Tuesday 29th July 2025
Blog Page 975

Preview: It Felt Empty

Miriam Nemmaoui
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Preview: It Felt Empty

It felt empty when the heart went at first but it is alright now is a sprawling title for an incredibly well-crafted play about sex trafficking, showing in the Pilch Studio this week. Despite my initial reservations about a student production dealing with such heavy subject matter, the quality of performance, combined with the tightness of the script, makes It Felt Empty a play which is difficult to describe without resorting to superlatives.

The play, which has a cast of just two actors, tells the tragic story of Dijana (Natalie Lauren), a young woman comes to Britain and is forced into prostitution by her invisible ‘boyfriend’ Babac. The audience meanders through a nonlinear plot, directed by Dijana’s confused monologues, witnessing her abuse, her time in Babac’s house, and her imprisonment in a detention centre with Gloria (Shannon Hayes). The extent of Dijana’s mental illness (she seems to have symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) becomes evident as the play unfolds, with her narrative providing inconsistencies in place, time, and reality.

What struck me most about this play was its ability to demand attention without sensationalising the subject matter. It deftly avoids the dangers of portraying heavy themes too flippantly, or else indulging in gruesome detail for gratification. It Felt Empty is able to do this because it is about so much more than just victimhood. Gloria’s gallows humour is testament to her resilience and generosity, and Dijana’s comment that it is ‘so weird that you can live in the same place as someone and not know what they do’ is simultaneously a comment on her own life and on the isolating state of modern society.

The staging of the play will be ambitious. I asked director Lauren Jackson how she planned to stage a play in which so much of the action takes place inside one character’s head; she tells me that it will be in promenade, allowing the audience even more access to Dijana’s mind as we are placed within the liminal space of the play. I imagine this will heighten the disorientation which we feel as we watch Dijana’s constantly fluctuating mood and timeline.

I come, at last, to what promises to be the real highlight of this production – the cast. The main challenge with putting on a play like It Felt Empty, which is mostly made up of a monologue by one character, is finding an actor capable of doing it justice. Luckily, the casting is perfect. Natalie Lauren’s performance as Dijana is breath-taking; I had goose bumps as I watched her transform a brightly lit room in Teddy Hall into a stormy emotional landscape. Lauren captures the visceral details of the psychosis episodes, as well as the Croatian accent, with gritty brilliance. The peaks and falls of emotion and energy keep the audience captivated by her long, wandering speeches. Shannon Hayes as Gloria is also a delight to watch—she has perfected a balancing act which leaves us unable to judge Gloria’s character, as her displays of warmth towards Dijana are broken by violent shouting, and dark stories of severed tongues.

Although it deals with horrific social issues, It Felt Empty does not preach at the audience. It is, first and foremost, a highly personal story, which allows us to connect with a woman who might otherwise become a statistic to us. It Felt Empty could be one of the most important things you see this term.

St Anne’s responds to Teddy Hall rugby team smashing toilet and holding “topless brawl”

Tony Diver
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St Anne’s responds to Teddy Hall rugby team smashing toilet and holding “topless brawl”

The Domestic Bursar of St Anne’s College, Jim Meridew, has assured St Anne’s students in an email that the college is pursuing damages and an apology from the culprits of the smashing of a disabled toilet and what was described by an onlooker as a “topless brawl” on the quad on Saturday of Second Week.

His email explains that there has been “slow progress” in dealing with the incident after Teddy Hall students have been “slow to own up” to causing damage to the bar, following a 10-2 loss of the Teddy Hall darts team to their hosts, St Anne’s.

The message also revealed that Professor Porcelli, the St Anne’s Dean, “has been negotiating with his opposite number at Teddy Hall” this week.

“We are expecting as a minimum financial recompense for the damage caused and an apology to the Dean, myself and the JCR President”, he said.

“I’d like to reassure you that we will not let this drop.”

Tom Dyer, the Teddy Hall JCR President, told Cherwell that he had nothing to add to his original statement, in which he apologised to St Anne’s for the behaviour of Teddy Hall students at their college.

“The actions at St Anne’s bar are in no way acceptable and are not something which we want any student or society of Teddy Hall to be associated with”, he said.

