Sunday 17th May 2026
Blog Page 882

SolidariTee: Student activism for global issues

Mouki Kambouroglou
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SolidariTee: Student activism for global issues

Two images spring to mind when I think of student activism: ‘gap yah voluntourists’ and protests outside the Rad Cam. Give me a couple minutes, and I’ll provide you with crisis relief club nights, like Honeyy’s launch at Cellar, or mental health support fundraisers like Bad Rap’s Dance for SANE. There’s no doubt that activism can manifest in many varied ways, and we’re certainly not lacking in opportunities here at Oxford. There is, however, an issue that underpins most forms of ‘aid’, and the refugee crisis highlighted that to me. It’s clear that the well-intended and crucial work of those who spend a month or two in camps like Calais is largely unsustainable – unless the aim is to sustain thousands of people living in plastic jungles.

Last year, Tiara Ataii, a first-year at Cambridge University, set up a charitable initiative named SolidariTee. As a volunteer interpreter herself in Calais, Dessau and Chios, the “legal limbo” she encountered was a cruel shock. She decided to invest her student loan in the making of slogan t-shirts that she then sold around Cambridge, ultimately raising nearly £4000 for Advocates Abroad. At first glance, the concept is a simple fundraiser, similar to any other student fundraising initiative that fleetingly engages the privilege of some for the benefit of others, yet the team managed to organise a photo campaign and a ‘SolidariTee day’ where all those who had purchased a ‘SolidariTee’ wore it. The streets of Cambridge and all its social networks showed unity and support, and the campaign became not only a practical one but one with great sentiment too. In addition to this, the money was sent to a charity that directly helps refugees whilst constantly looking to the future.

Advocates Abroad is an NGO which provides legal representation for refugees in Greece, Italy and Turkey. It’s a team of field and remote lawyers and interpreters from all over the world. Since it began in early 2016, the team has run 120 field missions in four countries to asylum seekers from more than 25 states and nations around the world. Whilst other organisations and independent volunteers vitally distribute the flood of food and clothing donations, Advocates provide legal and non-legal aid for groups or individuals, host information sessions and circulate multilingual ‘know your rights’ leaflets. They respond to, and report, human rights abuses and legal violations, provide support in asylum interviews and encourage appeals, as well as providing court representation for asylum related claims in Greece. Recently, they’ve started a Medical Advocacy Team of doctors, lawyers and interpreters that support patients and ensure they receive the medical attention they are due in public hospitals and clinics in Greece. Essentially, Advocates Abroad fight the long-term issues. It goes without saying that it’d be impossible to do so without the foundation of short-term support provided by those spending their summers volunteering, but in order to progress durable solutions across the board must be guaranteed.

This year, the SolidariTee campaign has spread to universities across the nation. The fundraising concept isn’t novel but it certainly is unique: the design on this year’s T-shirts comes from a meeting between an Afghan man and an Advocates lawyer in Chios. It’s a map of his life; where he was born, where he trained as an army officer, where he was captured by the Taliban. It’s personal, as everything referring to such a horrific humanitarian crisis should be.

Each T-shirt sells for £10, the cost of one night of accommodation for a field lawyer, the cost of 24 hours of potentially life-saving expertise. Advocates, like many similar NGOs, focuses on only a part of the struggle of refugees and asylum seekers. The truth is that without a combination of short term relief and long-term aid there can be no resolution; but we must not lose sight of the ultimate goal no matter how far off it seems, as it can often be closer than we think.

Science fiction that shaped the Revolution

Daniel Villar
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Science fiction that shaped the Revolution

If you had been in Petrograd in 1917, during the first few months of ferment after the Tsar had been expelled and before the new regime had entrenched itself, you would have had the pleasure to encounter scores or brilliant and original theoreticians.

However, none would have been quit as interesting as Alexander Bogdanov. Bogdanov was a polymath – as a philosophy, physician, politician, and novelist he had gained note. But it was as a novelist that he most aided the Russian Revolution. In his 1908 work of science fiction, Red Star, Bogdanov gave one of the clearest vision of the scientific socialist society which was envisaged by most of the Russian intellectual class during the Russian Revolution.

The story revolves around a mathematician, Leonid, who travels to Mars and discovers how socialism, brought about by technology, has created a utopia. By the end of the novel Leonid returns to earth, and seeing that utopia is possible, enters the revolutionary fray with new vigor.

Bogdanov is often forgotten today, but a century ago he was a close friend of Trotsky and involved in most of the revolutionary movements, in arts, sciences, and politics, which were in the air at the time.

Many Russian scientists and intellectuals were introduced to socialism via Red Star, and although he is little remembered today, the influence of his technologically driven space communistic ideology survives in things as varied as Star Trek and the technology of Richard Stallman.

Makeover Montage

Shamika Tamhane
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Makeover Montage

For me, the makeover montage is the guilty pleasure within the already guilty pleasure of the rom-com, the perfect thing to watch when feeling under the weather in bed and far from glamorous.

The transformation from ugly duckling to sexy swan is seen as far back as fairy tales like Cinderella and remains a common plot line, sometimes accompanied by a desire to change a woman’s behaviour to conform to societal expectations as seen in Pygmalion and The Taming of the Shrew.

This is all deeply problematic when we look at it from our modern, feminist perspective and yet we still enjoy it. Conventions like ‘monobrow removal’ and ‘girl takes off her glasses and she’s suddenly hot’ leave a lot to be desired but seem to reoccur time and time again with little real complaint from their audience.

In its modern form the makeover montage is seen in iconic movies including Grease, Clueless, Mean Girls, and The Devil Wears Prada. The messages of the montages in these movies often seem to be more positive or empowering and less troubling, but there is still the underlying assumption that changing your appearance will help you attract men and, by consequence, success.

Some poor girl is often shown to be assaulted by hairspray and tight clothing in a bid to improve herself and her social standing within high school cliques, the career ladder, or the romantic playing field. As a severely myopic woman I’m most concerned by the way glasses are broken without a second thought.

