★★☆☆☆

Two Stars

Matt Smith bombastically stumbled onto our TV sets nearly four years ago with the incredible ‘The Eleventh Hour’, quickly putting to rest any fears that this 26 year-old was too young to play Doctor Who. He has since been at the forefront of three series and seven specials of what is, ultimately, unparalleled family television. It is a shame therefore that his final departure, the Moffat-penned Christmas special ‘The Time of the Doctor’, is a deeply disappointing spectacle, failing to do justice to Smith’s spellbinding reign as the eleventh Doctor.

The plot is an utter mess; the central conceit of the Doctor spending his final days on Trenzalore to protect the inhabitants against a second time-war is novel but drearily executed. So maniacal is the narrative in cramming the writer’s every fan-boy impulse into an hour’s show that one can almost envisage Moffat sitting at his desk with the whiteboard ‘Ideas for Matt’s last episode’ as he moves through the various post-it notes labelled ‘Weeping Angels’, ‘Cracks in Space and Time’, ‘Daleks’, ‘Amy Pond’.

Moffat is a brilliant and brave screenwriter, always one to tread the fine-line between complex and convoluted story-arcs, but now is not the time to experiment in these areas. The joy of the 50^th anniversary (which was a rip-roaring dramatic success) was its recognition of the need to streamline the ‘plot’ sequence in order to shift utmost focus on to the interplay of the doctors, and their wrestling with past identities. Here the work feels artificially episodic, driven by a hyperactive imagination which is beginning to forget the need to slow down and grant the audience a lingering final moment with their doctor.  

There is nothing wrong with a frivolous romp. Indeed, it may have been too soon to repeat the dramatic intensity of the anniversary (and it is Christmas day), but if this was Moffat’s initial line of thought then he simply doesn’t commit to it. While the episode opens with an explosion of extraordinary ideas – Gallifrey still exists, the Time-Lords are returning, a fleet of the Doctor’s worst enemies have assembled, Clara has feelings for the Doctor – around the episode’s half-way mark one can feel the writing team going into panic mode.

For example, the Christmas festivity elements are violently shoe-horned into the work and the misjudged plot points are inadequately explained away in hurried voice-overs. As the writers begin to remember who exactly this episode is supposed to be about, both the fact it is a Christmas special and the fact it is a family adventure feel less like joyful dynamics and more like unwanted burdens.

Because the piece is so inorganically stitched together, Smith spends the majority of his time reciting exposition, while Coleman (a highly engaging actress when properly directed) is given little else to do other than run around and cry. Thus caught in-between desires to be a Christmas romp and a satisfying departure for Matt Smith, the episode sadly achieves neither – merely occupying a boring liminal space between the two.

That’s not to say there is nothing to appreciate in the hour. As with every Doctor Who episode the set-pieces are tenderly observed and lovingly performed. The notion of the doctor as a toy-maker, the repeated motif of childhood drawings and Orla Brady’s role as a ‘galactic nun’ are positively enchanting. Furthermore, even though there is something counterintuitive about making Matt Smith unrecognisably old in his final episode, his parting speech will bring a tear to the eyes of anyone who has followed the eleventh Doctor’s trajectory.

Christmas specials are never particularly good. The best have been last year’s ‘The Snowmen’ and 2006’s ‘The Runaway Bride’ and then only because there was something aptly festive and ‘new-beginnings-esque’ about the introduction of different companions. Perhaps it is we, not Moffat, who are asking too much of ‘The Time of the Doctor’, or perhaps Moffat is too busy working on the New Year special of Sherlock. Certainly though, it will be the 50^th anniversary episode by which we remember the last days of Matt Smith, and it will take more than a dull Christmas special to taint the spectacular virtuosity with which he has embodied the eleventh Doctor. 

We’ve already taken you through the villains of 2013 – but it’s also been a good year for music. Here we take you through the best songs of the year.

20. Bugatti – Ace Hood ft. Future and Rick Ross

19. Bashful – Kwes

18. Freak, Go Home – Darkside

17. Misunderstood – oOoOO

16. Badman City – Kahn ft Flowdan

15. Aleph – Gesaffelstein

14. Harm in Change – Toro Y Moi

13. Grammy (Soulja Boy Cover) – Purity Ring

12. Aerial – Four Tet

11. No Doubt – Lil Silva ft Rosie Lowe

10. Organ Eternal – These New Puritans

TNP’s move toward the orchestral is embodied in this majestically understated number.

9. Sosa(d) – Lil Cloud x Druture

Chief Keef’s slurred threats moulded into a thing of ambient beauty.

8. The Owls – Felicia Atkinson

Drone so delicate and exploratory it’s almost jazz. Like a feminine Fuck Buttons.

7. Boring Angel – Oneohtrix Point Never

A simple, yet kaleidoscopically beautiful, progression.

6. High Street – Blood Orange ft Skepta

A wistful paean to London meandering in and out of a ghostly beat like a preoccupied youth wandering through the backstreets of Tottenham after dark.

