Category: Culture

by Maggie Baring

In 1939, red-headed 28-year-old Viola Hogg embarked on a yearlong tour of Australia and New Zealand with the Australian Gilbert and Sullivan Opera Company, where she played the principal roles for many of their famous operettas, including Josephine in HMS Pinafore, and Mabel in The Pirates of Penzance. It was during her tour of Australia that she met her husband, Frank Tait, who was one of the Tait brothers who contributed significantly to the prosperity of C.J. Williamson’s, an Australian theatrical management company. Viola’s involvement in opera, in particular the operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, led to her membership of the order of Australia, the writing of two books, and a lifelong commitment to the arts in general; helping to establish the Performing Arts Museum in Melbourne and serving for a short time as artistic director of the Williamson Company. 

This inspirational woman, who died in 2002 — the year before I was born – is my great-grandmother, and has been a personal inspiration to me in my artistic endeavours. When Durham Opera Society, therefore, began opening positions for Assistant Director for their upcoming operetta, HMS Pinafore, I jumped at the chance to continue her legacy in some form, and to contribute to the revitalisation of opera for audiences who have, since the mid 1940s, increasingly lost interest. 

Audiences often see opera as an elite form of performance, with inaccessible lyrics (often in a different language), expensive tickets and formal dress requirements. One of DOE’s (Durham Opera Ensemble) aims with our production this term, which will be staged in early March (29^th February-2^nd March), is to debunk these elitist tropes; encouraging informal attire and offering tickets at affordable prices. Gilbert and Sullivan operas are the perfect performances to stage in order to raise the appeal of opera for modern audiences and the younger generation. Pinafore is written in English, containing moments of comedy and satire, whilst the songs themselves are memorable and highly energetic. Recognisable songs and lyrical phrases such as ‘He Is An English Man’ and ‘Sisters, Cousins and Aunts’ will remain stuck in audiences’ heads after the production, if they weren’t already ingrained there from the sheer fame of these iconic scores. The potential for slapstick and pantomime in Gilbert and Sullivan are also endless and deeply exciting for a director. 

DOE’s attempt to appeal to families with young children is a part of the company’s vision of inspiring a love for opera in young hearts that has perhaps been lost in the modern era. DOE has allocated a specific performance (the Saturday Matinee) and are also encouraging informal attire when attending the production. It is unfortunate that often, when one asks their friends if they have seen an opera, the reply is often that they have never been due to expense, a lack of interest or an inference that it only appeals to an older generation. The rare occasion one has been, it is often because one of their grandparents forced them.

But Opera does not have to be such an intense, formal and confusing experience. When I first watched a Gilbert and Sullivan production, I was struck by its similarity to musical theatre (the same caricatured cast, vibrant and recognisable songs, simple storyline), and its sense of fun and informality. Furthermore, if one looks for more than just entertainment in their viewing-choices, Gilbert and Sullivan, and HMS Pinafore in particular, also includes some topical debates and political satire about the role of class in society. 

Tickets for the production are already on sale on the DOE website, and I thoroughly recommend a visit. Only a few weeks into intense rehearsals, and the show is shaping up nicely, with a dedicated cast and passionate creative team. The performances will be held at the Assembly Rooms Theatre in week 18.

By Edward Bayliss

Our current season has so often been relied upon in cinema to accelerate some kind of dramatic effect. Importantly, winter hosts the world’s favourite event in the Christian calendar. Think of charity, love, and compassion, along with accentuated feelings of security and warmth; that is, if you have God and triple glazed windows. Just as easily, winter can be a hellishly frigid wasteland, and if that’s not bad enough, you might find yourself on a Norwegian glacier with Nazi zombies chasing after you (Dead Snow). There is such a thing as winter without Christmas.  

Nevertheless, winter cinema isn’t always just a godless freeze, nor is it as simple as warm candles casting long shadows across tastefully decorated drawing rooms. Let’s leave this binary to thaw into a messy puddle and look at two films that toy brilliantly with the season of snow.

Director Michael Dougherty wages war with Christmas – the American Christmas – in his 2015 film, Krampus. The slow motion opening credits show a shopping mall opening to hordes of frenzied shoppers, each looking to get their hands on last minute presents for the festive season. Shots of credit cards, cash, plastic, sickly greens, reds, and golds all drip like syrup before the camera. In this ‘monster of melodrama’, fantastically choreographed fights break out between rival shoppers – even the most grotesque scenes can become beautiful if seen in slow motion. As this plays out, we hear the tinny tune of ‘It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas’. It might look like Christmas, but it doesn’t feel like Christmas. 

