Having returned to Jordan’s capital, Amman, for a second term, I have now finessed the brief cultural differences I serve up when faced with various questions along the lines of “What’s different?”. Among my favorites have been, “Do they have pizza?” and “Is fun legal?”, both of which I can answer in the affirmative.

It is very possible to live what can be called an almost entirely “westernized” lifestyle in Amman – shopping malls, night clubs and fast food joints are all readily available. When surrounded by such familiar comforts it is easy to forget the differences between Jordanian and British culture, but they are often betrayed in the most subtle of social interactions.  On getting in a taxi a man must always climb into the seat next to the driver but a woman should sit in the back seat. One male classmate made the error of attempting to shake our hijab-wearing teacher’s hand, leading her to flush noticeably and awkwardly fumble in response.

As with the cases above, most of these differences stem from gender. The status of women and relationship between the sexes varies enormously throughout neighborhoods of Amman as well as Jordan as a whole. This might seem obvious enough, but the uncovered Queen Rania’s many jaunts across the pages of OK! magazine give the impression that most Jordanian women are free to dress as the please and live independently from husbands and male relatives. This is not true.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that even wealthy, middle-class Jordanians often face what British girls would see has heavy restrictions. At one gathering where everyone was at least university age, all of the (again, non-headscarf wearing) girls suddenly got up to leave at 11.30. When I asked one heavily intoxicated male guest of the same age why they where all leaving, he explained they were all subject to 12 o’clock curfews – an inconvenience he did not have to contend with.

If this is the standard procedure for wealthy, educated women I imagine that life for the poorer is far more constrained. Women’s status in Jordanian law certainly affords them little scope to battle for autonomy. Although verbal and physical harassment are both illegal, this small concession is overshadowed by far greater legal oversights.

Perhaps the most horrific is article 308, known by its detractors as “crime 308”, which allows a rapist to avoid prosecution if he agrees to marry his victim, and then stay married to her, for at least five years. This law is supported by 55.8% of the Jordanian population, who see it as a win-win situation for rapist and victim, which gives a very upsetting picture of Jordanian society.

Perpetrators of so-called “honour killings”-when a woman is murdered for having an illicit relationship with a man in a way considered to be shameful to her family, are also able to escape harsh punishment. If the victim’s family do not wish for the murderer to receive a harsh sentence, they may get away with as little as three months spent in prison – a common occurrence since those who carry out the crimes tend to come from the victim’s own family. Depressingly, a recent study of secondary school pupils in Amman showed that almost half of boys and one-fifth of girls believed that honor killings were justified.

Protests and campaigns against this harsh treatment of women are far and few between. Women and a few men have protested against the article which bars children born to foreign husbands from inheriting Jordanian citizenship, but presumably the stigma attached to calling out for women’s rights in a patriarchal country where freedom of assembly is still relatively constrained discourages many from making their voices heard.

With sexism so entrenched in society, and defenders of women’s rights understandably unwilling or struggling to make their voices heard, I feel it’s not too culturally imperialist to suggest that countries where women have more rights should pressurize Jordan to shape up.  In 2013, Jordan ranked 6^th highest amongst countries receiving US aid. Surely the international community, if it wanted to, could encourage the Jordan to stop treating half of its population as second-class citizens? 

The problem with being ‘in’ someone else’s eyes is that you can never be quite sure if what they’re seeing is really happening: there’s always the possibility that it’s all imagined, untrue, made-up. As director Lucy Fielding tells me, there’s no knowing where reality begins and ends in In Her Eyes, the dark musical about an isolated teenage girl whose life is turned upside down.

The whole story is told through the eyes of a narrator (Ellen Timothy), who both sings and speaks the story of Freddie (Rachel Coll), the play’s protagonist. Acting as an extension of the audience, we watch the play through her eyes, at times unsure what to believe. The musical’s concern with teenage gossip blurs the line between truth and illusion – as rumour spreads about the new boy in Freddie’s life, the music itself becomes distorted and disturbed, until the original tune is lost and the message has been transformed into something else. Like in a game of Chinese whispers, what we end up with, in both the music and the story, may be a distortion of the truth.

The all-female aesthetic of the musical is striking, and emphasises the centrality of Freddie’s relationship with her mother and with the other girls at school. Though the story is mediated by the narrator, the emotional proximity and honesty of the characters’ feelings is undoubtedly one of its strengths: there are no jazz hands to be seen, but there is an intimacy set up between the audience and the seven-person cast that is refreshing for a musical. In a testament to the musical’s emotional depth, in one scene Freddie’s mother (the convincingly maternal Heather Young) managed to bring tears to the eyes of one of the cast. The minimalistic staging at the Burton Taylor Studio will add to the sense of closeness, with the audience positioned on three sides of a thrust stage.

