Tuesday 28th April 2026
Blog Page 707

Review: Bandages – ‘hard-hitting and unromanticised’

Reem Ahmed
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Review: Bandages – ‘hard-hitting and unromanticised’

I will preface this review by saying the trigger warnings and age guideline for Bandages are there for a reason. This ‘dark comedy’ is not for the faint-hearted. In the opening scene, our troubled protagonist, 18-year-old Isabelle, played by Lou Lou Curry, takes centre stage, but for a tragic purpose: to mutilate her own face. Kneeling on the floor, only a couple of feet away from the front row of the audience, she takes out a knife from her bag. Her expression is a mixture of distress and determination. Comprising of only a few pieces of furniture wrapped in white sheets and red thread, the set surrounding her is like something out of a horror film – harsh, bleak and a cruel reflection of her plight. After a long moment of heavy breathing, Isabelle, at first hesitant, cuts her cheek, guiding the knife with the aid of a small mirror. Her ragged gasps ring out in theatre, the blood dripping from her face onto the floor beneath her. Without warning, the stage goes dark. So begins Bandages, the brainchild of student playwright, Chloe Jacobs.  

Bandages is, more than anything, a character study. It offers its audience a candid glimpse into the psyche of a disturbed young woman, and explores what leads her to perform such a violent act of self-harm. Her tense, awkward and often angry conversations with her psychiatrist, Dr Guild, provide the foundation for the play and the scenes that unfold. After much probing from Dr Guild, Isabelle, her face now bandaged up beyond recognition, details her unhappy childhood and fraught relationship with her abusive parents (especially her mother, Meddy). The disturbing flashbacks from her past come alive, terrifyingly vivid. They are performed, rather than narrated, for us (along with the psychiatrist, always sitting silently in his chair off to the side of the stage) to observe, with something akin to morbid curiosity.

Where Bandages succeeds is in its hard-hitting, unromanticised portrayal of not only self-harm, but a variety of taboo subjects in addition. For example, in the re-enactment of scenes from Isabelle’s childhood, the horrors of a dysfunctional home environment are explored. For this, Joe Stanton must be singled out for his outstanding performance of Eno (Isabelle’s father) and the domestic abuse he inflicts on his family – it was definitely the most disturbing and realistic acting by a student I’ve seen in a long time. A scene in which Eno comes home drunk stood out to me in particular. It culminates in his attempted strangulation of Meddy, who collapses on the floor, as a younger Isabelle (played by Leanne Yau) watches on, crouching in the corner, terrified. After letting Meddy go, Eno laughs manically. His laughing fit lasts for several minutes, reverberating raucously throughout the theatre, continuing even after the scene switches back to the conversation between Isabelle and Dr Guild. Thus, the boundary between the past and the present is blurred: the echo of Eno’s laughter from all those years ago is deafening in the midst of their present conversation.  

A final word must be said about the character switching throughout – specifically, how Meddy in the past and the older version of Isabelle in the present are both played by Curry. Curry’s act of switching was seamless, and can only be fully appreciated by watching her performance – with a swift turn of the head, she ‘becomes’ her own mother who inflicts the abuse on her younger self. This deliberate choice to have the same actor for both roles is highly effective; it invites an interesting discussion on the unparalleled closeness of mother-daughter relationships, and how this closeness can be toxic. There is a horrible irony in how Isabelle’s fate mirrors that of her mother, whom she despises (both end up with their faces mutilated, Meddy at the hands of Eno), and how she ‘becomes’ the abuser her mother was. The underlying message is clear: we are, irrevocably, our parents’ children, no matter how much we attempt to distance ourselves from them.

The final scene is of the younger Isabelle cutting her face in the same way as the older Isabelle at the beginning of play, and her arrival in the psychiatrist’s office. We have come full circle, the past and the present meeting, the older and younger Isabelle merging together in a wonderful employment of ring composition. I left the theatre with a heavy heart, still reeling somewhat from Isabelle’s story – and that is how I know ‘Bandages’ succeeded in what it set out to achieve.

Statues Must Fall

Adam Dalrymple
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Statues Must Fall

On 9th April 2015, Rhodes fell. One month previously students at the University of Cape Town had begun a campaign to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes from their campus. The campaign was called ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ and their mission statement said that the statue glorified a man who was “racist, imperialist, colonialist and misogynist”. A key figure in colonial history, he aggressively annexed land in South Africa to further his ideology; “the bringing of the whole world under British rule…making the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire”. Students believed that its removal would begin the “decolonisation of the university”. On April 8th, the university council accepted Rhodes Must Fall’s demands and the following day, a crane heaved the statue off the plinth it had rested on for 80 years, surrounded by a throng of jubilant students, cheering and dancing.

The Rhodes Must Fall campaign in South Africa marks the beginning of a trend in global politics. Statues have become a battleground for culture wars. From the United States to South Korea, debates about historical legacy and modern cultural identity have raged around these figures of iron and
stone.

From South Africa, the Rhodes Must Fall movement came to Oxford. Students campaigned for the statue of Cecil Rhodes in Oriel College to be taken down. Sneering out across the High Street onto University Church, the statue of Rhodes stood there due because of an endowment he had left the college in his will. The movement attracted national media attention but was ultimately unsuccessful. On 29th January 2016, Oriel announced that the statue would remain, after college donors had threatened to withdraw £100 million of funding.

Rhodes Must Fall also emerged across the Atlantic at Harvard University, in the form of the Royall Must Fall movement, which took off in autumn 2015. The campaign called for changing the Harvard Law School shield, which depicted the coat of arms of Isaac Royall Jr, who had made his fortune in the slave trade and owned multiple plantations. The shield was retired 6 months later.

Meanwhile, the same month that the Rhodes Must Fall movement began in South Africa, Ukraine initiated a formal process of decommunisation, which led to the destruction of 1,300 Lenin statues by the following year. One of these monuments in Edessa was converted into a Darth Vader statue.

Then in June 2015, the murder of 9 African Americans in a church in Charleston by a white supremacist prompted soul-searching in the United States over its confederate history. Since the attack, over 100 statues of monuments to confederate generals, who fought the Civil War to maintain slavery, have been taken down.

