It seems like there’s enough drama happening in the real world to justify dark theatres and empty stages. The Edinburgh Fringe has been cancelled, Broadway is in its longest-ever closure, and there won’t even be any experimental student theatre in the Burton-Taylor Studio next term. While many major theatres are releasing recordings of their shows, this isn’t an option for typical student productions – especially for those which were due to perform in Trinity. Instead, there’s been a slew of cancellations and postponements.
But, as I was
scrolling sluggishly through my Facebook feed, I saw something shocking –
auditions being advertised! Highly complex investigate journalism showed that
these auditions were for a virtual production of Richard II, produced by
Not the Way Forward Productions. I was curious to know more, so (virtually) sat
down with the director, Dorothy McDowell, to (virtually) discuss creativity in
a time of crisis, the appeal of Shakespeare and the joy of quizzes!
Dorothy McDowell is a second-year English student at Keble. Previously, she’s directed Measure for Measure and she’s the current President of the Keble O’Reilly. At the moment, she’s directing Richard II, which will be available for free as a virtual show from 5-8 May. More information can be found here.
What gave you the idea of doing a virtual production?
I mentioned it as a joke to Juliet (the show’s producer) when we began to realize that our Trinity show probably wasn’t going to happen, and the more I thought about it the more I liked it – it’s nice to be able to make something that’s genuinely responsive to the situation you are living in. We had to move pretty quickly to make sure we were ready to rehearse when lockdown started. We were keen to do the majority of the work when the tightest restrictions were in place so we could give everyone involved something fun to do.
Was there a significant difference between looking at filmed auditions and the in-person ones which are more typical for Oxford productions?
It was a bit odd, but only in that it
wasn’t something I’d done before. In fact, I hope it might have made the
audition process a bit easier for the actors because they didn’t have to worry
about getting their performance right first time (or having two strange women
staring at them for 10 minutes).
Why
did you choose Shakespeare (and specifically Richard II)? Why is Shakespeare
appealing to creatives so much now?
I think the answer to why so many people
are reaching for Shakespeare right now is, in part, a very boring one: he’s one
of the few playwrights that basically every theatre-minded person has a good
working knowledge of. A bit more poetically, there is also something very
reassuring about plays that are 400 years old. They are so far removed from the
situation you find yourself in that they act as a welcome distraction; and they
come with a sense of ‘well, these things have survived several plagues and a
couple of world wars; I suppose I can make it through this’.
As to why I chose Richard II: I’ve loved it for years – it’s always been in the back of my mind as something I’d like to direct, but I’d never come up with an interpretation strong enough to justify it. I stumbled upon it when I was trying to think of a show to do in an online format. I’d decided I wanted to make a show about ‘choice’, because I think the thing that makes the situation we’re all in at the moment scary is the fact that we don’t have anychoice about what happens next. Besides, I’d just been put in a position of not having any choice over the kind of show I was going to make (it had to be online), so I felt I had to acknowledge that in the show itself. Richard popped into my head and I realized that it’s all about choice – it’s about people being forced to pick a side in a civil war; and about other people causing that civil war by stealing money and raising armies and then claiming that they didn’t have any choice in the matter. The irony of Henry Bolingbroke standing outside Flint Castle with 3000 French soldiers explaining that ‘well, I didn’t actually want to invade, but, honestly, what other logical choice was there?’ is oddly fitting. As I’ve been rather irritatingly repeating in all of my marketing copy: this isn’t the way I’d choose to tell this story; but it isn’t the story that any of the characters would choose to have told about them either.
From looking at your auditions event, the genders of characters have clearly been switched even before casting. Why is this and what effect do you think it’ll have on your production?
I always do majority-female shows, for all kinds of reasons. A lot of student directors will tell you that the number of female-identifying actors auditioning for shows significantly outnumbers the number of male-identifying ones, but any play written before 2000 is almost guaranteed to have far more parts for men, which is unfair. Having a majority female cast also makes it easier to convince the audience that they are listening to a story that they haven’t heard before. One of the most famous speeches in Richard II is ‘let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings’; it’s a page of meditation on what it means to be a king, and probably one of the most quoted bits of Shakespeare. But I don’t think I’ve ever heard a page on what it means to be a Queen. We’re rehearsing that scene in a few days: I’ll have heard it then. I also just love putting powerful women onstage – Richard II is full of Queens, usurpers and political fixers; people who hold everyone else’s future in their hands. Women that other people are scared of are such a rarity onstage and I think they’re great: so much fun to play, and so much fun to watch. I understand why the question has to be asked, but I find it a strange one to answer: ‘why are you putting on a show where all of the interesting characters are men?’ is really the one that needs asking.
Marketing will have to be innovative – you can’t put posters up in the JCR anymore! Is there anything we should be looking out for?
Quizzes. Soooo many quizzes. If our play is
about choice, we want to give our audience as much choice as possible. Get a
warring noble to align yourself with or roast your mates on a tag yourself –
we’ve got loads of option-based marketing lined up for you! (I have remembered to
say: follow us on Facebook @notthewayforward so my marketing manager doesn’t
kill me).
Lots of directors have had their Trinity projects cancelled or delayed – do you have any advice for how they can remain encouraged or even attempt to transfer their work to the digital realm?
I wish I was wise enough to be able to give
other people advice. I have a theory that it’s almost easier to be creative
within sets of restrictions, because when you have to work out how to get round
something you come up with things you wouldn’t have thought of otherwise – I
don’t know if that’s exactly helpful, but maybe it’s encouraging?
