(Post-) Secret Society

Mon 21 Jun 2010

‘I tell people I do yoga to be healthy and stay in shape. Secretly I do yoga to stay flexible so I won’t be bad in bed’. ‘My mom killed my dad long before he killed himself’ ‘I don’t really love you’ Can you keep a secret? My secret is a sad, obsessive addiction. An addiction to other peoples’ hidden scandal, other peoples’ sins, other peoples’ failings, other peoples' regrets. An addiction to a captivating, stimulating, delicious form of art. An art that brings the same thousands of viewers back each week, each day even, to appreciate, to ponder, and to reflect. For those of you who have missed the boat, I’m addicted to the internet phenomenon that is Postsecret.com PostSecret began in January 2005 as the brainchild of American, Frank Warren. The concept of the project is very simple: to display on the web the secrets of anonymous Americans, mailed into the site on a personally decorated postcard. The site is updated each Sunday morning with a brand n ...

Femme Fatigue

Mon 12 Apr 2010

I am definitely speaking for every single person in the world when admitting that the first thing I think of upon hearing the term ‘literary heroine’ is a very BBC image of Elizabeth Bennett sticking it to the man (the gender and the system), speaking when she’s not spoken to, and generally walking around fields being empowered. Like Gloria Gaynor, but in a muddy petticoat and charmingly bedraggled bonnet. I think of Wuthering Heights’ Cathy running free on the moors, enchained only by an all-consuming crippling love for a man she cannot have; a beautifully tragic image, if not inextricably linked with a late ‘70s Kate Bush. I then ponder Scarlett O’Hara, who marries all the wrong people and gets bit too hung up on a particularly symbolic plantation; Anna Karenina, who was a bit too hung up and symbolic in general; Madame Bovary and Lady Chatterley, who as far as I could tell were just pretty nasty to their poor long-suffering husbands, Jane Eyre, Moll Flanders... There’s ...

Bourne Again

Sat 20 Feb 2010

Even those who have not yet seen Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake will have been hard pressed to escape the posters prominent in the tube throughout the noughties or else might have caught Adam Cooper’s brief appearance as the swan at the end of Billy Elliot. The production is now in its fifteenth year, making it the longest running ballet in both the West End and on Broadway, which is a tribute to the brilliance of Bourne’s choreography, design and eye to detail. What struck me the most when I watched it recently, for the third time, was how the dance has matured with time. Whether I had become more astute or whether Bourne has refined and developed the production, I could not say, yet I certainly understood much more what Bourne is getting at. The development of Swan Lake owes much to both Bourne’s later productions (in particular The Car Man and Dorian Grey ) and to the triumphs of the Gay Rights Movement in the new millennium. The prince is not driven into the arms of a m ...

Freshly grown tunes, locally sourced

Thu 4 Feb 2010

In one of those feeble bits of filler copy that consitute G2 , I recall once reading some loser whose proudest vaunt was that he had known Joy Division when they were Warsaw, back in a Salford establishment called Eric’s. If all else fails, I fully expect to eke my moments through by reiterating, similarly, that I knew the most lyrical, melodic body of musicians in Britain back when they were just Stornoway, performing to a humble diehard audience of 600 or so Oxford students and residents in the Sheldonian Theatre, with only an orchestra apiece to back them up.The brag, I accept, falls a little flat. Stornoway have arrived already, and I cannot discover them, only depict them as accurately – and hence as glowingly – as I can. In the invidious classifications of their industry, this band have easily been subsumed under the banner of the “alternative”, and it is important to express first just how effective an alternative to the alternative Stornoway in fact are. Their lyric ...

Letter from Prague

Mon 9 Nov 2009

In 1791 a vast outdoor exhibition took place in Prague to mark the coronation as King of Bohemia of the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II. The celebrations included the first performance of what was to be Mozart’s penultimate opera, La Clemenza di Tito. Its story, of an emperor who shows mercy even to those who plot against him, was no doubt intended to appeal to a ruler who had already pursued peace in Europe with considerable intelligence and skill. The century following Leopold’s death was dominated by a period of enlightenment and increasing industrialization, during which Bohemia witnessed a sea-change in the form of the Czech National Revival. Although still technically part of Austro-Hungary, the Czechs under the Revivalists laid claim to their own history, culture and most importantly their original language. All of this was reflected in the 1891 centenary exhibition, this time held in a purpose-built ‘crystal palace’ at Holešovice, in the loop of the river Vltava. ...

Nicolas Roeg’s Performance (1970) & the East End gangster

Sat 17 Oct 2009

Performance (1970) is an era-defining film, a dark, sexy portrayal of 60s rock ‘n’ roll and the East End gangster underworld, which makes more contemporary directors like Guy Ritchie’s gangster films pall in comparison. Though visually and musically exciting, and with star performances from the central characters, the film reveals the darker, rotten layer of Sixties bohemia. The main characters are all suffering identity crises, as the dream of the decade comes to a sharp decline. As identities merge and intertwine, mainly that of rock-star Turner, and the East End gangster Chas (pitched perfectly by James Fox), the film seems to challenge perceived notions of masculinity and sexuality. With its mixture of Kray-inspired gangsterism and rock ‘n’ roll psychedelia, Performance is an immensely influential film on the British gangster genre. The fluidity of identity between the characters is one of the central themes of the film. Chas and Turner are frequently merged and c ...

I’d Have Liked The Set

Fri 9 Oct 2009

An excerpt from a great work of literature always makes a good talking-point, and so I selected for this article’s title an utterance of Horace Slughorn, the Potions Professor at Hogwarts during Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince . Professor Slughorn is here expressing his disappointment at failing to receive Sirius Black as a pupil along with the rest of the Black family. Like any discerning cultural commentator, on returning from a recent holiday I rushed to watch the new Harry Potter film. It had met a mixed word-of-mouth reception, but I enjoyed it about as much as I had expected to, and especially Jim Broadbent as the said Slughorn. Broadbent’s performance embodied a skilfully rendered cliché, one that has popped up a lot in reaction to paedophile hysteria, and in the wake of The History Boys – namely that of the pleasant and unaggressive academic pederast.Yet while this archetype has tripped merrily from Sir John Falstaff, to many a mid-20th century novel, to Martin ...

Julius Caesar: undernourished, overcomplicated

Sun 14 Jun 2009

Excluding Timon of Athens , as modern theatre mercifully does, Julius Caesar is Shakespeare's worst Roman play. The others have their faults - Troilus and Cressida , in particular, swamps its fascinating heroine with one of literature's dreariest takes on the Trojan War - but no Roman tragedy is as potentially difficult as Caesar . Despite an abundance of Shakespeare's most famous lines - if the audience isn't lending its ears, it's crying havoc and letting slip the dogs of war, &c &c, the uneasy prequel to Antony and Cleopatra often disappoints. Unfortunately, Lucy Bailey's new production for the RSC fails to solve any of the problems of the text. Instead, visual trickery and multimedia effects fail to disguise sloppy characterisation and a lack of directorial grip.Grip is what is needed here. From the page to the stage, this production is a mess. There's no real protagonist: Caesar himself is dead by the interval, leaving us with a choice of Brutus, Cassius and Octav ...