‘Body music.’ That’s how Adonis, one of the leading poets and critics of the last generation, puts it. Way back in the Jahiliyyeh, the ‘Time of Ignorance’ before Islam, the Arab tribes would turn to their poets for the things they couldn’t quite say, the stories and feelings that lay just on the edge of speech. The poet would sing of loss and pride and passion straight from the heart of his people, a laureate by every campfire, and this was how the Arabs knew who they were and who they should be.

This function – the gift of a tongue to what is felt in the voiceless blood of a nation – never left the Arab poets. In spite of Islam’s strictures, or perhaps because of them, they still cry out with – or often against – their societies. Nizar Qabbani, for instance, whose collected works grace nearly every literate household in Damascus, wrote relentlessly for the sexual emancipation of Arab women. ‘My friends,’ he says of them, ‘birds who perish in caves without a single sound.’

The Arab nations are in turmoil, and in this world of fire, hate and disappointment, poetry is not a luxury but an absolute necessity. It is what keeps men humane, women hopeful, children aware of their identity. Poems are passed around the exiled and the illiterate like contraband belief: I have heard soldiers who could not write their names sing poems. If you want to taste the raw distillation of what the Arabs feel, drink here, for there is no contact between East and West more immediate, more alive, than this. Taste the words of Samih al-Qasim:

‘I would have liked to tell you
The story of a nightingale that died.
I would have liked to tell you
The story –
Had they not slit my lips.’

Blood music. Body music.

TO TRY: On Entering the Sea, by the Syrian Nizar Qabbani (Interlink Books, tr. various), and The Butterfly’s Burden, by Palestine’s Mahmoud Darwish (Bloodaxe Books, tr. Joudah).

It seems fitting that I visit this exhibition during a winter vac that began with eyes on the Copenhagen climate change conference and a vac that has seen the longest cold spell in Britain in thirty years. Increasingly, we are fascinated and frustrated by the world around us.

For most of us, climate change is a reality and a defining issue of our time. ‘Earth: Art of a changing world’ brings together contemporary art that reflects on, explores, and engages with our evolving relationship with the nature. Works by established names Cornelia Parker, Anthony Gormley and Tracy Emin are interspersed with specially commissioned work by lesser-known emerging talent. Artists have actively sought out nuances in the climate change debate, as well as allowed it to pervade their working practices.

“It’s a thought-provoking exhibition, seductive and frightening. Fragile and powerful.”

 The exhibition is divided into sections. It begins with an introduction to the key elements of the natural world and the fragile equilibrium we find it in. The exhibition then goes on to question man’s perceived control over his and the planet’s existence. The third section presents work where artists have assumed the role of an explorer, developing the artistic interventions in monitoring and portraying our human, cultural and natural evolution. The penultimate section considers the damage we have inflicted and continue to inflict on the environment, foretelling worrying consequences of this continuing path of destruction. Finally, the exhibition ends with pieces that tell of a stark awareness of a challenging future that we continue to redefine and alter.

A whole range of work in different media is on display. Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey have planted young oak tree saplings on the portico of 6 Burlington Gardens, whilst Clare Twomey has created beautifully delicate unfired clay flowers, some of which are placed in a ‘protective’ cabinets, others of which are casually strewn on the floor, exposed to the damaging effects of visitors’ curiosity. A special mention should go to Antti Laitinen. It is amusing, annoying and intriguing to watch mini-films of the Finnish artist struggling yet persevering in building a homemade island in the middle of the cold Baltic Sea. The photographs of the newly constructed land mass alludes to our dream-like conceptions of paradise and are visually stunning.

 “The theme is overplayed, but should not deter you from visiting”

The exhibition is thought-provoking. It seduces as well as frightens. Fragility is presented alongside power. It navigates the discord as well as the beauty in the natural world that we may often take for granted. For those of you sceptical of the value of contemporary and modern art, let this exhibition connect ‘issue’ with ‘art’ and show strongly the relevance of the artist in the climate change debate. Equally, the exhibition’s overplayed theme should not deter you from visiting. The work presented is not an irritating pastiche of activist content and press cuttings. The pieces, though very relevant to our time, are refreshing, inventive portrayals and testaments of a changing world.

four stars

Earth is at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, 6 Burlington Gardens until 31 January. Admission is £7/5.

Photo: Anthony Gormley, Amazonian field (1992), courtesy of the artist and White Cube, London.

In 1919 the Emir Faisal, leader of the Arab Revolt and key wartime ally of T.E. Lawrence, went to Paris to claim the great Arab state he believed was due to his family according to British pledges. He came back empty-handed, and explained to his people, ‘I soon realized that the Westerners were profoundly ignorant about the Arabs and that their information was derived entirely from the tales of the Arabian Nights.’ The condescension and prejudice that faced Faisal at the peace conferences persist in the Western world today, and Eugene Rogan’s new book is intended to restore intellectual parity between East and West.