Although Dyer originally told Cherwell that “the Teddy Hall dean will be working to ensure that appropriate action is taken against those responsible”, Meridew’s email to St Anne’s students suggests that students not owning up may have made this more difficult than anticipated.

Pranay Shah, the St Anne’s JCR President, said, “Following the progress update from St Anne’s to all of its students, I agree with the college that the slow response from Teddy Hall is disappointing, due to the nature of the actions they carried out.

“I also agree with the minimum expectation from the College in terms of financial compensation and apologies and hope that cooperation from Teddy Hall will eventually result in this incident being resolved.”

 

Live review: The Lovely Eggs, Cellar

Ellen Peirson-Hagger
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Live review: The Lovely Eggs, Cellar

The Lovely Eggs have some great stories to tell. They’re on tour, they say, because they  have a three-year-old son and can’t go to parties anymore. But getting a set list together and driving up and down the country playing shows every night means getting away from their hometown of Lancaster. They get to drink every night, and party every night, even if they’ll be woken up at 6.30am by their son, whom they’ve brought with them. “That’s when I regret the last can”, Holly Ross, guitarist and lead vocalist, says, downing her Strongbow.

The married pair bring the thrill of an escape from domesticity to a Monday night at Cellar. It’s all a bit ramshackle, with drummer David Blackwell shuffling onstage with his 60s beatnik haircut hiding his eyes and a bag still slung over his shoulder. He plops himself down on his drum stool and suddenly Holly lets rip a guitar thrash. It’s a sudden punkish slam which no-one sees coming from the gawkish looking couple who slumped onto the stage looking as if they were just sound-checking.

The thrill of the Lovely Eggs is this disjointedness. They have thick, homely Lancaster accents and, when cheerily chatting onstage, seem like just the type of people you’d chat with in the pub. But when they start singing, you wonder if you could even follow the conversation. They sing things like “Peel back everything you’ve got for the magic onion” in ‘Magic Onion’, released on green “splatter” vinyl as a 7” in April last year, or “We were goof-goof-goof-goof-goofing around” from ‘Goofi ng Around (in Lancashire)’, released on 7” “egg” vinyl last November. The band are notoriously ‘DIY’ and, via Egg Records, have released some of the maddest looking indie records of the last few years. I was very nearly persuaded to part with a reasonable £12 for a scarf emblazoned with “FUCK IT” from the merch stall on my way out.

Fan favourite ‘Don’t Look at Me (I Don’t Like It)’ hears Holly shrieking “Look at him with his dog dirt smile … Look at her with her cul-de-sac arms”, as she works her way through numerous ridiculous but gleefully impossible phrases. When the stabs of noise stop, the lyrical climax is Holly’s lone voice saying, quite frankly, “Don’t look at him, cause everyone knows he’s got a sausage roll thumb”.

The best thing is that the audience, crammed into the low-ceilinged venue, are prepared for this nonsensical mayhem. Most seem like regular Eggs fans, the type who buy every limited edition recording. This crowd is familiar with these absurdities, and any reaction is just cheerful agreement. Of course this woman has a “washing line smile”. It all becomes quite normal.

Holly introduces ‘Fuck It’ as “the national anthem of Lancaster and Morecambe District”. Considering the less than polite lyrics, it is just fitting that the song begins with the softest melody we hear all night. Holly strums out a sweet little riff underneath a delicately-voiced “Fuck it, oh yeah-ah-ah-ah-ah”, meandering up and down the scale with a soft, tuneful voice we rarely hear in amongst raucous shouting or rhythmic speaking.

‘I Shouldn’t Have Said That’ hears Holly scream, full-pelt into the microphone, alongside churning drums and guitar, galloping underneath a fiery wrath of a lead singer caught up in the midst of an argument, or something.

Because surprisingly pleasing is the very little we find out about these in-song situations. What shouldn’t Holly have said “right into your face”? And what is ‘Drug Braggin’’, a phrase we only hear over Wurlitzer-like guitar sounds, all spinny and distorted, punctuated with cymbal crashes?

