Ben Brown
Three Days in May
Trafalgar Studios, London, until 3rd March

…

What if, instead of prolonging England’s involvement in World War II, Winston Churchill and his war-cabinet had quietly met with Hitler to negotiate a quasi peace treaty brokered by Mussolini? This sounds like the set-up to a bad joke one hears at a cocktail party (“a rabbi, a priest, and a minister walk into a bar…”), yet the plausibility of just such a meeting is the crux of Ben Brown’s play Three Days In May.

After an opening scene in which the war cabinet members are shown literally on bended knee at Westminster Abbey on May 26th, 1940 (The National Day of Prayer), the play introduces a nerve-wracked French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud (Timothy Knightley), who tries to coax Churchill (Warren Clarke) to negotiate with Hitler. What ensues is a dovetailing of research and imagination, as Brown explores the three days Churchill and his cabinet supposedly “wobbled”, to use the phrase of the play’s narrator, Cabinet Secretary Jock Colville (James Alper).

However, rather than portraying a wobbling Churchill, Brown depicts a skilled politician who cajoles, appeases and sways an adamant Lord Halifax (Jeremy Clyde) who is threatening resignation. So too, we observe an ailing Neville Chamberlain (Robert Demeger), recently resigned from his role as Prime Minister but still inhabiting 10 Downing Street, and suffering under the pressure of a looming catastrophe (namely the 250,000 English soldiers stranded at Dunkirk). Director Alan Strachan explores the nuances of men who quite literally held the weight of the world in their hands.

The play is an observation of the politics of relationships as well as a dramatized history lesson. A private scene between Chamberlain and Churchill focuses on their personal war – a heated exchange in which each man alternately upstages the other – but one that concludes with the pair uniting, centre stage; Chamberlain shows regret for his Munich Pact and acknowledges his faults, while Churchill forfeits his own pride to ask Chamberlain for support. Whether this is staged humility or not, the scene is poignant at the very least for illustrating the “dance” of two men setting their hubris and political differences aside to unite in a common cause.

Seventy-two years after the event it seems absurd to even imagine England negotiating with Hitler. But on May 27th, 1940, Lord Halifax viewed parley as the way to spare countless men’s lives, and somehow the audience is led to sympathise with him in the first act. Halifax is initially rational, not a cowardly capitulator. The play introduces a silent, tormented and emotional Churchill as counter to the composed and resolute Halifax, whose courageous tranquility in a time of imminent disaster, momentarily lures the audience into considering the outrageous plea bargain. Years after the fact, would an audience think Halifax’s plea bargain is smart? Can we, when we know the outcome of the war and the evil of Hitler, momentarily suspend disbelief and see sense in the negotiations?

Brown’s play is an exploration of human character in the face of fear. Perhaps the audience initially supports Halifax because they are tempted by his calm dominance over Churchill’s distraught ambivalence, which could also be read as a sly manipulative tactic later. Thus, the play skillfully forces individuals to question their own rational ability to make decisions in times of conflict – does one respond to emotion or to facts? How does one know he is making a sound choice?

If we divorce the play from a specific war, and view it as an observation of those who make the final call, it is strikingly relevant. In 2012, in the wake of the Arab Spring and the recent Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, events engineered via Twitter-feeds and Facebook postings, Churchill’s three days of deliberation seem an eternity. Social media has arguably transferred power from the individual to the masses in the click of a mouse. At the end of Three Days In May, Stalin’s famous words about Churchill are quoted: “The courage of one man changed the history of the world”, and this raises the central question: could there be one leader in today’s world who could change the course of history in three days? Or is the legacy of Churchill a marker of a time and clime that will never exist again? Ben Brown’s smartly-crafted play, chronicles this suggestion with dramatic ingenuity, and we the viewers are left to make the answer.

Leah Novak is reading English Literature at Worcester College. She is visiting from Trinity College, Connecticut.

My review of music in 2011 starts in a very odd place: 2007. It’s a warm April evening in Bristol and my friend Joe and I have just left a gig that we both agree was pretty awesome. The artist in question, Frank Turner, is so small he sells his own merchandise. I mean, in person. So when he goads the audience into giving his young supporting artist, Jay Jay Pistolet, a hug should we see him afterwards, Joe and I are happy to oblige. Pistolet – aka Justin Haywood Young – is a shy figure, blown over by our complements.

“You guys really liked it?” He seems genuinely surprised.

“You’re way better than Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly.” I tell him.

“He’ll be even more famous than Frank Turner one day” Joe predicts as we leave. I laughed.

But in 2011 that wasn’t so low a bar to beat. Turner’s fourth album England Keep My Bones charted at number twelve, and would have gone top ten on a less busy week. Pistolet stormed it. Except now he wasn’t Pistolet, but simple Haywood Young, front man of buzz-backlash-chip-paper beat combo The Vaccines.

