★★★★☆
Four Stars

The Dalston-based Arcola Theatre’s underground performance space is an apt area to stage Alice in Wonderland – walking down the stairs into a dark room you cannot but help make comparisons with dropping down a rabbit hole. Despite the theatre being on the cosy side of cramped and swelteringly hot, OUDS managed to pull off a captivating performance, brilliantly directed.

Much is made of physical theatre’s ‘intimacy’ and it almost seems a cliché to write of intimate performances, but it is fair to say that this was an all-encompassing show; the actors run around the audience, hiding behind seats and popping out from unexpected places. The effect is visually stimulating, strengthened as it was by the physical interaction between the actors. For example, the Caterpillar’s many legs were portrayed by 3 actors standing behind each other and using their hands in synchrony (the Caterpillar, played by Richard Hill, was fabulously ‘queer’ as he turned about the stage fluidly).

The chaos of Wonderland too is perfectly actualised during the Cheshire cat scene: Alice is surrounded by different members of the cast, their heads snapping up and down to represent the reappearing and disappearing of the cat, their voices eerily echoing each other.

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The theme of madness is strongly upheld by juxtaposing sober scenes alongside the anarchic ones. This compared Alice’s ‘reality’ with the world of Wonderland and blurred the dividing line. (For example, the Cheshire cat scene is placed next to the moving moment when Alice’s uncle admits in tears “I am not truthful”.)

This is also the case when the Queen of Hearts’s scene dissolves in chaos and is replaced by Alice and her mother, a change signalled by the lighting – from warm to something colder and sharper as her mother bides her, “You must be truthful…that is life’s duty.” This prevents the play from being merely an explosion of nonsense – it was tightly held together and contained several great performances, including Vanessa Goulding as the Queen of Hearts and Johnny Purkiss, who manages to show both vulnerability as Alice’s uncle and then becomes entirely unhinged as the Mad Hatter.

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Alice is wonderfully foot-stompingly petulant, but this is all – her characterisation is otherwise a little bland, though arguably this gives room for the more colourful performances and prevents distraction from the themes.

OUDS is taking this to Edinburgh Fringe next, and it can be recommended without reservation as not only an entertaining, amusing performance, but a show which will leave you feeling stirred and thoughtful. 

Alice in Wonderland will be staged at C Nova, in Edinburgh, from 31st July to 26th August.

“We believe it is our right and responsibility to write ourselves into the future.” This is the powerful mission statement of Walidah Imarisha and Adrienne Maree Brown, the co-editors of a forthcoming anthology of radical speculative fiction written by social justice activists.

Social justice and science fiction initially seem to have little common ground. There is no overt relation between radicalism and a genre perceived as the preserve of overweight white men in Cheeto-stained slacks. Women are objectified in wallpaper roles, while colonial parallels emerge in narratives of space exploration.  The editors recognise that science fiction has reacted to minority writers “through a lens of hetero-normative white male supremacy, even when there has been curiosity or good intention.”

The anthology, entitled Octavia’s Brood, exists in part to redress a historical bias toward white male writers. In the 1960s, a poll to find the greatest science fiction novel of all time featured not a single female author.  The editors position themselves “among a community of writers and editors uplifting new voices which don’t fit the mainstream sci-fi demographic.” 

Since the sixties, the situation has improved. Science fiction “has responded to minority writers as society has responded- slowly.” This is thanks in no small part to the female African-American science fiction pioneer Octavia E. Butler who is commemorated in the title of the anthology. Specifically, the editors name-check the “Octavia Butler scholarship, an Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network, and all the work the Carl Brandon Society has been doing since 1997” as examples of science fiction’s slow progress toward equality across barriers of gender, race and sexuality, of which Octavia’s Brood forms a part.

However, this anthology is more than an exercise in equality. The co-editors feel that “speculative or science fiction [is] really speaking about the present in the context of… future generations.” Science fiction is here understood as the ideal literary platform for social activism, as both are concerned with the future of the human race. “All social justice is an act of speculative fiction, as we work to envision and create and organise for worlds we have never seen,” Brown tells me.

“Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in an exercise of speculative fiction. Organizers and activists struggle tirelessly to create and envision another world, or many other worlds, just as science fiction does… so what better venue for organizers to explore their work than through writing original science fiction stories?”