These removals outraged many from the American south who claimed that the movement to topple confederate statues threatened their cultural heritage. In August 2017, white supremacists descended on Charlottesville in droves for a “Unite the Right” rally that tried to prevent a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee from being taken down. Violence erupted between the white supremacists and counter-protestors, leading to 3 deaths and a state of emergency being called. Former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke said, “I believe that today, in Charlottesville…is the first step towards taking America back.”

Charlottesville prompted mayors in Durham, Baltimore and Lexington to remove confederate monuments from their towns within a week. Donald Trump responded by tweeting, “sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues”. Confederate generals are obviously contentious figures, however it may be more surprising to hear that more recently protestors have toppled a statue of Mahatma Gandhi. The University of Ghana took action against a statue of the Indian civil rights activist in December 2018, after 1,000 students signed a petition calling for its removal. Gandhi is a controversial figure, particularly in Ghana because of his racist views about Africans: he considered them “inferior” to Indians.

Then, just weeks ago on 1st February 2019, South Korean activists assembled around a bronze statue of a “comfort woman” outside the Japanese Embassy in Seoul to protest Japan’s failure to apologise for forcing South Korean women to work as sex slaves in military brothels during World War Two. Japan had previously withdrawn its ambassador to South Korea over the installation of the statue.

While debates about controversial statues have gained huge prominence within these countries, it is rarely recognised as an international phenomenon. The media, caught up in these national debates have failed to explain that these conflicts over statues are part of a global process of reckoning with our history in the 21st Century. But that begs the question, why are statues proving the focal point for these reflections on national identity and history? Why have these movements suddenly emerged across the world in the last few years?

Statues are symbolically important; physical representations of a nation’s values. They populate our urban landscape with reminders of who we are, and glorify the heroes of our common histories. Statues are powerful tools for propaganda; looming over us, the figures they show are idealised and immortal. Yet this immortality means that statues linger in our streets long after the ideology they represent has gone. Cultural identity is constantly evolving and statues become artefacts of outdated attitudes. Does Cecil Rhodes belong on the streets of post-apartheid South Africa? Does the Statue of Liberty, with its inscription “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore” belong in a country whose government is locking children in cages at the border and whose president wants to build a wall to keep these huddled masses out?

Even if they represent outdated attitudes, statues still maintain their psychological impact. Vann R. Newkirk II wrote of the experience of being an African American growing up around confederate statues in the South; “I lived in occupied territory. I did not belong in the society represented by the statues, even though my ancestors had tilled the land for centuries.” A student at the University of Ghana said after the Gandhi statue was removed, “it’s a massive win for all Ghanaians because it was constantly reminding us how inferior we are”.

As a symbolic representation of the ruling ideology, pulling statues down can constitute a powerful message of overturning an existing order. The Hungarian Revolution against Soviet rule began in October 1956 with demonstrators toppling a 30-foot statue of Stalin. Victory in the Battle of Baghdad after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 was celebrated by the toppling of the Saddam Hussein statue in Firdos Square. That is why statues are at the focus of these culture wars: they are symbolic of overcoming an old order. Rhodes Must Fall had goals beyond Rhodes falling, with students in both Cape Town and Oxford seeking to decolonise education by combating institutional prejudice and widening the scope of humanities syllabuses. The statue of Rhodes in a privileged position in both universities symbolised the hegemonic prejudice that they were trying to combat, and the statue’s removal in Cape Town represents a significant symbolic victory.

Yet colonial South Africa and confederate America fell by the historical wayside a long time ago, so why are Cecil Rhodes and Robert E. Lee falling today? The campaigns across the world since 2015 all have had an urgency to them that seems odd considering it was two decades since the end of apartheid and Soviet rule of Ukraine, and even longer since the end of World War Two, the fall of the British Empire and Confederate America.

This urgency is because these debates are not over ideologies that have been forgotten and therefore look out of place.The problem is that these ideologies are still widespread.

The Rhodes Must Fall movement did not celebrate the end of racism in South Africa, but dealt a symbolic blow to the institutional racism that has persisted to the present day. In Oxford, Rhodes doesn’t represent colonial privilege that has long since faded, but rather access problems and prejudice that still plague our admissions process. Confederate statues are being taken down in America because the white supremacist ideology they represent is experiencing a revival in mainstream politics. Ukraine’s decision to take down statues of Lenin came after Russia’s annex of Crimea and fears of Russia’s influence extending further into Ukraine. These culture wars are fighting over the present, not the past.

If this trend continues and our cities are depopulated, as more statues are deemed problematic across the globe, the next question we must ask is “what do you do with these problematic statues?”. A million articles have been written debating whether or not we should remove statues or leave them where they are, and I will not enter that debate here. Any readers interested can go to the Oxford Union YouTube account, and watch the ‘Must Rhodes Fall?’ debate.

Instead, I would like to present the options one is faced with if they believe action should be taken. One obvious solution is that you could destroy them. I do not doubt that slamming a sledgehammer into a lump of stone that has stood oppressively over you for your whole life feels cathartic. If a statue’s toppling represents a rejection of a past ideology, that rejection would surely be more emphatic if the statue were destroyed.

However, as we have established, the urgency for these campaigns is due to the fact that these poisonous legacies have endured. Destroying these statues prevents a valuable opportunity to educate future generations about these legacies in order to correct the arc of history. As journalist Radley Balko put it, “we shouldn’t try to erase the past, but we should strive to provide it with the proper context.”

This context can take many different forms. Statues can be taken down and put into museums, where an explanation of its providence can be provided. Alternatively, one can assemble a large group of controversial monuments in one public space, as Moscow’s Fallen Monument Park and Budapest’s Memento Park do with the city’s Soviet statues, and as Delhi’s Coronation Park does with its British imperial statues. In Delhi, the statues are removed from their plinths, no longer allowed the grandeur of their original design. Both of these options remove the statues from spaces that glorify them, while serving the purpose of public education.

