On nights spent lounging on the balcony with Maher and Nisreen, sipping
on mint tea, drawing apple-infused smoke through the nargila and
exchanging conversation – partly in my tentative Arabic – I find myself
forgetting entirely  where I am. Where I am is Bait Sahour, in the
Israeli-occupied West Bank, but the adjective ‘occupied’ tends to lapse
from my consciousness with disturbing regularity. And it’s not as if
there’s a dearth of visual reminders; there’s the eight metre high
concrete monstrosity of the separation wall snaking its way through
Palestinian land; there are the Israeli soldiers lugging M16s around;
there are the illegal settlements with their thousands of houses, each
one a bland and soulless replica of every other; there are the
omnipresent checkpoints, erecting barriers between every point of note.I felt deeply unsettled the first time I saw an armed soldier – the
casual way in which he held his gun jarring with its sinister
potential. The first time I saw the wall, my eyes struggled to take in
its size and its ugliness. My first experience of being held up at a
checkpoint left me furious and frustrated with impatience. But
familiarity breeds desensitization. You begin to dissassociate: the
wall from the land it confiscates and the communities it splinters; the
soldiers’ presence from the humiliation of military occupation; the
settlements from how they appropriate and carve up another people’s
land. Words become devoid of any meaning deeper than their respective
OED definitions. A wall becomes just a wall, a settlement just a
settlement, a checkpoint just another checkpoint. The real tragedy of
occupation does not manifest itself in the visible but in the lives and
minds of the occupied; so as an outsider it is easy to be blinded to
the sorrows of occupation.
Moments of poignancy then take you by surprise. Tragedy slips easily
into what would otherwise be the most ordinary of dialogues and
situations: Maher interrupts the peace of an evening on his balcony to
recall a memory from the first intifada, when, aged 14, he was shot in
the leg with a rubber bullet, knocked unconscious and then beaten
because he threw a stone at a soldier. Manar’s tour of her university
takes in the auditorium, the faculties, the monument to students killed
by the Israeli army, and the view onto the hill from which the army
shelled buildings, as if each landmark were as run of the mill as the
others. My Arabic teacher oscillates between merry anecdotes of her
German students to tearful recollections of encounters with the army –
feeling “like a sheep” when she nervously crossed the checkpoint into
East Jerusalem, walking away from a soldier so he wouldn’t see her cry
when he came to inform her that the army had taken her land. The
parallel running of the trappings of a ‘normal’ life alongside the
misery of occupation is tragically expressive of the fact that here the
misery of occupation is normal life.
It wasn’t until I heard Amjad Rfaie (Director of the Social Development
Centre in New Aska Camp, Nablus) verbalise it that the meaning fully
resonated with me: “Everyone here has a sad story. Sometimes it’s a
small sad story, sometimes it’s a big one, but everybody has a sad
story”. The statement has since stood out in my mind for being eloquent
in its simplicity, yet ineffable in its implications: as an
international, you can never fully fathom the grief of a society
crumbling under the burden of 4 million sad stories, big and small. The
closest you can get is reading the stories, with all their layers of
meaning, as they unravel before you every day.
Like the 27th July 2005, when three houses in the village of Al-Khader
were demolished by the Israeli army. Last year Israel demolished the
homes of 1,471 families, mostly for “administrative” purposes. The
buildings in Al-Khader are being cleared because they are too close to
the settler bypass road; the army use the excuse that the residents do
not have a building permit. Whatever the reason the action is contrary
to international law: the Fourth Geneva Convention strictly prohibits
any destruction of property by the Occupying Power “except where such
destruction is rendered absolutely necessary by military operations”.
The day after the demolitions I journey to the ruins with a group of
internationals. By asking “ween?”(where?), while miming out destruction
to every villager we pass, we finally accumulate the directions to the
site of the demolitions and meander our way through Al-Khader to the
ill-fated destination. There we are confronted with the sprawling
concrete and metal corpse of the bulldozed homes. The houses have been
ripped out from their very foundations, bleeding a tangle of metal
arteries onto the earth.