Can the girl see? Why not insert a section where she puts on some contact lenses so we can all rest easy? It is certainly perplexing that we love watching something that disempowers women and crudely reduces them to their physical appearance. So why do we enjoy it, even when the flaws they remove are ones we have, and can something valuable be taken from the makeover montage?

On a purely superficial note, these montages are fun. Fast paced eyebrow plucking and throwing clothes around coupled with a breezy pop song can never go too wrong. Transitions are made more humorous because no one ever seriously believed that Sandra Bullock (Miss Congeniality) or Anne Hathaway (The Princess Diaries) are even mildly unattractive. It simply makes for good entertainment watching the frenzied attempts to get a girl ready.

The physical comedy is also pretty good because painful hair removal does have its funny moments. We can relate to pain of a bikini wax and eyebrow plucker. That’s the crux of it- it is all somewhat relatable to our own lives, and to the ritual of getting ready. We recreate our own version of the makeover montage each week before a night out. We cram ourselves into one room sharing gossip, hair straighteners and a bottle of £4 Sauvignon Blanc purchased hastily from Tesco at 9:45pm.

It’s our Cinderella-esque transformation from being hunched over in the library to feeling like a queen  We had similar ceremonies when we were younger – albeit without the Tesco booze run. At sleepovers we painted each other’s nails badly using Miss Sporty glitter nail varnish and put on homemade yoghurt face masks to try and sort out our burgeoning acne. Makeover montages have been and still are a real part of our life.

Beneath the lip gloss, DIY crop tops and haircuts, the makeover montage represents something much more important. Rarely do we see a girl transform herself – the makeover is a social act, a bastion of female friendship. It’s women coming together to talk and trying to empower and help each other. Granted that empowerment shouldn’t come solely from our physical appearance, or at the expense of others’ self esteem, but a flick of mascara can definitely help you feel a little better about yourself.

Perhaps what helps the most is that the recipient of the makeover is surrounded by friends who in their own, sometimes misguided way, are attempting to help. Friendships are built during the montages which are much more significant than a new look.

In film, a makeover montage frequently undercuts its own values before the end credits. For instance, it is Alicia Silverstone’s character in Clueless who needs an internal makeover because of her harsh judgements and prejudice, while Brittany Murphy’s Tai is eventually accepted for who she is. The execution of these montages can definitely feel disempowering but they often come from characters’ good, albeit warped, intentions. We have to dig through the superficiality and layers of makeup in order to find what really matters- the friendships and bonds created through getting dressed up.

Even if the end goal is pleasing a male protagonist, the makeover itself is a distinctly boy-free zone. Now more than ever, it is increasingly important for women to support each other and show kindness and empathy.

Helping a sad friend pick out some shoes is just one step along a path that leads to solidarity and love amongst women and for that the makeover montage is at its core a good thing.

The planet saving solution on our plates

Tom Ash
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The planet saving solution on our plates

Meat is bad. Well at least that’s what all the vegetarians want you to think. But what exactly compels them to say this and confine themselves to a baron world with no burgers, no juicy lamb chops, and not a single Hassan’s kebab? I wanted to find out.

More specifically though, I wanted to find out about the environmental reasons for giving up meat. Sure, many vegetarians still claim that “animals have rights too”. While not denying they may be right, more and more people seem to have stopped eating meat because it kills the planet, not because it kills baby cows. Most will have experienced their JCR adopt meat free Mondays, and so probably won’t be strangers to such environmental arguments but perhaps, like myself initially, you just brushed them aside.

In fact, its hard not to, especially for me. I come from Somerset, where one of the main areas of employment is farming. I’ve grown up around cows and sheep and always just accepted that eating meat was part of life. Eating a roast on a Sunday from the
local butcher was never questioned in my household. Of course,
I knew vegetarians
and was often
was curious about why they’d decided to give up something that was such a staple for me, but, for the most part, they were nothing more than a curiosity. As I grew up already I became more aware of arguments against meat consumption, and constructed some pretty weak defences so I could continue brushing them aside. But about a year ago, content to brush no longer, I searched for the facts.

Should meat get the chop? The poster children for climate change are gas-guzzling cars and fume- producing factories, not cute little cows. However, it turns out the latter may be more of a culprit than I’d assumed.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a body set up by the UN to assess the science related to climate change and according to their headline figures, Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use (AFOLU) account for 24 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions. This figure is well ahead of transport on 14 per cent, industry on 21 per cent, and this is only superseded by Electric- ity and Heat Production on 25 per cent. These figures are striking, and led me to seriously question my image of vehicles and factories as the destroyers of the planet.

The AFOLU category isn’t just telling us about the impact of our diets though because it contains all emissions from forestry and land use, not just agriculture’s contribution to emissions. So we need to break it down. Although, a large but decreasing proportion of the AFOLU emissions is from forestry, most deforestation takes place with the aim of clearing land for cattle rearing, especially in the Amazon (80 per cent of Amazon deforestation is for cattle, accord- ing to a Yale research group) this all adds to the impact of meat. The next largest subcategory of AFOLU is enteric fermentation, which is basically cows and sheep producing methane through digestion and farting it out (nice). A further large category is manure spreading. Together these three agricultural processes make up a substantial proportion of AFOLU emissions.

But if we replaced meat with other food, would the effect be similar? It turns out that the same IPCC report found cut- ting animal-based products out of our diets could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 64 per cent. It also turns out not to be true that meat is a more efficient source of protein than other foods. If we compare greenhouse gas emissions per ton of protein consumed, beef produces roughly 15 to 20 times the CO2 of pulses (beans, lentils, etc.), according to the World Resources Institute, a global NGO focusing on resource sustainability.