The ascension of The Vaccines in 2011 is important for a load of reasons that have little to do with the music they actually made. It is important because it marks the point when music criticism and music fell off one another’s hinges. To the critics, The Vaccines were the hollow centre of a wall of buzz and propaganda. They reviewed each other’s hype and the scores came in negative. Within a few months The Vaccines went from the saviours of guitar music to the signatories on its death warrant, and they barely lifted a plectrum. In the meantime, bedroom stereos and tube train iPods and laptop speakers pumped out the good clean fun of a simple, well made rock album.

Music criticism needed to tighten its grip. Enter Lana Del Rey.

Lana Del Rey as a cultural entity is her criticism. She is embedded in it, caked in it, wears it like Lady Gaga does a meat dress. Except that Lana Del Rey never changes and that dress is starting to fester and stink. She is a canvas so blank that any costume rested: indie hero, media darling, reviled hate-figure, white noise. She is, in other words, the Nick Clegg of music.

Lana Del Rey and The Vaccines have something else in common, one of the defining aspects of musical content in 2011: retroism. And something more than retroism: instant nostalgia, self-historicising. The soundtrack to the Year of the Pop Reunion. Robbie Williams even rejoined Take That as they embarked on their biggest stadium tour yet, the acrobatic extravaganza Progress Live, bigger, grander and more regal than any royal progress in history. Some progress.

Yet it was this communal looking backwards that also spurred things forward and the music that was most invested in the past was some of the most artistically successful.

In March Jon Boden finished his year-long A Folk Song a Day project, with three hundred and sixty-five recordings in the can. Peggy Seeger re-emerged in the UK under cover of darkness and sat incognito in the back of folk clubs for months, lamenting the lack of unaccompanied singers. But it finally took a choir master to get the nation in tune and Gareth Malone took communal singing to Christmas number one, with the Military Wives seeing off the big business of Little Mix.

In Yorkshire, Eliza Carthy put folk in orbit around motown and jazz on Neptune. In France, Chilly Gonzales mixed hip-hop and classical as they’ve never been mixed before. People who aren’t South African started to hear of Spoek Mathambo, the man whose mixes sound like a life support machine hooked up to a kwaito drum band. In America, Nicki Minaj turned back to hip-hop and ‘Super Bass’ was the international smash hit anthem of the summer.

Let England Shake by P J Harvey won the Mercury Prize. Adele persisted.

But here are three other, far more important things that happened, somewhere out of sight:

A thirteen year old girl doodled Justin Bieber’s name in hearts on her school notebook.

A fifteen year old boy lost himself in the communal solipsism of a hardcore mosh pit.

And a couple of kids left a gig in a former industrial city. “Those bands will be famous one day” one of them says. The other one probably laughed.

Tom Moyser studied English at St Edmund Hall. He graduated in 2011.

The Maccabees
Given to the Wild
Fiction, January 2012

…

…

With typical hyperbole, the NME last month described Given to the Wild by The Maccabees as “the first classic album of 2012”. “By casting themselves to the flames”, the magazine’s reviewer wrote, the band “have forged an identity more purely them than ever”. Another review for The Fly magazine talked about the record’s “sweeping stamp of maturity” and “affective emotion”.

This is not the place to draw attention to the preponderance of tautology and confused writing in the British music press. However, it might be worth considering exactly what The Maccabees’ supposed mature classicism amounts to. Indeed, if Given to the Wild is truly a definitive summary of British alternative rock music in 2012, then we should be able to use it to compile a list of the genre’s key tenets.

With this thought in mind, The Oxonian Review has examined the album, and is able to identify the following Five Pillars of 2012 British Indie:

1) Vocal affectation. Something strange has happened to the voices of the nation’s youth. Maccabees frontman Orlando Weeks yelps lyrics rather than sings them, as though drawing attention to the “idiosyncrasy” we all know is a clear sign that we are in the presence of Serious Pop Music. Perhaps this is what The Fly means by “affective emotion”. It’s a sort of meta-singing, an emotional emotion, an attempt to transcend the art of song by focusing solely on the human voice as an instrument of exquisite affectation. In case you weren’t aware already, Given to the Wild is a high-concept project.

2) Camouflaged poshness. The second point is closely related to the first. Privately-educated upper-middle-class people from London like The Maccabees have probably always talked in braying, nasal tones. But to enter the elite of 2012 British Indie, Given to the Wild suggests, we must combine a pedigree of indoctrinated R.P. grandiloquence with gestures at gritty cockney bathos. The result is a vocal delivery and overall aesthetic that conjures images of Kate Middleton doing a Jamie Oliver impersonation. The Maccabees like cricket and rugby rather than football, but their clever balance of exaggerated parochialism and urban pluck helps to paper over such privileged credentials.

3) Pastiche and formal repetitiveness. In the eyes of the NME, Given to the Wild represents “a brave sci-fi dawn”. However, without wishing to pour scorn on this succinct conflation of several different clichés, I would like to urge that scepticism be applied to hopes of a Maccabees-led futurist insurgency. Sadly I could detect no real signs of innovation within the formal confines of the album, only composite pastiches of the last thirty years of alternative rock music, though there were occasional attempts to depart from post-Libertines conservatism into the territory of hipster dilletantism. This may have been “the Wild” referred to in the title.

