Known for his major contributions to theatre in the twentieth century, Bertolt Brecht wrote with his distinct political aims and convictions in mind. His commitment to Marxism is evident in a large handful of his works, and Die Maßnahme (‘The Decision’) provides us with a solid example of Brecht’s political theatre.

Four communist Agitators appear in front of their party in Moscow, reporting the death of a comrade that they themselves have shot. Over the course of eight scenes, the four Agitators attempt to justify their decision to shoot their Young Comrade on the basis that his behaviour both endangered them, and jeopardized their attempts to spread communist propaganda amongst workers in China.

We plunge into the action straight away, with the death of the Young Comrade being reported at the outset. This develops into a rapidly-progressing plot which jumps from episode to episode; from here we observe an account of the events that lead to the death of the Young Comrade, acted out and explained by the four Agitators. This pace however causes no issues – Die Maßnahme is written in a lucid, explicit style that ensures our understanding of the events portrayed.

The episodic structure of Die Maßnahme could be seen, however, as resulting in a somewhat disjointed plot. Instead of flowing into one another, scenes are snapshots of the Agitators’ experiences. This eradicates any sense of continuity; the plot is contained in chunks rather than in scenes that flow into one another. On the other hand, this technique of Brecht’s ensures that we focus intensely on each scene as we read it, further contributing to the clarity of the events in Die Maßnahme.

Perhaps the most appealing feature of this work is its wealth of rich themes and ideas, all of which provoke the reader to consider these central elements of the play. Can the Agitators’ actions be justified? Should the Young Comrade have obeyed party orders, or was he correct to conduct himself according to his raw emotions? It is such questions that Brecht brings to the surface through the politically-charged plot of Die Maßnahme, one of his Lehrstücke (‘teaching plays’), which aims to push readers to seriously assess their attitudes to what they have read.

On the whole, Brecht’s Die Maßnahme is a gripping, thought-provoking work. Its clear writing style, albeit not entirely fluid, ensures that the reader is explicitly presented with the key ideas found in the text. The experience of reading Die Maßnahme does not simply stop after the last line – the controversy portrayed in the plot stays with each reader after the shut of the book. The portrayal of difficult yet engaging ideas in Die Maßnahme makes it a must-read for any fan of political theatre.

What’s wrong with a good confession? Confessing might imply a kind of weakness of character in yielding to pressure. It also intrinsically involves the divulging of really personal details or remembrances. Its traditional, religious connotations meant the confession was framed in terms of immoral and regretted experience. However, in our age of reality TV, tabloids and social media, the meaning of confession today veers more towards a self-indulgent, salacious and enjoyable ‘Confessions of a Shopaholic/Teenage Drama Queen’ type of tone.

This culture of superficial, gossip-worthy confessions is not, as you might expect, contradicted by modern female popular literary and cultural icons of the moment such as Lena Dunham, Mindy Kaling, Meghan Daum, Rebecca Solnit, Marina Keegan, Katherine Angel, Leslie Jamison and Zadie Smith in their literary essays. Rather, what might be considered private trivialities or particularly gruesome, humiliating or personal physical and mental functions often become the sole focus from which the intellectual waves of the essay ripple outwards.

So part of the reason why I disagree with Cheryl Strayed’s opinion, voiced in the New York Times recently, that “as long as we still have reason to wedge ‘women’ as a qualifier before ‘essayist’, the age is not exactly golden” is because she didn’t take the time to properly investigate her more interesting follow-up statement that “and yet it’s hard to deny there’s something afoot. Essayists who happen to be women are having a banner year.” I think there is something about the essay that is particularly suited to expressing the female experience, and for fulfilling the feminist desire to break down patriarchal structures inherent in our language and culture. The ability of the essay to incorporate the female confession into a framework of logical analysis forces the audience into realising what is universal about the seemingly ‘petty’ truths of everyday female experience. And everyone, especially in a time where menstruation is still shunned and perceived to be a ‘luxury’, needs to acknowledge the importance of the individual female experience to society as a whole.

Leslie Jamison’s ‘Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain’ works towards such an accessible, persuasive and coherently considered feminist thought process. By juxtaposing several experiences alongside each other in numbered case studies, including several very personal confessions of “faint lines further up, at the base of my leg, where I used to cut myself with a razor”, Jamison is able to expose the clear similarities in different women’s experiences of pain, while not diminishing the individual and personal importance of each. Similarly, in ‘Empathy Exams’ she is able to fluidly negotiate between two bodily experiences – a heart operation and an abortion – to draw out threads of subjective truths that are objectively considered: “one was my choice and the other wasn’t; both made me feel – at once – the incredible frailty and capacity of my own body; both came in a bleak winter; both left me prostrate under the hands of men, and dependent on the care of a man I was just beginning to love.”

The confessional essay is also well-suited to young feminist writers because of its ironic self-reflexivity. The personal essay collection often claims itself to be unassuming, incomplete, and dismissible, as in Mindy Kaling’s Q&A with an imagined potential buyer in her introduction, one of whom questions, “I don’t know. I have a lot of books already. I wanted to finish those Girl with the Dragon Tattoo books before the movies come out.” To which her answer is, “This book will take you two days to read. Did you even see the cover? It’s mostly pink. If you’re reading this book every night for months, something is not right.” Yet her novel ends on another Q&A whereby the imagined reader asks “Why didn’t you talk about whether women are funny or not?” which she answers by saying that “I just felt that by commenting on that in any real way, it would be tactic approval of it as a legitimate debate, which it isn’t.”

