Apparently, ‘directing is like playing music’. It is also rather like trying to negotiate the Oxford High Street on a unicycle, or perhaps memorise Hamlet: it is often dangerous, sometimes difficult and always worth it in the end. I directed my first play when I was sixteen — my own adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray — and now, with four plays and, I hope, a slightly expanded theatrical knowledge in hand, I am about to direct one of the most iconic works in the English language — Brideshead Revisited. After more than thirty years, Brideshead is returning to Oxford, its undisputed spiritual home. And I will be sharing the whole experience — all the tears, tantrums and joy, until opening night at the Corpus Auditorium in 7th week — with you. Yes you, dropping your mug of tea in excitement at this scintillating news, and even you, the hardened cynic rolling your eyes at the screen thinking that this is just another play about over-privileged Oxford kids like yourself.

The script is my stage adaptation of the classic novel by an Oxonian literary giant, Evelyn Waugh, and the first draft was written during one mad night of inspiration last term, after a particularly lively formal Hall, which, I assure you, is not an oxymoron. There must have been something in the wine.

Although we begin rehearsals in 1^st week, I started working on Brideshead at the beginning of last term by finding a production team and casting. John Frankenheimer, the celebrated American director, maintained that ‘casting is sixty-five percent of directing’ and I don’t think I could disagree. The right actor in the right part only needs guiding rather than directing. Luckily, the idea of Brideshead was so popular that nearly a hundred of Oxford’s best actors came to audition and the final cast of eleven is really quite extraordinary.

After casting was completed, I began the Easter vac by trying to draw up an efficient rehearsal schedule. We all remember those school play rehearsals where you aimlessly waited around for three hours before your ten minutes of glory as Villager 5, or at least I do. Other things to consider were putting together a definitive props list — by which I mean trying to decide how many towers of wax fruit we need — and thinking about the music. Taking a cue from Tennessee Williams, music is going to be an integral part of this production, transferring the emotional intensity from one scene to the next by marrying period music from the 1920s and atmospheric scene change music, which has been specially commissioned for the play. The three protagonists and I also spent an afternoon at the National Theatre costume warehouse in London, hunting for various outré, decadent pieces from the 1920s. 

Before rehearsals start, the first real problem for a director is to determine what his direction will actually be, which is slightly more difficult and less obvious than it sounds. Once the production’s ‘center’ is found, every single directorial decision should be based on it. Of course, Brideshead is a play about many things but for me it is essentially a modern tragedy about the death of an idyll. Presenting the play from this angle will involve building up an unbearable sense of tragic futility from the very beginning, as the protagonists strive to satisfy their impossible yearnings. Now that that’s settled, let us begin.

You don’t have to channel flick for long through China’s deluge of melancholy soaps and anaemic news to find shots of gallant revolutionaries striding through hails of Japanese bullets, freeing the people from the corrupt Guomindang, and foiling the schemes of their villainous foreign backers in a stroke. The wars of the 1930s and 40s (or, to use the Chinese phrase, the Liberation) remain after almost a century a constant feature of Chinese programming. Granted, past wars are relived worldwide, but in no country, or at least none that I have visited, are the wars of a single era so firmly embedded in television schedules, broadcast at all hours of the day, to an audience that has long since grown bored of them.

This last point is interesting. War dramas here are not only omnipresent, but bad – the film is dull, the acting unoriginal, the action mimed, on a par with those weird battle re-enactments you probably watched in history classes. Even the Chinese themselves poke fun at the recurring technological anachronisms – peasant soldiers shown firing missiles and the like. The point is not that the Chinese make bad shows, but rather that such a casual treatment of one of the most vicious periods of China’s history does not seem utterly absurd. In the West, the horrors of war have to be relived in full, gory detail to seem anything other than crassly disrespectful to the millions sent against their will to die in terrified agony, but here historical disaster is legitimate fodder for anyone with a camera and a few thousand yuan.

There are two main reasons for this. First is the simple fact that  setting a program in the era is one of the only ways to get a bit of action, so corrosive to ‘harmony’, past China’s censors – thus, it is an easy choice for script writers. The second and more important reason is that the battles of the era, which, as the story goes, freed China from over a century of foreign exploitation and humiliation, are viewed by most Chinese in black-and-white terms. In those heady days, the line separating Communist good for foreign or Nationalist evil was yet to be blurred by the grim aftermath of the revolution. Without trying to downplay the callous exploitation of the Chinese by the West in the Opium Wars, the brutality of the Japanese invasion, or the corruption of the Nationalist government, the era is discussed among the Chinese with a total lack of moral ambiguity (the Communists committed their fair share of brutality as well), and a genuine passion that can come as a shock to more ahistorical Westerners.