The first step of reckoning with our colonial past is recognising its remaining presence. Every aspect of modern life is informed by the spoils of imperialism from the architecture that surrounds us to the languages spoken across the globe. The next step of decolonisation is much trickier: what are we to do with cultural institutions that embody the most aggressive and destructive parts of Europe’s history? Museums fall into this category. Their formation and proliferation in the eighteenth century paralleled the building of empires and the rise of nationalism. They are stocked with looted objects from colonial and ethnographic missions. Is it enough to just acknowledge that imperialism was (and still is) imperative to the museum, or should we be more proactive, following a policy of restitution?
Some progress has been made. Arts Council England recently published government-backed guidance for museums on repatriation; Macron commissioned a report pushing for the permanent return of looted items during French colonial occupation of sub-Saharan Africa; and curators are becoming more sensitive to the past of museums as pressure has mounted from protest movements like #RhodesMustFall. But I would argue it is not just what fills museums that make them problematic – rather, the function and concept of the museum are still rooted in a colonial way of seeing the world.
Museums decontextualize objects from their original conditions and reframe them on their own terms, which are often bound to colonial ideologies. This is simply unavoidable in the process of curation. Objects must be ordered and, if done chronologically, they risk perpetuating the pervasive myth of a nation’s teleological progress forward. Items looted by Napoleon like the Horse of Saint Mark went from a triumphal public procession straight into the Louvre, and the museum became a trophy box for war spoils. If categorised by function rather than geography, distinct cultural objects are collapsed into one – Portuguese pots are equated with Malaysian crockery, incorrectly portraying their original intention. Museums give cultural objects an aesthetic and artistic function, and lived social practices, beliefs, and identities infused in them are changed to foreign peculiarities for Western eyes. In Oxford’s own Pitt Rivers Museum, items are given blanket labels such as ‘animal forms in art’ that completely distort their makers’ intention. Essentially, there is always some kind of destruction in the act of collecting itself, and new meaning is inevitably created.
These issues are amplified when considering cultural value assigned to museums. Most public museums are in capital cities at the heart of town, with dominating architectural features. Consider the National Gallery’s huge pillars, lions, and dramatic steps – all of this signifies to the public that museums are places to be venerated rather than critically analysed. Most public museums mimic Greek and Roman temples, from the Glyptothek in Munich to the National Gallery in Sydney. Chosen for their beauty and glory, Carol Duncan has also noted that this rational form is also an expression of Enlightenment values, of secular truths being the basis of knowledge. Museums are seen then as places of objective knowledge and glory; however, they will always present information in a subjective and skewed way.
Is it enough, then, to simply return looted objects when the museum space remains problematic? For obvious reasons, I am not advocating for the wholesale dismantling of museums. The power of the museum space has resulted in it also becoming a crucial space for the creation of national collective memory and even definitions of citizenships, often positively: for example, recent efforts to include more representations of members of the BAME community in the Tate Collection. If the museum has such power to represent, I wonder if emptying museums of colonial goods could result in the end of discussions of imperialism and prevent proper reckoning with our past.
Wherever and whenever possible, it is crucial for museums to repatriate stolen goods, and to continue to find new ways to do so. Manchester Museum’s livestreams of ‘handover’ ceremonies of looted goods shows how museums can transcend geographical boundaries and improve current dialogues with those who suffered at the hands of the empire. However, this should not be seen as the end of museum decolonisation when it is clear Europe’s past is so ingrained in the museum’s history, function, and structure.
Rather, museums should also try to utilise their cultural value to begin new dialogues about colonialism. Some have already started this – the Victoria and Albert museum’s 2001 exhibition “Mixed Messages” engaged with the role of the museum in the British Empire and attempted to present the contradictions of colonialism by juxtaposing the perspective of the colonised and coloniser. This could be taken further by revamping the arrangement of museums. Elizabeth Edward notes that museums privilege sight over other senses and that this in itself reflects a ‘Western hierarchy of senses’ imposed on cultural objects. When objects cannot be returned, using more interactive and multi-sensual display methods is a creative way for museums to try and address their ethnocentricity. I suspect that arguments about art restitution will continue and rightly so. What both sides of the debate seem to miss, however, is that repatriation is only the start of decolonising museums and that the entire museum space must be critically considered.
There was little outrage when on 30th
March 2020 Hungary effectively declared itself a dictatorship. Parliament was
dissolved, rule by decree established, journalists accused of interfering with
the ‘successful protection’ of the public could be jailed. The new law has no
expiry date.
I have written before about
Hungary’s state-sponsored Holocaust distortion, and even last year in speaking
with young people in Budapest I felt as though the entire system of government
was in a chokehold. I wondered what Viktor Orbán’s next break would be.
This was not in the British news
headlines. It was scarcely present in Western European or American media. I
would like to think that at any other time this would be towards the top of the
international headlines, but because there is an ongoing pandemic, it is as if everyone
has forgotten that democratic government and proportional crisis response are
not mutually exclusive. Orbán has been let off.
Hungary is still shocking for
being so close to home. Accusations levelled at China back in February of
projecting political image as a priority were met by unsurprised shrugs; the
slow, callous response of the American president has come as a surprise to
nobody. But wherever human rights and civil liberties are a question on the
lips of journalists and observers, the answer is already tending towards
authoritarianism.
In the Philippines, Rodrigo
Duterte has given himself the power to silence ‘fake news’. Israel has used
coronavirus to grind its judicial system to a halt at the same time as Benjamin
Netanyahu faces charges of corruption. In India, protests against anti-Muslim
citizenship laws have also been halted. Serbia has arrested opposition
activists on the grounds of breaking isolation rules. In Japan, Representative
Mio Sugita of the incumbent Liberal Democratic Party has suggested that
Covid-19 measures should not be extended to foreign residents.
History does not repeat itself.