Dairy, meanwhile, produces roughly five times the greenhouse gases of pulses, and poultry and pork four times. And not only is meat an environmentally damaging source of protein, the same report also suggests we do not need nearly as much protein as we currently eat, so we can decrease our impact both by reducing our protein intake and eating more efficient sources of protein. It really does appear, then, that we could be reducing our carbon footprint substantially by dropping meat and animal products from our diet, especially beef. This is bad news for fans of a medium rare steak.

But what about the reasons for eating meat? You can’t simply say meat has a negative impact on the environment and call for an end to the debate. The good things about meat need to be considered. The most significant factor for the majority of people, including myself, is simply that meat tastes good. Obviously whether you think this outweighs the bad effects of eating meat is a somewhat personal decision, but there is at least one thing that we should all be taking into account. If we eat meat because we think we get enough pleasure from it to make the detrimental effects worth it, we need to remember if we did not eat meat we would consume a non-meat product, which presumably would give us some pleasure.

So, what is important is the additional pleasure we get from eating meat as opposed to non- meat products. Given the growth of non-meat alternatives in recent years, such as Quorn (their sausages are almost as good as real sausages, if you ask me), as well as the existence of the many delicious vegetarian recipes that have existed for years, this difference is likely to be minor and may struggle to outweigh the negatives.

This seems even more obvious once we consider what meat is probably taking more out of our pocket that could be spent on beer rather than burgers. However, ultimately, I leave questions of pleasure to the reader.

One other countervailing factor to consider is the economic effects of significantly reducing meat production. Although agriculture is a vanishingly small part of the economies of the developed world, in some less developed countries people can be quite dependent on it. I thought perhaps the effect on those in the poorest regions of our stopping meat consumption might outweigh the environmental benefit. However, although countries in Southern Asia and Africa are quite dependent on agriculture — according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations, in a few agriculture makes up over 30 per cent of the economy. These are not meat producing regions. Most meat imports to the developing world come from South America, which is much less dependent on agriculture (it’s less than 10 per cent of the economy in most places).

In fact, if we started eating more vegetables, the poorest
regions would probably benefit, because we’d have to start eating more plant based foods which these countries do produce. Also, we cannot know how regions that are dependent on meat exports would adapt to any change in meat production. Seeing as a lot of the cattle rearing farms in South America, for example, grew up very quickly in response to demand for meat, the region may respond quickly to a reduction. It seems to me, then, that the economic benefits of meat are at best quite uncertain whereas reducing meat consumption would bring obvious environmental benefits.

Where does this all leave us? It is undeniable that meat is bad for the environment. Stopping beef consumption especially could go a long way to saving the planet. What’s more, unlike with the alternatives, we could quite easily make diet changes right now. We don’t have to wait for the invention of super-efficient technologies, for businesses or the state to invest in renewables, or go and hide in a cave with no electricity. We could simply stop eating meat tomorrow. That for me seemed a pretty hard fact to avoid when I found all this out, but still the pull of culture and pleasure was hard to resist.

Not only am I surrounded by farms but we, as a family, have actually raised pigs on a very small scale to sell to local friends and to eat ourselves. It’s hard to escape the mentality that eating meat is just a normal, acceptable part of life, so I struggled with all this. Slowly though, the pull of the arguments became too much and I reduced my meat intake. I’m now a vegetarian, and have been for over a year, and am slowly reducing my dairy consumption. It was hard, but it felt like the right thing to do.

So what is being done and what should be done?

If meat is so bad for the environment, and if it’s really true that climate change is one of the greatest problems facing the world, then surely this should be a major issue.

We seem constantly being advised to turn out the lights, cycle more, or take shorter showers, and investment in renewables and electric cars are hot topics in the world of politics. Meat, on the other hand, rarely seems to come up in these public discussions.

This is more than just an impression. The government report from the Department of Energy and Climate change says absolutely nothing about meat. Meanwhile, in a piece heavily tucked away on their website, Greenpeace does talk about meat’s effect on the environment.

It claims veganism and vegetarianism are not practical solutions, citing subsistence farmers and fishers who would have very restricted diets if they were vegetarians.

This is all well and good but it hardly applies to most in the West- ern World, and for us reducing meat consumption would be a highly effective way to reduce our ecological footprint. WWF do talk about the problems with meat consumption on their website, but they only go so far as saying “eat more vegetables”, which is hardly an ambitious target.

Even more shockingly, Peter Singer and Frances Kissling, both prominent ethicists, have noted in the Washington Post that at a UN conference on sustainable development, meat was served at most of the meals, and environmental spokesman could be seen unabashedly chowing down on beef. Clearly, giving up meat is at the bottom of the agenda for those involved with conservation.

This may sound familiar to those who have heard of Cowspiracy, a documentary that says there’s a massive conspiracy to protect the meat industry which charity interests allegedly protect. Whilst I think this is a bit far-fetched, it does strike me that governments and charities have self-serving reasons not to sing the praises of vegetarianism and veganism. First, they would annoy the farming lobby, which is powerful enough to have inefficient agricultural subsidies, mostly through the Common Agriculture Policy of the EU. Second, no government or NGO wants to face the nation and say “You shouldn’t be eating the food that you eat for nearly every meal.” This would admittedly be a hard sell, especially compared to advising walking a bit more or investing in green technology.

However, if we want to avert major environmental catastrophe, hard decisions are going to have be taken and governments are going to have to be the ones to make them, by coordinating our actions. Plus, encouraging reduced meat consumption could actually be one of the easiest environmental decisions. It wouldn’t be massively costly and could be achieved fairly quickly. It’s time governments and campaigners started getting loud about just how bad meat is.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more the idea of a meat duty tax seems an obviously good idea. One easy way to reduce consumption of something is to increase its price, and one way to do that is through a tax. Not only would this help the environment, it would im- prove health, since it is well known that red meat in particular is bad for you when consumed too often.

The money raised could also be used to subsidise the price of fruits and vegetables, further encouraging a healthy diet. This would help alleviate the negative effects on low-income groups as they could swap meat (which is expensive anyway) for cheaper vegetables. Of course, those who consume a lot of meat through low-price outlets such as fast food restaurants would suffer, but that would be the point: to encourage them to change their habits or to incentivise the restaurants to offer meat-free alternatives.