Metres from this wreckage a newly homeless family sit on their
hurriedly salvaged furniture in the cooling shade of an olive tree. The
small children, who number twelve and one on its way, shyly eye their
international visitors with excited curiosity, immuned by the bliss of
youthful ignorance. The farmer and his two wives rest in near silence,
possibly reflecting, maybe contemplating, perhaps forcing off the
moment of realisation and the inevitable question, “What now?” Their
sombre tranquillity is momentarily broken when a settler decelerates
past the scene, orange anti-disengagement ribbon trailing from his
aerial, car horn blaring to signal out his glee.
In the face of the wretched combination of Israeli bureaucracy and
bulldozers I feel drained of every semblance of utility. Still, the
family thank us, in apples, for our solidarity, explaining that the
presence of internationals brings hope when it seems like the whole
world is deaf and blind to the situation here. Their words – translated
through a local – provide some comfort for a Westerner selfishly
seeking her validation. Before we leave, the family amble onto the
rubble remains to strike a disorientated pose, captured on our cameras
and allied with a promise to show and tell people back home. The difficulties the Israeli army impose on attempts to move from A to
B, saturate any journey with innumerable sad stories. Restri0ctions on
movement in Nablus – the largest city in the West Bank – wring
especially tight. Four checkpoints control movement in and out of the
city. Each of these is an internal checkpoint, impeding movement from
one Palestinian area to another. The Huwara checkpoint, restricts
movement to the south of Nablus, and is the biggest in the West Bank –
an average of 6,000 people pass through daily. But the production line
of the Huwara checkpoint churns out the perverse freedom at a painfully
slow rate: to exit the city you must pass through a sheltered area
encompassing a series of floor to roof turnstiles, metal detectors, bag
searches and questioning. Soldiers, many of them just teenagers,
control passage: they can hold you up for hours, turn you back to
Nablus, at a button’s press they can command the opening and closing of
the turnstile.
I approach the checkpoint and filter into the line for women and
children. As I wait to exit the incarcerated city I watch a soldier
ease his boredom by trapping a child between the cold metal bars of the
turnstile. The imagery invokes memories of snippets of conversation
from back in Bait Sahour: Maher imparting, “It feels like we’re living
in a prison”; Nisreen intoning, “See how they treat us? They treat us
like animals”. After a passport inspection and routine grilling from
the 18 year old soldier at the end of the production line, I’m free to
taxi back to Bait Sahour, with one checkpoint down and two to go.
The day makes good preparation for my trip to the city of Tulkarm. The
recent Netanyu suicide bomber hailed from near Tulkarm, and so the
residents of the city are finding themselves subject to a range of
collective punishments: floating checkpoints, road blocks, closures. A
three hour (there and back inclusive) journey stretches out into a 10
hour road rageist’s nightmare. I count a total of 12 obstacles
obstructing our freedom of movement, including road blocks, and all
manifestations of checkpoints: at one point soldiers march down the
aisle of our bus, inspecting papers; we wait in traffic jams to pass
through floating checkpoints, which are temporary and can appear
anywhere, at any time. We are held up for two and a half hours at a
four way checkpoint at a cross roads, where we observe a soldier train
his gun at an elderly women while the sun scorches above. It’s
monotonous travelling and it tires you out. We sit in buses, in taxis,
and on the hot ground before the checkpoint, quiet with fatigue. Once,
the silence is broken, by our guide, Mohammed, saying, “This is what
happens every day; all I want to do is go home and see my children.”
His voice is heavy with weariness from countless repeats of the day I’m
experiencing now for the first and last time.When asked why the checkpoints, why the wall, why the imprisonments
with no charge? Palestinians answer, “Security,” permeating the word
with heart-rending sarcasm. The word sounds no less hollow when uttered
by the Israeli soldiers. “Security” is perhaps the emptiest word here
in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). A quick look at a map or
a day spent on the ground in the West Bank is enough for that
realisation to dawn. It’s clear when you watch soldiers arbitrarily
turning cars back in the road, and then driving off and leaving the
remaining traffic to its own devices. It’s clear when a soldier at an
internal checkpoint turns your taxi driver back because he happens to
be from a particular village, and it’s clearer still when the taxi
driver is forced to take a long-cut (known to the Israelis) which puts
him back on the road not a hundred metres past the original checkpoint.