When, on Twitter, the news about Hungary was being discussed, comparisons to
the Reichstag fire, that created the atmosphere of national crisis that brought
the Nazis to power, felt cheap. Coronavirus is not a political act. That is not
to say that coronavirus can not also be a catalyst; in its chaos it, too, can
be an enemy of human rights and the rule of law.
We are living through an
extraordinary global health crisis, in which our first priority must be to
protect the lives of everyone at greater risk: older people and those with
underlying health conditions, health workers, homeless people, and refugees.
Almost unfathomable numbers have died, and many more will. Yet, there is no
political ‘off’ switch: tempting as it might be, we must not forget that
decisions being made in response to Covid-19 are done so within a political
paradigm.
I have heard people describe what
we are all living through with a tempered optimism. Perhaps we will emerge from
this crisis with a newfound understanding that we never really needed that much commercial aviation, or perhaps
with a well-funded NHS. Maybe I am a pessimist, nevertheless there is an
obvious need to prepare for the worst, and history hints that this could be an
unprecedented global shift towards authoritarianism and isolationism.
There are autocrats, like Orbán, who will simply continue to use Covid-19 to further their frightening political agendas, but even more frightening is the idea that, owing to the crisis, the world will take a break from scrutinising coronavirus-era power. Even here in the UK, I hear the attitude that an idea of ‘national unity’ is the most powerful way of navigating our way through this crisis – and that scares me. If there ever was a time to take a close look at the actions of the government and law enforcement, now would be it. Well-formulated and democratically enacted policy will solve the coronavirus crisis – lurch towards authoritarianism will not. Simple as it might be, it is worth repeating: for the health of civil liberty, democracy and freedom for many years after Covid-19, we need to be paying attention right now.
Oxford’s It Happens Here Student Union campaign, which raises awareness about sexual harassment and violence in Oxford University, launched a new platform today called “Letters from Survivors”.
The new platform aims to give a voice to survivors of sexual violence and harassment, functioning as a “place where they can express their feelings and experiences openly and without judgement, and know that they will be acknowledged and believed” writes the group.
The platform welcomes named and anonymous contribution, as
well as submissions from allies. Content will include profiles and stories
about experiences and recovery, interviews, opinion pieces, personal essays,
illustration, fiction and photography.
“Letters from Survivors” joins the Campaign’s other activism, which includes a photo campaign and vigil for survivors in Sexual Violence Awareness Week during Hilary. The platform will add to their termly open discussions as a way for Oxford students to voice experiences of sexual violence.
A Facebook group has been launched today titled “Letters from Survivors” and a website is launching by Sunday of 0th Week.
The Vice-Chancellor has criticised the response to the COVID-19 pandemic from the international community. In a post uploaded to the University’s “Coronavirus Research” page, she described the absence of a united global response as “one of the very many disheartening aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic”, noting that neither the G7 nor the G20 were able to fashion a unified response. The WHO, she added, has been the “only international institution in evidence throughout the crisis.”
She went on to note the stark inequality between COVID-19 relief funding for wealthier countries and for developing countries, describing the money allocated towards developing countries as “derisory”. Referring back to previous epidemics, such as the 2002-04 SARS epidemic or the Ebola crisis, she wrote that warnings of the past were largely ignored by global institutions. “That this pandemic occurred at all, of course,” she wrote, “reflects a failure of international institutions and national governments too.” Bill Gates’ 2015 TED talk entitled “The next outbreak? We’re not ready” should also have served as a warning, she observed, in which he outlined the need to match the money spent on pandemic relief to that allocated towards nuclear deterrence.
Moving on from the shortcomings of international institutions such as the G7 and G20, she noted that “far below the haute politique of international relations, there are global institutions in the trenched that are working to find a vaccine, develop effective therapeutics and use technology to design treatments and expedite mass production. They are working together with colleagues from around the world, including the global south. They are, of course, universities.”
Oxford labs, she wrote, are “buzzing” as scientists and technicians engage in Coronavirus related research. Along with Oxford-based study, the University also has teams around the world, such as in Thailand, Vietnam and Kenya, who are collaborating with local researchers to “build local capacity and to understand and to counter respiratory and other diseases.”
She highlighted the research being carried out by teams in Oxford, such as at the Jenner Institute, where a team led by Professor Sarah Gilbert have identified a non-replicating viral vector candidate, for which GMP manufacturing is in progress. It is soon to become an international effort, and is aiming to be effective in humans by late June. Another Oxford researcher, Professor Peter Horby, who led the University’s work in response to both the SARS and Ebola epidemic, has been collaborating with the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and the China Centre for Disease Control throughout the pandemic.
Overseas medics are also mentioned, such as a team in Thailand, led by Professor Nick Day, who are conducting large-scale multinational clinical trials. Oxford academics in Kenya, working at the KEMRI-Wellcome site, are one of only three sites in the country where COVID-19 testing is taking place. Programme capacity had been building for many years in Kenya, as a result of which many are now being run by Kenyan scientists.
She noted that “it is the bringing together of people from different nationalities, different perspectives, different disciplines with a shared commitment to translate the academic research of the university for the betterment of society that is leading the way in the global response to COVID-19.” However, she concluded that, despite the efforts of universities, it is still imperative that global institutions provide a unified approach to stop the spread of the virus. She wrote: “We know that this will not be the last pandemic. We need effective international institutions, supported by governments with the wealth to do so, to ensure that the next time we are prepared.”
Image Credit to Brian Deegan. License: CC BY-SA 2.0.