4) The persistence of the guitar band mythos. To give credit where credit is due, at times during the course of the album it seemed as though that The Maccabees were trying to do something genuinely progressive. However, there will inevitably be something self-defeating about attempting to move on from a culture of guitar-band commercialism when you are still being packaged and sold as an orthodox guitar band on a Universal Music Group subsidiary label. As far as making an avant-garde statement goes, I felt the band were severely hampered in this respect.

5) The lack of political engagement/any discernible worldview whatsoever. Opinion varies widely on the desirability or otherwise of political art. But surely everyone would agree that some sort of ethos or attitude to life on the part of the artist is an important part of aesthetic experience, especially in an “independent” art form with a proud heritage of counter-cultural dissent. Does Given to the Wild come with a discernible philosophy attached? Or even a thought or two about something or other? A band with a name as richly allusive as The Maccabees seems to promise a re-engagement with vital issues like religion, politics, and cultural history. However, a quick glance at Wikipedia undermines hopes of uncovering a Maccabees worldview: “The band came up with the name by flicking through the Bible and picking out a random word”. Somewhere in this metaphor of meaninglessness is the Fifth Pillar of British Indie in 2012.

Alex Niven is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at St John’s College, Oxford. Alex is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.

……………………………………………………………………………………………

◄ Back

Next ►

Picture 1 of 22

Soft drinks and cola are ubiquitous in the neighborhood, with many residents drinking at least two cups per day.

……………………………………………………………………………………………

Maputo, Mozambique: Mafalala Bairro is one of about 50 slum suburbs that radiate outward from the bustling concrete downtown of Mozambique’s capital city. Mafalala is Maputo’s oldest informal settlement. To meander along its narrow pathways is to trace the footsteps of numerous national heroes. An incubator of the struggle for independence that is often compared to South Africa’s Soweto, Mafalala consists of labyrinthine alleyways that once surged with anti-colonial resistance. Prior to the end of Portuguese rule, bold poets Noémia de Sousa and José Craveirinha met clandestinely in Mafalala’s haphazard zinc shelters. The neighborhood was also home to Mozambique’s first two presidents, revolutionary fighters Samora Machel and Joaquim Chissano.

A century before Mozambique’s independence, migrants from northern Mozambique and the Comoros Islands introduced rituals called nifalala—meaning “music and dance”—to Mafalala, and the neighborhood never again knew silence. Today, women swathed in capulana cloths and bearing white mussiro-painted faces rehearse Tufo-style routines; teenagers carefully study Azagaia’s socially conscious rap songs blaring from shop speakers; the soulful melodies of Bryan Adams and Phil Collins waft without irony from yards where women pin up laundry; and electric bass vibrates through the walls of Lima’s Bar, where men unwind after the day’s toils.

In Mafalala, the main thoroughfare bursts alive early each morning as women and men set off for ganho-ganho, or grinding itineraries of labor, in the ever-expanding informal economy. Lighthearted chatter in the marketplace and neighbourly drop-ins throughout the afternoon hardly betray the many daily challenges that wear heavily on cheery demeanours. Mozambique is one of the poorest countries in the world, where half of the population falls below the poverty line even in urban areas. The vast majority of Mafalala possesses little sanitation, basic electricity, and few social services. During the rainy season, flooding causes pit latrines to overflow, contaminating the streets as waste flows to open sewers.

Most pressingly, Maputo has the highest cost of living in the country. In September 2010, a price spike in bread was compounded with the elevated cost of fuel and public transport fares. Riots ignited in the avenues along Mafalala’s perimeter, leading to ten deaths and hundreds of injuries after police intervention. Very few of the neighborhood’s impoverished residents have access to land plots, therefore the majority of their income is spent on food purchases. Preparing street food and setting up bancas, or foodstands, have become common ways to supplement incomes. Yet, the rise in food price continues to compromise poor urban dwellers’ ability to purchase quality foods for healthy eating. Growing dependence on cheap alcohol, fried foods, and new processed snacks manufactured in Mozambique exacerbates malnutrition, which paradoxically manifests as both hunger and rising obesity.

While Mozambique remains a predominantly rural country, its urban centres are rapidly expanding, as is the case across Southern Africa. 70% of all urban residents in the region currently reside in informal housing, and Southern Africa will be nearly 75% urbanized by 2050. The ongoing urbanization of poverty necessitates increased attention to the vulnerabilities that urban life brings. Uncertainty regarding the day’s wages and obstacles to adequate nutrition characterize the everyday reality of Maputo’s urban poor.

Nonetheless, vibrant colours, ardent rhythms, and a profound sense of hope permeate the people who call this neighborhood home.

Poet José Craveirinha once wrote of Mafalala:
Só tambor ecoando como a canção da força e da vida

Só tambor noite e dia

dia e noite só tambor

até à consumação da grande festa do batuque!