With such aims, it would be easy for a history of the Arabs to go too far in the opposite direction and become a work of grovelling apology. Critics have been quick to level this charge at Rogan, but in fact his account of relations between the Arabs and the heavyweight ‘Powers’ of the last five hundred years is remarkably even-handed for such an emotive subject. He sets forth his thesis clearly in the introduction: the Arab world has gone through four phases of subjection to foreign nations; the Ottoman Empire up to 1918, the colonial powers from the early nineteenth century to the end of WW2, America and Russia in the Cold War, and America alone since 1989. All this time, he believes, the Arabs have manipulated and been manipulated by foreign powers, usually to their disadvantage. This is the chief source of Arab problems and grievances today.

“Time in the Arab world seems to have fractured and to be caught in weird loops and distortions, as the same mistakes are made over and over again.”

 The arguments get better as the book progresses, but he is often caught up in webs of intrigue and curious little stories. The great selling-point of his book is that, where possible, Rogan allows the Arabs to speak for themselves, quoting diverse eye-witness accounts and anecdotes. These are often great fun; we read of Fakhr al-Din, the Machiavellian Druze prince who schemed in Medici Florence, of the beautiful Palestinian air pirate Leila Khaled, who joyrode a plane from Fiumicino to Damascus, and of the Mamluk warlord Ali Bey, who ‘was so awe-inspiring that some people died in awe of him’.

This colourful content makes the book readable, even if it does often get in the way of Rogan’s argument. It feels at times as though the historian is struggling to impose an artificial order on a raw, chaotic, writhing mass of narrative. Nevertheless, as we progress through the ages of oil and Islamism the point begins to sink in. It is a cliche that history repeats itself, but in the Middle East these cycles are peculiarly local and vicious. The 2003 invasion of Iraq is a mirror to the British suppression of Iraqi insurgency in 1920; the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948 and 1967 were carbon copies of one another; Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 2006 presented mocking parallels with their occupation of the country in 1982. Time in the Arab world seems to have fractured and to be caught in weird loops and distortions, as the same mistakes are made over and over again.

 “It would be easy for a history of the Arabs to become a work of grovelling apology, yet Rogan’s effort remains remarkably even-handed”

In the excellent epilogue to this book, Rogan makes it clear that any lasting change must come from the Arab world as much as from abroad. He is too disinterested to draw explicit conclusions, but one clear and consistent failing emerges from the entire book. This is a failure of community. Let me put this bluntly: if you were to trap four Arab leaders in a mine with one shovel, two of them would fight for the shovel while the other two formed an arbitration committee and decreed that the shovel be broken into four to satisfy all parties concerned. Thus far no shared tie – not ethnicity, language, nor even shared religion – has bound the Arab states together for long enough to achieve anything of permanence.

A succinct example from The Arabs will illustrate this. At the start of the Arab-Israeli Six Day War of 1967, a Jordanian early-warning station detected a sortie of Israeli jets heading towards Egypt. Their radio operative frantically relayed a signal to his Egyptian counterpart. The Egyptians, however, had their radio tuned out, and heard nothing; their entire air force was wiped out in a matter of hours. The Arab countries were literally on different frequencies to one another, and a whole string of such basic errors led to a comprehensive defeat against the odds.

If the Arab world is going to get its act together and act effectively, the states must find common ground. Rogan’s history is an excellent place to start looking. To specialist and non-specialist alike, it offers the clarity of vision that has so often been lacking. This book is clear, reasoned and thought-provoking. Dig in.

In 1919 the Emir Faisal, leader of the Arab Revolt and key wartime ally of T.E. Lawrence, went to Paris to claim the great Arab state he believed was due to his family according to British pledges. He came back empty-handed, and explained to his people, ‘I soon realized that the Westerners were profoundly ignorant about the Arabs and that their information was derived entirely from the tales of the Arabian Nights.’ The condescension and prejudice that faced Faisal at the peace conferences persist in the Western world today, and Eugene Rogan’s new book is intended to restore intellectual parity between East and West.

With such aims, it would be easy for a history of the Arabs to go too far in the opposite direction and become a work of grovelling apology. Critics have been quick to level this charge at Rogan, but in fact his account of relations between the Arabs and the heavyweight ‘Powers’ of the last five hundred years is remarkably even-handed for such an emotive subject. He sets forth his thesis clearly in the introduction: the Arab world has gone through four phases of subjection to foreign nations; the Ottoman Empire up to 1918, the colonial powers from the early nineteenth century to the end of WW2, America and Russia in the Cold War, and America alone since 1989. All this time, he believes, the Arabs have manipulated and been manipulated by foreign powers, usually to their disadvantage. This is the chief source of Arab problems and grievances today.

