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

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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.

1. “The Poetry of North Korea’s First Family”, Huffington Post: “I would destroy all terrorists with the Hollywood star Jean-Claude van Damme… Everybody would be happy: no more war, no more dying, no more crying.”

2. “Socialism is the Name of Our Desire”, U.S. Intellectual History: “Learning about the history of those Americans who dreamed of a better world is a good antidote to cynics who decry the Occupy Movement’s lack of achievable goals.”

3. “William Gibson”, Full Stop: “…it was so profoundly post-geographical. To be a guy in Cancun saying “No! You don’t want to take the Yamamoto line, it’s not running! You wanna do this…” Very, very strange.”

4. “Seduction Therapy”, The Atlantic: “Would I have catalogued my sexual partners from throughout my life if her belly were stratified with fat rolls? Would I have referenced my publication history in such detail if her face were perforated with acne scars?”

5. Pitchfork on Julia Holter and Lana Del Rey: “I’m not good with knowing what’s going on with music, but I’m trying to catch up. I just get very caught up with things in my world.”

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David J. Nightingale is a fine art and commercial photographer and post-production instructor.

A great Victorian art critic, arbiter of the nation’s taste, suddenly turns his intellect and wits on the orthodoxies of the day — in this case, the revered science of political economy. In a series of four articles published in a popular, widely read periodical the critic condemns the very epistemological basis of classical economics. It is, he says, “the most cretinous, speechless, paralysing plague that has yet touched the brains of mankind”. His once docile, admiring and thoroughly middle-class audience is horrified. He is, in his own words, “reprobated in a violent manner”. He is denounced in the press variously as “crazy and ignorant”, “a womanish man, who has run foul of a scientific truth”, “a mere baby”, “a mad governess”, and so forth. But the man does not relent. He spends a good part of the rest of his life lecturing and writing on society and economy. He stubbornly describes his economic writings as “probably the best I shall ever write”. That, in short, is the story of John Ruskin’s foolhardy foray into social criticism. The four articles, a call to infuse economics with affection and morality, were published in the Cornhill magazine as Unto this Last, from August to November of 1860. In time, more sympathetic ears would transform his words into action: his message would inspire Octavia Hill, Gandhi, and scores of other acolytes.

Like his contemporary, Charles Dickens, Ruskin was a restless visionary ill at ease with the blind confidence and complacency of his times. Many in the press yoked them together in vituperative attacks: “the gospel of John Ruskin and of Charles Dickens” was “sentimentalism that paralysed the soul”. Ruskin endorsed Dickens in Unto this Last: “The essential value and truth of Dickens’s writings have been unwisely lost sight of by many thoughtful persons… He is entirely right in his main drift and purpose in every book he has written; and all of them… should be studied with close and earnest care by persons interested in social questions”. Like many others, such as George Holyoake, F. D. Maurice and Frederic Harrison, they saw through the comfortable mid-Victorian equipoise and acutely felt the pain and suffering of the ordinary worker. We have seen similar misguided confidence in our time: at the turn of the last millennium it seemed that the world had seen the end of contentions, the end of ideology, the very “end of history”. Even now, Steven Pinker would have us rejoice in the long-term decline of violence. Yet after the events of the first decade of this millennium, and the continuing crises of our present decade, we would be foolish to forget what Ruskin and Dickens came to realise: that we cannot rest idle, content with the achievements of so-called civilization, and that we should always strain to hear the needy cries of our fellow men.

In a time of Occupy Wall Street, of justified rage at obscene bankers’ bonuses, of fiery scepticism about the workings of capitalism, Ruskin deserves to be heard once more. Infused with a wrenching sense of moral outrage, the searching questions, childlike proddings and terrible anger of Unto this Last are the very exemplar of attitudes that we need to spur reform of our fallen world. Ruskin felt no shame in being scorned, savaged and ridiculed, because his cause was just and right; and neither should we, in our pursuit of justice and rightness. Ruskin reminds us all of our essential humanity. What matters are not inviolable, supposedly scientific laws and mechanical workings, it is the “Soul … an unknown quantity [which] enters all the political economist’s equations, without his knowledge, and falsifies every one of his results”. A boss or CEO is the “governor of the men employed by him … invested with a distinctly paternal authority and responsibility”. Political economy is not about the individual accumulation of wealth: “it is impossible to conclude, of any given mass of acquired wealth, merely by the fact of its existence, whether it signifies good or evil to the nation in the midst of which it exists”. The workings of our economy should teach nations and their people “to desire and labour for the things which lead to life … to scorn and destroy the things that lead to destruction”. Ultimately,

THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.

The words of the Master ring out as if they had been written just yesterday.

Daryl Lim is studying history at St Hilda’s College.

The Maccabees
Given to the Wild
Fiction, January 2012

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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.

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.

1. “Citizen Philosophers: Teaching Justice in Brazil”, Boston Review: “Learning how to read and write and basic mathematics is useful,” one student said. “But why should I care about Plato’s concept of the soul?”

2. “Review, The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg”, Rain Taxi: “Correspondence was her sustenance and a basic fact of life for her, kept up daily… The letters alight her myriad contradictions.”

3. “Transformation and Transcendence: the Power of Female Friendship”, The Rumpus: “They understood, together, as friends, and apart, as individuals in the world, the urgency of compassion, and that it often goes unnoticed but that this doesn’t make it any less important or vital or difficult to sustain and cultivate.”

4. “Reconsidering the Genius of Gertrude Stein”, New York Times: “Reading the word “rest” again and again creates a weird sensation. The story sort of stops, and a space opens up where you can disappear like Ida, or stop too. It provides a rest, as in music.”

5. “The Heart of Englishness?”, Times Literary Supplement: “The serene façade of a settled social order in which every man apparently knew his place concealed a riot of social mobility.”

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

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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.

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Ivan de Monbrison is a painter. He was born in 1969, in Paris, where he still lives and works.