The fact is, it doesn’t really matter. There is never any need for explanation of the band’s surreal observational lyrics. They don’t expect quiet contemplation or deep interpretation, and the crowd are too content grinning along, pints in hand, to worry about anything more than their sheer amusement. And the Lovely Eggs are more than amusing.

What animal is your degree?

Nicola Dwornik
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What animal is your degree?

Last week I took a ‘what animal is your degree’ quiz and I got a sloth. I was chuffed. Then I began to think—what if I actually am a sloth? My week ahead didn’t disprove this diagnosis: one essay, one tutorial and no lectures until Hilary. Even to regular historians, my Ancient History reading lists,, complete with sketches of Roman coinage, often provide free quality entertainment. As for the sleeping patterns, I’ve had quite a few successful 16 hour siestas. The evidence does seem rather alarming.

Then I look to my chemist friends. They trudge to their weekly 12 lectures (gleefully) and occasionally sit in a laboratory for a day, on top of their regular tutorial work. Multiple deadlines are customary, not the lone hand in that can mark the beginning of a questionably long mid- week weekend. They are also well acquainted with ‘the 9am’. This is a grim, grim foreign world to the bleary-eyed history student.

So are humanities degrees really just a matter of piña coladas and enduring the rain of Oxford’s freezing micro-climate? No, I daresay they are not. I can assure you that for every hour a human- ities student spends outside a one metre radius of a book, there is a simultaneous pang of guilt and an extra hour built into the ‘day-before-deadline work panic’ to get two-thousand tangible words on paper. It’s how it should(n’t) work. It’s our way of living on the edge, our way of forcing lots of required work into a much smaller amount of time. Inevitably, though, the time gets away from you and boom, the all-nighter begins reading as many sources as possible in as little time only to write relative nonsense about some subject you don’t really know anything about. I’ve gone to great lengths to indulge stereotypes here. But to an extent, that’s exactly what we do as Oxford students.

The humanities-science dichotomy may not be confined to the city, yet the University’s way of teaching serves to reinforce it. I’m not saying that my tutors must be my biggest fans when I leave my essay on ‘The Establishment of Rome’ to be completed in a day, however the way in which deadlines are scheduled allow such questionably-successful intellectual com- positions to be created. Thus we can indulge in this proposition, even though it is rather ridiculous and idiotic, just like croquet. Conversely, those studying science degrees often undertake a part-time job in advertising how much work they have to do, and how often they have to do it, not to mention the misery that accompanies that work. It seems they get the boring side of the debate, but hey ho, it’s a fun little game we play to keep ourselves entertained.

To argue that particular types of degree require ‘more work’ would not only generate contradictory conclusions, but fruitless ones. Humanities students are undeniably granted greater flexibility as to when and how much they work, guaranteed they can hand in a semi- coherent essay in on time. Yet, our affinity for the ‘all-nighter’, and books available online on SOLO, should also not remain ignored. There’s a good amount of maturity involved in a completely open schedule. Tutors only partially expect us to attend lectures and we are under no obligation to be up at any time, much less 9am.

For Science students, I would contend, the constant flux of lectures and tute sheets requires a more regular, and arguably more intensive, working pattern. With this, an enviable pre-planned life structure is also provided for £9000 a year, as is the greater chance of achieving a first, and, admittedly, not being the first to the bar every evening. If you don’t show up to your lectures and labs for science, you’ll inevitably fall behind and do considerably worse, but we humanities students are forced to be self-motivated and scheduled.

However, writing an article to highlight the workload imbalance between different types of degrees is narrow-minded. As much as we can play into the aforementioned stereotypes, the university should, and largely does, allow indi- viduals to tailor their degrees around how they’d like to work, a flexibility dually evident in the occasional choice of course from a wide variety of options. Obviously, the humanities–sciences divide does serve to define the degree to which the above flexibility is tenable, yet it is ultimately the choice of the individual as to how much they choose to work.This is a decision dictated by other forces: personal ambition and drive, the expectations of tutors and the work-ethic maintained by other students.

Certainly these are pressures much more significant to my work ethic than off-handed comments similar to: ‘Oh, she’s a history student, of course she doesn’t do any work.’We all know Oxford can sometimes prove to be a suffocating environment, so we should at least try to constrain our pressuring influences to ones grounded in the world around us. You may wish to paint me as a sloth, but I may actually be a caterpillar. And I don’t need a biological sciences degree to grant me that title.