And it was clear when a recently retired Israeli general who led the
civil administration in the OPT said, “Of course the wall is not a
security wall – it’s a political wall. Just look at the map.”
The Wall is unnecessarily the author of a thousand sad stories. It
slices through the Ayda Refugee Camp in Bethlehem, leaving many
Palestinians on the “other side”. The wall separates these people from
their medical and educational facilities. Cars cannot pass through the
checkpoint in the wall, where people can be held up for many hours. The
children are always late for school, the emergency medical services are
always potentially too far out of reach. The tactic aims at driving
these people off their land and to the other side of the wall.
In July last year, the International Court of Justice, the principal
judicial organ of the United Nations ruled that “the construction of
the wall being built by Israel, the occupying Power, in the Occupied
Palestinian Territory, including in and around East Jerusalem, are
contrary to international law; Israel is under an obligation to cease
forthwith the works of construction of the wall being built in the
Occupied Palestinian Territory, to dismantle forthwith the structure
therein situated, and to make reparation for all damage caused by the
construction of the wall.”  Yet, the damage continues unabated.
Standing on the balcony of Issa’s house, near Tulkarm, I can see out
onto his acres of olive tree groves. Each olive tree is imbued with its
own particular character. Their branches contort into the most
human-like of expressions; they demand anthropomorphising. The
Palestinian people oblige, referring to the trees as their
grandfathers. An innocuous looking fence, barely discernable against
the yellow hues of the desert land, runs across the horizon a few
metres from the house. The fence is part of the planned 400 mile length
of the separation wall and this section is severing Issa from his
family of trees. Issa can only access his olives through a gate in the
fence, five kilometres distant from his house, which is just ten metres
distant from his land. For the olives to be harvested he must call a
soldier to open a gate in the fence. Typically a teenager will saunter
up to the gate three or four hours later. Issa is then permitted to
work the land for two hours. He cannot bring vehicles onto his land: he
relies on his own work power and that of his wife and donkey (whose
names the soldier mockingly interchanges). These constraints make it
impossible to harvest enough olives. Most go to rot, ten metres from
his home. “They say this is for security, but where is our security?”
he implores.
Whatever your feelings about the Israel-Palestine issue, to materialize
an opinion on the above, there is no need for recourse to complicated
historical, religious, nationalist or political debate. There is no
need to construct arguments for or against why the wall should be torn
down, the settlements dismantled, the checkpoints and house demolitions
confined to the dustbin of history, and with immediate effect: it has
all be done for you. The collective punishment, the wall, the house
demolitions, the very occupation are all explicitly prohibited by
international law. It seems then that the most extraordinary thing
about the occupation is how very ordinary it has become.ARCHIVE: 1st week MT 2005

ANYONE WHO has ever run out of mobile phone battery at a crucial point in conversation will be aware of the latter day scarcity of the telephone box. Like the blue-footed booby outside its natural habitat (the west coast of South America, since you ask), phone boxes are notoriously difficult to find.Your local High Street may still yield one or two, although inevitably it will contain the only two teenagers in Britain who don’t yet own a mobile phone, or will have had the receiver lovingly removed by those with nothing better to do come Saturday night. Having shaken your head in disgust and trudged away down the road, you may wish to consider that it wasn’t always like this.
Phone boxes were introduced into Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century, some of them being staffed by attendants whose job it was to collect the fee. These were followed in 1926 by the cast iron red phone box designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, a structure which would become as iconic a symbol of Britain as the red doubledecker bus and Big Ben, although the design by which it was later replaced probably put paid to mostfeelings of sentimentality.
Now, however, BT has announced that revenue has dropped by forty per cent over the last few years and that only a third of its 75,000 phone boxes actually make a profit, leading to what it euphemistically calls a “review” of the number of phone boxes in many areas. Despite protests, especially from those in rural areas, it seems certain that this decay can only continue, and desperate non-mobile phone owners will, it would seem, be forced to mug passers-by for their phones if they are ever to discover exactly how good it is to talk.