Oh velho Deus dos homens

deixa-me ser tambor

só tambor!

Only drum echoing the song of strength and life
Only drum night and day
Day and night only drum
Until the consummation of the great dancing feast!
Oh old God of men
Let me be a drum
Only drum!

Serena Stein is an anthropologist and aspiring photographer. She is completing her MPhil in International Development at St Antony’s College, Oxford. In 2011, Serena spent several months living in Maputo, Mozambique where she joined a Tufo dance troupe in Mafalala while researching urban food consumption, prices, and vulnerability. Serena founded Oxford’s Food Security Forum in 2010.

Review of the Year: 2011 in Film

Franchises dominated cinemas in 2011; Harry Potter, Pirates, Transformers, Kung Fu Panda, Twilight bestrode the year. This is perhaps unsurprising in times of economic turmoil. Sequels and reboots are viewed by studios as reliable box-office hits. However, one franchise reboot, rather than causing the critical and financial splash of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, X-Men: First Class or Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, passed almost unnoticed across the cinematic radar.

2011 saw the return of Conan the Barbarian with Jason Momoa filling the loincloth. However, the cinematic landscape appears to have changed in the 29 years since Arnie’s iconic turn as everyone’s favourite Cimmerian. His version took $100 million worldwide whereas the recent franchise reboot has taken a relatively poultry $21 million. Why such a vast discrepancy?

One answer is Frank Sinatra.

In 1968, the big screen adaption of Roger Thorp’s novel The Detective saw Frank Sinatra cast in the lead. He delivered one of his finer acting performances, The Hollywood Reporter would comment: “Sinatra has honed his laconic, hip veneer to the point of maximum credibility.” When, in the 1980s, the idea of filming the sequel Nothing Lasts Forever was floated, the producers naturally approached Sinatra to reprise his role. His decision to turn them down, altered cinematic history and shaped our viewing in 2011.

As Nothing Lasts Forever was no longer viable as a sequel some alterations were needed. A wife rather than daughter provided the motivation for our eponymous detective to fly to Los Angeles. His name too had to be changed; Detective Joe Leland was replaced by John McClane. A role to be played by a young actor named Walter Bruce Willis. That’s right. Nothing Lasts Forever became Die Hard, one of 1988′s biggest hits. Through this film Director John McTiernan, composer Michael Kamen and second-choice actor Bruce Willis were to launch a new kind of action hero that would change cinema forever.

Superficially Die Hard bears all the hallmarks of the Arnie and Stallone films that had dominated the 1980s; Man in vest, with gun, background of fire, suitably macho title written in red. It is easy to see the audience they were pitching for. However, Die Hard is more than a two-dimensional cop thriller. McTiernan’s masterstroke was to make terrorist Hans Gruber, played perfectly by Alan Rickman, the protagonist. The best lines, suave gestures and stirring orchestral accompaniment go to Gruber. As a result, the audience end up rooting for the baddie and McClane is resigned to a more unimpressive supporting role. Willis doesn’t even get to wear shoes for the majority of the film. Composer Michael Kamen reinforced this image through a bold decision to give our “hero” no musical underscore at all. Silence only serves to highlight McClane’s paranoid babbling and sense of isolation. Yet, against all the odds, John McClane saves the day.

How though, is this late 80s film relevant to 2011 and Conan’s recent crushing at the box-office? Well, Die Hard was a highly successful and, more importantly, influential film. It took $140 million dollars worldwide and many subsequent films were described as “Die Hard on a …”. Insert “bus” for Speed, “island” for The Rock, a “ship” for Under Siege or even “house” for Home Alone. This became such a prevalent school of thought that Empire even ran a feature in the 90s discussing whether various films had “done a Die Hard”. McClane fed into the Reaganite “little man” politics of the day and became the new model for the hero and acted as a precursor to many of the most popular characters in cinema today.

Much like the plot of a movie, the lesser leading man has risen to triumph over the herculean heroes of the 1980s. Action movies were first to tumble. Unlikely protagonists such as computer hacker Thomas A. Anderson, aka Neo, from 1999′s The Matrix were now saving the world. During the Noughties Willis’ heirs became more numerous and appeared in a wider variety of films. Shaun of the Dead, The Constant Gardener and Casino Royale all have human, fallible leading men. 2011 has seen reappearances from the inept Captain Jack Sparrow, Po the Panda and Jonny English. All are logical extremes of this model. Even brand- new sub-genres such as the women-centric comedy have adopted the Beta male. In this summer’s top comedy Bridesmaids, Kristen Wiig’s character chooses The IT Crowd’s Chris O’Dowd over Mad Men’s own John Hamm.