And this is what Krampus does so well. It treads a careful path between the horrific and the familiar, the fantastical and the realities of family dysfunction. The eponymous character originates from Austro-Bavarian folklore, and punishes badly behaved children, almost like an anti-Santa. He absolutely brings with him a menace that will frighten younger audiences, including my 12 year old self upon first viewing. But on rewatching it now what seems especially unnerving to me is the subcurrent of uneasiness on which the film awkwardly floats. The constant darkness of winter, the disorientating use of animation, and the apparent question of dream and reality at the end of the film all threaten our sense of truth and fiction. Beneath the clotting accessories and circumstance of Christmas which Krampus so knowingly flaunts, there are mounting feelings of disillusionment on the part of the audience. 

Gasper Noé uses winter sparingly in Climax (2018). For the director, the colour of winter is unmistakably white, with its clinical and undistracting exactness. The notion of mise-en-scène is almost entirely buried under a reliably indifferent blanket of snow. It is in these couple of snow scenes that the camera comes back to its sober sided self, and watches overhead as the story’s fallout unfolds. 

Climax is set almost entirely in a remote empty school building in France, 1996. A dance troupe host celebrations as their rehearsals come to a close, though, unbeknownst to them, their sangria is laced with LSD. Noé takes us on a trip quite unlike any other I’ve seen in cinema. It is exhaustingly colourful, even kaleidoscopic, as the camera becomes entranced (the ‘master shot’ in this episode lasts a staggering 42 minutes). Sweaty and claustrophobic, the school rooms and corridors become a labyrinth with dark corners for even darker deeds.

Like a splash of water to the face, we gasp as we escape the school and are met with a bright shock of snow which brings with it a crisp clarity, both in terms of actual visuals and narrative understanding. Noé places a crawling body in frame against the blank canvas snow, presenting an arresting point of comparison between the stuffy slants of light and shadow in the school complex and the ‘freeing’ embrace of the ice cold winter. 

When you picture winter in cinema, you might think of snow blizzards so bad they look like TV static, honey tongued dialogues between repulsive characters, and the same old love stories over and over again. But let’s not meet this season’s cinema with a sigh.  

Here are a few other films that do interesting things with winter:

Fargo (Joel & Ethan Coen)

The Shining (Kubrick)

Snowpiercer (Bong Joon Ho)

I’m Thinking of Ending Things (Kaufman)

The Thing (Carpenter)

Cool Runnings (Turteltaub)

Groundhog Day (Ramis)

The Hateful Eight (Tarantino)

By Cosmo Adair

“I am deeply honoured and humbled to receive this prestigious award. Kudos to all my distinguished fellow finalists, you have all provided me with many hours of enjoyable reading over the last year.” James Frey was so thrilled with his prize that you’d imagine it was a Booker, a Nobel, or at least a Costa. But no, he’d just won the Literary Review’s Bad Sex Award, awarded to him for an egregious passage in his novel Katerina which reads: “Blinding breathless shaking overwhelming exploding white God I cum inside her my cock throbbing we’re both moaning eyes hearts souls bodies one”: a ridiculously awful sentence, which makes you question not only the limits of stream-of-consciousness narration, but whether anyone should ever be allowed to write about sex again. 

The Bad Sex Award was bestowed annually by the Literary Review until 2020 when they decided that simply “too many bad things” happened that year to justify exposing its readership to more. It was set up by Rhoda Koenig and Auberon Waugh with the intent of ‘[drawing] attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.’ It was, John Maier writes in The Times (“Bonk, bonk! Why it’s time to bring back the Bad Sex Award”), “the one literary prize where you felt the recipient truly deserved to win.” Look at the Roll-Call of its Victors: of the twenty-seven prize winners, only three of them were women. And so, not only did it highlight egregious, unnecessary, or else simply bad writing, but it constitutes a kind of send up of established male authors, letting you see the Narcissists, the Male-Power obsessives, and the Nerds: by that I mean that it gave the impression that most of these writers (including Salman Rushdie, Sebastian Faulks, Tom Wolfe, and John Updike, amongst others) were not only terrible at writing about sex, but that they were terrible at sex. For a few days every year, the public could think to themselves: I might be no Shakespeare, but at least I’m better at Sex. 