Getting it right: political commentary and rap

David Lawton
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Getting it right: political commentary and rap

The relationship between politics and art is an essential one. Even if artists proclaim themself ‘apolitical’, their art always fits, in some way, into broader cultural discourses, which are always implicated in a political reality.

When it comes to contemporary music, I hate most overtly ‘political music’, especially white political music. Most folk music, for example, in it’s attempt to construe a unified narrative through lyricism, forces ‘correct’ interpretation upon its listener. A derridean nightmare. Political folk, with its moralising tone, kitsch ‘popularism’ (which is completely anachronistic), and inauthentic sentimentality,is even worse. It should be consigned to the flames. At a time when consumer rights movements are interchangeable with civil rights movements, you, my folky friends, have nothing left to sing about except your post-materialist yearnings for greater self-actualisation.

‘Punks’, still making overtly political music,usually upon their farcically basic conceptions of left or right wing ‘causes’, are laughed at by mainstream society now, when once they were feared. To us, the ‘political punk’ of the late 70s kind seems little short of a joke. Punks can be grouped with emos and goths, and all of the other hair-dyed, stud-buckled, lost children of the twentieth century graveyard.

Yeah, this is polemical. But at least I’m being honest, if perhaps not truthful. There are ways of keeping the red flag flying, without singing ‘The Red Flag’. The future of political music lies beyond Billy Bragg and Fat White Family. Far greater potential is to be found in the work of Kendrick Lamar, whose album To Pimp a Butterfly, serves as extremely powerful political art,to be taken seriously by all. The form of his art,(and of rap and spoken word more generally)lends itself to politics in a way that engages the listener, rather than making them cringe. It departs (rightly) from the nostalgia of folk and lacks the childish virility of punk.

Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, which has been rightly described as an “ambitious avant jazz-rap statement”, powerfully delivers an encyclopaedia of competing messages, open to listener interpretation. It doesn’t create apolitical metanarrative over the tracks but revels in its fragmentary style, jumping from one sample to another, from distorted vocal wails to smooth saxophone, and from softly spoken rap to guttural chant.

Politically there are strong and clear messages about American society, racism, police violence, and gang culture in his work. But what makes Lamar’s album function in apolitically nuanced way is the manner in which it sends unclear or disordered messages to the listener, of which the listener has to make sense. For instance, in many of the songs Lamar liberally uses the term ‘nigga’, inits fraternal, re-appropriative sense. In ‘I’, the optimistic penultimatum to the album, we hear the lines “All my niggas listen/I promised Dave I’d never use the phrase ‘fuck nigga’/He said, ‘Think about what you saying’: ‘Fuck niggas’/No better than Samuel on Django/No better than a white man with slave boats”. Here we meet the genius of Lamar’s flippant use of the term followed by a deconstruction of the word’s oppressive history. This contrast leaves the listener questioning the political implications of language.

This is how to do political music in the early 21st century—with nuance, with audience engagement, and with artistic vision.There has to be an abandonment of certainty in progress, of the coherent narrative, and of fixed interpretation.

A dark trend in music documentaries

David Lawton
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A dark trend in music documentaries

The last couple of years have seen some particularly interesting music documentaries, especially about so-called “tortured artists”. Amy, Montage of Heck, Heaven Adores You and What Happened, Miss Simone?, are some of the film titles I recall seeing recently and most deal, in different ways, with issues concerning artists’ mental health, abusive relationships, misuse of drugs, and eventually death. In other words, documentary-makers seem to be discovering a formula that sells. It is, at base, the commodification of pain.

The reason this kind of documentary sells seems obvious to me. In a dramatic sense, a tragedy is more gripping than a fairy tale. We watch as the artist fluctuates between the peaks of fame and the troughs of depression. It reassures us that our lives are not so complex, and it puts a hard price on success. The music documentary can also be a site of myth-creation. The image of the tortured artist is exhumed from a graveyard of cliché and paraded once again, for our amusement. What is more, when the subject of one’s documentary is deceased, it is easier to shape their lives into a troubled hagiography. These are the rules of cinematising a real life.