2011 seemed to see this phenomenon peak. In a year of franchises this is to be expected. If a sequel is to be successful then a narrative needs to reduce the protagonist from the status as hero at the end of the previous film to zero during the opening of the second instalment. This is a transition managed perfectly in Kung Fu Panda 2, a rare sequel better than the original, by introducing gun-powder as the foil to Po’s Kung Fu. This opens up a new story arc. If, because of financial constraints, studios are producing almost exclusively sequels are super-heroic origin stories then this beta-alpha narrative fits the bill for the majority of releases. Unfortunately for Mamoa, Conan does not fit this model. The grunting alpha-male lead is a thing of the past. Watch out for John Carpter of Mars to flop for similar reasons next year.

This has been a retro year, defined by the eighties, but this has nothing to do with androgynous leading men, synth-pop or big hair (although TinTin, Drive and Peter Sarsgaard’s ludicrous mop and moustache combination in The Green Lantern do fit these stereotypes eerily well). Hollywood’s reaction to the financial crisis, that many economists would claim had its roots in the deregulation of the stock-exchange, is to make movies that fit our favourite narrative, also a product of the eighties. The time of Sinatra is long past. But the time of Bruce Willis is still with us.

Sam Poppleton studies music at The Queen’s College.

Motion Sickness of Time Travel
Seeping Through the Veil of the Unconscious
Digitalis, August 2010

…

…

My first experience of MSOTT, named for a phrase from William Burroughs’ novel, The Soft Machine, was the sublime “Electric Rain” mix for mnml ssgs. The tracklist reads like a who’s who of the synth world, made up entirely of low-fi gems released in criminally small quantities on CD-R and cassette. Seeping was originally produced as a run of 80 tapes in 2010 and was repressed in similarly small numbers by Digitalis in 2011.

Rachel Evans, the goddess behind the moniker, told me that “you can afford to release tapes more frequently and in smaller numbers, unlike records which have a significantly longer turn-around time and don’t make sense to release in small quantities.” But, due to its popularity it was eventually pressed on vinyl. I was extremely lucky to get hold of the third edition (white vinyl, catalogue no. ‘digiv032′, for all the trainspotters). It is quite simply the most beautiful, emotive hour of music I have ever heard.

Evans is clearly influenced by nature and the mysticism of the forest; reflections from her log cabin studio in LaGrange, Georgia. The tracks feel organic. Not acoustic, but, equally, not purely electronic. Evans laments in her Siren tones over hazy kosmische pulses, and a guitar can even be heard on “Mental Projection”. You can never quite decipher what she says, but the vocals transmogrify the sounsdcapes into something more accessible and human than her peers’ offerings. Evans’ aim with MSOTT was to make her voice sound as beautiful as possible. The voice here is the music. The synths are extra. And the synths themselves are incredible.

Considering Seeping is a collection of six tracks, each of unique character, there is a surprising coherency to the album. Evans wrote Seeping, she says, “a few days after I graduated from college in one sitting and [my husband] Grant said I should send it to somebody.” You are aware of the beginnings and ends, but in the middle you float, unaware of the passing of time. The album isn’t warm, uplifting ambience, nor is it dark, soul-destroying drone. Instead, it strikes a perfect balance along the spectrum, alighting somewhere near melancholy.

Harry Scholes studies biochemistry at Oriel College.

Steve McQueen
Shame
13 January 2012

…

…

Shame is an adult film. That is, it’s a mature piece of cinema that deals with issues and emotions as part of a spectrum rather than providing clear cut answers. There is ‘no War Horse sunset’ as director Steve McQueen puts it. Instead, it is a painful insight into the cyclical nature of addiction.

Shame deals with sex addiction, and the dominant role it plays in the life of New Yorker Brandon (Michael Fassbender) as well as the effect it has on those around him, notably his sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) and colleagues. A condition that could have been comic in a more childish film is treated with pity and truth. It is this controversial subject matter that gives the film its greatest power. Unlike other films about addiction such as Trainspotting or Requiem for a Dream which deal with substance abuse, not just a topic, but a set of processes and urges that the majority of audience members will be unfamiliar with, the subject of sex and relationships is something to which everyone watching can empathise. As a viewer you are in dialogue with Brandon and question your own actions in relation to his.

The medium of the film is dictated by the narrative, just as it is in other recent releases; Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s 3D film which deals with the three dimensional dawn of cinema, and The Artist, a black and white silent movie which revolves around the shift to ‘talkies’ in the late 1920s. Similarly, Shame, a film about a sex addict, obviously contains sexually explicit material. But McQueen’s direction removes any sense of titillation from the picture and prevents sex addiction being scoffed at. The BBFC’s 18 certificate is justified but should not deter those interested in a serious, challenging film.

Shame, like sex, is about both control and intimacy. Brandon is a high-functioning addict who has tightly compartmentalised his life; he controls he relationships with women, often by paying for them, always avoiding any sense of intimacy, and is able to do so through the instant access granted by the internet and the never-sleeping New York City. Glenn Gould’s highly visceral but equally poised recordings of the Bach Goldberg Variations are not only the music that accompanies Brandon but also the music he chooses to listen to, as if Brandon’s power of control extends to the film itself. The arrival of Sissy changes all of this. She is the unpredictable, jazz singing, element. Her actions are not part of any regimen; she brings men back to Brandon’s apartment and puts funk on his record player. Her improvisation does not fit into Brandon’s controlled world.