One could even keep the statues up, but install a prominent plaque to re-contextualise them. An example of this can be found in Oxford. The All Souls Codrington Library was endowed by Christopher Codrington, whose fortune was obtained through sugar plantations in the West Indies. Opening the gate off Radcliffe Square into All Souls today you are immediately faced with a large plaque commemorating “those who worked in slavery on the Codrington plantations in the West Indies”. If you then enter the library you will come across a marble statue of Codrington in Roman imperial dress. With this context, some would argue that the statue doesn’t glorify him but instead makes him look like a slightly absurd figure, playing dress up and picturing his own celebrated legacy, which today rightly lies in ruins.

Finally, rather than solely focus on removing the statues from our cities, we should look to reimagine our urban landscape and install new statues to better represent the values of our current society. In 2016, fewer than one in five listed statues in the UK depict women, and many that did were either anonymous and sexualised or of Queen Victoria. However, change is taking place. December 2018 saw statues of suffragettes Emmeline Pankhurst and Annie Kenney installed in their hometowns of Manchester and Oldham respectively. During the same month, while announcing the removal of a statue of racist gynaecologist J. Marion Sims from Central Park, New York ’s mayor announced that a statue of Shirley Chisholm, the first African American women to serve in congress would be erected in Brooklyn.

We should be careful to preserve memory of our problematic past in public consciousness, albeit not glorified on the plinths where these statues currently stand. Simultaneously, we must erect new statues that better represent our values. If we do, the oppressive psychological effect of the current statues would be transformed into one that is inclusive and inspiring. New generations would be unburdened of our society’s sinister historical legacies, but wary to stamp out the remnants of these legacies that persevere. If Rhodes does fall, we must be careful to bring the ideologies he represented crashing down with him.

Recoiling from the shock: how Dadaism swallowed a post-war Europe

Alex Beukers
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Recoiling from the shock: how Dadaism swallowed a post-war Europe

When Ludwig Kirchner painted his Self-Portrait of a Soldier in 1915 amid his nervous breakdown, it’s unlikely he knew how powerfully it would evoke the plight of European art. Glassy-eyed, pallid, and inattentive to both the nude model behind him and his bloody stump of a right hand, in the painting Kirchner is back in his studio – but in military uniform. Unable to comprehend the 600,000 German casualties from just a year of fighting, Kirchner’s work encapsulated the crisis faced by artists in WWI: jaded, liminal, and seeing little way of making sense or meaning out of the grotesque reality before them.

Once the war began, disillusionment was quick to set in. F.T Marinetti avowed in his 1912 Manifesto of Futurism to ‘glorify war…the only hygiene of the world’, but in wartime the movement began to lose momentum: Boccioni’s triumphant Charge of the Cavalry (1915) began to look naïve obsolete against the machine-gun atrocities facing Italian soldiers on the front. Meanwhile British artist Paul Nash, having enlisted for the Artists Rifles in 1914, had his romantic view of rural landscapes explode in Flanders. The piece he created in 1918, We Are Making a New World, was an acerbic satirisation of the Futurists’ surging, masculine optimism: the ‘new world’ was a ravaged one, of barren trees and grave-like mounds.

Other responses were even more visceral. Otto Dix’s The Trench (1923) is a gut-wrenching painting: the viewer is pulled into an apocalyptic beach scene, where on the right-hand side a corpse is tipped upside-down, stiff legs outstretched in a way that would be comical if it weren’t horrific. The public was so alarmed by the painting that it was covered by a curtain at its first viewing. ‘It was as if Dix needed to vomit his memories in order to purge himself of all that haunted him’, (The Guardian, 2014), but beyond painful catharsis, nothing else remained for the artist: only perverse detail, forcing its own recording.

It was the desire to escape this obligation of distilling war into art, that produced Dada. It found its nesting ground in neutral Switzerland – specifically the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, a thriving club for avant-garde artists. Coined by the Romanian artist Tristan Tzara, who chose its name at random from a German-French dictionary, the movement was anti-war, anti-establishment, even anti-art. Its manifesto, read out by Hugo Ball to the club in July of 1916, delighted its left-leaning audience. But the concept wasn’t politically one-sided: arising of no agenda, it was the perfect iconoclast, calling for destruction of all repressive traditions and traditions. But its nihilism spoke loudest of all: in the middle of war, seeing the apathy of the government over Europe, no wonder it resonated when death was deemed ‘a thoroughly Dadaist business, in that it signifies nothing at all.’

Dada succeeded because it dismantled. Responding to the catastrophe brought by technological development in the war, machinery lost its functionality and became monstrous. The art sought to represent the futility Dadaists saw in life: Man Ray’s The Gift was an iron with spikes, while Raoul Hausmann’s Rationalization is on the March! assembled the human form out of different mechanical objects to comment ironically on the impact of industrialisation.

Innovation was at Dada’s core. Scorning the unnatural pretence of oil-paints – life ‘squeezed out of tubes’- the artists used ready-made materials: newspaper clippings, photographs, ink-printed lettering. Richard Huelsenbeck, a fellow Dadaist chronicling the movement in 1920, explained the reasoning in En Evant Dada: conventional art forms, used by the German Expressionists, were seen as a bourgeois phenomenon: ‘abstract, pathetic gestures which presuppose a comfortable life free from content or strife.’ Art made the Dada way became relevant because it participated in life itself; its materials gleaned from mundane activity, it was totally universal. and

Hannah Höch’s photomontage work Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany (1919) mastered this new technique: in it, an effusion of photographs and text tumble like gore from a wound, assaulting the viewer. Excessive and non-sensical, the chaos was a culmination of the war. Yet through it, art was also being democratised: Hans (Jean) Arp’s According to the Laws of Chance came with instructions for DIY – cut clippings out of newspaper, let them fall, and paste them where they did. What began as anti-war revolted too against the imposition of art culture practices by the European intellectual elite – in its buying, selling, and production.

But then Dada expanded beyond its art, morphing as it did into a political rather than an aesthetic revolution. Berlin Dada was vigorously political, with John Heartfield and George Grosz returning to Germany to start subsume smaller anarchist groups, begin the Der Dada publication, and even form its own party – a kind of German Bolshevism. Joining in the savage satire of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), Weimar regime. Ironically, by the time of the First International Dada Fair, a subverted art exhibition, the movement had accepted its position in the mainstream renounced art completely.

