyer, but each of Leigh's five finely-drawn characters always has a drink on the go. Between them – and especially Pauline Simpson's charmingly naïve Angie – they down enough booze to sink more than just a single battleship. In fairness, they probably need a stiff drink (or four) to get through the party and cope with Amie Taylor's strident, acerbic hostess, Beverly.

The middle-class urbanites small talk their way through less raucous – though more dangerous and drink-fuelled – a party than that of Abigail, the teenager hosting her party down the road. At times, her unseen party sounds more exciting, but I bet it has nothing on the drama at Beverley's.

When I reviewed a performance of this play a few years ago, I saw it as a stultifying, dull script that could only appeal to a generous audience who'd attended similar parties in their younger days (decades ago). But the amateurs of Hessle Theatre Company utterly redeem Leigh's play, presenting a sparkling, perceptive comedy that appeals to the youngest and oldest of the audience. This is a bunch of performers who understand the comedy of Leigh's play far better than the professionals I saw a few years ago. They draw laughs from quiet little moments and facial expressions – perfectly judged moments of social interaction – as much as from their excellent delivery of the punchlines. They let the script breathe, allowing time for the laughter, but not often at the expense of pace.

This company contains amateurs with great skill, whose care and dedication to their craft is evident. It can be seen not only in the detailed set, which is pitched beautifully at a sense of suburban pretension and ostentation, but in the quality of acting. Of particular note is Martin Beaumont as Beverley's put-upon estate agent husband, Laurence. A master of trying to maintain social dignity balanced with the husband resisting (vainly) domination by his wife, Beaumont's Laurence is a joy. His relationship with Beverley is a familiar one, well-evoked , of the couple politely vying for control. That he looks and sounds like a younger Ian Hislop only adds to his comic power.

Hessle Theatre Company has given Hull an invigorating dose of modern classic drama, and for that they are to be applauded; it's exactly what the best regional theatre should be doing.