Heaven Adores You, the recent official documentary about Elliott Smith, Oscar nominated singer-songwriter who died in 2003, broke these rules. As I watched, I began to notice an absence. It was an absence of melodrama, an absence of discussion about Elliott’s person drug-use and battles with anxiety and depression, and an absence of mystification over his death. What the director, Nickolas Rossi, decided to do instead, was focus abundantly on the music, and on Elliott’s achievements, which were vast. At first I was confused and a little disappointed. This was a revision and gentrification of the Elliott Smith story I thought I knew. The reviews, which were good but not fantastic, generally noted that it was odd that the negative aspects of Elliott’s life seemed to have been swept under the rug. But why is it odd? It is odd to us, because we are a generation raised on celebrity scandal. We too often have a pornographic attitude to drug addiction, sexual violence, mental health, and suicide. Clearly, we find pain and demise intriguing. The more I came to think about it, the more I realised the respect and gravity given to making a documentary which depicted the good, at the expense of the bad. Why shouldn’t a music documentary be a celebration of achievement, rather than a sordid exposé?

What Happened, Miss Simone?, a recent documentary about the truly unique musician Nina Simone, didn’t explore her songwriting process in depth, the technical aspects of her piano or vocal style, or her diverse discography. I came away knowing intimately about her personal battles with mental health, sexual and physical abuse, politics and racism—but little more about her music. This seems to me a trend in documentary making. Some kind of balance can be struck.

The award-winning Amy, was certainly more nuanced in its dual focus on Amy Winehouse the musician, and Amy the person. We got to see fascinating shots of her at work in the studio, heard a wide scope of her discography, and got insights into her musical influences and career development. Nevertheless, even Amy wained towards the end into a kind of moving tabloid about her personal life. I would rather see more music documentaries that don’t pander to the dark interest we all have in the personal problems of others. When it comes to music documentaries, let’s do justice to the music and the artistry first.

Rewind: The Gunpowder Plot

Thomas Athey
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Rewind: The Gunpowder Plot

There are few icons more readily associated with power than the concept of absolute monarchy, and James I provides perhaps a near-perfect example of why this is the case. He was the ruler of a fast-growing island nation which had shown itself to be impervious to foreign invasion by defeating the Spanish Armada. He spun a wide-ranging and efficient web of patronage that ensured parliament was of little real significance. Most impressive of all, being Head of the Church of England gave him control over his nation’s spiritual life. Divine Right, centralised authority, global significance. It is hard to imagine a more powerful individual.

And yet, on the November 5, 1605, James I was nearly blown into a thousand pieces, along with his court and family. Twelve conspirators with an adequate knowledge of explosives were all that were necessary to bring this about, prevented by a single stroke of luck in the form of an anonymous tip off. Despite the King’s inarguable concentration of power, it is remarkable how close the plotters came to abruptly ending his reign in such a brutal way.

There is a lesson for us all here: no matter how powerful a premier or head of state seems, we are all just flesh and blood, and therefore all as vulnerable. No ruler can make themselves impervious to bullets, or guarantee that disease won’t carry them away.

Perhaps they may be able to gather resources to make this less likely, but this comes at the cost of multiplying the threats. Despite the growing mood of religious fragmentation and anti-Monarchist thought (which would eventually lead to Civil War), it seems unlikely that James would have been the target of a conspiracy if he had never inherited the throne.

Indeed, the threats a ruler will typically encounter are almost too numerous to count. A relentless balancing act needs to be conducted with all the significant stakeholders in society, lest the discontented become as dissatisfied as to revolt. This is compounded by recurrent economic and natural crisis, which typically are difficult to predict or control.

This is not to elicit sympathy for the powerful, but to remind us of how fragile their position really is, and prevent them from abusing an appearance of power to achieve their ends. It could all be undone with a little gunpowder, and a spark.

Memes, Trump and MLG

William Shaw
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Memes, Trump and MLG

“Dear FAZE POTTER, you have been accepted at Hogwarts school of MEMES AND QUICK SCOPING” Such is the opening of ‘Harry Potter and the Noscoper’s Stone’, a short film which, at time of writing, sits at 3,219,168 views on YouTube. It’s a prime example of the MLG video: a short, humorous montage of clips from a popular film or TV show, overlaid with text, memes, and video game assets. These videos have become very popular in recent years, and there are plenty of laughs to be had, but like everything else, they come with a dark side.