It had doubled back and consumed itself: by 1920 Huelsenbeck would declare Dada to be dead. The factionalism that was tearing the group apart was only to be expected of a group founded on a total distrust of unity. But the floodgates had already been opened. Max Ernst’s Murdering Collage of the same year, with its fusion of metal and human limb, was the nascent beginnings of anti-war surrealism; the effects of which would ricochet through the 20th century.

And Dada could never really die – emancipated from the confines of ‘Movement’, the Dadaist is flexible and unexpectedly immortalised. Its capital was in its democracy: it was acceptable that no one could pin Dada down or define it, so long as everyone could join in, utter a cry themselves into the void of war and violence. Flaring out, Dada was only a palliative solution – but, inspired by disgust, it was the only one possible.

The Epilogue of a Lifetime

Lawrence Li
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The Epilogue of a Lifetime

Julian Barnes’ third of three essays, ‘The Loss of Depth’, is an epilogue in form and in subject-matter, trapping the pulse of his wife’s memory in his intimate and moving portrait of grief.

“You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed.” So begins Julian Barnes’ Levels of Life, a triptych of essays that is at once a celebration of love, and a profound examination of sorrow. Comprising of ‘The Sin of Height’, ‘On the Level’, and ‘The Loss of Depth’, Barnes gives us the story of Nadar, the pioneer balloonist and aerial photographer; the story of Colonel Fred Burnaby and Sarah Bernhardt; then, in his harrowing final piece, he shares with us his own grief about the death of his wife, courageously endured.

It is this last essay that I would like to focus on, as it is the emotional centre of the book. Barnes, with devastating honesty, depicted how he dealt with the death of wife, Pat Kavanagh. They were together for 30 years, until she died just 37 days after discovering she had a brain tumour. He describes her as “the heart of my life; the life of my heart.” Such an abrupt encounter with death could be brutal enough to paralyse even the brightest minds. However, this is far from the case with Barnes.

As is often true, the result of such tragedy is a raw yet restrained piece of art: sincere in its emotions, restrained in its form. Barnes offers us a polished, meditative memoir which flourishes with literary ingenuity, distinguished also by his sensibilities in classical traditions. As a writer, Barnes believes in the patterns his words construct, which he hopes will naturally add up to stories, ideas and truths, in which he can find salvation, both for the grief-stricken living, and the griefless dead. What is impressive, therefore, is the way in which he sustained his finesse throughout, resisting the temptation to unload his burden onto his reader.

Barnes’ approach is reminiscent of Robert Frost’s reply when asked “Isn’t writing that is spontaneous, even disorderly, a better way to reflect the traumas of modern-day experience?” The answer Frost gave was this: “I lost my nearest friend in the one they called the Great War. So did Achilles lose his friend in war, and Homer did no injustice to his grief by writing about it in dactylic hexameters … Such grief can only be told in form … Without it you’ve got nothing but a stubbed-toe cry – sincere, maybe, for what that’s worth, but with no depth or carry. No echo. You may have a grievance but you do not have grief.”

Phase by phase, Barnes describes his experience floating through the various stages of bereavement, from anger to calmness. As he observes “one grief throws no light upon another”, he himself starts with an outward anger against the injustice he has suffered. His stubborn insistence to invoke his wife whenever he can, and his scorn for euphemisms such as “passed” or “lost to cancer” proved to be the source of many awkward moments between him and his friends. Barnes even admits being angry at travellers on buses, whose “cheerful, happy and normal faces” enrage him. “It’s just the Universe doing its stuff,” he says bitterly, yet he is no clearer on what the “stuff” is.

Gradually, the outward anger is absorbed into an inward obsession. He developed a habit of talking with Pat, believing that she visits and converses with him in his dreams.

He justifies this with his own irresistible logic: “the fact that someone is dead may mean that they are not alive, but doesn’t mean that they do not exist.” This vision of a loved one returning again is strange, but not unheard of, as we see echoes in the works of Su Dongpo, the 11th century Chinese poet:

‘In a dream last night suddenly I was home.

By the window of the little room,

You were combing your hair and making up.

You turned and looked, not speaking, Only lines of tears coursing down’

When it all becomes too much to bear, Barnes contemplates the possibility of suicide. He describes his preferred methods in excruciating detail: a hot bath, a glass of wine next to the taps, and an exceptionally sharp Japanese carving knife. Poignantly, his only reason for resisting is out of his love for her: “she was alive in my memory — she was within me, internalised. How am I to live? I must live as she would have wanted.”

In one moving passage Barnes recollects seeing Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice (in which Orpheus descends to the Underworld and leads back his wife, Eurydice, on the condition that he can’t look at her until they are in the land of the living) and thinking first to himself how could anyone be so senseless as to look back at his wife, just as when she is so close to be saved. Yet it all makes sense to him, now that he is in the same position of bereavement. Of course Orpheus would turn to look at the pleading Eurydice — how could he not? “Because, while ‘no one in his sense’ would do so, he is quite out of his senses with love and grief and hope.” That is what the world is for: to lose for one glance. How could anyone hold to their vow with Eurydice’s voice at their back? Such precise in- sight into the mind of someone in intense grief is simultaneously illuminating and heart-breaking. The essay finishes on a note of sublime tranquillity as he finally reconciles her death with himself. When the memory of her fades, he frantically tries to relive her final moments — the last book she read, the last wine she drank, the last clothes she bought; her last written sentence, her last spoken word — but to no avail. Grief has moved elsewhere, shifted its interest, and with it took the last living memories of her. And he is powerless over it. “We did not make the clouds come in the first place, and have no power to disperse them.” His final message, however, is one of movement and hope —”an unexpected breeze has sprung up, and we are in movement again. But where are we being taken? To Essex? The German Ocean? Or, if that wind is a northerly, then perhaps, with luck, to France.” Personally, I would like to interpret the enigmatic closing lines as the sign that his love for her has not gone away, but he will carry it with him wherever he goes. Barnes’ prose might fade out, but Pat’s imprint on her widower is an obituary which is everlasting.