Imarisha and Brown “met through the internet”, and are crowd-sourcing the funding they need to publish and promote their anthology online: support their campaign here. Our transatlantic interview is conducted via email. Given that this forward-looking project was born online, it seems surprising they are publishing a traditional, physical anthology rather than exploring new media.  However, the editors make it clear that whilst “the media is instant… the issues are not.” 

“[Questions of social justice] have deep roots in history and they are our responsibility to figure out with more focused attention than a sensationalised 24 hour news cycle allows. We chose to collect short stories that could be read quickly but ask important questions that stick with our readers. Where is home? What is justice? What makes life worth living and fighting for?” Speculative fiction interrogates current societal values through its portrayal of alternative paradigms and social structures, and the editors feel that traditional narratives allow for these complex parallels to be developed to their fullest.

There are parallels to be drawn between the field of science fiction writing and the University of Oxford. Both were historically dominated by hetero-normative white males and have some way to travel toward a condition of equality, despite recent advances. However, just as science fiction’s forward-looking stance makes it the ideal platform for literary activists, so Oxford graduates are granted a unique platform from which to shape the future.

I therefore finish by asking what advice the editors would give to student activists in Oxford. They quote from the dystopian novel Parable of the Sower by the eponymous Octavia Butler, with a simple and encouraging message. “Write about the world you all want to see and share it. Trust yourselves to work together and stay in the work through the hard conversations. Remember, as Octavia taught us, ‘everything you touch you change’.”

Discussing 15-foot, electric blue chickens brings out the seven-year-old in all of us. Katharina Fritsch’s latest sculpture, commissioned to fill Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth for the next 18 months, has brought with it a wave of critical immaturity and double entendre. Every article, every interview, every po-faced critic’s blogspot piece has been accompanied by at least a trace of a snigger. It’s a cock! But not that sort of cock – a cockerel! Haaw haaw haaw! In unveiling it Boris Johnson was forced to resort to a Victorian music-hall-esque avoidance of saying the word, clutching at all the synonyms he could find to replace it – “Ladies and gentlemen, feast your eyes on this beautiful, big, blue…BIRD”.

But the sniggers are, in many ways, the point. Fritsch’s sculpture is all about mocking. Hahn/Cock is designed to undermine the other ‘cocks’ on the plinths surrounding it – the literalization of a metaphor for the preening masculinity that Trafalgar Square represents.It is, as Johnson himself put it at its grand opening, about ‘a woman’s rendering of a man’, subverting the testosterone-fuelled military history Trafalgar commemorates in phallic columns and roaring lions. It’s flipping the birdy (‘scuse the pun) at Nelson and all the other venerated ‘his’s of Britain’s navel-gazing naval ‘history’.

Of course, Fritsch’s sculpture is not without its critics. Before it was even erected, the Thorney Island Society had written to Westminster Council to complain. The Daily Mail had run articles of thinly disguised approbation. The idea of a hallowed landmark being openly, deliberately mocked – and in such a wincingly bright shade of blue – isn’t to everyone’s taste.

But the Fourth Plinth Project, the commission that, since 1999, has displayed a series of temporary works on the once-empty plinth, has its foundations in controversy and public debate. Since Trafalgar Square has some of the highest pedestrian traffic of any square in Britain, the breadth and diversity of the Fourth Plinth’s audience is almost infinite. It would be almost impossible to reach a consensus about the aesthetic worth of anything raised there.

It’s essential, therefore, that the Project embraces the controversy its artworks provoke – to engage Trafalgar’s public in debate about what constitutes ‘art’; to invoke a critical response; to generate reaction. And nothing says ‘react’ like a double-decker-sized double entendre.

There’re still always rumblings that a single, permanent statue could be erected to replace the Project’s temporary installations. Names for figures worthy of representation have ranged from Nelson Mandela to Margaret Thatcher and, according to Ken Livingstone, ‘the understanding is that the fourth plinth is being reserved for Queen Elizabeth II’.

But as it is for now, the plinth is defined not by revered individuals but by the opinions and responses of the thousands of people passing it daily – the children chasing Trafalgar’s pigeons; the tourists posing by the lions; the GSCE art students eating school-trip sandwiches on the steps of the National Gallery.

Anthony Gormley had the right idea in his 2009 installation One and Other, in which 2,400 individuals were each given an hour on top of the Plinth. It’s the most ‘public’ of public spaces, and long may its big blue cocks continue.