“We talk here in the public haunt of women”, an adaption from a line in Act 3, Scene 1 of the original play, is the tagline of ‘R&J’, and powerfully sets out the dominant role of women in this rendition of Shakespeare’s famous play. The classic story about two young ‘star-crossed’ lovers from two feuding families and their tragic end, called Romola (Georgia Figgis) and Julius (Jack Taylor) in this particular adaption, is given a compelling twist with the gender swapped cast: Acted out in front of a very plain set design, utilising the entire room as a stage, this adaptation reveals the nature of the play in a different and fascinating light.

According to Sami Ibrahim, one of the play’s directors, “you can read whatever you want into the gender reversal, but I think it works nicely because you realise how well these characters work as either male or female – I guess the point is that the gender of each character doesn’t really matter. However, as much as the heart-rending, yet tragic love story at the heart of the plot persists without forfeiting any of its dramatic appeal thanks to the talented cast, swapping the male and female roles grants the play a whole new feel. There is no need for a degree in gender studies or even a thorough knowledge of the original to feel the changes in the dynamic of the play, and the dramatic differences in the ways male and females characters were written become drastically obvious. As we witness the women being loud, aggressive, and cocky in the way they talk to men, whereas the latter are much more gentle and passive, we realise how this role reversal, or rather the feeling of unfamiliarity it evokes, beautifully highlights how femininity and masculinity are indeed constructed social categories that shape our expectations towards men and women – not just in 16^th century theatre, but also in contemporary everyday life.

What’s more, female desire, too often neglected or depreciated in classic and modern culture alike, is played out through the male gaze of the original in a refreshing, engaging manner; Romola’s pursuit of Julius is passionate and forceful, peaking in the famous balcony scene with an unapologetic vigour and energy arising from Romola’s performance that we can only hope to find in more female characters on screen, stage and in literature in the future.
It is, however, curious to observe the body language of the two protagonists: As they embrace for a kiss, Julius puts his arms around Romola’s waist whereas she holds his head. Whether this was an unconscious reaction or part of the script, this preservation of somewhat traditional gendered body language added an interesting layer to the performance.

Here’s to more innovative challenging of gender norms!

FIVE STARS 

Today, topping the list of whining little shits from Canada who just won’t go away is, of course, Justin Bieber. A decade ago, however, Nickelback would have been on the top of most self- respecting music fans’ hit lists.

A scourge on the ugly face of hard rock music formed from the skid marks of 1990s’ grunge, it is a challenge to isolate a song by them that doesn’t use the same riffs and recount the profound themes of sex, substances and stardom. This is evident in 2001’s gold-certified ‘This is How You Remind Me’ and culminated in the ultimate douchebag manual ‘Rockstar’.

Lead singer Chad Kroeger’s lack of cool has rubbed off on his wife Avril Lavigne, whose recent single ‘Hello Kitty’ both single-handedly massacred an entire nation’s pop culture and probably reserved her a spot on a future edition of this column. Having released nothing since 2011, the next stop is a multi-volume greatest hits compilation. Because more than one album is needed to count for the collective legacy of two songs and tragically bad taste.

Unlike Kyla La Grange’s debut Ashes, her new album Cut Your Teeth makes good on the promise of its singles. It’s an album that has embraced its own commerciality without sacrificing its darker, lyrical intrigue, while a large dose of hypnotic production cloaks each song in opaque layers of synthesised beats and dreamily drifting vocals. Resistant to labels or classification, Cut Your Teeth represents a heady mix of different influences but nonetheless stands on its own two feet as an original artistic achievement.

After a strong opening in the form of title track ‘Cut Your Teeth’, that offers a slower, weightier version of the popular Kygo edit, ‘Maia’ propels the pace forwards with a faster, lighter, but lyrically two-dimensional track that acts as a precipice for a fall into the grand, soaring vocals of ‘Cannibals’. There is a sense that these songs stretch themselves out and explore the possibilities of the space, of hollowness, rather than desperately trying to hold themselves together in distinct separate songs.

As a result, the album flows from track to track, with each one accentuating a different stylistic element present in them all. ‘White Doves’ introduces an exotic rhythm that is compellingly secured in the steel drums of ‘The Knife’, while the sweeping melodic motif of ‘Fly’ is stripped back to make room for rippling, liquid bass of ‘I’ll Call for You’. The album finishes in the same vein as it began, with ‘Get It’ heralding a carefully crafted uplifting synth-pop anthem with an acidic, splashing beat. What makes it work so well is the consistency of the album as a whole and the way in which, despite some indisputable frontrunners, none of the songs is disposable but all merge seamlessly for a great overall effect.