Some of the more brilliant entries are: Giles Coren’s Winkler (“… and as she grabbed at his dick, which was leaping around like a shower dropped in an empty bath, she scratched his back deeply with the nails of both hands, he shot three more times, in thick stripes on her chest. Like Zorro.”); Jonathan Safran Foer’s Here I Am (“He jerked off with the determination of someone within sight of Everest’s summit, having lost all his friends and Sherpas, having run out of supplemental oxygen, but preferring death to failure.”); Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls (“I slid down the bed and took his cock in my mouth, shlurping away as if I’d just discovered a particularly juicy pear.”); and John Updike, winner of a Lifetime Achievement Award, in The Widows of Eastwick (“Her face gleamed with his jism in the spotty light of the motel room … She laid her head on his pillow and seemed to want to be kissed. Well, why not? It was his jism.”). 

But, as Julian Gough wrote in The Guardian (“I was nominated for the Bad Sex Award. Don’t laugh”), the competition’s light-hearted nature started to disappear with the rise of social media and its mob of illiterati. People who’d never read his nominated book, Connect, trolled him online. He wrote, “It deliberately and successfully encourages the worst, and dumbest, misreading of fiction; the conflation of authors with their characters in order to publicly shame them. This is regressive cyber-Victorianism in progressive drag.” He discusses how the nature and tone of these ridiculed sex scenes can be understood (surprisingly) when placed back into the context of the book. Connect is about socially awkward teenagers and the nominated passage concerns the protagonist’s first sexual experience: “He sucks on the hard nipple. He has never done this before, and yet; no, wait, of course, it’s totally familiar. The first thing he ever did.” That is the only extract of his fiction which most people have read, and it hardly inspires you to read much more of his writing. 

Auberon Waugh’s involvement in creating the Bad Sex Award was surely influenced by what is the most awkward, strained and poorly written passage of his father, Evelyn’s, oeuvre: “It was as though a deed of conveyance of her narrow loins had been drawn and sealed. I was making my first entry as the freeholder of a property I would enjoy and develop at leisure.” (Brideshead Revisited) Evelyn Waugh himself, questioned on that passage, would argue that the English Language had developed at a time when sex was not freely discussed, let alone written about. Thus the words and phrases which the Dictionary offers for its description are, invariably, crude, if comic in a schoolboy way, whilst most attempts to write it through metaphor feel like uneasy euphemisms. In this way, bad sex writing breaks the third wall: the reader becomes aware of the inadequacy of language and of the writer themselves to discuss such a natural occurrence. This is why it becomes so easy to conflate the author with the sex scene: because poor writing is often the result of the writer becoming too conflated with the work. Martin Amis was right to say that “Very few writers have got anywhere with sex … My father used to say that you can refer to it but you can’t describe it. It’s inherent in the subject. It’s not that someone’s going to hit upon the right way; it’s that there’s no right way … The novelist, unlike the poet, has to be a universal figure and our sexual urges are deuniversalising. There is a Bad Sex prize but there’s no prize for Good Sex. That is probably significant.”

And so, whilst it’s hilarious to think of willies flying about like loose shower-heads and blowjobs in culinary terms, most sex writing vindicates Evelyn Waugh and Martin Amis’ arguments. Most sexual descriptions — be they deliberately comic or highly serious — are funny. Few writers do sex well, since it’s a unique, subjective experience and good writing requires an impersonality that’s hard to achieve when discussing sex. Still, most writers persist: and I respect their noble effort which might, one day, land them unwanted laurels. But, for now, I implore the Editor of the Literary Review to revive the Bad Sex Award, so that whoever writes sex badly does so at their own peril.

by Sophie Holcroft

Talking to Tom O’Sullivan leaves you feeling truly inspired because his passion for music is so infectious. He has been playing the drums for as long as he can remember, performing ‘concerts’ in his living room whilst banging on pots and pans as a two-year-old and getting his first mini toy drum set at just three years old. Renowned for his drumming talent (and eyeliner), he is now at BIMM Brighton where he is moving towards bigger things.

One can only be in awe of Tom’s versatility, and this is reflected in the many bands that he is part of. In January 2023, Tom joined the band Mindframe who tie together elements of Grunge, Math-Rock and Shoegaze, and have performed in Brighton for the last two years, with the occasional show in Bristol and London. Mindframe released their latest single in November which is available on all streaming platforms, and they plan to play across the UK in 2024. Tom also plays in a “Jazz-HipHop-Funk-Prog-Whatever Else six-piece” called Goetia, which was formed out of a jam session in 2022. They are a force to be reckoned with, as after a debut performance at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in Soho, London, Goetia has since signed with Nasty Mode Records and is recording an album in January with legendary producer, Mark Dodson. Tom says, “Going to see Goetia play live is something that everyone should do at least once in their life, the guys in the band are just the most talented musicians.” Tom clearly lives and breathes music, because he spends his spare time playing as many session or dep gigs as he can, with recent artists including Tamara Kramar, LIZMNK, Molly Thorne and many others. For Tom, “there is no better feeling than playing gigs – once you get a taste for it you just can’t stop. When you are performing with your best mates and the audience loves the music you are playing, that’s a special feeling. Performing is one of the only times I feel completely present.”