They could be given fair warning and this would allow them to adapt their diets or menus accordingly. A meat tax, combined with a strong public voice on the negative im- pact of meat, should be at the head of governments’ environmental policies.

However, these hopeful reflections are, unfortunately, just that. I realise governments are unlikely to tackle their bad relationship with the agricultural lobby or have the strength to stand up to meat eaters any time soon.

We must ask, therefore, what we can do in the inevitable case our government fails to do anything for us. Whilst personally the facts I uncovered did lead to me becoming vegetarian, I do realise this might be hard for everyone to do.

However, we can all take steps to improve our diet’s environmental impact. You could simply reduce how much meat you eat, or cut out beef, the worst culprit, or even, if you love meat that much, forgo other greenhouse gas emitting activities to compensate for your meat consumption. In particular, you could try swapping Quorn or something similar for meat in a curry or bolognese.

It’s almost as tasty and produces 90% less greenhouse gases than beef. Or have eggs for breakfast instead of milk and cereal, as eggs have greenhouse gas emissions almost as low as vegetables. But however you change your
habits, be
loud about
it! It’s great
if you eat
less meat,
but if you
encourage
others to as
well, you can multiply your impact. Personally, although my family still eats meat, they eat much less, and they’ve pretty much given up beef as a result of my slow (but still, I’m told, slightly tedious) prompting. We should not be quietly virtuous, because no movement was ever built in silence.

 

Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage: His Darkest One Yet

Raffaella Sero
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Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage: His Darkest One Yet

Like all good children’s stories, His Dark Materials is just as enjoyable to read at twenty-two as it was at twelve. As I recently re-read the trilogy, however, I was struck by just how greatly and how variously this truth relates to it, compared to other children’s books.

As time goes on, I have not just discovered new ways to enjoy His Dark Materials, but new worlds within the book, worlds of meaning beyond those within the story that would have been imperceptible to my twelve year old self. Of course, however, I have also lost perhaps just as many of these worlds in the dull process of growing up.

The perception of this loss made me wonder what 12-years-old me would have thought of La Belle Sauvage, the first installment Pullman’s newly released prequel to the trilogy, The Book of Dust. While this question is sadly destined to remain unanswered, I am ready to guess she wouldn’t have been half as struck by it as I was. After I finished reading the first installment of The Book of Dust, I felt shattered.

The journey undertaken in reading La Belle Sauvage is a dark one, but the quality of this darkness is different than that of Pullman’s preceeding trilogy. Lyra, the protagonist of His Dark Materials, is a half-wild creature, brave and fierce and slightly savage from the start of the books. Malcolm Polstead, the protagonist of La Belle Sauvage, is at first glance very different. There is a sweetness to him, and an aura of love and warmth surround his life at the Trout Inn. Like Lyra, he is clever, and yet unlike her, he is from the first a lovable character. This warmth is something Lyra and Jordan college unmistakably lack. Her story begins without pre- amble with a strong sense of the corruption of figures of authority, and children going missing.

From the outset, the reader is encouraged to trust no one but Lyra, and her demon Pantalaimon, despite Lyra being such an accomplished liar that she wins the name Lyra Silvertonge over the course of her adventures.

By contrast, at the beginning of his story, Malcolm definitely always tells the truth. Stemming outwards from Malcolm’s initial innocence, the atmosphere of the first part of La Belle Sauvage encourages the reader to feel safe and to trust its character.

But the warm shelter of the first half of the novel acts as a foil to its much gloomier second part. As we venture into the flood on board La Belle Sauvage the familiar, reassuring Oxford landscape changes. Under the water, the city and the story assume an eerie, menacing light. The cold, haunting tone which permeates His Dark Materials is again felt, and felt all the more impactfully because of the warmth it replaces.

Trying to explain his perception of the flood, Malcolm says: ‘It’s kind of between time. Like a dream or something…It’s as real as anything could be. But is just seems kind of bigger than I though. There’s more things in it”. In the flood, the world is different to how it was before; richer, and yet more frightening. In a nod to the diluvial, the flood seems to mark a turning point in history. The reader is left with the soul shattering impression that after the flood, nothing in Malcolm’s life will be the same, just as the book cannot fail to change the reader’s own world view, albeit in subtler, less definable ways.

Hollywood’s glamourising of Beauty and the Beast buries its troubling implications

Susannah Goldsbrough
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Hollywood’s glamourising of Beauty and the Beast buries its troubling implications

To become grown up is ‘a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.’ So wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, so clearly believe the producers at Disney, who for the past decade or so have commissioned a series of live action remakes of the fairytale cartoons of childhood. Into the Woods (2014), Cinderella (2015), Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016) and Beauty and the Beast (2017) have all barged their way back onto the big screen, complete with spell-binding budgets, jazzed up scores and A-list casts. You might think that the idea is nothing more than a shortcut through creativity, from a studio that has fallen into a lazy cookie-cut formula. But the remakes have proved hugely popular – Beauty and the Beast, for instance, is the tenth highest grossing film of all time. Far from running out of ideas, Disney is astutely capitalising on our desire to relive the fantasies of childhood.

But is feeding our fetishisation of a child’s world a sufficient justification for serving up stories that are deeply unsuited to a modern adult audience? Well, for one thing, Disney has made some effort to update the stories for contemporary consumption. After all, fairytales which have origins twisting back hundreds of years, which only began to be systematically written down in the early nineteenth century, and which have always been targeted at the fairly uncritical market of pre-teens, were always going to need some adjustment to meet the requirements of a twenty-first-century British audience made up of as many adults as children. And if the evidence of the box office is anything to go by, Disney has done a pretty good job.