But perhaps all is not lost. It would appear that there are still some who harbour a deep affection for the phone box. The village of Kersall in Nottinghamshire, for example, boasts what it refers to as the “World’s Best Kept Phone Box”, which, if setting the standard for local landmarks, is a place you wouldn’t go on your summer holidays. For those who merely wish to appreciate the aesthetic beauty of the phone box, a famous local landmark in Kingston-Upon-Thames is the sculpture by David Mach comprising twelve red phone boxeslying like dominoes. Otherwise, from only £2,550, Eurocosm.com will restore and deliver a red phone box to your door, although what exactly one might wish to do with it is not explicitly stated on their website. For the rest of us, however,seeking a hiding-place from inclement weather or simply making spur of the moment plans in the event of some improbable accident having befallen one’s phone will gradually become more difficult. In the midst of your mournfulmeditation on the passing of the phone box, spare a thought for those whose livelihoods will be seriously compromised by the change, and ask yourself the question, “Where exactly will Superman change now?”ARCHIVE: 1st week MT 2005

How much a judge of true talent is the Booker prize? Last Monday’s
shock triumph of John Banville over Kazuo Ishiguro, Julian Barnes and
the Smiths Ali and Zadie is surely one that will go down as truly
unforgivable in the grand scheme of Booker Prize misnomers. There has
most definitely been a fair few. Yet sources close to the judging panel
commented on how, rarely, all six shortlisted books were in the running
for at least half the discussion which lasted more than an hour.
Novelist Josephine Hart, whose work has been translated into twenty-six
languages, and literary editor of the Evening Standard, David Sexton,
were among those anointed with the decision-making powers for this
year’s Booker. It was, though, by no means a verdict by acclamation. A
split vote scenario between Banville’s The Sea and Ishiguro’s lament of
loss and longing, Never Let Me Go, called for Professor John
Sutherland, the chair of judges, to cast the deciding glance Banville’s
way. Of The Sea Sutherland remarked, “It is an incredibly written piece
of work if very melancholy. But if you can’t tune into it, the novel
won’t work for you”.
Out of this rather unique scenario arises the question of how a novel
that, at the admission of the chief judge “won’t work” for many
readers, went on to take the more-than-prestigious, quasi-mythic Man
Booker Prize for Fiction. The Sea is nothing more than an unfeeling
exercise in coterie aestheticism, a collection of deceptively beautiful
sentences in the place of a fully developed novel with real riches and
deep delights. Style over substance, it seems, prevailed once more this
week.
And what makes the judges’ decision even more disconcerting is the fact that 2005 has been widely acclaimed as representing the strongest year
for fiction since the conception of the Booker prize thirty-six years
previous. The longlist, announced way back during the height of summer,
confirmed this with its finely tuned balance of established giants
mixed with young writers in the throes of their vibrant talents. The
roll call surveyed titles as diverse as first-timer Tash Aw’s
accomplished essay on fluid identities, but none of these novels even
made the expected leap to the shortlist. Nor, shockingly, did J M
Coetzee’s masterful metafictional accomplishment Slow Man.
So what does all this ultimately say about the quality of the other
books on this year’s “vintage” shortlist? Runner-up Ishiguro’s Never
Let Me Go reminds us of what gives greatest meaning to our lives in
this time of fear, what the jihadists most despise: love and loyalty.
The meaning of love in a time of fear is also a theme in Zadie Smith’s
third novel, On Beauty. Her mixed-race cast is adrift; they are all
searching for certainty, for meaning under the vexed umbrella of
Anglo-American relations. On Beauty asks important questions about that
all-encompassing relationship between culture and power.