This sense of closeness is offset, however, by a perpetual air of mystery. Freddie’s new boyfriend Jamie is never seen, for instance, and the musical ends quietly, leaving suspended unresolved and unanswered questions. The music keeps us guessing as well: Toby Huelin, the third-year student who wrote In Her Eyes during Trinity last year, described it as “very difficult” – mainly operatic and classical, but with some catchy tunes more typical of musical theatre. Like the rumours in the story, the music refuses to settle into one genre, instead ever morphing into something else. For Huelin it’s “musical theatre subverted”. With a talented cast and the energy provided by a three piece band, In Her Eyes promises to provide emotional depth along with some of the exhilaration of musical theatre.

William Doyle’s debut album as East India Youth demonstrates an extensive array of influences and reference points. Over the course of the album, Doyle touches on acid house, ambient, krautrock, synthpop and even gospel. He demonstrates his innovative compositional abilities alongside a unique pop sensibility and impressive songwriting skills, which results in Total Strife Forever being both original and accessible. Shimmering synth arpeggios accompanied by mournful piano chords open it, a combination of electronic beauty and human emotion which together perfectly encapsulate the feel of the album as a whole.

Total Strife Forever is a remarkable example of variation; ‘Hinterland’ is almost a dance track, all squiggly basslines and pounding four-to-the-floor drums. Testament to Doyle’s talent, the album manages to feel coherent, both in sound and in concept. Tying the more experimental tracks together are the songs featuring Doyle’s vocals, which are the emotional heart of the album. Lyrically introspective, it explores themes of love, longing and loneliness, echoing the bleak instrumentation. Doyle’s fragile voice heightens the emotional impact of these brilliant pop songs.

Anyone who has experienced the music of Aaron Funk (more commonly known as the man behind Venetian Snares) in full flow will be aware that it is about as bracing as the weather that has been recently tearing through the producer’s Canadian home town of Winnipeg.

In this release, however, gone are the harsh, synth-heavy sections; intense, chopped up breakbeats and erratic time signature changes. This could be due to the influence of collaborator Joanne Pollock, a relatively new name to electronic music, with only a few independently released tracks on Bandcamp and SoundCloud.

Together they have created an ethereal and dreamlike landscape; its synthesized textures just abstract enough to allow the listener to drift off into it, whilst the occasional jarringly surreal lyric on tracks like ‘Ancient Pony’ bring moments of lucidity. The lo-fi vocals given by both artists have a distinctly Warpaint-esque sound to them, whilst the nocturnal atmosphere calls to mind Moby’s 2011 release, De- stroyed. Though some tracks such as ‘Losing Meaning’ feature more activity, at times even the most sparse musical textures seem to retain the intensity of Funk’s breakcore output.

Poemss is a vehicle for abstract escapism best experienced late at night, in its entirety, as loud as possible.

Actress has done it again. This, the fourth, and possibly final LP under Darren Cunningham’s thespy moniker is an excellent addition to an outstanding body of work. 2012’s R.I.P. was always going to be a tough act to follow, and whilst Ghettoville doesn’t quite reach the dizzying heights of that masterpiece, it is his strongest conceptually. R.I.P. was equal parts beautiful and erratic, subtle and abrasive: more a compilation of sketches than the carefully considered narrative presented here.

Ghettoville sees Cunningham return to a more stereotypical sound palette, far removed from that of R.I.P. The album’s title, therefore, is not all that surprising, forming a sequel of-sorts to 2008’s debut Hazyville. That being said, it is striking how individual and distinct each of his four albums have been from one another. True to his name, Cunningham is a dab hand at playing different roles. Even so, every album unmistakably carries his signature.

The opening track, ‘Forgiven’, sets the scene for Cunningham’s miserable portrayal of the modern metropolis. An ominous thunderstorm occasionally infiltrates the beat, only to be driven back by the incessant hum of traffic. The realities of urban living are laid plain: this is the London of the people, not of the fat cats and their bonuses. The theme is continued through a series of anaesthetised 4/4 interpretations brimming with emotion until an orchestral stab of dread pierces the fabric of the album in ‘Towers’, conjuring images of an Orwellian nightmare. ‘Gaze’ offers a glimmer of hope with its uplifting string pads, only to be abruptly curtailed by the visceral terror of ‘Skyline’. A cityscape defaced by decay.