But I’m not sure the takings tell the whole story. Once upon a time, fairytales were a little more reflective of the societies for which they were created – their fantastical elements provided a mirror on the wall to the contemporary contexts. But while the recent revisions have proved undeniably popular, I’m not convinced that the fairytale is the right story for our time. Does fairyland work in a twenty-first century world?

Well, Beauty and the Beast, the most recent addition to this nascent tradition, offers a useful way into the question. It is the obvious choice for a fairytale that will satisfy a modern audience: the character of Belle is a book-worm rather than an airheaded princess – and casting the Oxford educated Emma Watson, who has become as famous for her feminist activism as her acting, cleverly reinforces this idea – while the doctrine of inner over outer beauty fits snugly into an era concerned with disentangling attractiveness from power. But these comfortable narratives can only take us so far. In the film’s first scene, Belle’s book-worminess deems her ‘peculiar’ in the eyes of the village; one person goes so far as to ‘wonder if she’s feeling well?’ In an attempt to reconcile a twenty-first-century expectation with an eighteenth-century setting, Belle becomes exactly what she really is – out of place, born before her time, a strange prophet from a feminist future that cannot bear to see its own historical inequalities played back to it on the big screen.

And the idea that Disney is understandably so anxious to underpin the story with – that inner beauty is worth more than outward appearances – is rather undermined by the facial capture of the Beast. He needs to be an embodiment of ugliness, but in fact, he is far from unattractive, and looks more like a rather handsome dog or good looking bloke who doesn’t believe in razors than the grotesque monster of children’s nightmares. Director Bill Condon might have wanted his audiences to leave the cinema with the charming belief that humanity is capable of loving something despite its physical flaws, but he certainly doesn’t seem to believe it himself.

More than that, the snuggly inner-beauty interpretation that this version places so much emphasis upon has limits. Of course, to an extent the Beast’s duality of self – the handsome prince and the hairy monster – does work as a metaphor for someone who’s beautiful on the outside and ugly on the inside, but only up until the final scene. As is quite brilliantly pointed out at the end of a truly modern fairytale, Shrek, if the moral of the story is that physical attractiveness is subsidiary to goodness, why is the Beast changed back into his handsome self? Despite the characters’ protestations to the contrary, this plot point surely leaves the viewer with the sense that ‘Beauty’ deserves or requires beauty in her lover, even more so than goodness.

And as the inner-beauty interpretation crumbles around the edges, it reveals a far more troubling allegory. In the most authoritative written version of the story, Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve’s late eighteenth-century novel La Belle et la Bête, Belle lives in the Beast’s castle for months, waited on by invisible servants and dressed in an endless supply of expensive clothes. It does not take much imagination to work out what kind of arrangement would involve a young woman kept in a life luxury by an older man in eighteenth-century France, and so, suddenly, the scenes in the middle of the film where Belle lives in the Beast’s castle become a little less romantic, and the illustrations of the tale that you find in some children’s books, in which a monster sits opposite a young girl in a virginally white dress, begin to make a lot of allegorical sense. Most traces of a less consensual kind of relationship have been submerged in sugar-syrup sweetness, but it is impossible for Condon to completely untangle their relationship from the dynamics of power.

The first time indications that Belle is falling in love with the Beast come immediately after he has gifted her his enormous library, and she has pointed out that he has begun to crack jokes. The implication, then, is that their love is based on the male figure bestowing wealth and knowledge on the female, while she adds a lighthearted humour to his serious concerns – progressive, right? There is also one pretty horrible moment when Belle chucks a snowball at the Beast (because, obviously, girls just want to have fun) and he responds by flinging one back about the size of her head, which knocks her flat on her back. The camera cuts away before you really have time to digest what you have just seen – an aggressive physical demonstration of the frighteningly unequal power balance between the two lovers ­– and you are simply left with a haunting shot of the Beast chuckling to himself. The story is, after all, the classic example of Stockholm syndrome, which is the phenomenon in which a captive develops powerful emotional ties to their captor. It may sound obvious, but a syndrome is not something healthy or desirable: in one of the most famous real life cases, Patty Hearst’s defence lawyers described their client as brainwashed. And yet, Disney has no problem celebrating the diseased love of captor and captive as long as the captor is a prince and the prison is a castle.

To continue to unpick the allegorical resonances of the story means unearthing another really unpleasant idea. In La Belle et la Bête, the Beast asks Belle to marry him every night of her imprisonment, only to be continually refused. Right at the end, however, she finally declares her love for him, and he is transformed back into a handsome prince. It appears to be a great victory for love, but to me it seems more like her defences have finally worn down, and she has succumbed to his persistence and her own warped Stockholm feelings towards him. His transformation represents the terrible fickleness of the world’s judgement when it comes to men’s treatment of women. Sure, he is a Beast when she has strength to publically refuse his affections, but as soon as she gives in to him, he becomes a paragon and a prince, regardless of the means he has used to get the girl.

So no, I do not think Walt Disney Studios has any business glamourising the horrible undertones of old stories to fulfill the childish desires of a contemporary audience. As much as I don’t think we have any business walking into cinemas and paying money to watch it do so.

 

“If we dig in and accept the challenge, it is very much in our hands”

Matthew Roller
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“If we dig in and accept the challenge, it is very much in our hands”

On the face of it, it is hard to see why a university rugby match would matter to a Premiership-winning flanker with over 120 caps for Saracens and England Saxons experience.

But it soon becomes clear when you speak to Andy Saull, that, to him, it matters one hell of a lot.

“It’s been a transitional period of my life,” he tells Cherwell. “But this is the first time in my life since I was fifteen years old where all [I’ve been] playing for is the respect of my team.

“I’ve played in teams where that’s almost been the case, but there’s always been a financial issue and a selfish issue: I want to get selected for my country, I want to get a contract for next year, I want to earn my bonus. It’s definitely something that’s often lacking, a genuine ‘I will die for my teammates’ feeling that is prevalent in this Oxford squad.”