Above all else, On Beauty, like the novels of McEwan and Ishiguro, is a
book about the present that fulfils the most demanding test of fiction
as stipulated by Ezra Pound: that it brings news of how we live, news
that will forever more stay news. It makes the decision of this year’s
Booker judges all the more perplexing, truly saddening in its lack of
vision. John Banville could never engage as imaginatively with the
challenges tossed up by the stormy new order of our society.ARCHIVE: 1st week MT 2005

The Mystery of Empty SpaceAshmolean Museumuntil 16 OctoberThe twentieth century has not been kind to traditional Chinese painting. Its place usurped by the revolutionary ideals of the Communist government, as well as the massive influence of western art, Chinese traditional art has had to transform itself to survive. While few of the great traditionalists themselves survived the brutal cultural revolution, the practice continued and is in the throes of painful resurrection. The Ashmolean’s decision to host this exhibition is not just a tribute to the resilience of the art form, but a demonstration of the open door policy, the thawing of Communist Chinese ironhandedness. Choosing to display the concept of empty space prevalent in Chinese art (and alien in western art) seemed at first a risky undertaking. Some may well view the notion of space as an entity to itself as ridiculous and, as one visitor was heard to mutter, proof of a lack eithe of skill or of imagination. To the casual observer this may well ring true, but such a person fails to understand the fundamental principles of emptiness in Chinese art: like silences during music, space is at its most powerful when a void. When the viewer is asked to reach into the space and define it for himself, that is the point when a piece stops becoming art and takes on the divine. It should be of little surprise that Chinese painting is so fused with Daoism, and the belief that space is the beginning of all things and, as such, more important than the solid forms around it. If one takes these principles into consideration, the exhibition shifts from an examination of artistic technique to something far more profound.The ultimate question remains whether you feel you will be able to overcome inherent western preconceptions of space and form, and be able to appreciate the difficulty of conveying information through nothingness. It would be profitable to look around the exhibition at least twice and draw yourself into the emptiness of the pieces. What makes Chinese art so exciting is that it requires interaction to fully appreciate its nuances. Those unwilling to make this effort should probably steer themselves into the familiar territory of the European art on the first floor.The Ashmolean Museum has once again shown its determination in presenting something little known and, in this instance, underappreciated. Unfortunately, traditional Chinese painting is something that will be a source of either enjoyment or irritation. Be prepared to totally embrace the emptiness or simply walk away.ARCHIVE: 1st week MT 2005

Wallace and Gromit: the Curse of the Were-rabbitCreator Nick Park’s lovable duo hop onto the silver screen this week in their first full-length feature, an amusing clay-clad tale of bunnies and bungling pursuits. Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit opens to find our twosome’s little village fraught with anxiety over the upcoming Giant Vegetable Contest. Residents madly cultivate their precious veggies while living in constant fear of   rodent attack. A recent outbreak of greens-seeking rabbits threaten not only the prize-winning produce but the Contest itself. Even Gromit is concerned. He nurtures a big, beautiful marrow squash, each night tucking it tenderly beneath covers before setting a greenhouse intruder alarm.Wallace and Gromit’s humane pest-removal services are soon called in by the twig-framed, frizz-haired Lady Campanula Tottington (voiced with enchantingly scatter-brained, high-pitched timidity by Helena Bonham Carter). The Anti-Pesto, as they are known, go to work ridding Lady Tottington’s property of dozens of rabbits but soon encounter a pest less easily removed: Victor Quartermaine, Tottington’s swaggering suitor, voiced with perfect snootiness by Ralph Fiennes. Quartermaine, who seeks Lady Tottington’s hand in marriage, senses Wallace and Tottington’s mutual romantic interest and sets out to destroy the Anti-Pesto.He is accompanied in this task by his faithful, fanged, gun-toting pooch, Philip (one of the film’s most amusing characters, with a prissy prance to match the firearm he clenches between great white canines). Philip’s snarlingly comic dealings with Gromit provide some of the best moments in the film.  