Review: Redacted Arachnid – ‘has the audience close to tears with laughter’

Katie Knight
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Review: Redacted Arachnid – ‘has the audience close to tears with laughter’

As I have been legally instructed not to mention the name of the musical which bears a remarkably strong similarity to this one – the true story of the biggest flop in Broadway history, which came in at a budget of around $75 million – I trust everyone to work out which teenage superhero is hence referred to as ‘Redacted Arachnid’. If there was any danger of the audience missing the point, the show opens with whirring red and blue lights and a theme song with the name conspicuously blanked out. So begins ‘Redacted Arachnid: Switch off the Light‘, the story of the ‘comic book rock opera circus’ which actually became reality.

It’s fantastic source material, and the show is keen to emphasise the parts which really are true – exhorting the audience to “honestly, look up the Wikipedia page” for the bits which seem a little too unbelievable. As someone who was already familiar with the Broadway legend I find writers Caleb Barron and co. have done a fantastic job of communicating the story, realising that sometimes truth is stranger than fiction and framing those points to seem just unbelievable enough. Though heavy on exposition it’s not boring, in part because of their skilful choice of facts and the cast’s emphatic performances (the producer-narrator Michael Cohl (Daniel Ergas) looking near-constantly on the edge of a breakdown).

Some of the scenes have the audience close to tears with laughter: a choreography practice with “Touch the spider! Touch the spider! Your uncle’s dead! Your uncle’s dead!” to a Single Ladies dance routine has to be seen to be believed. Meanwhile, I can barely stop laughing at a re-enactment of Act One of the original script, which highlights the absurdities in all the right places. There are inexplicable Greek myths; a particularly gormless ‘Parter Peaker’ (handled admirably by James Akka); a piano lugged to the top of the Chrysler Building. This is the show at its best – the opening-night audience barely stops laughing for a good ten minute stretch, and neither do I.

The character performances are especially fantastic. Joshua Clarke does an excellent job of Bono in a leather jacket and rotating range of pink glasses, and I’m impressed by Harrison Gale, who delivers lines pitch-perfectly across a range of roles with a world-weary New York accent (“How hard is it to swing a man from the ceiling?” “Depends, do you want him to die?”). But excellent comedic performances abound throughout, conveyed with cartoonish facial expressions and vocal ability.

The lighting contributes to the sense of spectacle, providing brilliant spotlights and flashing at the hint of an approaching name. They ease the snappiness of the performance, which zips along at a fair old pace and in and out of four-wall breaking aides with ease. Having been presumably unable to fund the actor suspended from the ceiling (“at least we didn’t spend $75 million on this production!”), the team still create a clear sense of a vaguely collapsing production, an attempt to untangle cables veering into playful slapstick as they collapse in a tangled heap on the floor.

After a stellar first two-thirds the show begins to drag as it enters its final stretch, though in part this is due to the subject-matter: an attempted turn for the serious and muted doesn’t exactly ring true, and (although there’s still some great character performances) the depressing tone doesn’t quite match the irreverent air of the earlier show. Not a joy-ride from start to finish, then, but without a doubt The Owlets’ production is still one of the most enjoyable things I’ve watched all year.

Video games: Design/Play/Disrupt

Adam Story
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Video games: Design/Play/Disrupt

From the mid-2000s to now, video games have slowly revolutionised the ways in which we communicate within society. Our lives are enmeshed by them. These hugely codified systems make it increasingly challenging for us to define digital reality apart from the physical. Looking back over the past 15 years, this exhibition serves to materialises the digital. It is an investigation into the creative processes involved in video games stretching from designer to player.

Walking into the exhibition, you are immediately struck by the expansive Victorian architecture that is a sure contrast to video gaming. The space is divided up by panels of metallic mesh that span from the floor up to the roof. Despite being segmented, the material unusually allows you to both see and hear what is happening throughout the entire space. Flashing screens dominate the building, each radiating an undying heat. In this quantity, it is clear of the privilege that Western society must produce and consume digital media. I can only imagine how different the space must feel when the electricity is turned off at night.

The exhibition structure felt comparable to a gaming convention. It employed displays that looked to be selling the game experience to us, even as visitors. One game that received a lot of interest was Journey, an indie adventure game developed by Thatgamecompany. Footage from the gameplay could be seen on a huge LED panel overhead. The serene desert landscape world that the game is set in is stunning, which deservingly has won multiple BAFTA and VGX awards for its contribution to the platform. Next to this were a series of display cases and small screens showing the workflow in order to achieve the games realistic whimsical effect. The protagonist character who floats and dashes across the desert waterscape is a feat of animation. Taken from real life movements of people walking across a sand dune and repurposed into a game engine, it is exciting to see the full working process. It makes viewers aware of the level of experimentation and labor required to create worlds that are compelling for players to inhabit.

After focusing on how some iconic games were made, the exhibition led into three spaces which explored the social effects of the video gaming industry as a whole. As individual spaces, these rooms contained excellent resources and works tackling current issues, such as underrepresentation in the gaming industry for women and those from BAME backgrounds. By this point however, the exhibition had become   quite diluted and completely overwhelming. The amalgamation of game processes, eSports/voyeur culture and industry representation on hundreds of screens created a sensory overload.

Saying this, the exhibition does reflect the experience of digesting information both online and in gaming scenarios. Towards the end of the exhibition, you enter a huge space with a truck sized LED screen floating in the sky. Commanding so much attention, people can be seen forever gawping into its endless abyss. The video shown provided a commentary to the culture that has emerged from Youtube and Twitch, which dominate as video streaming platforms for online gaming. They both serve as spaces to not only watch others play live but provide an extensive and forever growing archive of videos that continue to receive billions of views each day. As these videos are usually viewed at home, to bring them into the gallery really emphasized the online communities that have risen from gaming in the past decade.

As the show opens up a conversation about game design, it is apparent that we must continue to talk/play collaboratively. Online gaming is a huge part of our society now, with the capabilities of being a largely solitary activity to one that is incredibly sociable. There is a wide discrepancy in the ways that this exhibition has explored the industry, which should provide recognition for more museums and galleries to feature this as an artistic medium.