Cut Your Teeth is unapologetic in its own vacuousness and insistent in making its polished exterior enough of an appeal in its own right. La Grange’s vocals are fragile enough to benefit from the heavier production and the very contrast between their ethereality and its assertive strength is responsible for much of the beauty of the album. In short, Cut Your Teeth is a majestic myriad, filled as much by the neon colour of pop as it is imbued with the darkness of lyrics of loss and pain.

Floating is the third studio album from Sleep Party People, a.k.a. Brian Batz, the latest in a string of breakout Scandinavian acts. Opening with triumphant chorus of echoing guitars, light flanger, and high pitched vocals of the track ‘Change in Mind’, much of the album is dark and synth driven, although more lively tracks such as ‘Floating Blood’ are a welcome upbeat change.

The influences of darker new wave music can be felt in the harmonies and bass of ‘In Another World’ and the instrumental ‘Death Is the Future’, which – as if the name wasn’t enough of a clue – are reminiscent of themes to 80s sci-fi franchises. The latter half of the album takes a turn for the surreal, with the dreamy tracks ‘I See The Sun Harold’ and ‘I See The Moon (featuring Lisa Light)’ and the more mellow ‘Only a Shadow’ featuring minimal vocals and multiple clashing effects.

The aura produced by this album is unseasonably cold and tends more towards the region atmospheric than the lyrical. However, the entire album is thematically united by its exploration of musical dreamscapes. The memorable synthesiser riffs, the occasional chamber pop influences and wide variety of sounds make this an album which will be a favourite for intimate settings in which Sleep Party People is due to play on his forthcoming European tour.

Clean Bandit’s New Eyes (try not to think about Brand New Eyes) is one of the most hotly-anticipated electronic albums of the year. The popularity of their first couple of singles, ‘Mozart’s House’ and ‘Dust Clears’ was quickly outdone by 2014’s massive ‘Rather Be’, which has since been played non-stop everywhere from Bridge to Barcelona.

The album is wonderfully crafted, with the bizarre but beautiful marrying of electronic and classical influences which was so brilliant on ‘Mozart’s House’ notable throughout. This track, the first on the album, is still arguably their best song, and having it open the album is an important nod to their original success. With the lyric “Tan my face with that paggiato”, who could claim that ‘Rather Be’ is better?

More ambitious than Disclosure, but a bit less weird than Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, it draws upon both these giants of electronic music to great effect. Combinations of robotic Auto-Tune and female vocals complement their excellent instrumentation, which includes steel drums, and not even in a shit way.

Apart from the excellent singles, title track ‘New Eyes’ is a definite highlight, featuring Lizzo, a female rapper set to finally get the recognition she deserves in 2014.

Osymyso is something of a cult hero in the electronic scene. He’s been active for over twenty years, shaping and influencing the bootleg genre with cool beats and wacky samples. Last term he was in the Bargain Bin with his record ‘Rabbit to Rabbit’, which saw him mash up breakbeats, Peter Rabbit and Bugs Bunny. Now Cherwell talks to the man behind the whiskers, musician and DJ Mark Nicholson, about inspirations, being a perfectionist, and EastEnders.

Nicholson can still vividly remember where Osymyso started, “As a teenager, I was obsessed with Art of Noise and their use of sound collages and the new sampling technology. I got into synths and sampling in the dying months of the 1980s inspired by the likes of The JAMs, Negativland, The Orb. Then M/A/R/R/S got to number one and Bomb The Bass reached number two, with a record that was just a montage of other people’s stuff. I got myself a drum machine, a sampler and a computer and tried to emulate my heroes.”

Osymyso became my own hero when he immortalised the Pat and Peggy fight from EastEnders by sampling “You Bitch!” and “You Cow!” and pressing it into a breakbeat. ‘Pat n Peg’ may be one of the bootleg genre’s finest creations, but Nicholson is quick to point out that it “came about by accident as I saw that fight scene whilst round at a friends house who had it on in the background”.

But despite my love for the soap-inspired track, there’s no denying that Nicholson’s masterpiece is ‘Intro-Inspection’, a mini-mix of 101 intros in one twelve minute mash up. Nicholson also regards it as his greatest achievement. “It’s the one thing that people ask me about the most and it had clever people writing essays about it in magazines. I like listening to it now and then, it brings back such good memories. “It’s also one of only a few things I’m really happy with. I very rarely make anything that I like. When I finish a track all I hear are the faults and it gets deleted before anyone hears it. But now unlike before, I actually like my music to sound a bit rough around the edges. I like the mistakes.”