Crafting a respected legacy is difficult to achieve in the music industry, and relevance is even harder for artists to maintain. The dominance of streaming in modern music consumption favours the catchy single over conceptual albums, though the latter are usually the key to critical acclaim. ‘Cancel culture’ (the internet’s form of group shaming) sets a shelf-life on popularity. The link between youth and pop culture has always made ageing a difficult inevitability for musicians but is acutely present now the constantly evolving realm of social media has become the frontline for advertising. Essentially, the internet’s ability to rapidly build up and tear down musicians gives the old saying ‘It is better to burn out than fade away’ new meaning.
And perhaps it is better to burn out instead of slowly
fading away. Passion for anything is difficult to sustain and made especially
hard when musical success comes with the baggage of media scrutiny. Justin Bieber’s
recent return to the industry after abruptly cancelling his tour dates in 2015
leaves one wondering if his legacy would have been better preserved, albeit by
its infamy, if he had left his fans wanting more. His return came alongside a
new documentary and a tightly run publicity campaign. Yet when Changes
did arrive, it was mostly panned by critics, judged as riding the wave of
R&B’s current popularity with little originality and predictably labelled a
cash-grab. Bieber’s call on TikTok for his fans to create content for his new
Chipotle-sponsored single, ‘Yummy’, was mocked by Gen Z and boomers
collectively on Twitter.
I am not going to try to defend Justin Bieber’s recent album and rather transparent marketing techniques. However, some criticism directed at Changes orbited around the fact that its subject matter – settling into marriage – was not nearly as exciting as that of his previous works like Purpose, which dealt with the crushing effect of fame on his mental health. Though valid, such criticism touches upon a pervasive theme in the creative sphere present before the dawn of the Internet: the myth that the creation of the best art is an unsustainable and painful process that comes at the expense of the creator. As Matty Healy of The 1975 quipped, “It’s so much sexier if artists are in pain, but it can be really, really destructive”.[1] YouTube videos of him crying onstage at the height of his heroin addiction and the epoch of his commercial success are filled with comments discussing his ‘tragic beauty’.
The toxicity of this is self-evident, but the aphorism ‘it is better to burn out than fade away’ is widely accepted, despite the fact it insidiously feeds the same narrative. Burning equates to destruction. Yet the destructive substance abuse burn-out legends like Hendrix, Winehouse, or Cobain struggled with is still framed as a necessary ingredient to their creative work. Kurt Cobain’s drug addiction, tumultuous relationship, and eventual suicide are as important to Nirvana’s legacy as ‘Come as You Are’ ’s opening guitar riff. It is painfully clear that musicians’ publicly displayed personal lives can be as formative to their status as their music. In Cobain’s suicide note he penned the phrase ‘‘It is better to burn out than fade away”, quoting Neil Young’s 1979 song ‘Hey, Hey, My My (Into the Black)’.
Cobain, however, misconstrued Young’s lyrics. He had actually
been trying to reach out to Cobain at the time to encourage him only to play
when he felt like it. There are countless examples of musicians who have
faded away from the spotlight in a dignified manner or maintained a modified
form of fame as ‘nostalgia acts’, like Elton John, The Cure, or Paul McCartney.
Yet, there remains a morbid obsession with posthumous glorification in pop
culture, fuelled by consumers of music more than by the musicians themselves.
This is because the beneficiary of the ‘burn out or fade
away’ doctrine is the audience, never the performer. To burn out is to be a
visual spectacle, and a star’s cataclysmic rise and fall is exciting to watch. But
measuring an artist based on public reception creates countless other ethical
problems in the music industry. What is an artist to do when their image is no
longer palatable to the public? Madonna was originally praised for embracing
her sexuality when young and conventionally attractive. As she has aged, Madonna’s
attempt to continue to utilise her sexuality has been shunned. She is now
framed as an aged, embarrassing has-been. A study by Marketing Professor
Jeetendr Sehdev at the University of Southern California found such efforts
were described as ‘desperate’ and three in five said her image was ‘embarrassing’[2].
If we continue to validate the ‘better to burn out than fade away’ mantra, we
continue to consider relevance the yardstick of success despite its being bound
up with some of the most toxic traits of our society, such as ageism and sexism.
Taylor Swift is only thirty, but acutely aware and anxious of this, stating in
her 2020 documentary “I want to work really hard while society is still
tolerating me being myself”, because “female artists I know of have to remake
themselves, like, 20 times more than male artists”.[3]
I mentioned earlier that musicians can fade out of their
career peaks peacefully. However, this seems easier for men, whose behaviour is
permissible until much later in their lives whilst the same would be framed as outrageous
if continued by the opposite sex. Though most agree Morrissey’s current
political stances are outdated at best and blatantly racist at worst, his
musical legacy with The Smiths remains relatively intact. Mick Jagger is still
widely considered a sex icon, and details of his salacious private life are
praised rather than ridiculed. There are few, if any, females comparable to
these men.
It is incredibly difficult for creative industries to shake
the enduring ‘better to burn out’ myth. Creatives’ use of emotion in art makes
their private lives feel more open to us than in other careers. When this art
is the product of pain, it is even harder to praise it without implicitly
validating the context of its creation. To be a musician you have to consider
audience response, and though relevance is evidently problematic, it is quite obviously
the only route to commercial success. Thus, though it’s clear it is not better for
musicians to burn out, it remains obscure how we can disentangle this belief
from our collective understanding of the creative process and of the music
industry.
NHS staff are on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic – and therefore at the forefront of the public imagination. Whilst the success of initiatives such as Clap for our Carers seems to suggest widespread support and respect for health workers, there have been reports of physical and verbal abuse against NHS staff across the country. These range from racial abuse, to staff being spat on, to doctors being punched whilst treating COVID-19 patients.
The assault of NHS workers is far from a new phenomenon. The most recent annual NHS staff survey revealed that 14.5% of staff had experienced physical violence from patients, their relatives or the public – that means an average of over 200 violent attacks a day. But where does this hostility towards those risking their own health to save lives come from?