Watching our wide-eyed Gromit look on while Philip struggles daintily with a feminine change-purse aboard an unpiloted plane is quite enough to satisfy an appetite for wordless humour.In the meantime, Wallace has begun self-experimenting with a new invention: a mind-altering machine intended to erase unwanted thoughts. Using the device to link his own brain to those of captured rabbits, Wallace harnesses lunar power to transmit his brain waves to the carrot-loving bunnies, feeding them currents of anti-veg propaganda. Quel surpris, the experiment goes horribly awry, leaving Wallace and a single rabbit comically affected, their minds strangely fused.The once-bubbly village is suddenly frozen by fear.  The appearance of a monstrous Were-Rabbit has thrown the sacred Contest into true danger.  In the midst of this curfuffle, Wallace and Gromit’s Anti-Pesto are commissioned to capture the beast, but find their humane removal tactics questioned when they fail to rid the village of its vegetable-demolishing fiend. Quartermaine is called in to exterminate the creature and so begins a trigger-happy safari towards  glory and uproarious fun.The adaptation of the Wallace and Gromit stories to full-blown feature-length status remains somewhat strained, as the characters have only previously appeared in film shorts, memorable and wildly imaginative though they were.  At times the action, though playful, feels a bit like a merry-go-round: amusing but repetitive. Certain sequences are significantly tedious, in view of the ninety-four minute running time. Regardless, Wallace and Gromit’s banter is warmly consistent with their previous shorts. Wallace comfortably inhabits his fromage-adoring character, and Gromit does not disappoint those fans wishing to see the Charlie Chaplin-esque silent comic take up his knitting needles in true wifely fashion.On the whole, Park and fellow director Steve Box deliver a light and lively adventure, punctuated by several moments of absolute hilarity.  Puns and parodies bounce throughout the film, tucked away in shop windows and newspaper headings, and emerging out of toothy, smiling clay mouths. Another hidden delight is the innuendo concealed behind the pretext of the vegetable competition. “The beast!” a yokel cries at one point, “he’s ravaged my wife’s giant melons!” The chuckles of the film are to be found in these details: self-conscious, witty, and as yummy as Wallace’s trademark stinking bishop cheese. All this makes Wallace and Gromit as eccentrically English a cinematic experience as you’re likely to encounter for time to come.ARCHIVE: 1st week MT 2005

Kinky BootsFor all the complaints about the semi-ghettoisation of British cinema, it often appears closer to its American mainstream counterparts, using the same emotional tricks and feel-good conventions. Julian Jarrold’s Kinky Boots is no exception, composed of generic set pieces and vaguely emotive pathos; a prime example of both the genre’s strengths and its failings.The premise of the film is vaguely quirky, about a failing shoe factory, transvestites, and a conflict between Northern sensibilities and metrosexual mores. Within this, there are the sketchy vestiges of social commentary, and the film even manages to inject a certain amount of tart humour. With a classical narrative ploy of the returning son, and a voyage of re-discovery both for hero and for community, the feel-good atmosphere that pervades the film is nothing we haven’t seen before. It’s practically made for Channel 4, in spirit if not in practice, and will most likely be more than moderately commercially and critically successful.Yet viewed objectively it looks calculated, a compilation of moribund motifs and touchstones from other movies. Its muted panoramas of a failing industrial Northern community is inferior to works such as 1996’s Brassed Off. Even The Full Monty, to which it must be inevitably compared, bettered its attempts at drawing analogies between masculine insecurity and declines in communities. Ironically, Kinky Boots’s greatest weakness is that when it comes to its central issue, its rather too successful for its own dramatic good. By showing us the complications of being true to oneself in a world which has abandoned its certainties in favour of style and transience, it only shows up the complete lack of core to the movie itself, disguised behind a thin layer of cliché.In its attempts to appear altogether liberal and sensitive in its sensibilities, Kinky Boots inevitably limits both its comic potential and the lucidity of its message. The film proclaims that the problem lies not with the individual, but with the interpretation of the social group, and then glorifies the mildly rebellious aims and effects of gender blurring. One character in especial, Lola/Simon, forms the focus for this discussion of gender, but Jarrold doesn’t have the conviction to address the reasons, save for a faintly charming Billy Elliot style flashback sequence. The film as it is cannot tackle these serious questions while still maintaining a primarily comedic tone; as a result, it fails to do either properly and is torn apart by its own paradoxes.The film also soft-peddles, surprisingly, on