It’s been fifteen years since he release his debut album, Welcome to the Palindrome, but Nicholson has been releasing music underground, online with free MP3s, and even soundtracking Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. I ask him where the project’s at currently. “I’ve given up trying to work out what Osymsyo is and where it’s going as I keep starting these ludicrously over ambitious projects and never finishing them. I’m working on some new tunes, which might become an album or they might just be free tracks I throw at the internet. Some of the new tracks I’m working on are short melodies with beats and synths, and I’m also working on some really harsh unofficial remixes of chart toppers.”

But of course, it would never just be the Top 40 to spark his interest. “I’ve been collecting loads of fragments of discarded and utterly forgettable TV, like 30 year old bits of Continuity. I found some VHS tapes someone had dumped in the street with strange late night TV clips.”

Late night TV, breakbeats and synth. You’ve been warned.

Metamorphosis of Narcissus

Salvador Dali (1937)

One of the most famous paintings by the mag­nificent Spanish surrealist, the Metamorpho­sis of Narcissus depicts the story of Narcissus. According to Greek mythology, Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection in a pool and, unable to embrace it, remained sitting on the bank until the gods turned him into a flower. In the painting, he gazes into the pool. To his right, a decaying stone figure bears a resem­blance, but is in fact a stone hand holding up an egg. A Narcissus flower grows out of it.

Arachne from Metamorphoses

Ovid (8 AD)

The Roman poet Ovid’s work the Metamorpho­ses related numerous different transforma­tions from throughout ancient Greek and Roman mythology. Arachne, the weaver, claimed to have more weaving skill than Minerva, goddess of wisdom. Since weaving and looking pretty were women’s primary roles in the ancient world, this was some chal­lenge. In a contest, Minerva defeated Arachne, and transformed her into a spider. Have fun drawing your own etymological conclusions.

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A Midsummer Night’s Dream

William Shakespeare (1590)

In a metatheatrical construction within this classic Shakespeare play, a troupe of actors put on a production of Pyramus and Thisbe. They journey into the forest for rehearsals with di­sastrous and hilarious consequences. One of the actors, Nick Bottom, encounters Puck, ser­vant of Oberon, King of the Fairies. The sprite casts a spell on him, transforming his head into that of a donkey. The Fairy Queen Titania is later bewitched into falling in love with this unlikely ass.

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To some extent, all of the most memorable musical artists are shape-shifters. There’s the transformation of Snoop Dogg to Snoop Lion which enabled him to go from gangster rapper to reggae prophet; the evolutions of child-stars Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus from innocent pop-princesses to rebellious, sexual women; Prince’s metamorphosis into a symbol, “the artist formerly known as Prince”. 

Arguably, there is no artist who is so defined by his many “ch-ch-changes” as David Robert Jones – or David Bowie, as he is known to us mortals. Bowie has been a major figure in the world of music for over four decades. The exhibition “David Bowie Is” at the V&A was the first retrospective of the extraordinary career of Bowie. It charted his rise to fame, his various transformations and reinventions, and his continuing and monumental influence on music, art, film, and the fashion industry. 

Interestingly, the first thing with which visitors to the exhibition were met was an installation piece by Roelof Louw – a conceptual artist who explores the relationship between physical space and viewer. Pyramid (Soul City) is a pyramid of 6,000 oranges to which visitors are invited to help themselves. The shape of the artwork gradually depletes as more oranges are taken. 

What does this have to do with David Bowie? Colourful, experimental, and ever shape – shifting from all angles, Pyramid is a metaphor for Bowie and his career. 

Perhaps Bowie’s most memorable transformation was Ziggy Stardust – theatrical, deliberately flamboyant, neither male nor female. For Bowie, Ziggy was “a shape for the moment” – an opportunity to explore a world outside of gender constraint. His next persona was Aladdin Sane, with the lightning-bolt which would become our iconic image of Bowie. 

Although technically a new persona, Bowie now regards this as a way of “getting out” of Ziggy: a transitional, ephemeral self. He changed again for Diamond Dogs, with Bowie’s head appeared attached to a dog’s body: a sinister, sphynx-like metamorphosis from human to animal. 

In the ‘80s, he disappeared briefly into relative anonymity, recording under the guise of other band-names and questioning the validity of creating a new persona for each new album. On the jacket of 1999’s Hours, he holds his own corpse, mourning the passing of yet another self. 