And to Saull, this is far more than just a one-off game. It might be expected that a man who has played at Twickenham several times before, notably in two Premiership finals for Saracens, should be a leader for the younger players in the squad, but that is not how he sees it.

“I wouldn’t say there’s a difference between the professionals and non-professionals,” he says. “But I’d say there’s a difference between those who have played Varsities before and those who haven’t. For us as professionals, we haven’t played the same one-off, winner-takes-all, whole season depends on it type of game.

“Whereas those who have played in Varsities before – Conor Kearns, Will Wilson, Will Thornton – are able to talk to us, and tell us ‘here’s how to win the game, here’s how to approach the training.’ So we’re the ones who are new to this concept.”

Indeed, Oxford will line up with only six returning Blues in the side next Thursday, so it is important that the burden of leadership is shared across the XV.

“It’s about the ability to look others in the eye [after the game] and knowing that as a group of 23, 40 or 80, you’ve achieved something for each other,” Saull says. “It’s the respect that you have for each other with the players around you that will stick with you for a lifetime.

“That will really be the mark of success for me – whether we can really help form those bonds and show that commitment that we’ll talk about forever to come.”

The Dark Blues have every reason to be confident going into Thursday’s game. While opponents Cambridge have had a mixed season, with some narrow wins punctuated by heavy defeats, Oxford have won eight of their ten fixtures to date.

Furthermore, the standard of opposition has been high throughout: Saull is keen to point out the side’s victories over the Collegiate All-Americans side, the Irish champions (Trinity College Dublin), last year’s Bucs Super Rugby champions (Hartpury College) and this season’s early pace-setters, Northumbria.

“I’ve always been told by my friends at other universities, like Newcastle or Leeds, that Oxford and Cambridge aren’t the best university teams any more. But we’ve played the best teams in the US, Ireland and the UK, and we’ve beaten them all. This is, for want of a better analogy, to become the best university team in the Northern Hemisphere – that’s going to be a very nice little title.”

Naturally, there are nerves in the camp ahead of such a big game, and Saull does not try to play those down. “Anxiety levels have increased a little bit, and there’s an appreciation of the task at hand,” he says. “We really have to be on our game.”

“We’ve obviously looked at a few of their tactics, and identified a few of their strengths and a few of their weaknesses, as any clever side would do. But ultimately, we’re fully aware that if we do dig in and accept the challenge, then it is very much in our hands.”

Saull will line up as part of a frighteningly strong back row for Oxford, with ex-Viadana and Italy U20 player Rob Talotti starting as the other flanker, and former England Sevens man Will Wilson at number eight.

But it is a fresher who Saull picks out as his key man.

“The player who I’m thrilled has been selected is Charlie Pozniak.

“He’s come in, and I’ve not seen a man so inquisitive in my life before. He asks question, retains the information, learns, and adapts his game accordingly,” Saull says of the 19-year-old. “He has tried so hard to get into the Varsity squad, let alone get a starting position. He’s someone I want on my team, and someone I’m going to be playing for.”

On a personal note, Saull is determined to win at Twickenham, but he does not see the trophy as the only marker of success in the game.

“I see my career highlights as… [the times] when a team has just had such a lovely bond, and everything has clicked, rather than the attainable trophy of winning the Premiership,” he says.

Indeed, it seems as though Oxford rugby means far more to Andy Saull than just winning a one-off fixture. While some ex-pros – including Cambridge’s Ollie Phillips this year – play only a game or two in the run-up to a Varsity fixture, and as a result struggle to integrate into their club, the 29-year-old has built friendships and memories since his debut in September that he will carry with him into the game.

Securing a win on the day remains the ultimate challenge, but Saull’s season with OURFC reflects everything good about Oxford rugby: his determination, drive and love of the game stand the Blues in good stead for any challenge thrown at them.

Preview: ‘Lovesong’ – “one of the best pieces of student theatre this year”

John Livesey
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Preview: ‘Lovesong’ – “one of the best pieces of student theatre this year”

It is a shame that student journalism so consistently lavishes praise on mediocre productions. This tendency is understandable given that reviewers are more often than not writing about the work of friends and acquaintances. However, the unfortunate consequence of this is that every time a show genuinely worthy of acclaim appears on the Oxford stage, all the recommendations we can give appear tired and superficial. To say, for instance, that Lovesong looks set to be one of the best pieces of student theatre this year might seem hyperbolic, clichéd and disingenuous but I urge readers to believe me. Moreover I am sure that, if they are lucky enough to have tickets for this sold-out show, they will make the same judgement for themselves.

Before I go any further, it is important to acknowledge that previews can be deceptive. For example, the three scenes I was shown at New College over the weekend were all individually stunning but by no means does that rule out the chance that the rest of the show may be unvarnished or, indeed, boring. I would, albeit, remain happy to bet against these odds. When you observe such a finely sculpted dramatic collage, as I was given the chance to this weekend, it is hard to believe that its creators don’t know exactly what they’re doing. In fact, I am more than happy to start the applause so prematurely.

Written by Abi Morgan (the screenwriter behind The Iron Lady, Shame and Suffragette) Lovesong is a play partially inspired by T.S Eliot’s poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. The narrative explores the nature of love and desire and how both change over time: growing, receding, and changing shape. Its main action leaps to and fro between two versions of the central couple, Maggie and Billy. Past and present meld seamlessly together and we are invited to view the newly-wed pair side by side with their older, wearier, emotionally-bruised selves. Scenes blend, timelines intermingle, both young and aged exchange glances as they share in the blisses and agonies of love and co-dependence. The gulf that time creates between who we are and who we used to be is at once emphasized by the two representations of the couple and collapsed by having both pairs occupy the same space. It is a serious rendering of human connection and human decay, possessing both imagination and poignancy.