Some attacks seem to be motivated by fear; since lockdown measures have been put into place, community nurses have reported being called “disease spreaders” whilst attempting to do their jobs. Receiving treatment for a disease as potentially deadly as COVID-19 would undoubtedly be a harrowing experience, with the stress bringing out the worst in some. But directing this stress at health workers, the very people working to combat the virus, makes little sense. Instead, it suggests a lack of respect for the essential work performed by healthcare workers.
Rather than being viewed as humans executing a difficult and often emotionally harrowing job under pressure, some seem to view NHS workers as simply a cog within the sprawling healthcare system. They become invisible, taken for granted until needed. Anger at the system – for example, misplaced anger that allowing nurses to continue carefully performing their much-needed duties means there are “disease spreaders” in the community (a grossly inaccurate view – the nurses themselves are at the greatest risk of infection) – is directed towards individual workers.
This view does not have to manifest itself through direct violence. The continuous underfunding of the NHS, meaning workers are increasingly underpaid and overworked, also suggests a blindness to the fact that healthcare is provided by people, not automatons. This does not necessarily mean healthcare is viewed as non-essential. In fact, it can sometimes seem that healthcare is viewed as so essential that is taken for granted that someone must provide it, and thus the person who eventually ends up providing it loses their individuality. They are nominally respected for filling the position but offered little renumeration or empathy for the actual effort their job requires.
It is possible that in the aftermath of the pandemic, this could change. However, it is far from guaranteed. When asked if nurses deserved to be paid more in the future, Matt Hancock, the health secretary, replied that “Everybody wants to support our nurses right now and I’m sure there will be a time to debate things like that. At the moment, the thing we’re working on is how to get through this”. Whilst this does seem to express support for the notion of increased pay, there is no concrete commitment even to a review of wages in the future. The work of nurses is seen as so essential that their material needs must be put on hold for the greater good of the nation.
This line of thought seems to lead towards a far more positive perception of NHS workers that still ignores their humanity. Health workers are placed on a pedestal, their work viewed as selfless and invaluable. Yet their requests for better working conditions or better pay are ignored. Support is offered only on the terms of those offering support. This also allows for the deaths of health workers to be glorified as noble and heroic, without acknowledging the fact that many could be prevented if hospitals could afford and obtain the correct protective equipment.
The pandemic has not created these perceptions, it has simply brought them more starkly into focus. However, it also provides the opportunity for them to change. Daily briefings from Downing Street see key members of the cabinet speaking alongside medical experts that many would never have heard of before the pandemic. After one of these briefings launched a drive to recruit volunteers to help the NHS, over 500,000 people signed up within a day.
For vast swathes of the population, health workers are no longer faceless and invisible, nor is their work taken for granted. But we are in extraordinary times. A true shift in the perception of healthcare workers would be accompanied by a significant improvement in pay and working conditions. Professing support while failing to implement or support such measures simply allows the belittling of healthcare work to continue in a new, ‘progressive’ guise.
Despite what social media analytics might
suggest, Tiger King was not the only Netflix Original series released last
month. The English Game, created and directed by Downton Abbey’s Julian
Fellowes and with a conspicuous lack of big cats, was released on the same day
but has been wholly and understandably overshadowed in its pursuit of viral success.
The British period drama, which focuses on the development of football in 19th century Britain, follows a number of characters on both sides of the amateurism vs. professionalism debate which emerged in many sports in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It very roughly follows true events, as it sees Fergus ‘Fergie’ Suter, and his friend and fellow footballer Jimmy Love, move from their Scottish club, Partick, to the Lancashire team Darwen, becoming some of the first professional football players. The pair, alongside their boss, hope to help the mill-based team become the first working class team to win the Football Association Cup, hitherto dominated by gentlemen. These gentlemen are – quelle surprise – not particularly pleased with this challenge and feel threatened by the professionalisation of ‘their’ game, thus moving to ban the participation of players who are paid to play.
The series isn’t bad. It’s certainly
enjoyable, but it promises so much more than it delivers. Its constituent parts
appear to provide a recipe for inevitable success, with its award-winning
director, cast of familiar faces, fascinating social, cultural, and political
historical backdrop and, above all, a central theme focusing on the development
of the greatest game ever played – football. Perhaps, however, this privileged
starting position was the cause of its deficiencies. The English Game
has all the hallmarks of a project designed to capitalise on the reputation of
the director, profiting from his oft-trotted, though admittedly popular, Posh
‘n’ Not theme.
The cast all put in good, solid performances, but they’re hamstrung by average writing, which necessitates their characters erring on the verge of becoming parodies of themselves. Fellows does not delve into the complex lives of the working classes in the small Lancashire town in which the series is largely set, or indeed the lives of the Old Etonians with which they’re unsubtly contrasted, but rather falls back on unimaginative, painting-by-numbers-style period drama clichés. From the outset, we are confronted with the arrogant toffs who are entitled snobs, complete with the charming young son who can never live up to his father’s expectations, and with the hard-working, salt of the earth northern mill workers, variously presented as happy-go-lucky or angry. There is a little more depth of character afforded to Kinaird and Suter, with the former suddenly abandoning his long-term and institutionally-bred arrogance in order to become the champion of the working class football movement and the latter battling between the pull of his heart and pocket. But again, they exist within such a cliched plot that character development can be predicted at every turn, and much of the nuance is lost.