This tension raises the problem of intimacy. Both characters’ boundaries are confused, Brandon incapable of connecting with people except physically, Sissy reaching out to everyone and anyone. Former visual artist McQueen’s direction involves the audience in this struggle. The art-house techniques he utilises are beautiful in their own right but the fact that McQueen has a voice and vision with which to martial these resources leads to a powerful viewing experience. His achingly long shots create a crucible within which personal connection is made to feel uncomfortable; the claustrophobia of Sissy singing New York, New York in a club, Brandon’s attempt to break from his cycle by going on a real date (forgoing control of his own freewill) and his various physical reactions to this inability to handle intimacy are all captured in single takes.

This generates a kind of painful but also familiar realism. Life doesn’t cut to the highlights of a date, it doesn’t play music in the silences in conversations, few human interactions are unambiguous. Despite its many abstract elements, not to mention its provocative subject matter, Shame is most deeply interested in the grey areas of ordinary lives.

Sam Poppleton studies music at The Queen’s College.

Diagrams
Black Light
Full Time Hobby, January 2012

…

…

Black Light is the debut solo album from former Tuung singer and songwriter Sam Genders, now recording as Diagrams, a name that he hopes suggests the “crisp, minimalist pop music” that makes up this album. As a concept Diagrams works well, and though the ideas flow freely, and some miss the mark, the songs cohere thanks to Genders’ honeyed vocals.

“Ghost Lit” is a melancholy opener, with blippy synths and jazzy guitar overlaid onto a conventional indie-rock chord pattern. As it builds, Diagrams’ sonic hallmarks become clear: half-synthetic string orchestras, those ubiquitous Futureheads harmonies and an ear for sentimentality – Genders is never afraid to milk a melody.

Lead single “Tall Buildings” is more lively, its gentle funkiness and breathy strings recalling Prefab Sprout. It’s hooky too, and a commitment to pop melodies is what dominates this debut. More curious are some of the textures and forms that he employs: the initially skittish “Mills” seems to feature an uncredited guest appearance from Rick Wakeman, rocking out over the outro, while “Antelope”’s time signature changes suggest King Crimson playing chamber pop. Or perhaps The Minutemen with Peter Gabriel on flute. This is the most charming song on the record, and its quickly-changing, concise arrangement rewards repeat plays. This fractured danceability gives way to the easy sway of the title track, powered by the Graceland-esque rhythms popularised by Vampire Weekend, and now adopted by every second indie band. We’re in familiar territory, but it ambles along well enough, propped up by those ear-catching synths and a hummable refrain.

“Animals” occupies much the same sound-world– all palm-muted Telecasters and boomy toms – but it’s set in 7/4, and the bridge sounds like Aphex Twin. Sadly though, this oddness fails to fully counteract the sugary sweet refrain “I never believed in love ‘til now”, and when everything collapses into the sound of a brass band, it’s all a bit too much. “Peninsula”, however, is an entirely lovely closer. It’s driving, it’s sentimental and it does sound a bit like Elbow, but the conclusion thrills as the drumming grows ever more frantic and a discordant synth threatens to overwhelm those “uh-oh” vocals.

A likeable, tune-packed debut then, that marries eloquent rhythms to a glossy, bells-and-whistles production – Genders has crafted a winsome, eclectic album, unified by his mathematical concept and, if you can forgive its tweeness, there’s plenty to enjoy here.

Mike Smith plays and teaches guitar. He is studying for an MA in Music at Oxford Brookes University.

Margaret Litvin
Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost
Princeton University Press, 2011
280 pages.
£24.95
ISBN: 9780691137803

…

…

“Hamlet is an Arab, despite his European clothing, and he is a contemporary despite the swords and castles and ghosts.” This sentence, from the programme notes to a 1973 Syrian adaptation of Hamlet, summarises the phenomenon Margaret Litvin sets out to address. Since the 1960s Shakespeare’s hero has captivated the political as well as the theatrical imagination of the Arab world, as he no longer captivates the English-speaking world. He has come to seem a figure perhaps uniquely suited to express the fraught predicament of the Arab people, whose very existence has often seemed to be under threat, as disasters from the 1948 and 1967 defeats by Israel to the 2003 invasion of Iraq “raised the spectre of national fragmentation or extinction”, in Edward Said’s words. Quoted by liberals, nationalists and Islamists, TV pundits and literary essayists, Hamlet’s most famous line, “to be or not to be”, resonates across the Arab world as a call to arms, a crisis, a dilemma, an opportunity finally and belatedly to be.