So how does the future look for video games? Built between gaming and social networking, it is predicted that we will see a revival of mobile based role play games like Facebook’s Farmville. The sharing of gaming experience is surely also set to rise, as we will not only be playing games but continuously watching others play them too.

Othering Ourselves

Basil Bowdler
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Othering Ourselves

Nationality dominates in discussions of Kazuo Ishiguro. Moving to Britain at the age of six, he was brought up in a Japanese speaking household, at once an outsider in his adopted home but also cut off from his birth country.

Indeed, Ishiguro’s imaginative vision of Japan forms the setting of his early works, the haunting A Pale View of Hills (1982) and An Artist of the Floating World (1986). Etsuko, the protagonist of A Pale View of Hills, is, like Ishiguro, a Japanese immigrant to Britain, who retreats into her memories of her homeland after her daughter Keiko commits suicide. Place looms large in the novel: the very absence of Etsuko’s adopted home from most of the novel is significant, Ishiguro implying that it is Keiko’s failure to place down roots in Britain that ultimately leads to her death. By the close, Etsuko resignedly admits, ‘I knew all along. I knew all along she wouldn’t be happy over here.’

Yet while A Pale View of Hills clearly borrows its setting from Ishiguro’s own life, in other ways it appears to bear little resemblance to his own experiences as an immigrant. Ishiguro did not return to Japan, after all, for nearly thirty years after he left, and has persistently insisted that stylistically his work owes little debt to Japanese literature. In fact, there are striking comparisons to be drawn between Ishiguro’s own work and those of Japanese writers, both contemporary and past, yet he can hardly be regarded as a part of the Japanese literary canon. Indeed, were Ishiguro to write under a pseudonym, one could easily be forgiven for thinking that this is the writer who has lived their entire life in Britain.

Rather than seeing outsider status as a purely external imposition, Ishiguro explores marginalised ‘otherness’ through a preoccupation with introspection, memory, and its (lack of) reliability.

This is highlighted by Ishiguro’s focus on social turning points. Both A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World are set in the immediate post-war era of Japan, a time of rapid social and economic change. In The Remains of the Day (1989), both Stevens’ remembered past, interwar Britain, and his present, the late 1950s, can be considered moments of acute social transformation. While Stevens acknowledges changes in his present time, mourning declining standards and his reduced staff at Darlington Hall, the 1930s in his memory are frozen in time. Nostalgia subtly reduces it to a dreamlike caricature of antiquated gentlemen influencing politics from country houses, a world that is in fact vanishing before Stevens’ own eyes. Similarly, in Ishiguro’s latest work, The Buried Giant (2015), the protagonists are an elderly couple whose collective amnesia, fondly titled ‘the mist’, blinds them to most details of their past.

Marginalisation as psychological phenomena is further explored through the passivity of many of Ishiguro’s protagonists. In A Pale View of Hills, Etsuko’s sense of guilt and responsibility for the death of her daughter is transmitted to another mother, whose daughter appears to echo Keiko. Whereas Stevens in The Remains of the Day has – at times comically – an exaggerated sense of his own importance as a butler, his position is nevertheless one of an unknowing performer, mistaking himself for an actor yet passively accepting his role. Indeed, the horror of Never Let Me Go (2005) comes from Kathy’s unquestioning acceptance of her role as an organ donor. Here there is a striking comparison with Haruki Murakami’s works, the protagonists of which, like Ishiguro’s, often appear more as observers than agents; it links also to classical Japanese poetry’s emphasis on acceptance that our fates are out of our hands.

What makes this self-marginalisation all the more complex in Ishiguro’s work is the persistency with which characters return to the topic of their occupation. Both Kathy and Stevens are driven by a deep conviction that what they do matters, yet as drivers of plot they appear to do almost nothing. Meanwhile the protagonist of An Artist of the Floating World, Masuji Ono, an aged painter struggles to accept responsibility for his past actions during the Second World War.

What Ishiguro appears to suggest, therefore, is that we subconsciously marginalise ourselves in the account of our own lives. But why? Stevens’ failure to confront the political extremism of his master, Lord Darlington, is to his mind justified by his status as a servant. Similarly, Kathy comes to terms with her fate by emphasising the importance of her work as a donor, which in reality reduces her humanity. Both characters belong to an underclass yet what is most striking is the way in which they subconsciously reinforce that status by attempting to dignify it. However Ishiguro does not close his novels on irredeemably bleak notes. The end of The Remains of the Day is intentionally ambiguous: Stevens announces his intention to surprise his new master, though whether this represents an attempt to escape the confines of his social status, or just another attempt to adjust to the changing expectations of his new master, is left for the reader to decide.

Characters make outsiders of themselves. This is not because they attempt to impersonally scrutinise their own lives, but rather because the very impossibility of interrogating one’s past so dispassionately leads us to subconsciously rewrite our own memories. Paradoxically, introspection and memory to not bring great knowledge of oneself, but rather turn ourselves into strangers. Ishiguro, by making transformation a powerful backdrop, suggests that the antidote is to embrace the impermanence of our worlds – even if this is usually ignored by his protagonists.

Interestingly, temporariness forms the central theme of The Tale of the Heike, one of the greatest classics of fourteenth-century Japanese literature. Yet Ishiguro has a very timely point to make: that we must acknowledge change.

His own experience as an immigrant, somewhat caught in a cultural limbo, is best seen as a starting point for his discussions of marginalisation and ‘otherness’. Just like the young Ishiguro, the characters in his early works are bound in the world of an imagined Japan, which cuts them off from the here and now. With this in mind, the quintessentially British Stevens’ nostalgia for the peak of his career at Darlington Hall, and Kathy’s embellished memories of an idyllic childhood at an English boarding school, are potent reminders: we ourselves can be subconsciously complicit in creating a psychological outsider status.