Historically, The English Game is less than impressive. Much of the real history is simplified for the sake of the plot, and the chronology is a little askew in various, unimportant aspects, but almost all of these misdemeanours can be forgiven. This is not a documentary, after all, and the plot isn’t obviously undermined by the ways in which the production fails to represent the historical reality faithfully. Visually, the series is pleasing, and there are satisfying nods to the tactical development of the game, alongside representations of the incredibly physical nature of the 19th century game, which often saw the practice of ‘hacking’ employed as a tactical decision. Again, whilst the treatment of upper-class women is largely reduced to gossiping and following their husbands to and from the dinner table, the series does present Kinaird’s wife, Alma, as an influential character in Arthur’s life, and alludes to the social activism with which many upper-class women were concerned during the period.
Despite the criticism which has been fairly
levelled at the series, the overall viewing experience is good enough. I wasn’t
left overwhelmed at the spectacle I’d seen, desperate to watch it again; nor
was I scrambling to tell my friends to watch it. Despite the sometimes-painful
stereotypes, historical flaws and clichéd subplots, The English Game
does provide 270 minutes of useful ‘bingeable’ Netflix fodder that is
particularly welcome during this period of football-free isolation.
The words spring to mind quickly when thinking of San Francisco in the seventies. Between the tail end of an active hippy movement and a ferociously blossoming gay scene, this is where the suburban sensibilities of the American middle classes were reborn again in the form of LSD tabs and ethereal clouds of pure thought. Sex seemed like the central axis of the world. The sexual revolution defied the traditional limitations set on sexual and romantic freedoms. For the first time, it seemed, homosexuality, masturbation, contraception, pre-marital sex, pornography and more were all in common discussion. Sex was political. Sex was radical. Sex was, above all, diametrically opposed to the dry dreams of domestic stability idealised by the conservative press. The cups of tea left on the counter for a late-rising second half, syncing schedules and platonic morning hugs, one would think, belonged to another plane of reality altogether. Certainly, in this world of acid trips, politicised sex and fearless activism, domesticity would seem a little out of place.
This at least was the message pushed by the media at the time. They hystericised activist groups and the (mostly well-meaning) hippy communes into anti-Christian ‘sex cults’ and ‘hidden drug orgies’ and prophesied the ‘corruption of family values’. But the dichotomy they play on, between domestic stability and sexual or passionate love, is actually an ancient one. The literary canon has been at it for centuries.
Throughout poetic history there is a sustained theme, especially in the body of work by straight male poets. Love is presented as an urge to physically pursue, worship and chase the, generally female and voiceless, love interest. At the same time, in both literature and culture, waning sexual appetite is equated to waning love. There are very few poets who wax lyrical about the subsidence of quick, passionate nights into slow, intimate, but impotent, mornings. The implicit suggestion is that sexual desire and a wish for domestic stability are in some way opposed.
According to the seventies press, then, it ought to be all the more surprising that the poet to break this dichotomy should have risen from the depths of San Francisco’s sex clubs. Thom Gunn openly took his inspiration from popper-driven open-air orgies; party drugs, one-night stands and gay club culture was all fair game. He also took inspiration from his long-term polygamous relationships and the domestic functionality of the housemates he lived with for over thirty years. His poetry centres specifically on the gay experience and seventies SF; he moves intimately from the inner workings of sex clubs to the enlightening – and the darker sides – of recreational drugs. But he also often imbues his poetry with the kind of communitarian, familiar spirit of hippy communes. His flatmates, to him, were family. He valued the kind of dry, domestic love that grows out of long-term relationships. His poem ‘The Hug’ centres specifically on that experience:
It was not sex, but I could feel The whole strength of your body set, Or braced, to mine, And locking me to you As if we were still twenty-two When our grand passion had not yet Become familial. My quick sleep had deleted all Of intervening time and place. I only knew The stay of your secure firm dry embrace.
Joshua Weiner, a close heterosexual friend of Thom’s, describes how “in his life and in his work he [showed] how pleasure and eroticism and domestic stability were, for him, a seamless continuum.” In the essay At the Barriers, Weiner muses on the constraints prescribed especially to straight male poets in love poetry. The antithetical presentation of eroticism and pleasure to domestic stability traps them in the kind of poetic tropes that seem to make it near-to impossible to write the kind of poetry Gunn does. Cue castration anxieties and fears of sterility and empty love. He stresses too the importance of Gunn’s communal living situation too; his constant flatmates provided him much of the domestic stability that the revolving door of lovers could often not, taking turns to cook and clean on a solid rota for thirty-three years. But there is an implicit suggestion that Gunn’s homosexuality frees him somewhat from these constraints. Here, his friend sheepishly underplays Gunn’s revolutionary spirit.
Because looking at queer literary history too more often than not reveals the same tropes as the canonical tendency above. The love interests of Wilde, Mackworth Dolben, Garcia Lorca are, unnamed and ungendered, the objects of a love all the more sexually charged in nature for the difficulty in their fulfilment and the criminality of their attraction to them. Love is expressed – maybe even disguised – through traditionally heterosexual tropes of uneven power dynamics; the pursuer and the pursued, the possessor and the possessed.
Perhaps this parallel happened out of an urge to validate a sexual attraction that was considered a perversion punishable by law. Perhaps it was an act of quiet subversion by using tropes otherwise so unquestioningly applied to heterosexual couplings. Either way, it seems, Weiner was wrong. These static roles ascribed to love poetry were not limited to heterosexual poets.
Which means: Gunn was, even in the radical era he lived in, a true exception. After the seventies, both on the liberal and the conservative side, the ‘acid age’ was dismissed as a drug-hazed misadventure. But San Francisco in the Seventies saw the boundaries of what counted as ‘family’, as ‘love’, as ‘relationships’ radically challenged by ‘alternative’ ways of living. Gunn embodied, and continued to embody the spirit of that era, both in his life and his work.