No respecter of the boundaries of academic disciplines, Litvin succeeds in describing the Arab Hamlet as a political and sociological phenomenon, without ever losing her grasp on the aesthetic. She is also refreshingly free from literary theory orthodoxies: her explanatory metaphors remain metaphors rather than becoming a strict theoretical framework. Rather, in engaging and lucid prose, she tells a story, and it is a compelling one. The tale of the Arab Hamlet, properly speaking, begins in the mid-1960s, at the height of Nasserism, when the eyes of the world were on Egypt. Influences from across the world—French-influenced adaptations, Kozintsev’s Soviet film version, Olivier’s English one, and the opinions of German, French, Russian, as well as English critics—provided the context for al-Sayyid Bidayr’s grand, classical production of Hamlet, designed to show that the Arabs could do Shakespeare. Thereafter, the Arab Hamlet tradition became more resolutely local. Through a series of original adaptations and rewritings, the play became part of an Arab tradition of political and “post-political” drama, drawing on global references but concerned with Arab dramas and dilemmas far more than Western ones. This, as Litvin reads it, was not a case of “writing back” to the dominant metropolis—in classic post-colonial theory fashion—but of Hamlet going native, becoming spliced into an Arab dramatic tradition and giving it a series of new twists.

Thus allegorical adaptations of Hamlet in the 1960s and early 1970s cast the prince as a revolutionary in a corrupt world: “the time is out of joint” and Hamlet is “born to set it right”. Litvin draws an apt parallel with the play-within-a-play that Hamlet stages before usurping his uncle Claudius. Like Hamlet’s ”The Mousetrap“, allegorical Hamlets were designed to “catch the conscience” of Arab rulers, for in the heyday of Arab nationalism there was a belief that leaders like Nasser, tyrannical enough to censor plays, were also sensitive enough to understand criticism. After the defeat by Israel in 1967, a huge blow to the status and self-confidence of Arab governments, and the death of Nasser in 1970, political plays tried increasingly to “catch the conscience” of public opinion by exposing their rulers’ injustice. The dead father, calling the Arab hero Hamlet to action, was now reminiscent of the ghost of Nasser and his dreams of an Arab nation unified and strong.

But from the mid-1970s the mood grew altogether darker. There was a growing sense of a political order deaf to irony, intractable to moral pleas, and yet utterly secure in its position. Moreover, especially in Egypt under Sadat, the theatre (and art in general) was becoming reduced despite itself to a form of entertainment—dumbed down for a mass commercial public or made postmodern for a blasé cultural elite. The response from the Hamlet tradition was a host of ironic rewritings. The ghostly father receded into the background or became an unheroic figure; the young prince became powerless and incoherent; and Claudius the tyrant grew to almost godlike proportions. Denmark was rottener than ever. In one play (Mamduh Adwan’s Hamlet Wakes Up Late) Ophelia becomes a whore and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern police informers; in another (Hakim Marzougi’s Ismail/Hamlet) Hamlet himself seems set merely to replace his uncle as tyrant; in a third (Khazal al-Majidi’s “Hamlet” Without Hamlet) he is shipwrecked and drowns on his way to his father’s funeral, leaving the other characters to “muddle along without him”.

As Litvin describes these rewritings we draw closer to the grim heart of the “Arab predicament” of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. They reshuffle and parody the Shakespearean text, with Hamlet himself tongue-tied or emptily bombastic, and his lines quoted back at him by other characters. They offer not the old heroic challenge of “to be or not to be”, but a gloomy hopelessness, a sense that Hamlet has come too late to be anything at all. Here Litvin deftly incorporates a political argument drawn from Lisa Wedeen: the productions’ portrayal of the tyranny of Claudius and his spymaster Polonius in fact confirms the political status quo by showing just how unassailable Arab regimes had become. Far from being vulnerable to exposure by satire, a regime may be all-powerful because it is transparent, as Wedeen argued for the Syrian Ba‘th Party (Ambiguities of Domination, 1999).

In the face of the haplessness of all potential actors and the sheer absurdity of the situation, Litvin detects a move toward “post-political” laughter in Sulayman al-Bassam’s The Al-Hamlet Summit. This English-language rewriting of 2002 offers a pastiche of the world media’s Middle East: al-Jazeera, an Arab League summit; Hamlet an Islamist revolutionary locked in conflict with the tyrant Claudius. The Arab nations are placed firmly within a global context, for even Claudius is subordinated to a shadowy arms trader, missionary of the Western-capitalist God to whom he prays: “I want your pimp ridden plutocracies; I want your world shafting bank; I want it shafting me now….” The last version Litvin describes, Hani Afifi’s I Am Hamlet (first staged in 2009 and due in London for the 2012 Olympics festival), casts George W. Bush as Fortinbras.

One aspect that Litvin notes but does not explore in detail is that even within these “dark meditations” on powerlessness before domestic and international tyranny, one can hear echoes of the old intransigent hero. In Jawad al-Assadi’s Forget Hamlet (1994) these come not from the prince himself but from others. Ophelia is thrust into activism against Claudius’s tyranny despite herself, by the uselessness of all potential male heroes. Laertes, another dissident, before being imprisoned and killed, cries: “Claudius killed the just king! Which of us does not know that! And Hamlet responds to his father’s murder with ‘to be or not to be.’ Be, just for once be, you rat!” From a scene of “post-political” paralysis and despair a line or two thus seems to be directed outwards, a challenge to the sloganeering political world.