It’s because of this lack of sensitivity to the moral ambiguities of those conflicts, born out of a strong sense of righteous victimhood, that such casual treatments of war fails to raise eyebrows in China. Revolutionary battles sit comfortably on daytime TV only because there is no doubt in the minds of the audience that the dead deserved to die – the Nationalists for their corruption, the Japanese for their barbarity; Westerners earn contempt for their shadowy attempts to hold back the revolution (which, to be fair, is entirely accurate). Though the events concerned have long faded from the public consciousness in the West (they are, for example, rarely taught in schools), the image of China as the victim of foreign oppression still hangs heavily over the interactions of the Chinese with the West.

Take, for example, the virulently nationalistic protests that erupted in many Chinese cities a year ago, after a show of Japanese defiance in a dispute over a few islands. The anger both on the streets and in the press was rooted not in the importance of the islands themselves, but in Japan’s past crimes against China, and outrage that such a past sinner would not cave in to Chinese demands. Despite dozens of apologies, not to mention the fact that Japanese yen, through both commerce and  aid, have powered much of China’s rise, the occupation remains far from forgotten.

Equally, polls, op-eds and much debate online is shot through with a lingering suspicion that Western nations are conspiring to keep China weak and servile, and prevent it taking it’s perceived rightful place as a great power. Western complaints, from support for Tibetan independence, to calls for political reform, even requests for a revaluation of the yuan, are framed as insidious plots to ‘split’ China, and keep it weak. However large a pinch of salt the rantings of the official press may be taken with these days, that latent suspicion remains firmly ingrained in the minds of many Chinese, especially those whose contact with the outside world is kept to a minimum by low income and education.

I’m not, of course, arguing that such attitudes were created by war dramas. Such grievances were embedded in the rhetoric of all the original revolutionary factions, and are sustained today by the Patriotic Education Campaign that began in schools after the Tiananmen crackdown, to play up the role of foreigners in China’s troubles and divert attention away from the Party’s own wrongdoings. Even less am I trying to argue that this anger is not genuine, or somehow a government con – a classmate of mine was harangued only yesterday by a taxi driver about the destruction of a Beijing palace by foreign powers over a century ago.

The war dramas are in a sense China’s answer to America’s 24. Political paranoia that normally lies beneath the surface of public discourse is played out and climatically resolved in a straightforward conflict between good and bad of the sort that only violence can provide.  Our views of China are invariably coloured by its recent, terrible, history, yet the Chinese perspective is still to this day determined by conflicts and crimes that foreigners barely remember, let alone consider relevant to the modern day. Whether the Chinese will move on within our lifetimes is difficult to say, but for a while the sight brave revolutionaries charging into the face of foreign adversity, no matter how low-budget, will continue to warm the heart of many a disgruntled patriot.

I was ten years old and in the fifth grade on September 11, 2001. I lived in New York at the time, in a community that lost many victims to the attacks on the World Trade Center that day. So, like most Americans, when I heard that Osama bin Laden had been killed, a mixture of emotions rushed through me – relief and regret at once washing over me in waves.

I remember vividly what it was like, on a sunny afternoon, to be taken into the school gymnasium along with the rest of my grade and told of the terrorist attacks that had taken place, as airplanes were intentionally crashed by al Qaeda not only in Manhattan but near the Pentagon and in the fields of rural Pennsylvania. In the hours, days, and weeks that followed, somber silence was punctuated at intervals by anger, fear, and sorrow. But it was also broken by the outpouring of patriotism that engulfed a city and a nation.

At our school concert the following spring, we sang a medley of songs, ranging from The Star-Spangled Banner, our national anthem, to America the Beautiful, My Country, ‘Tis of Thee, and God Bless the USA. We wore red, white, and blue humbly, without even the slightest hint of irony or self-deprecation to mar the pride felt across the country in being American and in possessing the ability to survive and to show the world that as a people we were stronger than ever.

Over time, that spirit seemed to fade in some ways. We still said the Pledge of Allegiance every morning at school and paused afterwards for a moment of silence to commemorate the victims not only of 9/11 but of other wars. Flags still flew from the homes of citizens, and the fireworks on the Fourth of July hinted at a greater significance. But as people went about their daily lives, memories grew a bit dimmer. For the families of victims, while their own memories will never dim, trying to move on became a priority.

So when I woke up Monday morning to the news that the man responsible more than any other for the terror of that day was gone, I was jolted by that emotional rush. Because I was here in Oxford and not in New York where people flooded the streets near Ground Zero, or in Washington, D.C., where they gathered on the National Mall. Across the country, college students held impromptu parties on campuses bedecked with American flags, already memorialized in their own way in the Facebook pictures of my high school friends.

I quickly understood, though, that being here has only brought me more clarity in looking back on what happened and in processing this most recent event. I’m not standing right now in the New York metropolitan area, but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel the same elation and regret. I’ve simply been given more time in a foreign place to realize I will never lose those feelings.