What I think Gunn really teaches us is this: there is just as much poetic force in the kinds of love that do not conform to traditional tropes of poetry. Be they heterosexual or homosexual, monogamous or polyamorous, sexual or asexual, none of them have to take up those roles. We need to start forging, and appreciating, the roles that lie outside these simplistic dichotomies.
At midday on Friday, February 22nd, 2019, a loud explosion is heard in one of Medellín’s most affluent neighbourhoods. The explosion is so large that it engulfs the neighbourhood, covering the surrounding apartment blocks in a cloud of orange dust. Yet this is not the work of drug cartels or FARC guerrillas, but rather the city mayor and his new initiative, ‘Medellín – Abraza Su Historia’ or, in English, ‘Medellín Embracing Its History’. The building demolished that day was the Monaco building, drug lord Pablo Escobar’s luxury home for much of the 1980s where he planned some of his most violent acts. While the building had been left more or less abandoned after it was seized by the Colombian government in 1990, its gruesome past meant that it quickly becamea popular tourist destination. Frustrated with the dominance of Escobar’s legacy in Medellín, the mayor decided that this ‘symbol of evil’ needed to be entirely obliterated and replaced with a memorial dedicated to the victims, rather than the perpetrators, of the city’s bloody past. Over the last decade, an enormous amount of time and money has been put into reinventing Medellín, Colombia’s second-largest city. Once named the most dangerous city in the world, Medellín has since become known as ‘the most innovative’, winning an international prize under this label in2013for its successes in social development. Yet at the core of this regeneration lies a more fundamental question: will Medellín, or even Colombia as a whole, ever be able to truly overcome its past and create a new legacy for itself while there is still a high demand for cocaine?
Medellín provides a microcosmic example of Colombia’s fight against Escobar’s legacy – that is to say, a fight against its international reputationas a politically corrupt and violent nation, as well as being a major producer of cocaine. All cities are made up of the remnants of their past, both in material and non-material form, and this provides a particular challenge when the recent history is one made up of so much bloodshed and crime.As the Harvard University study ‘Roots of Violence in Colombia – Armed Actors and Beyond’ points out, ‘Colombia’s history is one of the most violent in thehemisphere, with organized killing existing at chronically high levels, punctuated with episodes of high-intensity murderousness, for nearly two centuries’. Medellín became the centre of this ‘endemic violence’ in the latter half of the 20th century.
To understand how Medellín became an urban war zone, we need to understand the city’s past. Following an industrial revolution in the first half of the 20thcentury, Medellín became a hub of economic activity, the population increasing sixfold between 1905 and 1951. The influx of rural migrants led to the development of poor comunas in the hillsides, not dissimilar from Brazil’s favelas. The economic growth that took place across Colombia in the 1970s may have improved life for white-collar workers, but the World Bank suggests that this was highly damaging for poorer communities, with unemployment rapidly increasing in Medellín. During this period, cocaine also reemerged as a fashionable drug in the US and Europe, providing the city’s struggling, marginalisedcommunities with a route out of poverty – drug trafficking. The dominance of the Medellín Cartel grew alongside the richer countries’ appetite for cocaine which consequently led to the city being named ‘the most dangerous in the world’ in a 1988 article by TIME Magazine. The article describeshow what was once known as the ‘city of eternal spring’ had become ‘the city of eternal violence’, policemen pacing suburban streets with automatic rifles and civilians walking around with pistols underneath their shirts. In 1987, 3000 people were murdered in Medellín, a homicide rate five times higher than that of New York the same year. Drug-trafficking had turned the city into a notoriously dangerous place, with around 80% of the cocaine imported to the US coming through the Medellín Cartel. Bombings, assassinations, shootings, torture and sexual assault weredaily occurrencesin some neighbourhoods of Medellín throughout this period, with cartels controlling every aspect of civilian life. Bearing all this evidence in mind, the task of creating a new legacyfor Medellín and for its younger generations seems laughably impossible, but it was after Escobar’s assassination in 1993 and the consequential downfall of the Medellín Cartel that this challenge became the mayor’s policy.
Stanley Stewart summarises the city’s impressive and bizarre reinvention in a 2018 article for The Telegraph: ‘How Medellín went from murder capital to hipster holiday destination’. Stewart, perplexed by the city’s sudden transformation, asked his tour guide what lay at the core of the regeneration’s success, to which the tour guide replied “Transport”. The idea that public transport could put an end to decades of widespread crime and violence seems bizarre, but this is the commonly-held belief of the city’s natives.
In 1995, the Medellín Metro was established in a desperate attempt to reconnect the divided city and avoid the geographical segregation seen in places like New York, Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro. The Metro became an important cultural symbol in the city for marginalised workers, and was soon followed by the Metrocable, a gondola lift system which provided a solution to the steep hills that mark Medellín’s topography. This transport network is more than a means of getting around as it symbolises the transformation of Medellin for the city’s inhabitants and is regarded with something approaching reverence. Announcements on the Metro call on people to behavein the outside world as well as they do in the train carriage, all part of what is known as the cultura metro. When I visited Medellín in 2018, a woman in a tienda in Villa Sierra (once Medellín’s most dangerous comuna) told me that most people’s commutes into the city centre had been halved by an hour thanks to the new gondola system. Medellín’s Metrocable has since become the inspiration for many other cities across the globe which are considering a similar approach to tackle social segregation. By addressing the issues which led to such high levels of poverty and crime, Escobar’s legacy in the city diminished and was replaced with a sentiment of determination.