5. Semena Mertvykh – Boards of Canada

At the last, Boards of Canada’s much-heralded LP ‘Tomorrow’s Harvest’ descends into understated oblivion.

4. The Mahdi – Underachievers

For all the noise around Chance the Rapper, there was no better hip-hop made in 2013 than this- conscious, gorgeously produced and with flows potent enough to make grown men weep. ‘We be that Elevated Mafia.’

3. Blackpool Late Eighties – James Holden

Holden’s 2013 LP ‘The Inheritors’ was like the malformed brother of Oneohtrix Point Never’s more widely acclaimed ‘R Plus 7’, an analogue exploration of the weird pathways of the human mind. Blackpool is a rare moment of beauty amidst the fractal insanity.

2. Enter Paradise – Vatican Shadow

Simultaneously guttural and apocalyptic.

1. Niggaz Dying – Fat Trel

If Chief Keef read Nietzsche, he might produce something like the auto-tuned nihilism of Niggaz Dying. The cavernous production leaves plenty of space for the lyrics to have full impact as a chilling rebuttal to those who think hip-hop exclusively glorifies violence. ‘They shooting for nothing. They shooting to kill.’

and…

Biggest disappointment: Cyril Hahn- Perfect Form

In many ways, 2013 was the RnB bootleg wunderkid’s year, as his star continued its meteoric rise in a wild collision of astronomical metaphors. But could he translate his ethereal house template to a proper solo release and chart success? No. The result was sickly sweet, anodyne and immediately forgettable, leaving the faltering deep house revival still searching for a figurehead with more musical personality than Ben Pearce, that guy from Disclosure or that other guy from Disclosure.  

The latest offering from London producer William Bevan, aka Burial, is the fantastic ‘Rival Dealer’, a three-track EP proving to be his most divisive release to date. Part of his fanbase claims that this is his best release since 2007’s ‘Untrue’ while others claim he’s watering down his music and selling out. The second criticism is obviously ridiculous; two of the songs run past 10 minutes and the title track is a homage to the rave music Burial grew up listening to – hardly commercial gold. I also disagree with the first criticism, and hopefully any naysayers can be convinced by taking a look at Burial’s previous output.

Bevan’s existence in the world of music is one of true anonymity; he never makes public appearances or plays live shows, only very rarely gives interviews, and managed to release two highly acclaimed albums before we even knew his real name. One might expect that all this would distance fans from his music, but the exact opposite is true: his anonymity heightens the intimacy of what is already introspective music. The lack of live performances is hardly an issue either; Burial is headphone music, designed for isolated listening. It has always been a contradictory mixture of light and dark, simultaneously hopeful and melancholy; it’s cathartic, and while some tracks could be called dance music, the best time to listen to it has always been when you feel alone.

He’s mellowed in recent years, but Burial’s early production style was darker, rougher, more visceral. The beats were skittery, the bass switched between smooth and twitchy, the sound was cavernous. By removing some of the more jarring electro elements from this and giving the music more breathing space, he created one of the most hauntingly beautiful electronic records ever in ‘Untrue’. Since then, Burial hasn’t given us another full album, preferring to release occasional songs and EPs as and when. Starting with ‘Kindred’ in 2012, his music took on a more expansive feel, with songs regularly clocking in at over 10 minutes long and comprising several movements. People welcomed this change in style, praising the more experimental approach Burial had taken, whilst still ‘sounding like Burial’.

So why the indignation over the change on ‘Rival Dealer’? The production has shifted away from the jittery darkness of previous work, but the philosophy and soul behind the music is intact. Littered across the songs are samples of people discussing identity and sexuality; ‘Come Down to Us’ finishes with an excerpt of Lana Wachowski’s acceptance speech for the HRC’s Visibility Award, in which she discusses being transgender. In a rare communication with the public, Burial texted into Mary Anne Hobbs’ radio show regarding the EP: “… I wanted the tunes to be anti-bullying tunes that could maybe help someone to believe in themselves, to know that someone out there cares and is looking out for them. It’s like an angel’s spell to protect them against the dark times and the self-doubts.” Bevan still sees his music as providing comfort, and ‘Rival Dealer’ is just a natural progression for him; turning down the dark and stepping out of the shadows to give people hope in his own small way.

As anger sparks at the recent actions of the Hungarian far right Jobbik party, whose members have erected a statue of the Nazi collaborator Miklos Horthy at a church in Budapest, it is worth remembering the voice of one of those many Hungarians persecuted under Horthy’s rule.

Antal Szerb, author of the stunning Journey by Moonlight (Utas és holdvilág) was one of around half a million Hungarian Jews to be deported to concentration camps, such as Balf, where he died aged forty three. Unsurprisingly for a writer of the time and place in which Szerb found himself, much of Journey by Moonlight revolves around death. What makes it extraordinary is the curiosity, sensuality and generosity with which it considers life.