MLG refers to Major League Gaming, a professional e-sports organisation—like FIFA for professional video game players. In the same way sports broadcasters produce edited highlights of matches, MLG produces montages of players’ most impressive gaming moments: impressive kills, deft bits of strategy, that sort of thing. These montages started hitting YouTube in the early-2000s, along with a flood of copycats, usually amateur players crudely editing together their own footage. This was, obviously, a bit of a joke. Imagine if every pub league football player started putting out edited highlights of their own performance. The videos made use of several stock elements, including blaring dubstep, anguished shouting, and references to popular memes. They were loud, obnoxious and totally ridiculous, which gave them a cultural presence in excess of their actual popularity. It was only a matter of time before the meme lords got to work.

The process was gradual, but between 2011 and 2014(ish) MLG videos transitioned into what they are now: montage parodies of popular media, having moved beyond video games and into film and TV more generally. This new breed of video was similar to its forbears in its over-the-top obnoxiousness and frequent references to video game culture, but the presentation was both more ironic and far more information-dense. The modern MLG video is a compressed tissue of quotations, audio and visual, its humour coming not just from references but the speed and inventiveness of those references, not to mention a significant uptick in editing quality. What was once amateur backwash had become slickly-produced gold; the alchemy of the internet works again.

The MLG effect, like most great art, is better seen in motion than dryly described. You only need to see Albus Dumbledore say, “Welcome back to Hogwarts School of Memes, Weed, and Good Banter” once before never looking back. But the structure and style of MLG is not new in itself, having borrowed most of its tricks from the twentieth-century avant-garde tradition. Jarring shifts in pitch and rhythm are a standard trope of experimental music, and the irreverent remixing of disparate texts is basically Postmodernism For Dummies. MLG is western culture doing what it always does, folding the marginal back into the mainstream in a way which strengthens the latter and legitimises the former. And, as ever, the margins bring their revolutionary power along with them.

The power of MLG is that nothing is above reproach. News, movies, politicians—none of them is immune to this remixing spirit, and there’s nothing they can say that can’t be cut off and replaced with a text-to-speech program making references to cannabis. MLG’s power is its constant and relentless humour —nothing it says is taken seriously. And it is precisely this quality which, as well as being powerful, makes MLG profoundly dangerous.

Do a YouTube search for ‘Donald Trump MLG’ and you will get a slew of results, obviously. Trump is the most-memed politician in living memory. But the most popular videos do not, as one might expect, frame Trump as the deluded, incompetent fool he is; rather, they seem to actively root for him. One of the top results shows Donald Trump “reking” journalist Megyn Kelly at the first primary debate, and another simply shows clips of Trump’s speeches and interviews overlaid with images, often of Donald Trump himself. The presentation is joking, but the effect is to hammer home the message more forcefully than a sincere depiction ever could. This is what makes MLG, and memes in general, so dangerous as propaganda tools.

The aim has moved away from straightforward opinions to an attempt to flood the discourse with so many images and perceptions of Trump that support becomes a matter of instinct, rather than reason. Trump has got where he is partly through the power of online discourse. In the words of Adam Hess, he’s “proof that if Hitler was alive today he’d be the biggest thing on Twitter.” I’m not trying to start a moral panic about memes. But we need to think more critically about what we encounter online, and with an eye towards memes’ material impact. And if we could stay away from shady crooks like Nimble America that would be good too. Above all, we must be vigilant, and conscious that the ends do not always justify the memes.

Preview: Frankenstein

Nina Sandelson
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Preview: Frankenstein

It is rare in student drama to find a production which updates a classic text which such coherence and profundity as Fred Wienand’s 5th week production of Frankenstein promises to do. After deciding to stage Nick Dear’s 2011 adaptation of the novel, Wienand was convinced he could go further still, and proceeded to update the text beyond Dear’s version, staging it in a counterfactual reality in 1929. The First World War continued for another eleven years, eventually ending in a stalemate that left Europe a wasteland of broken-down political structures and thousands of displaced refugees. It is out of such a landscape that both Wienand’s brainchild and Frankenstein’s monster were born.