The mayor and the Colombian government were also aware that Medellín’s public spaces needed to be redeveloped in order to create a safer environment in the city centre. Many squares were hubs of drug trafficking and prostitution, the Plaza Cisneros being the most infamous of them all. In 2005, the mayor of Medellín decided to put 300 towers of light in the square to quite literally dispel any darkness – without any dark corners, it became impossible for the square to become a hub of illegal activity again and it was transformed into a popular attraction for tourists and locals alike, now known as the Plaza de las Luces (Square of Lights). And this is not an exception – examples of the city uprootingits past and putting in place the foundations for a brighter future are abundant. In June 1995, the year that the process of regeneration began, 30 civilians were killed and 200 wounded by the detonation of a 20-pound bomb at a music festival in the Plaza de San Antonio. The bomb had been placed at the base of a sculpture called ‘The Bird’, the work of Medellín’s most famous artist, Fernando Botero. What remained of the artwork was a distressing reminder of the event, a jagged hole tearing through the bird’s metal stomach. Instead of removing the sculpture, Botero decided that it would make more sense to create a new legacy of peace by keeping the damaged bird and placing a new version of the original beside it. Named ‘The Birds of Peace’, the two statues side by side embody the new path that the city is attempting to follow – one which both embraces the past and looks towards creating a better future.
Yet trying to transform a city so drastically in such a short space of time is ambitious, and whether such a feat will be able to sustain itself is a worrying prospect for Medellín. While the city’s art museums and botanical gardens do attract many tourists, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has suggested that Escobar’s legacy has provided a whole new wave of tourism in the city – narcoturismo. That’s to say, tourists going to Medellín to take or traffic drugs and visit brothels, the city supposedly having “the most beautiful women in the world”. The UN study also explores the link between tourism and the sex trafficking of children and adolescents, a pertinent problem in many of Colombia’s touristic hotspots, such as the colourful, colonial city of Cartagena.
Many foreigners go to Medellín to feed their morbid curiosity by visiting sites related to the famous Medellín Cartel, including Escobar’s country estate ‘Hacienda Nápoles’ which is now a theme park and ‘La Manuela’, another of the drug lord’s properties, which overlooks Guatapé’s reservoir which is now used by tourists as a paintballing venue. Guatapé, reportedly one of the most beautiful towns in the country due to its colourful houses and astounding green landscape, has only recently reemerged as a tourist destination after years of chaos under Escobar. Like much of the region, Medellín is home to some of the most beautiful natural landscapes and architecture, yet despite its many charms, it seems that some tourists are more interested in the darker side of its history.
Nonetheless, Medellín is fighting against Escobar’s legacy with an arguably more influential force for change – education. Nelson Mandela famously said that ‘education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world’, and Medellín has invested in this belief with its system of ‘library parks’. A ‘library park’ is a concept native to the city; these multi-purpose educational buildings surrounded by green space open to the public aim to provide education and innovation in the most deprived neighbourhoods of Medellín. The most famous is the ‘Parque Biblioteca España’, created in 2007 in one of the city’s most notorious northern neighbourhoods – Santo Domingo Savio. The building provides the comuna with a library, a cultural centre, a community centre and internet access. The architectural design focuses on providing a sanctuary for the locals; many of the rooms have small vertical windows to allow young people to escape from their environment for a few hours.
Medellín’s regeneration project suggests that the city is creating an exciting new future for itself – one of innovation and determination in spite of such adversity. And this is without mentioning its environmental projects, education schemes, street art and the music genre which has begun to dominate the city’s image on a global scale – reggaetón. There’s even a twenty-minute documentary dedicated to the city’s ‘Rebirth through Reggaeton’. The short film made by Complex News explores Medellín’s newfound role as the epicentre of the genre through interviews with various reggaeton superstars, including the Latin Grammy award-winning artist J Balvin who tells the viewer ‘You’ve just got to go [to Medellín]. I guarantee that you’ll be back. 2000 per cent. If not, I’ll give you your money back.’
However, despite so many successes, Medellín is still struggling with crime and violence. In 2018, the city’s murder rate rose for the first time after years of decline with 626 murders, an increase of almost 10% from the previous year. The national newspaper El Tiempocalled 2018 a bloody year for Medellín, one local government official statingthat such violence hadn’t been seen in the city since 2008. Most of the violence that year occurred in Comuna 7 and Comuna 13 between local gangs who control the majority of the city’s drug trafficking. Cressida Dick and Sadiq Khan are among many public figures who have attacked middle-class liberals for the hypocrisy of their cocaine use which ‘perpetuates a chain of violent activity’, creating misery and environmental degradation at every level in the supply chain. It is not only Escobar’s legacy that Medellín (and much of Colombia) is fighting against but also our national demand for drugs, with Britain estimated to have a cocaine market worth around five billion pounds.
Ultimately,Medellín’s regeneration project has completely transformed the city’s landscape and atmosphere, seemingly ridding the city of much of its dark past. Yet, while this did initially lead to a considerable drop in the crime rate and gave the city a brand new identity to present to the international community, the city is still struggling with the problems left from decades of drug-trafficking and guerrilla warfare. This is to be expected as modern art galleries and chart-topping music cannot wipe away years of violence nor fix the destruction of much of the city’s infrastructure, yet there is also another obstacle that is far too often overlooked – our role, as Britons, in Medellín’s development. Cocaine leaves victims at every level of its production, be it thechildren forced to make the drug, the police officers who face violence and death for trying to fight the cartels, the mules who ingest the drug for transportation or the teenage victims of knife crime in London.And this is to name but a few. Medellín, like all great cities, has many problems but the drug-trafficking and the violence that the cocaine trade brings with it is at the very top of their concerns. In the globalised world in which we live, we are all mutually responsible. Drug-trafficking is not just a Colombian problem, but a global issue. As long as there is a demand for cocaine, Medellín’s drive for a new future will never entirely succeed, and ‘the city of eternal Spring’ will be cursed with many more years of insecurity, crime and violence.