“Time in the Arab world seems to have fractured and to be caught in weird loops and distortions, as the same mistakes are made over and over again.”

The arguments get better as the book progresses, but he is often caught up in webs of intrigue and curious little stories. The great selling-point of his book is that, where possible, Rogan allows the Arabs to speak for themselves, quoting diverse eye-witness accounts and anecdotes. These are often great fun; we read of Fakhr al-Din, the Machiavellian Druze prince who schemed in Medici Florence, of the beautiful Palestinian air pirate Leila Khaled, who joyrode a plane from Fiumicino to Damascus, and of the Mamluk warlord Ali Bey, who ‘was so awe-inspiring that some people died in awe of him’.

This colourful content makes the book readable, even if it does often get in the way of Rogan’s argument. It feels at times as though the historian is struggling to impose an artificial order on a raw, chaotic, writhing mass of narrative. Nevertheless, as we progress through the ages of oil and Islamism the point begins to sink in. It is a cliche that history repeats itself, but in the Middle East these cycles are peculiarly local and vicious. The 2003 invasion of Iraq is a mirror to the British suppression of Iraqi insurgency in 1920; the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948 and 1967 were carbon copies of one another; Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 2006 presented mocking parallels with their occupation of the country in 1982. Time in the Arab world seems to have fractured and to be caught in weird loops and distortions, as the same mistakes are made over and over again.

“It would be easy for a history of the Arabs to become a work of grovelling apology, yet Rogan’s effort remains remarkably even-handed”

In the excellent epilogue to this book, Rogan makes it clear that any lasting change must come from the Arab world as much as from abroad. He is too disinterested to draw explicit conclusions, but one clear and consistent failing emerges from the entire book. This is a failure of community. Let me put this bluntly: if you were to trap four Arab leaders in a mine with one shovel, two of them would fight for the shovel while the other two formed an arbitration committee and decreed that the shovel be broken into four to satisfy all parties concerned. Thus far no shared tie – not ethnicity, language, nor even shared religion – has bound the Arab states together for long enough to achieve anything of permanence.

A succinct example from The Arabs will illustrate this. At the start of the Arab-Israeli Six Day War of 1967, a Jordanian early-warning station detected a sortie of Israeli jets heading towards Egypt. Their radio operative frantically relayed a signal to his Egyptian counterpart. The Egyptians, however, had their radio tuned out, and heard nothing; their entire air force was wiped out in a matter of hours. The Arab countries were literally on different frequencies to one another, and a whole string of such basic errors led to a comprehensive defeat against the odds.

If the Arab world is going to get its act together and act effectively, the states must find common ground. Rogan’s history is an excellent place to start looking. To specialist and non-specialist alike, it offers the clarity of vision that has so often been lacking. This book is clear, reasoned and thought-provoking. Dig in.

The sky really is the limit for students’ dramatic ambitions this term. Skimming through the latest OUDS email offers a glimpse of the possibilities. ‘It’s about a man who learns to fly – you could be that man’, reads the tagline for a Film Cuppers entry.

Alternatively, keep your feet on the Edinburgh ground (which will hopefully have thawed by then) as a director or producer at the Fringe Festival, or jet off to (sunny?) Japan, as producer/director for the OUDS Tour 2010, provided you have an artistic concept for a Shakespearean play on the back-burner.

We’re only just back and, bizarrely, their emphasis is very much on getting away. For those thespians flying their student nests this year there’s the Finalists’ Showcase, workshops for aspiring technicians, producers, designers and directors and a masterclass with Barrie Rutter based upon the Northern Broadsides’ production of Medea at the Playhouse (2-6 February).

Fledgling that I am, I don’t feel like abandoning the Oxford stage just yet. There’s the New Writing Festival coming up and, here at Cherwell, we’re gathering performances of original monologues and dialogues for publication online. Even when I do eventually take flight, I’ll soon be coming back, if the Playhouse’s almuni production is anything to go by (Live Canon on 29th January).

Saturday before 0th Week. Radcliffe square is ankle-deep in snow. Straggling winter tourists dominate the term-time student streets. As I head into Brasenose to join The Magic Toyshop in rehearsal, the place seems deserted. But the cast have been there for a week, working on what sounds like my six year old cousin’s fantasy.

They are ready to run something, the director tells me, so I switch my camcorder on. Then the unexpected happens. ‘If there’s one thing I cannot stand, it’s cold porridge,’ says Philip, the play’s patriarch figure – and the room falls dead silent.