The overarching gloominess is juxtaposed by the pop sensibilities of ‘Rap’, but the melancholy remains in its repetitive cries of “Wrap yourself around me”. A reflection of the city’s youth craving physicality in our increasingly virtual world. Connected, but alone.

If this really is the curtain call, then so be it. Cunningham has said and done more with Actress than I ever dreamt possible on discovering Hazyville. And therein lies the crux – all that can be said, has been said. In the artist’s own words: “the demands of writing caught the artist slumped and reclined, devoid of any soul, acutely aware of the simulated prism that required breakout.”

Exit Actress.

One of the greatest unforeseen challenges of capitalism has been the concentration of financial power within institutions which manage investments. The share-owning democracy is the openly stated ambition of many a politician. An instrument of investment in which profits are contingent upon volatile share prices, which can fluctuate wildly in response to any number of factors, has created an ancillary industry of stock brokerage. Knowledge of share price behaviour has become a profession of itself, one for which investors are willing to pay a handsome premium in order to try to shield themselves from the volatility of the shares market. The Wolf Of Wall Street is a case study by one of the greatest living film directors, Martin Scorsese, of one such real life stock broker, named Jordan Belfort. It is based on a book of the same name, written by Belfort (played by a superb Leonardo DiCaprio) as a memoir of his “professional” life.

It begins with a 22 year old Belfort arriving on Wall Street to begin a career in a stock brokerage firm. Married, seemingly honest and decent, his sole determination appears to be to improve his prospects for both himself and his wife. A laudable ambition. Upon commencing his job, however, he is inculcated into a world which seems utterly insane. His immediate senior within his job is a wealthy but morally bankrupt drug addict and alcoholic share dealer, who sees his function as one of organised theft of the investors whose interests he is theoretically supposed to serve. Although initially reticent to replicate the behaviour observed in his superiors, Belfort quickly succumbs to temptation. We see him embark upon a hedonistic orgy of class A drugs, alcoholism and sexual promiscuity barely imaginable. Fuelled by the high earning lifestyle of his role in the brokerage firm, Belfort’s activities are brought to a sudden halt by ‘Black Monday’ as his firm is forced to close.

Scratching around for a new job, Belfort begins working for a small, run-down brokerage firm which tries to push “penny-stocks” (i.e. worthless investments) upon the unsuspecting poor. Realising that the commission rates on worthless stock run to 50% of the value of the investment, rather than the 1% he was used to in his previous work, Belfort sets up his own firm with the sole objective being to foist such worthless shares upon as many unsuspecting investors as possible. By recruiting a plethora of salesmen, with no moral inhibitions, he becomes a personal financial success, and before long is earning north of $40m per annum.

Belfort is a fascinating character. Much like Shakespeare’s Richard III, he wins our affections as an audience, not because we ethically endorse his behaviour, but because he has a charm and wit which is appealing. He is highly intelligent, driven, and conducts his life without any moral restraint whatever. Yet his transformation on screen is from an ambitious but naïve family man to a morally vacuous individual. The brokerage firm he establishes is a ruthless environment, where non-conformity to the accepted professional norms of the exploitation of naïve investors is met with dismissal, violence and social exclusion. The almost exclusively male environment painted on screen by Scorsese is one in which cocaine, prostitutes, alcoholism and theft become ends in themselves. Their indifference to those they steal from is only exceeded by their indifference to any notion of fidelity or emotional loyalty they might be expected to exhibit toward their wives and families.

A moral treatise this film is not. The objective is to set out on screen what happened in Belfort’s life, and how. There is no focus on the consequences of his behaviour for anybody except himself and his immediate friends and relatives. Despite given numerous attempts to escape from his degrading and self-destructive environment, Belfort refuses to surrender his delinquency. Manipulative, myopic and aggressive, he is the very definition of a psychopath. Scorsese offers us no solution to such behaviour, or cure for its consequences. As a study of the human nature of financial elites who have made the world what it is today, The Wolf of Wall Street is a reiteration that man, placed in an environment with no ethical, financial or legal checks on his behaviour, is unlikely to conduct himself with the best interests of others in mind. DiCaprio’s on screen performance is one of unconstrained, unabashed self-interest, the very behavioural norm that market liberal economists tell us is good for all. Whether audiences are inclined to agree is another matter, but the closing scene – in which many hundreds of members of the public seek to learn the secrets of Belfort’s wisdom in order to replicate his ‘success’ – might tell us all we need to know about the future of capitalism.