When I met with Wienand and producer/assistant director Megan Thresh, their enthusiasm for the upcoming production was palpable. They spoke passionately and convincingly about how their re-imagining of Shelley’s classic not only spoke to the original novel, but to a contemporary audience in a world increasingly tainted by masses of misplaced refugees and a pervasive fear of ‘the other’. Their production even nods to a post-war society feminized by thousands of deaths of male soldiers, and appropriate amendments have been made to portray Frankenstein as a product of a newly matriarchal society. Without wanting to give too much away, every aspect of their update has been given deep consideration in relation to the original novel; as Wienand himself put it: ‘There’s no point changing something if the text doesn’t respond to it’.

The rehearsals I witnessed in the week before the production suggested the cast is as strong as the concept. Tom Curzon and Seamus Lavan play Victor Frankenstein and the creature respectively. Curzon promises to deliver a compelling performance that embodies the post-war disillusionment underpinning the production. Lavan, as the creature, conveys the immense physical dedication involved in such a role: with no costume, make up or speech he transformed himself remarkably into a contorting, non-human beast. Such attention has been paid to the creature’s physicality that a dedicated choreographer has been hired to choreograph his movements. However, this won’t be the only impressive thing about Lavan’s performance: the directors were keen to assure me that an emphasis has been placed on the creature’s interiority and character development, in order to explore ideas of empathy and consciousness in non-human creatures. I also witnessed brief but commendable performances by Rosa Garland and Alice Boyd as Madam and William Frankenstein, suggesting that the characters surrounding Frankenstein and the creature will be anything but peripheral.

Wienand comes across as an engaging director, and one that his cast seem enthusiastic about working with. Whilst I was only privy to a brief snapshot of a rehearsal in Christ Church JCR, it is clear that the cast are fully behind Wienand and his innovative concept. So they should be; if it lives up to expectations this should be a brilliant production, and certainly one not worth missing.

“Dear Non-American Black…”

Hannah Chukwu
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“Dear Non-American Black…”

Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I’m Jamaican or I’m Ghanaian. America doesn’t care.

The label ‘black’ is at the heart of Americanah, just as it is at the heart of so much modern political discussion. These human labels that have made their way into our everyday rhetoric are under continual scrutiny. But Americanah marks the beginning of a new way to talk about race. The interlaced and overflowing racial conversations in Americanah are held together by the slowly unravelling love story of Ifemelu and Obinze. Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love as teenagers in a Nigeria that is under military dictatorship, but their love story comes to a halt when life throws them into two different directions—Ifemelu begins a new life in America, whilst Obinze stays in Nigeria and eventually attempts to start afresh in England.

Oscillating between conversations about black experience in Nigeria, England and America, Adichie’s Americanah follows the direction set by Justin Simien’s 2014 film Dear White People in which the necessity for a conversation about intersectionality is mirrored by the intersection of narrative styles in the finished artwork. Echoing the seamless transitions between Hollywood film scale production and personal video-blogging in Dear White People, Americanah weaves together cutting blog posts and—overheard-on-public-transport—observations with its compelling wider narrative.

Adichie successfully sits close to the vivid minutiae of how race impacts the protagonists’ daily lives while drawing the reader’s attention toward the enveloping discussion of how this impacts the ways in which the entire world chooses to use the word ‘black’. The characters are sensitively constructed and bursting with human contradictions: insight and ignorance; passion and apathy; a desire for change and desire for stasis. All of this works together to create a novel that resonates with the reality of living within societal constructs out of our control and attempting to forge an identity in a world determined to tell us who we are.

Ifemelu asks the reader, in a throwaway line, “Why did people ask ‘What is it about?’, as if a novel had to be about only one thing.” Race is undoubtedly at the centre of the novel, but the characters we meet also create a generally nuanced insight into the ways in which humans, all humans, relate to one other and what it means to communicate. Americanah is daring, beautiful, darkly funny and undeniably real. It is Adichie’s most astonishing novel to date.

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