Roughly speaking, Journey concerns the adventures of one couple separated on their honeymoon: disparate Mihaly, tormented by nostalgia for the astonishment of youth and wracked with guilt at his inability to mature into bourgeois adulthood; and sheltered Erszi, longing to flirt with the passions of the bohemian lifestyle, but held back by her own straightjacketing respectability. Their quests of self-discovery lead them on separate flights across Italy and throughout Paris, negotiating on their way their understanding of love, sex, art and the precarious nature of civilization.

Szerb’s writing is preoccupied with an elusive sense of wonder – of what it means to really be alive and aware of it. His story unfurls in a haunting world of moonlit gardens over whose walls rise the voices of monks, in the back-alleys of Venice, in an attic of clockwork toys just dimly remembered from childhood. What all his images share is an ability to de-familiarize a world which the demands of civilized, adult life so often renders banal and bureaucratic. Journey by Moonlight reminds us what a strange and marvellous place that world can be.

This fascination with the world also comes across in Szerb’s connoisseur’s appreciation of the good life. The novel abounds in good wine, good sex and sumptuous settings. Lest this makes it sound dangerously like a forerunner of Eat, Pray, Love, however, Journey always retains too sharp an eye for reality to stray into the realms of guru-ish self-help. Szerb acknowledges the seedy side of bohemia as much as the allure; acknowledges too the futility and exhaustion of trying to feel alive all of the time. Most penetratingly, though, he sees that the converse of the desire for a meaningful life is the desire for a meaningful death – that moments of destruction can also be moments of ecstasy. This dark realization is one of the book’s central themes – and one that Julia Roberts might find harder to sell.

Journey by Moonlight invites us to remember life’s moments of rapture, while never letting us forget that they are only moments; temporary and fleeting. Affirmative but not sentimental, it treads the fine line of relishing in culture and material pleasures without becoming pretentious. When one considers the circumstances in which Szerb died this becomes a triumph – pleasure and an appreciation of the complex experience of being human is everything the Nazis tried to deny their victims. Hungarians aghast at the bold statement of the Horthy statue might take comfort in Journey’s subtler articulacy. 

Journey by Moonlight is published by Pushkin Press and is available to buy here

Is the long tradition of the pantomime dame under fire due to political correctness? The character’s disappearance from current shows is the latest uproar in panto-land, and it may have some eyes rolling. After all, whether Widow Twanky is offensive to cross-dressers, or a healthy way of exploring sexuality, might seem like the kind of bourgeois debate best left far ‘behind you’.

Trivial as it may appear, the debate raises an important question – that of censorship in theatre. The Widow Twanky case is a little obscure, but pantomime has been directly banned before – Snow White and the Seven Asylum Seekers was forbidden from performance in Devon in 2003. Last year, Exeter students were asked not to cross-dress in theatre because it was as offensive as blacking up. And a few years ago, a production satirizing the BNP, which toured the party’s main constituencies, was barred in Dudley two days before an EDL rally. So, is censorship in theatre ever a good thing?

In liberal England it is easy to forget the gravity of censorship abroad. The Syrian playwright Zaki Cordillo, whose work was seen to challenge Assad’s regime, was arrested in August 2012 and has not been heard of since. (PEN International is fighting his case.) A similar fate awaited the comic trio The Moustache Brothers, whose performance in 1996 which satirized the Burmese military government, staged outside the then politically imprisoned Aung Sun Suu Kyi’s house, landed them in jail for seven years.

Burma has since moved to a more civilian government, and the trio have been freed. They continue to perform in Mandalay. It is a traveller’s pilgrimage, and feeling a bit smug about my oblique political activism, I waited eagerly for the act to come on stage earlier this year. It was, sadly, cringingly bad. The show consisted of cheap jokes about not telling the main performer’s wife he fancied Jennifer Aniston, shameless merchandise plugging throughout, and a tiny granddaughter running on stage crying or wanting crisps (although that was easily the funniest bit). However the almost unbearable moment was when Par Par Lay made his one minute debut – he trudged on stage to have fake chains slapped on his wrists and kneeled with a sign saying ‘3 Time Arrested’ while we were forced to take photos.  

It seems cruel to criticize an act which once carried charged political satire, and paid the price for it. There is a possible vindication for what seems a depressing sell-out. The trio have obviously struggled to convert their act to English – so why bother? I found out that the show has not actually been totally authorized, but The Moustache Brothers are still kept under close watch, and only allowed to perform to travellers, not Burmese people themselves. This creates tourism and ironically puts money into the pockets of the government.

Parts of the US government think theatre might challenge their authority too. The Tempest was axed in Arizona as part of a list of books that might ‘promote the overthrow of the United States government’. And Shakespeare is often banned in America, for everything from being homophobic to racist, to ‘glorifying teen suicide, drugs, and disobedience of parental authority’.

My point is that maybe Snow White and the Seven Asylum Seekers was offensive. But for me, the cost of censorship almost always outweighs the positive effects of freedom of speech, and when something is damaging, we must hope for the discretion of the viewer to be enough to censor it for them self. Theatre creates a unique platform for experimentation, providing the opportunity to consider ideas which could not be so openly examined elsewhere – and so the show must go on.