Just as the story moves between the two different stages of Billy and Maggie’s relationship, the piece takes an equally mutable form, shifting from high naturalism to monologue and finally to physical theatre. Sound-tracked by an astonishing score composed in its entirety by Sarah Spencer, action feels perpetually on the edge of breakdown. Much is left unsaid between the couples and, increasingly as the play progresses, these silences break through in breath-taking movement sequences. Words give way to embraces, lifts and caresses and the fluidity with which these transformations happen is a testament to the strength of the play’s choreography and the actors’ dedication.

The moments of naturalism within the play warrant equal praise. All four actors present emotionally detailed characters, rich with complexity. One concern about the show might come from the thought of 20-year-olds playing the very elderly Maggie and Billy but Adam Goodbody and Miranda Collins seem more than up to the task, transforming vocally and physically before my eyes. Collins’s performance is particularly good. Her work is so understated and so nuanced, it could almost be for film. It feels utterly believable. Chloe Delanney also deserves a mention for her energetic, charismatic, heart-warming portrayal of young Maggie. In the scenes I saw, young-love seemed to positively light up her face and the whole of the stage.

The effect is most striking when abstract and realistic play out simultaneously. In one scene I was shown the older Maggie sets to making breakfast, moving with a rickety gait about the kitchen table, making coffee and opening a newspaper whilst her younger equivalent is being swept onto the same piece of furniture, erotically entangled in her young lovers arms. The contrast between the two scenes would almost be comic did it not feel so sad and truthful.

Returning to the statement I started this article with, I worry that I have become guilty of my own accusations. From what I have seen of this play, there is little I can think of that could be fairly criticized and impressive marketing tells me that Baz Luhrmann is of the same persuasion. However, there is also the possibility that this review is once more placing the vanilla on an unearned pedestal. I guess it is up to those lucky-few ticket holders to cast the deciding vote. And if anyone wants to sell me their seat, I’d be thrilled!

Review: ‘Yellow’ – “sensitive and complex”

Zad El Bacha
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Review: ‘Yellow’ – “sensitive and complex”

The opening scene of Yellow immediately characterises the protagonists: Charlotte is a bubbly blonde, perhaps a bit too bubbly, full of teasing humour. She’s teasing her husband for putting on a working class accent to talk to a cab driver. He denies the accusations:  he’s a good man! With a good social conscience! He knows all about classism and cultural appropriation! Then he gives in, alright, yes, he did it. His admission does not hold any actual guilt in it, any acknowledgement of the damage his actions could cause. It’s a goofy, well-meaning error from a man who is clearly a good guy. His wife takes it the same way and hugs him.

At this point of the play, the characters seem nothing but annoying. But very soon, the traits they display in this scene are filled with wistfulness and pain. As the play goes on, we discover that Charlotte is held hostage by her husband and an evil doctor so that she may “recover” (from what?) and spend time with her newborn baby. She is slowly isolated from everything, forbidden even from reading books. Writing, which used to be her career, becomes her little secret. The bubbliness we see in the first scene is curbed, until it disappears completely.

The play reveals the violence in the husband’s well-meaning, caring demeanour. In one particularly moving scene, he ignores her protests as he further isolates her from all that she loves, gaslights her when she expresses her feelings about it, and then tenderly kisses her on the head. He is also portrayed as a good and caring father (unlike her, the selfish mother), and the hypocrisy of his act is revealed.

For example, he tells her off for leaving the baby alone while she went to the library, despite having been away for a conference for an entire week. He says, horrified of her and conscious of his own goodness: “I had to rock her tiny little body until she fell asleep!” As if that was a shocking, unexpected thing for him to do.

The character development is made through frequent flashbacks, which also have all the poignancy of a time of freedom which is so different from the present. I was impressed by the smoothness and unity of these flashbacks. Non-linear narration is hard to pull of in a play without falling into an excessive experimentalism, but Yellow managed it seamlessly.

This was partly due to the simple set, which remained always the same as the scenes changes, keeping the viewer grounded in the reality of an isolated room. A particularly harrowing, and technically well-done, flashback was one where the protagonist is in a club with her best friend, who is planning to get herself a post-breakup goldfish. The scene perfectly captures the moments of drunken female friendships that we all know from nights out, and the contrast between the carefree, silly tone of the scene and the rest of the play is truly heartbreaking.

The set is surrounded by a net, illuminated in a faint yellow. It slightly clouds the vision of the play, and I expected it to fall down at any moment. It never did. This made perfect sense with the progression of the story, as Charlotte’s truth is clouded more and more, and she is always more entrapped in the little box that is her room. Its transparency allowed for an artful rendering of “the woman behind the wallpaper”, who was simply standing behind the the screen. Unfortunately, the technical limitations of the Pilch’s lighting system meant she couldn’t move much without getting out of the light, but the artful directing turned that into a solemn, eerie stillness.

The only criticism I could level against this play is the exceptional flatness of the evil doctor. However, given the shortness of the play, and the complexity of the themes it was handling, this cannot be but a passing note. Overall, a sensitive and complex portrayal of the ways ideas of motherhood are used with a benevolent facade to violently police a woman’s life.

Five Minutes With… Hugh Tappin

Cherwell Stage
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Five Minutes With… Hugh Tappin

How did you get involved in drama?

When I started at Oxford, I always knew I wanted to be involved in drama. I’d done a lot of acting at school, and back then it was sort of a pipe dream idea that I wanted to go into acting. I knew I wanted to get involved, and so I started out with Cuppers. I directed a really, really bad St John’s Cuppers play, and that was basically it!

What’s your happiest memory of drama at Oxford?

My happiest memory? Oh my lord… I have so many happy memories, it’s hard to think of one in particular! Working with the cast I did over the summer for the OUDS Shakespeare tour would have to be some of the most fun memories I have, it was just a wonderful cast to work with, but so much other stuff too!

Have you ever had any production nightmares while in Oxford?

I directed a play in Trinity last year, and I wouldn’t say it was disastrous, I just got very stressed because one of my actors didn’t learn the lines fairly close up to the production, so that was quite stressful. Oh, and we’re currently trying to find a sink for Lovesong, which is causing a little bit of stress. It’s fairly hard to find a sink.