Where many celebrity transformations nowadays are messy, fleeting, or deliberate publicity stunts, Bowie changed in carefully considered stages, all of them theatrical, beautiful and psychologically complex. His shape changing made him a cultural icon of the Twentieth Century, proving that change is the way to endure. 

Like Prince, Bowie is in some ways more of a symbol than a man. He is a living legend marked by his various incarnations, who will doubtless continue to influence culture in all its forms for many generations to come. 

Transformations provide happy endings: the beast becomes human; the sleeping princess awakens; the frog becomes a prince. The idea that wishes really can come true is a premise that provides the foundations of our myths and fairy tales, where metamorphosis is a magical plot device that restores order and brings about happy endings. 

Transformation into a princess, if only for a night, gives Cinderella that one chance meeting she needs to dazzle the prince and make her nocturnal guise a permanent reality. This is a fantasy of climbing the ranks – the phenomenon of social mobility technically known as hypergamy. The virtuous Cinderella has her goodness rewarded. Dressing up gives her an external beauty that reflects an internal reality eventually made permanent by the marriage at the end of the tale. 

You need only flick through any British tabloid to see that this obsession still prevails. “‘Commoner’ Kate Middleton finds happiness with the heir to the throne” is a fantasy that conveniently ignores Kate’s not-so-common origins. Now we have a load of St Andrew’s girls kicking themselves for not joining the running club, and the upcoming reality TV show I Wanna Marry Harry, in which a host of American girls try their very best to replicate Kate’s success. 

The fantasy has its literary antecedents. Richardson’s epistolary novel Pamela centres around the eventual transformation of its protagonist from serving girl to wife, to “the joy of the chambermaids of all nations”, in the words of Lady Mary Montagu. Montagu’s observation is rooted in economic and social reality. The outlook for 18th century servant girls was particularly bleak – domestic servants were pretty much bound to stay with employers until twenty-one or until married, and many even forbade their servants to marry servant girls. It’s therefore no surprise that these kind of social transformations should capture the imaginations of a nation’s wishful servants. 

This all gets a bit worrying, though, when you start to fully consider the abuse that Pamela endures to get her happy ending. The same is true for a character such as Patient Griselda, depicted most famously in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, who has to do more than just shove her foot in the slipper to get her happy ending, enduring the loss of first her daughter, then her son. 

So, transforming for the prince can sometimes be pretty painful. In fact, it seems that transforming for love is about shoehorning yourself into a form that will accommodate Prince Charming. Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid slits her tail so she can walk on land to please her man. The statue in Ovid’s Pygmalion is turned from stone to human at the bequest of its creator. Sandy goes from good girl in gingham to black-attired femme fatale to snare Danny Zuco. The lines of gender are drawn in pretty clear ink – these are women transforming to fit in with the systems that will please their men. 

We’re reminded of The Taming of the Shrew’s Kate who, exhausted from the abuse of Petruchio, finally submits to her new husband’s dictatorial reality. The very world transforms according to her husband’s will: “And be it moon, or sun, or what you please. / And if you please to call it a rush candle, / Henceforth I vow it shall be so for me.” 

However, this idea of transformation as the submission to another’s will doesn’t always seem to be gendered. The 1993 Pulitzer Prizewinning play Angels in America explores the transformative powers of love, and has the Mormon Joe offer to give up anything to be with the man he believes he loves. In one of the most powerful scenes, he stands naked on a beach and denounces his religion, removing his Mormon undergarments (his skin) and then punning on this removal: “I’m flayed… I can be anything I need to be. And I wanna be with you!” 

The powerful location of the scene is brought out even more vividly than is possible on stage in the terrific HBO miniseries of the play. The beach is a place of continuous transformation – my Geography teacher once told me that no beach is fixed, the sand and its waters never the same. It’s also a place where gay men historically explored and discovered their sexuality. And here Joe undergoes this same change, treading in the footsteps of his gay forefathers, submitting and leaving his body vulnerable to any change dictated to him by his new lover. 

This isn’t always the case, of course. Elle Woods in Legally Blonde wants to change herself into Warner’s ideal man. But, after studying really hard and broadening her horizons, she realizes that Warner really isn’t all that, and finds a new Prince Charming to suit the independent transformation she has undergone. 

I don’t recommend Legally Blonde to any finalists, though. Despite Elle’s metamorphosis into a successful, confident feminist icon, the message is basically that good grades can be acquired through a montage scene of revising on a treadmill. If only the reality were that simple.