One wonders if that world has begun to provide some kind of response in the last year. Since the Arab Spring, Hamlet’s slogan has moved from columns and chat shows to election posters, graffiti, and placards (see Margaret Litvin’s blog for some examples). What might a post-2011 Arab Hamlet look like? The state of Denmark perhaps a little less rotten than it was; the ghosts of past heroes still haunting the stage; tyrant Claudius reduced from monstrous to human stature, but far from dead; secret policeman Polonius up to his tricks again; a shadowy (American?) Fortinbras waiting in the wings; Prince Hamlet regaining something of the aura of a hero, revolutionary, and martyr, but still divided against himself, uncertain of his role. Will he rise to the challenge? Might others, like Ophelia or Laertes, not cast as the hero, defy the scriptwriters and rise to it instead? Will they succumb to paralysis, leaving an omnipotent Claudius to rule on, or to be replaced merely by a Hamlet corrupted into the likeness of his uncle? The scenes play out before not only an Arab but a world audience; the curtain is up, and the ending undecided.

Peter Hill is reading for a MSt in Oriental Studies at St John’s College, Oxford.

Martin Scorsese
Hugo
Paramount Pictures, GK Films, Infinitum Nihil, 2011
126 minutes

…

…

…

…

While some machines are designed to hide their origins and conceal their inner workings, others proudly display the human effort and ingenuity that went into their construction. The same could be said for art: while some masterpieces erase the artist from the canvas, others place their creator centre-stage, celebrating the mind to which they owe their existence. The purpose of a magic trick is to conceal the process of invention, but openly acknowledging this process in art and machinery draws attention to a different kind of magic: the mysterious workings of the human imagination.

This is the kind of magic evoked in the 3-D film Hugo: magic that can be found at the core of every invention, from the train engine to the silent film. Indeed, Hugo makes no distinction between machinery and art; the machines that dominate the visual landscape appear first and foremost as aesthetic objects. Not only is the main character, street urchin Hugo Cabret, primarily concerned with reconstructing a mysterious clockwork automaton from his deceased father’s workshop, but he also lives amid the whirling gears of a clock tower and the pumping pistons of a railway station. Far from being depicted as old- fashioned and ineffective, the sheer magnitude and complexity of this bygone technology is shown to be as awe-inspiring as any work of art. The practical merits of each machine are beside the point; the viewer has no more hope of figuring out how an automaton works as the camera zooms in on the masses of gears than they have of figuring out how life in 1920s Paris works as the camera zooms out to view the glittering, moving city as a whole.

At one point Hugo Cabret explicitly compares the city to machinery, but the image already speaks for itself: from above, it is possible to see all the active, individual parts of Paris combine to form a machine just as unified and self-sufficient as Dickens’s London. And just as Dickens preferred to write of the spirit of London rather than of the technical details of its construction, director Martin Scorsese seems far more interested in distilling the life and personality of Paris than delivering a history lesson. This is classic Paris, Paris as everyone who has ever seen a postcard knows it ought to be, where everything circulates around the Eiffel Tower and passersby are armed with baguettes, where even Isabelle, Hugo’s best friend and fellow sleuth in the mystery of the automaton, sports a striped shirt and beret. Less important than reinforcing the distinct personality of Paris is explaining exactly how and why skinny little urchin boys like Hugo are frequently scooped up and carted away to the orphanage in Dickensian fashion, or when exactly the film is set; its historical position is clarified almost in passing and near the end of the film, when a character mentions that his leg injury is a war wound. But it seems petty to worry about historical accuracy given the intensity of Hugo’s world, and the thrill of chase sequences through the winding, cobblestoned streets. Paris might be a machine, but like other machines in this movie it is also a work of art, and as such it is to be experienced than to be fully understood.

Once Hugo finally manages to fix the automaton, it gives him and Isabella a clue that takes them right to the doorstep of silent film director Georges Méliès. The footage of his original 1902 movie, A Trip to the Moon, with its hand-painted colours, exotic costumes and grainy, flickering backgrounds, is integrated seamlessly into the gleaming, 21st- century digital animation of Hugo , without the latter being lauded as in any way superior. As with the clock, train engine, and automaton, Méliès’ films are aboth machines and works of art; a series of behind-the-scenes flashbacks show just how much time, effort, and resourcefulness it took to make them. When A Trip to the Moon is triumphantly resurrected from the past, all the original ingredients of its construction are still visible on its surface, including the artist’s imagination. And this, the film suggests, is the magic that gives even the most antiquated creations the timeless quality of beauty.

Rachael Goddard-Rebstein is studying English at Lady Margaret Hall. She writes fiction and is from Vancouver, Canada.