Nature as a gallery

Connie Sjodin
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Nature as a gallery

Atop a Dumfriesshire hill in Scotland sits a large egg-like construction of stone. Three of the same can be found in a vast line across the United States: at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, at Iowa’s Des Moines Art Center and at the Neuberger Museum of Art in the state of New York.

Seen from afar, they could be relics of a bygone age, built of local rock such as Iowan limestone and with no binding cement. They are actually the work of British artist Andy Goldsworthy and his cairn-building team.

Since the 1970s Goldsworthy has been working in Land Art, in the tradition of Richard Long and Robert Smithson. Goldsworthy stages interventions in the landscape that range from the permanent structures of the cairns to ephemeral arrangements of bright-orange leaves plastered to trees, or icicles balanced on branches hanging over streams.

The permanent and the ephemeral are equally concerned with the passing of time. Over the years the cairns accrue signs of wear such as moss. His use of leaves and ice is intimately bound up with cycles in nature and the inevitable end of each piece.  Goldsworthy charts these changes in folio artbooks, such as Passage (2004) and Enclosure (2007).

He explains his method, tracks the progress of each piece and reflects on the result in a diary format. This mixture of sculpture, photography and writing is both a necessary documentation
of his practice and arguably the main result, akin to Richard Long’s use of poem-like notes tracing his thoughts in pieces like A Hundred Mile Walk (1971-2).

Goldsworthy has been dismissed as a sentimental creator of ‘pastoral fictions’. It’s true that he avoids polemic and refuses to make art obviously about environmentalism. This might seem out of touch with human complicity in today’s climate change, but Goldsworthy is fully concerned with our interaction with the landscape: he worked on farms in Yorkshire from a young age and engages with the communities that live near his rural works.

His work is not radical, he simply points back to nature with a conceptual simplicity. In an interview with the Tate he muses, ‘an artist has this amazing ability to show you what’s there’ – showing us what’s there is pointing out what we stand to lose.

His popularity has led to a second documentary, Leaning into the Wind: Andy Goldsworthy (2018) by German director Thomas Riedelsheimer as a follow-up to the earlier Rivers and Tides (2001).

Public commissions include Garden of Stone, at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York: a group of eighteen granite boulders each with a small central hole through which a tree is growing.

The piece commemorates victims of the Holocaust and is a beautiful reflection on hope and growth in the midst of an impossibly hard situation.

Compare this to the imposing Mastaba on Hyde Park’s Serpentine Lake last summer, or the enormous inflated ballerina deposited outside the Rockefeller in 2017 right out of the imagination of Jeff Koons (now featured at the Ashmolean, if you hadn’t heard). Two pieces of ephemeral public art, they are the wrecking-ball equivalent of Goldsworthy’s tiny chisel approach.

It’s not all quiet interventions. Goldsworthy’s spell of recent commissions stateside reveal a lucrative business in what could be seen as the bio-art aesthetic, seen again in his award of an OBE in 2000.

However, his daily art practice is refreshingly playful; any- one could collect and arrange leaves into a colourful mosaic, given the time and some outdoor space.

There is something universal about handling nature, exemplified by children’s fascination with mud and sticks. Goldsworthy asks: why stop?

The surface is all you get from me: Identity and otherness in art

Ayesha Malik
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The surface is all you get from me: Identity and otherness in art

There is a certain intrigue when it comes to the ‘outcast creative’. Put simply: people like the abject outsider. It is, on the whole, far more re- warding to root for the underdog than it is to support those who are already on top.

This brings about images of the ‘Byronic hero’; the artist who mopes about on some windy hilltop, moaning on about his exile and great Romantic grief, but it also suggests that artists in an attempt to generate more interest in both themselves and their work may play up their perceived vulnerabilities. They can do this by upping the ‘working-classism’ so much associated with a Dickensian England, remarketing the struggle of the artist as a “cartoonish class war.” One of the most famous faces of the YBA (Young British Artist) movement, Damien Hirst, presents himself as a ‘class primitive’: So, in a way, the YBA’s presentation of their perceived ‘otherness’ allows for the ‘concerned privileged’ to dip their feet comfortably into the world of the outcast, thus the audience proves to the world that they truly root for the underdog.

YBAs rely on outmoded British stereotypes as the surface to their work, generating the persona of the easy- to-swallow outsider that does not too aggressively confront its own audience. According to a poll, sixty-three per cent of white Britons think that immigration has, on the whole, been a bad thing for Britain. This widespread fear of the ‘Other’ has caused a rift in the demand for abject art that celebrates the ‘outcast artist’. YBAs are able to fill this gap, by acting up their ‘Britishness’, yet still upholding their status as ‘other’. Legge describes how YBAs “opportunistically simulate lost avant-garde engagement, adopting a media-friendly ‘look’ of being shocking in the tradition of the angry young man, the working-class hero, and the punk”, from which foreign audiences have been entertained, but are relatively indifferent. If we look back at Hirst, we can see quite prominently featured in his work and his artist persona is the fact that he achieved ‘E’ in A-level art, that he is from a council estate in Brixton.

He plays this up, he is the ‘working class hero’. And yet, his work is still a “collage of quickly recognisable cliché”. In such, the YBAs create for themselves what Kobena Mercer refers to as a “cult of abjection”, a reliance on making themselves appear weak in the eyes of the ‘powerful’ art world, coaxing its audience into celebrating them, to ‘root for the underdog’.

Hirst, and his fellow YBAs, are cushioned by an army of followers in the form of critics, collectors, or gallerists, that allow them to push the boundaries more and more over the edge of ethical considerations.

Not only that, but YBAs also exhibit a sort of ‘sameness’ that has created an echo chamber so that little criticism can affect them. By being unable to criticize the YBAs due to their sup- posed ‘otherness’ (and as such, fear of being accused of being ‘pompous’) they allow the YBAs to surround themselves in a bubble where surface is all that is required to make successful art, creating an echo chamber which (perhaps unintentionally) outcasts others.

We can observe how the movements of Black and Asian British artists’ mirror some of the actions of YBAs that have been described above. As mentioned, there has been and still is a certain hostility towards minority artists due to their perceived ‘Otherness’. However, what separates black artists from YBAs is that abjection is thrust upon them rather than taken up by them. Indeed, successive generations of black artists have been received with hostility, and have suffered from the contempt of critics, galleries, and potential patrons.