This statement of a stern feminist philosophy which has seemingly run throughout what is occasionally presented as a haphazard collection of spontaneous musings presses on the reader the framework in which all of Kaling’s confessions exist: that of a hugely successful and intelligent writer whose parodic list of movies that “someone is pitching somewhere in Hollywood” ends with a half-serious reminder of her actual fame and position as a notable comic: “as much as it may seem like I am mocking these movies, if any movie studio exec is reading this and is interested in any of the above, I will gladly take a meeting about them.”

Lena Dunham also reflects on her own fame and position within the canon, and is similarly half-deprecating and half staunchly unapologetic about her success, even in her introduction: “I’m already predicting my future shame at thinking I had anything to offer you, but also my future glory in having stopped you from trying an expensive juice cleanse or thinking that it was your fault when the person you are dating suddenly backs away, intimidated by the clarity of your personal mission here on earth.” Therefore the embarrassed tone of the confession in these modern feminist autobiographical essays are used as counterpoints to the relative position of huge success and progress from which they are voiced.

So each essay relates to its predecessor on a continuum, however the author is allowed, and encouraged, to reflect and change in the blank space between the two. Keegan’s collection always makes us awake of what could have been, Kaling’s is signed off “See you guys soon”, and Dunham’s is subtitled ‘A young woman tells you what she’s ‘learned’’ – each pointing towards themselves as writers in the midst of a promising career.

The uncertainty, and therefore the constant hopefulness, of the confessional essay is undeniably suited to the changeable and undefinable nature of the young, female experience. Go read them all.

As Peep Show enters its final series, fans of the show are happy and heavy-hearted in equal measure. Happy because, after a three-year hiatus, perennial losers Mark and Jez, an anal loan manager and juvenile waster who live together out of purgatorial necessity, are back on television in all of their tragic glory. Heavy-hearted because this series marks the end of twelve years of stagnant careers, disastrous relationships, untold social faux-pas, and eating the occasional dead dog. Yet, viewers can take solace in the ever-insightful words of Jeremy, referring to a bouquet of flowers he’s bought for Big Suze – “They’ll die eventually, but everything does, doesn’t it? Apart from love, a true love. A good love can sustain you all the way through.” Though it may be coming to an end, a good love of the remarkably re-watchable and quotable Peep Show can continue to sustain you.

And it is a real love that fans hold for the show, which has gained a cult following. Written by Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, Peep Show is perhaps most notably distinctive for its point-of-view filming style, which constantly alternates between the characters’ faces. While this technique may have originally jarred, seeming occasionally dizzying and disorientating, it allowed for the trademark of a sitcom that has come to define a generation: the excruciatingly honest internal monologues that articulate often unspeakable but unfalteringly comical thoughts – “How do I feel? Empty, check. Scared, check. Alone, check. Just another ordinary day.”

In their voyeuristic frankness, it is these thoughts that make the show so worryingly, yet somehow comfortingly, relatable, revealing the inward selfishness, warped morality, and loneliness of the characters. In season three, Mark tells Jeremy he’s proposing to his girlfriend, Sophie, and Jeremy immediately thinks: “How does this affect me?” The way in which the sitcom embraces these grimly realistic qualities – the awkwardness of sex, the simultaneous excitement and stupidity of drugs, the unspoken nervousness and cynicism with which we greet so many people and social situations – gives it unrivalled and darkly accessible hilarity, perhaps best encapsulated by Mark’s adage, “I suppose doing things you hate is just the price you pay to avoid loneliness.”

The writers utilise the perpetual hopelessness of our generation for maximum comic effect, cultivating sharp comedy from the inescapable greyness of the everyday – the anxiety of being confronted by local youths and called a ‘clean shirt’, the sad satisfaction derived from the frugality of having the boiler on a mild twenty-one degrees, and the outrage at the decision to order ‘four naans’ at an Indian. Bain and Armstrong also skillully engineer scenes of somehow believable ridiculousness: Mark’s turkey rant at Christmas, the grotesque ‘bad thing’ at Jeremy’s shroom party, Mark hiding on his wedding day as Jez uncontrollably wets himself, and the pair vandalising a music executive’s caravan at a Christian rock festival. The show’s colourful secondary characters supplement this: Alan Johnson, a recklessly confident corporate manager with motivational maxims including “Fuck a chicken if that’s what it takes. Watch a chicken fucking a horse”, and Super Hans, Jez’s band-mate with a crack addiction, a part-time job on an oil rig, and unseen twin children who were “fünf, zwei years ago”.

In the first episode of the new series, aired last week, the comedy was true to form, with a blend of the drearily ordinary, as Mark grinds through a new bank job, and the entertainingly outrageous, as the self-styled ‘Croydon Bullingdon’ waterboard Mark’s erstwhile flatmate, Jerry, with a sleeping bag and a Budweiser tinny. Somehow, it couldn’t finish any other way.

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?’