Do you have a particular favourite play?

That’s so hard! I read what Lucy (Hayes, Chair of OUDS) wrote and basically completely agreed with her that I cant really choose one. And I’ve never seen or read Angels in America, which I feel singles me out as one of the few people in Oxford drama who didn’t see that production of Angels at the National! In general, I have quite an eclectic taste in theatre. I really like modern stuff, I’m a big fan of David Hare and his writing in general, but I don’t really know what my favourite play is. Sorry, that’s a really bad answer!

Are there any plays that you’d like to see put on in Oxford?

I play that I really really like is a play called Betrayal by Harold Pinter. It’s really cool, it’s got a very small cast, it’s a very intense play about three people and it goes backwards chronologically, over the course of an affair that’s happened, which I think is a really cool concept, having a play that goes backwards.

Do you have any inspirations in the world of theatre?

There are some truly amazing people at Oxford drama. In terms of who inspires me, I would have to say Chris Burr is up there, simply because of the sheer amount of work and shows that man can get done – he’s an absolute machine. It’s really quite impressive. In sheer terms of workload that man is an inspiration to everyone. And then, I wouldn’t say I have one person who inspires me, but I’m inspired by the sheer talent of everyone around me. It’s so much fun working with them.

Do you have any plans to go to drama school after Oxford?

I need to get my applications in over the Christmas holidays, so yes, that is the plan. I was tempted to apply before (in lieu of going to Oxford) but I’m very glad I didn’t because I feel like I’ve got a lot better since university, and I feel like I’ve also grown up quite a lot.

Do you have any advice for freshers who want to get involved with drama at Oxford?

Just go for it, generally. Really go for it, throw yourself into it. Go to socials. Go to the drinks events. Go to workshops. The auditions workshops are really good if you’re in anyway nervous about auditioning, for example if you don’t know what monologue to do, go along to those. There’s a new lot coming up run by Fran Amewudah-Rivers through the BAME Drama Society which she’s founded, which is really cool. I also think that anyone can get involved with drama, not just freshers. There was a friend of mine who graduated a few years ago, who in fact helped me get into drama, and he only started acting in his third year at Oxford, he really got into it and now wants to go into it professionally, so I don’t think you have to be a fresher to want to get into drama.

What’s your favourite role on the production team?

My first love is acting. I did really enjoy directing Skylight, and I’m really enjoying producing (for Lovesong), it’s good fun. I’m working with an amazing cast on Lovesong at the moment, and I’m producing Crocodile which is coming up next term with the same production company.

Have you seen any plays at Oxford that stand out to you?

What have I seen this term that’s been amazing? I’m trying to think. A few years ago I saw a production of Rhinoceros which has stuck in my mind as being one of the most amazing shows I’ve seen at Oxford, it was just incredible. I saw it right at the end of my first year and it’s just stuck in my head. Then the tour show last year, which was A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I remember seeing that and finding that one of the funniest shows I’d seen in a long time, which is always hard with Shakespeare.

Could you tell us a bit about the OUDS tour?

This summer we had the privilege of doing a week at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, which is part of Shakespeare’s Globe. It’s completely auditioned from Oxford actors, directed by Oxford people, and it just gives you the opportunity to work with a company of actors for the space of two and a half months. I wouldn’t say it was that different to any other Oxford show, except in the size of it and the length of the run. That’s one of the things about Oxford shows, you work really hard for about 2 or 3 months on a show and then it’s over in 3 or 4 days, so it was great to have the opportunity to do a show where you do it and keep on doing it,and you learn new stuff along the way.

Could you tell us a bit about Lovesong?

The concept of Lovesong is that there is a couple, who we see at the start of their relationship just after they’ve got married, and then we see them 50 years on, but we don’t see them in separate scenes, we see the characters working together, interacting with each other on stage, principally through movement, so you have one actor coming in and being replaced by another, and it’s very fluid in that sense, so you don’t have this strict timeline. It’s also very beautiful, and I think it’s a really important show for Oxford because physical theatre doesn’t get done enough. I think what Luke is trying to do in Lovesong is really important, and it’s really fun, but really hard for the actors. I was in a rehearsal the other day and the actors were working with Luke deciding how to physically represent a sequence, and it was really interesting to watch because they were there working with each other, devising movement as they went along, which is just a really cool way of working.

Do you have any other exciting projects coming up?

We are in the process of holding callbacks for The Crocodile, which is a show that we’re doing in 7th week at the Pilch next term, which is different to Lovesong in the sense that it’s a comedy – it’s by Tom Basden, so it’s absolutely hilarious. It’s all being done through Nitrous Cow, which is me, Luke and Alex, so hopefully we’ll be able to give it a bit of a quirky edge, like we’re trying to do with Lovesong. It may well be my last project. Obviously I’ll audition for the tour again next year and hopefully do that, but this may well be one of my last projects. I’m trying to do a bit more film, I’ve got a couple of films coming up in the holidays with some Oxford people, but that might be it for me! Well, it would make my tutor happy. It’s been fun while it lasted.

How did you go about founding your own production company?

It’s much easier than you think. People worry that there’s a lot of paper work and everything, but basically its you, a producer and a director, basically deciding that they want to run some theatre together and creating a Facebook page, and that’s basically it. You can go about slightly more complicated things by having a bank account and stuff like that, but realistically it’s very doable. You establish really strong working relationships with people, and it’s nice knowing that you’ve got people there to get stuff done.

Do you have any quirks before going on stage?

I brush my teeth. I also have a tongue twister which I always do to myself, generally, which I was taught when I was about 14, and I’ve pretty much been doing it to myself ever since. I don’t have any grand rituals, like spinning round three times in the wind facing north. In fact, it’s not even a tongue twister, it’s just a weird little phrase. I will keep it to myself. It will remain a secret.

Lovesong is playing at the Michael Pilch Studio from November 29th to December 2nd and is currently sold out, but more seats may be added.

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