Black artists are able to find some success by othering themselves and by actively taking up the role of the underdog, but many argue this causes them to sacrifice complexity. While white artists can carry on making art as they always have been, without making any show of their cultural identity, non-white artists are only able to enter dominant culture by, as claimed by Rasheed Araeen “showing their cultural identity cards.”

Black critical art theory calls for a shedding of the culture card to regain meaning and substance in individual art works, and thus to gain more respect as artists (and not as ‘Black artists’) within the art community. Rasheed Araeen argues that there is an acute struggle for non-white artists who wish to make art – just, art, in response to the contemporary movements of its time, no ‘Indian’ or ‘African’ or ‘ethnic’ art, but this has been denied to them.

In response to complaints of ethnocentric exclusion, the term ‘multiculturalism’ has been coined as a model of inclusion, and yet, it very quickly began to feel like a hastily configured problem-solving response. This too relied on the perceived ‘Otherness’ of non-white artists, although it did allow more artists be seen.

A notorious example of this was the exhibition celebrating multiculturalism in modernism, ‘Magiciens de la Terre’. 150 of the artists were of European descent and 50 of these artists were from the developing world’ The European artists chosen were trained artists, who had made a name for themselves within mainstream developments, and yet the artists from the developing world were chosen due to their folkish and tribal nature, and those artists who had been a part of Modern developments were completely overlooked, only seeking to celebrate the differences of these ‘Other’ artists than to truly give them equal visibility.

The issue that faces us now is that despite this, black and Asian artists still feel obliged to ‘play the cultural card’. Jean Fisher argues that, ‘cultural marginality [is] no longer a problem of invisibility but one of excess visibility in terms of a reading of cultural difference that is too easily marketable’. In an interview, Steven McQueen replied irritably when asked about ‘questions of visibility’, stating that he doesn’t constantly see himself as black when going about day-to-day activities, even though other people might see him as that.

“Just like everyone else I want people to think beyond race, nationality and all that kind of crap. This debate is tired, ugly and beat up … it is boring.”

When reviewing the above points, I am forced to think about my own work. I can’t deny that I have at times felt the obligation to and explore my Pakistani heritage. While, as a mixed- race person, I feel no obligation to explore my English heritage. My art is not out-of-touch with myself and my culture.

To ‘play the culture card’ and to ‘other’ my work would be to sacrifice the complexity of my work Within the upcoming generation of artists I am part of, I see that my other mixed-race or non-white peers do not focus solely on race as to do so would render little success. That is not to say that to ever make a note of one’s culture would be to make ‘bad’ art. Peers who have grown up in different countries give an international flair to their work without sacrificing all the other nuances of meaning. There is a fine balance between talking about culture and relying on culture.

Review: Many Moons – “thoroughly compelling”

Katie Knight
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Review: Many Moons – “thoroughly compelling”

I have a self-professed weakness for inventive staging. Many Moons’ four-sided, two-tiered staging leaves the actors with nowhere to hide: even when, as I’m about to find, the characters most want to. Despite the minor number of blind-spots – as to be expected – the monologues are delivered convincingly to every angle, making the entire audience complicit in the secrets which are shared. The lighting and soundscapes, though used minimally, contribute to a wonderful sense of awe; a stuck-down sigil in the centre of the stage works as an effective axis, and I’m particularly impressed with the movement direction (managed by Tilly Hadcock and Luke Wintour). At times I wish these elements could be used further: but to do so would detract from the beautiful minimalism of the standalone speeches.

It takes a great stage-presence to remain onstage for a whole 90 minutes – then to command the stage alone when thrust into the limelight – but each actor is thoroughly compelling, even with the density of the text. Sam Scruton as Ollie plods through his text at a measured pace, voice perennially raised, inhabiting an awkward and strangely affable persona with ease. Abby McCann as the lonely mother Meg, though initially confusing, warms into her character convincingly as her arc becomes more defined. Two of her speeches leave a lasting impression far beyond the theatre; a pertinent diatribe regarding social media feels unquestionably relevant, while in another I see genuine tears. Henry Wyard is fantastic at portraying the shaking brokenness of Robert – with one of the most startlingly confessional performances I have seen this year – while Mati Warner’s Juniper provides a just-visible complexity beneath her very welcome breeziness.

Alice Birch’s script is harder to comes to terms with. On the one hand it is beautifully lyrical: there’s a wonderful poetry to the lines, with fantastic imagery – “I have mapped out the heavens through the constellations with those glow in the dark stars on every bedroom ceiling I’ve had since I was eight” – and startlingly natural humour – anecdotes regarding snakebites and Urban Outfitters get a knowing laugh from the audience. Each of the four monologues is given its own space to inhabit, never drawn-out or rushed. This is a play about connections – or the lack thereof – and the way in which each character approaches one another and moves apart again, ever so gently, gets to the heart of this more than any other.

Then the narrative develops, and everything becomes – for want of a better phrase – thoroughly unpleasant. It’s true there are content warnings before the show – warnings I perhaps should have paid more attention to – but they somehow don’t quite capture the sheer graphic moroseness which develops (even if the suggestions are, rather horrifyingly, always present). One particularly graphic scene makes me actively flinch in my seat, and I leave the theatre with the suggestion of tears in my eyes: just from the sheer overwhelming nature of it all.

It’s not the show which was promised at the start, a tale of wonderful interconnection and our orbiting around one another, even though an end scene at the local fair brings everyone together in a powerful amalgamation. It’s a story which shatters our trust in one another and leaves us feeling hollow. This doesn’t make the production itself any less powerful, nor does it detract from the wonderful individual performances: there’s certainly a lot to fall in love with here.

Birch’s script is big on empathy, but it doesn’t provide solutions. Instead, having raised the questions, we are left with a double cliff-hanger: one which offers no hope, no resolution, and a decent level of discomfort. Theatre, of course, should be provocative, and should raise questions which are as of yet unanswered: but it’s a lot for a weekday night, so just be sure you want to be challenged first.

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