Then they said: Refugee is a timely documentary expertly produced by two Oxford students, Persis Love and Jake Boswall, about how Palestinian artists are responding to the conflict with Isarel. The film centres on an interview with Fadi Ramadan, a refugee living in the Deheishe camp near Bethlehem who runs an amateur dramatics society for the local children. Through his interview and interviews with other local artists and dramatists, this documentary asks a question which in the West we have all had to consider in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks: can art be a form of resistance to violence?

Our media is much more interested in, and much more horrified by, violent actions intended to disturb the status quo, such as the Charlie Hebdo attacks and last week’s horrifying sequel to them, than it is in violence enacted to maintain the status quo. This is part of the reason why Then they said: Refugee is such an important film. Its viewers cannot help but be shocked by the amount of violence Israeli soldiers have subjected Fadi and his community to, just to maintain the original injustice of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. “My brother was a prisoner”, he tells us, “and my mother was shot […] there is a checkpoint in the road where, at any time, I can be arrested.”

The most recent blow to Fadi’s community was the killing of his friend Jihad al-Jafari, who was shot only three weeks ago by Israeli soldiers. “They wanted someone”, Fadi says, “they started shooting bombs, tear gas, and rubber bullets. Then suddenly they began shooting real bullets […] later they wouldn’t allow the ambulance to come.”

The documentary covers two efforts to commemorate Jihad al-Jafari, one by Fadi and one by an artist, called Ahmed Hmeedat. Ahmed paints murals in the streets of the refugee camp which, Fadi says, “show our daily suffering”, and has painted one of al-Jafari. Ahmed describes his paintings as “a means of struggle, like art, painting, theatre or music.”

It is a very intelligent decision by the film makers not to add their own commentary, because it means that no final judgement is given on the question the documentary implicitly asks, which is whether Ahmed and Fadi’s hope that art can be politically useful is grounded in reality. Thus we, the viewers, are made to share their uncertainty about this very point.

At the same time, the film makers make very clear that in Fadi and Ahmed’s community many people have a more bellicose idea of how to enact change. At a commemorative event for al-Jafari, young men chant “Mother of the martyr, lucky you / I wish it was my mother instead of you.” This puts the viewer in a rather uneasy position, making them aware that it is not only the Israeli soldiers who are eager and willing to inflict pain on the opposite side. But this sense of unease is a mark of the documentary’s success; it is a reminder of just how fraught and how complicated Israeli-Palestinian relations are.

‘Where were you the day President Kennedy was shot?’ As recently as 2011 this was a question that 95% of Americans born in 1955, or before, had an answer to. At that time, the USA was a nation divided, not only along state lines, but also in the hearts and minds of its people. Lives were lived in parallel, and little portended to broach the difference.

That is, until the events of that fateful November day in Dallas, Texas. Aghast, speechless – millions of people, of all walks of life, tuned in to transistor radios and switched on their televisions, in their workplaces, homes and schools. Yet, in remembering the message we oftentimes forget the messenger; one audience, one camera, one man to bring calm to the chaos: step up, Walter Cronkite.

Kennedy was the publicity president. Before him elections had been fought, won and lost in black-and-white, on covers of broadsheets. Yesterday’s happenings were tomorrow’s bulletins. You could have the biggest scoop in the world but without the necessary channels of communication, it became the biggest secret in the world. And CBS faced this problem. Taking thirty minutes to set up, Cronkite first took to the radio before continuing on camera. Measured and poised, little over a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Cronkite was the conscience of a nation – one of only three news coverage outlets to address 175 million shocked Americans. Amid speculation Cronkite held off, awaiting an official announcement of Kennedy’s condition. It came. He began to speak, fidgeted with his glasses, then a brief silence, a quiver of the lip and a cough: the President was dead. He gathered himself and carried on.

Cronkite’s report was the defining moment of broadcast journalism, a coming of age and, with it, a new era. No longer the polished product of an editorial meeting in Downtown Manhattan, news became a process.  Information needed to be disseminated thick and fast. This is when current affairs became current: something that was, and is indeed happening at this very moment.

That is not, however, to say that news was more reliable in the early 1960s, but at least it was sincere. Without competition, without instant messaging and social media, news was news – it had no need to be anything else. Now, in the post-9/11 age, we have the apocalyptic ‘BREAKING NEWS’ slogan and the slick special effects to accompany it. News now has entertainment value that is all at once perverse, graphic and voyeuristic. What Cronkite knew and practiced was moderation; the need for a cool, calm and collected delivery.