It is said in the theatre that you cannot play the King. Only the court can show you are the King by the way they treat you. And when the play’s younger characters were cowed into silence by his seemingly mundane remark, I knew two things. Firstly, that Philip is a king here. And, secondly, that the ‘porridge’ reference couldn’t be further from Goldilocks.

This is no fairy tale. Dialogue and action hide a torrent of violence under the surface. I watched the rest of the ten-minute segment, and realised that Philip was a figure of abject terror. And in the second half, says writer Theo Merz, he gets even worse.

‘It sounds like a kid’s story, but the second act is very disturbing’. Merz adapted the script from Angela Carter’s novel of the same name. It’s an unusual tale, written in 1967 by this popular feminist writer. Melanie steals her mother’s wedding dress and roams the night outside. The next day, her parents are dead, and she must learn to live with her menacing uncle Philip – and her growing sexual awakening. I ask Merz what made him decide to adapt this story for the stage.

He cites the challenge as a motivating factor, and explains ‘I’ve always really liked Angela Carter. Jess and Katie decided, before I’d even read this book, that they wanted to do The Magic Toyshop, some way, somehow. Jess asked me if I’d be interested in adapting it, so I said okay.’

Jess Edwards and Katie Carpenter, the play’s two directors, are refreshingly realistic about their play’s prospects. ‘The Playhouse have taken this semi-financial gamble on us’, says Edwards, when I ask her about how ambitious her project is.

‘It’s a new script, an original score and we’ve added three characters’, summarises Carpenter. It’s been a long while since the Playhouse hosted a show written by a student. Add to this the unconventional juxtaposition of childish themes with adult ideas and one marvels at the courage of everyone involved in this venture.

Yet as I leave the world of The Magic Toyshop and trudge once more into the January snow, I cannot help but be inspired by their optimism. Despite the play’s surreal elements, writer Merz is confident it will send the audience home happy. ‘It’s still a romance’, he says. ‘It’s a cracking tale.’

As the new term ushers in another wave of drama, we at Cherwell have been busy checking out the latest batch of student productions hitting the Oxford stage.

Students start taking to the boards in Second Week with Flipping the Bird’s production of The Magic Toyshop (adapted from Angela Carter’s famous novel) opening at the Oxford Playhouse. We are promised a production that ‘fuses projection, physical theatre and a live quartet’; the project is certainly a must-see for all those interested in puppet adaptations of unpopular novels. Also running from Tuesday of Second Week is a production of Caryl Churchill’s Far Away (a play set in a war-torn dystopia) at the Burton Taylor Studio.

In Third Week two plays will be performed at the BT – Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me, Frank McGuinness’ 1992 play about three men imprisoned a

s part of an unexplained conflict, and Rhinoceros, Absurdist Eugène Ionesco’s dark comedy about inhabitants of a French town turning into rhinoceroses. There will also be performances of Equus (at the OFS Studio) and Macbeth (at the O’Reilly, Keble).

Fourth Week sees a more light-hearted musical interlude with productions of Little Shop of Horrors (the show about a man-eating plant) at Pembroke College and Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera Ruddigore at the O’Reilly. There’s still straight theatre on offer at the Burton Taylor where Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good takes the 19.30 slot.

The range of comedy on offer means that Fifth Week Blues won’t be an issue mid-term – there’s musical comedy The Boy Friend at Lincoln College, bourgeois comedy The Philanthropist at the BT and Noel Coward’s supernatural comedy of manners Blithe Spirit at the O’Reilly. It’s not all laughs and happiness though, there’s more Caryl Churchill (this time Vinegar Tom at the Moser Theatre, Wadham) and a piece of new writing (The Aphorist at the BT).

In Sixth Week, another student production team takes charge of the Playhouse stage – this time Old Street Productions with Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love. The Oxford Imps (with new show IMPerium) and Oxford Revue perform back-to-back at the BT and there are also productions of Yawn (at the OFS Studio) and Platform (at the O’Reilly).

Seventh Week is the week of the New Writing Festival – four brand new plays, chosen by Michael Frayn, are performed at the Burton Taylor before the overall winner is announced. Elsewhere, Martin Sherman’s Bent (a play about the persecution of homosexuals by the Nazis) will be onstage at the O’Reilly, Exeter College’s chapel is the setting for The Revenger’s Tragedy and Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding will be on at the Moser. Wrapping up the term in Eighth Week, David Harrower’s‘post-modern classic’  Knives in Hens will be performed at the Burton Taylor.

Don’t forget to check cherwell.org regularly. Every show, every first night, reviewed.