issues of sexuality. Lola/Simon might be torn, the film suggests discreetly, between a tensely flirtatious friendship with his boss Joel and a faintly flickering thing for his boss’s Northern Lass love interest, but it all ends in typical romance, with Lola left bullish but alone on stage, replete with heels and no hang-ups. Like another character, Chiwetel, when faced with real neurosis the film prefers to stave it off through glitzy set pieces and hollow music numbers.Kinky Boots proudly acknowledges its “based on a true story” origins. This doesn‘t, however, preclude its use of several horribly “quirky” stock-types, such as the eccentric but curiously unshock-able old  landlady. The acting is solid all-round, from both principals and supporting cast, and the cinematography is competent but uninspiring. In the end, though, there is nothing to set this film apart from the chain of look-alikes that have preceeded it in the British film industry.Our nation as it portrayed in its movies seems to be no more than a stockpile of stereotypes and platitudes. From the floppy-haired foppishness of Hugh Grant, to the feisty Northern strippers of The Full Monty, and now with more clichéd Brits to add to the list in Kinky Boots, we cannot seem to muster the courage to make a mainstream film that breaks free from these tired comic motifs. What we need in Britain is not a stiff upper lip, but a film industry with real imagination.ARCHIVE: 1st week MT 2005

Theatre criticism, unsurprisingly, offends pretty much everyone involved. The journalist who dares hint at any form of negative opinion is condemned for being narrow-minded and unjust, and the threat of appearing biased looms like a doom-laden thundercloud over any poor university student who fancies themselves as a bit of a Sheridan Morley. If your best friend has a sister at Durham whose tutor’s niece got into Balliol and is playing Ophelia in the Hamlet you’ve reviewed, you cannot commend her performance. Similarly, if it’s common knowledge that you and your college dad don’t get on, you cannot point out that his Oedipus had an unfortunate stutter without the danger of being vilified for a lack of objectivity.It is still worse if you yourself have drunk from the cup of ‘thesp’. In this situation, you may blithely agree to review an upcoming production only to find, upon arrival at the press preview, that it’s being put on by a director you’ve previously worked with, and features a cast of friends, all of whom see you every evening in the thesps’ gathering ground, the Far from the Madding Crowd pub. What if you don’t like it? Will you ever get a good role in Oxford drama again, if you say that these people couldn’t act their way out of a gold-sequinned ethno-rah handbag with a copy of Stanislavski ostentatiously poking out of it?The answer seems clear: don’t review plays. It’s universally acknowledged to be a complete waste of both the performers’ and the journalists’ time. No half-hour press preview can give you a proper sense of what the finished production will be, when it is put on in an uninspiringly bare lecture room in Oriel by a stressed cast who are clad, not in their costumes (which the RSC wardrobe department won’t lend out until show week), but completely in black. Not only will you offend everyone from the director to the marketing manager with your lukewarm critique of their efforts, you won’t even have got it right, since the whole play will have exploded in the final week of rehearsals with the arrival of the set, costumes, sound and lighting, into a bearable and even enjoyable show. But someone has to write these reviews, otherwise no student theatre-goer will know whether the week’s dramatic offerings are worth seeing or not, right?The problem that arises from the reviewing concept is that both the reviewers themselves and the productions they review really seem to believe in the power of theatre criticism to make or break a show. Thesps who have been critically savaged in the student press are treated almost as war-victims by their thesp colleagues. Not to mention the critics who have been ostracised for being too critical of student drama, or for showing bias towards productions with which they have a personal connection.Reviews, though, mean very little, if we’re being honest. Of course, if an aspiring Emma Thompson receives glowing praise from Cherwell, it will be a quote they exploit on their theatrical CVs for years to come. But who really takes any notice of what we reviewers actually say? We might as well tell people to deep fry their own grandmother, for all the influence we have upon our readers’ decisions. So, student directors, turn to the example of Chekhov for comfort when your play has been torn apart by an Oxford English student with an attitude: his 1895 production of The Seagull was so badly received that he left the auditorium halfway through in shame. And I believe he survived the temporary setback.ARCHIVE: 1st week MT 2005