The voice of a regular, levelheaded guy detailing the facts as they are, Cronkite didn’t have an Italian suit, a nicely chauffeured fringe or a teleprompter to fall back on. Instead, he relied on a journalistic integrity not too often seen nowadays. An anchor hungry for the story but not for the glory, he wanted people to be informed, not frightened out of their wits (a quick shout-out to Fox News). In a time of peril his sober yet compassionate diction was like a clasp of the hand, as if to say, “I’m with you and we’re walking this road together.” And really, there’s no trick to it, that’s all it takes – a little humanity. Let tragedies be tragedies and not an ideological hook upon which to hang an argument, nor an opportunity to one-up someone by crunching them in ratings. 

“The vegan James Dean”. That’s how popular culture chooses to remember River Phoenix, if at all. One time teen heartthrob, musician and Academy Award nominee (Best Supporting Actor in Running on Empty, 1988), nowadays his memory is but an interesting afterthought – a footnote to the biography of his younger brother, Joaquin.

But River was more than that, so much more. In twenty-three short years he’d lived a lifetime, filling each ‘unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run.’ Just another washed up, burnt out 1980s child star? Hardly, and that is the real tragedy: that someone so full of life, so attuned to the pulse and rhythm of the world around him could be reduced to a couple of lines in an obituary and ‘do-you-remember-when’ filler-articles on the back of magazine clippings.

Born and raised in a family of hippies, River’s was an unusual childhood, to say the least. Movies like The Mosquito Coast (1986) found an unlikely parallel in his own upbringing alongside the controversial cult, ‘The Children of God,’ and busking on the streets of Caracas, in Venezuela. However, it was the coming-of-age classic, Stand by Me (1986), and River’s disarming performance as Chris Chambers that ushered in his rise to fame. From then on, the PETA activist moved from strength-to-strength, not content to cash-in his pay cheques, but to make movies – movies that meant something.

Speaking with Charlie Rose, Ethan Hawke tells how “My Own Private Idaho [1992] was the bar for young men” carving out a career for themselves. This raunchy independent film, the story of a narcoleptic gay hustler venturing out in search of his estranged mother, was a bold choice by River. It sang of promise, although promise cut short. It’s true, River’s brilliance was never fully realised – neither in music nor on the big screen. Yet, it’s the hint – that inkling of what could have been – that toys with our indispensible capacity for wonder, and leads us to beg the question: ‘What if?’

Unfortunately, previews sometimes don’t provide the opportunity to glean even a partial impression of what the precise impact of a show will be when it is actually performed. In the tradition of late twentieth-century absurdist drama – the influence of which was apparent even prior to asking about it – what is not said, rather than what is said, appears to be the key factor of dramatic interest in Rendezvous. Whilst the premise of the play is two men in a room, waiting to be called for a highly desirable job interview, it is not the interview itself which is of importance, but what can happen within the space of the room. 

As such, although the scene performed was a work in progress and scripts were still in use, the physicality of the scene was what initially struck me the most. The exchange of glances and silences was already quite nuanced; Josh Dolphin skillfully begins the scene with a nervous barrage of small talk, displaying his character’s nerves and feigned arrogance through his wary glances to the side, shuffling of his tie, and his habit of self-consciously placing himself at a distance from Dan Byam Shaw’s seemingly far more composed character. While the portion of the script I saw was absurd primarily for its tongue-in-cheek treatment of the mundane, it opened up numerous questions regarding the characters’ puzzling relation to, and memories of, the room itself, something that is also apparently vastly expanded later in the script as the tone grows still more absurd and the characters’ understanding of the structures surrounding them begins to unravel. We are not even offered names for these characters – rather, the names of the characters are deliberately elusive – something that will apparently come into play more significantly later in the show.

Exactitudes of the staging are still to be properly figured, but writer and director Anthony Maskell is full of ideas as to how to illustrate the subtextual elements of the script. Even at the preview, however, a ticking clock was placed as a blank noise in the background, deliberately drawing attention to the passing of time in the room. Various other ideas including lighting effects and having the shadow of a metronome moving across the stage have been discussed as potential methods of illustrating the characters’ sense of time fluctuating around them. 

As mentioned, however, at this point I believe it is impossible for me to render the completed work of this production, for it will be a subtle exploration of the relation of the characters to the space of a room – perhaps a metatextual exploration of the stage’s own relation to the room, even – and will work to reveal the arbitrariness of the language and the fixed perspective on life that people use to define themselves