Tom’s interest and ability to play such a breadth of genres of music means his sound “is a bit messed up really.” His inspirations vary from Rock legends like Dave Grohl through to jazz pioneers like Max Roach and Elvin Jones and Fusion players like Vinnie Colaiuta. His own musical career so far has been a medley too, starting off playing Rock and Pop music before getting into Metal and then studying Jazz and Afro-Cuban drumming for 5 years. Tom says he “really likes having the variety,” from making people mosh with Mindframe on a Saturday and then playing in a jazz show with artist, Sambambo, on a Sunday.

When asked about the music scene in Brighton, Tom lit up, as he feels it really is “second to none, it’s hard to put into words… Whatever kind of music you are into, you can find it – whatever kind of music you make, there is a place for you to perform. Venues like Hope and Ruin and The Prince Albert provide a stage for up-and-coming artists, allowing anyone to get their foot in the door – Green Door being the beating heart of the Brighton music scene.” Unsurprisingly, Tom loves going to as many live music events as possible and supporting grassroots venues. With Brighton being a hub of musical activity, Tom says, “at least two or three grassroots gigs are happening on any given night, all within about a ten minute walk of each other. Including support bands, you can quite easily find yourself accidentally seeing over ten bands a week.” This constant exposure to creativity and innovation inevitably has a ripple effect.

Tom’s goal moving forward is to keep creating music with the incredible musicians that he works with and to play his music to as many people as possible. He feels that “there is nothing better than writing music you really care about with people you love and sharing that with whoever wants to listen.” Without being prompted, Tom spreads love for his art by offering the following advice, “if anyone is, or knows anyone who is thinking about going out and doing music, absolutely go for it! You meet the best people, have the best experiences and make the best memories – it definitely beats a 9-5 desk job.” Do you see what I meant by infectious now?

Go follow Tom on Instagram – @tjsixx and keep your ear to the ground for his next moves. Have a listen to @mindframeuk and @goetiaofficial and if you’re in Brighton, keep an eye out for his gigs!

By Harry Laventure

The Photograph: 695 x 1005mm, 1984. 

More precisely, one month after being battered. The eyes neither project nor accuse, but retain a grandiosity in the look of two distinct acts. White as marble, crimson as blood, her twin axes speak in the binary colour-coding of a pill. Bruises orbit like the curls of withered petals, autumnal, but the vulnerability here is only physical. Sparked coils, almost regal, drape over the shoulders in simple decadence, and frame the punctuation mark of the picture: the rouge glamor of lips in pout, hardened. It is in this defiant diarism that we meet Nan Goldin face to face in her early career, stoic and honest to the beatings she received to conclude the “crav[ing], dependency, the adoration, the satisfaction, the security” of her relationship with an older man. Follow through to 1^st July 2019, and we are electrified by the same spirit as she lies Louvre-side, still as a corpse, below a rippled slab of vermillion accusation: “SHAME ON SACKLER”.

It is in admiration of this vital force that ArtReview have recently awarded Goldin the top spot on their Power 100 list for artists of the highest influence. Such recognition titillates even the casual observer as to the merit upon which it is rewarded, and it is under the admission of such scepticism – I blame the Englishness – that I found myself investigating the life and work of Nan Goldin. What a mockery would come of my brambles. 

On 12^th September 1953, Nancy ‘Nan’ Goldin was born to middle-class Jewish parents in Washinton D.C., before growing up in the deliciously named Swampscott, Massachusetts. Her early years were bedfellows to numerous tensions and tragedies, and by the age of eleven both the claustrophobia of her parents’ expectations and the suicide of her elder sister Barbara had amputated Goldin from any sense of domestic comfort. At the mercy of a carousel of foster homes, she would next find permanence in her enrolment at Satya Community School in Lincoln, aged 16. Perhaps as well timed as it was ostensibly trivial, a Polaroid camera found its way into Goldin’s possession here on the back of a grant. This has since been autobiographically retrojected as the artist’s first finding of her “voice”. 

Within two years, Goldin had “[fallen] in with the drag queens” of downtown Boston. These would become her subjects, her muses, but most importantly her family. Indeed, the raw tenderness of Goldin’s first major publication The Ballad of Sexual Dependency resonates to this day, and gently showcases the intimate haze of neon Lepidoptera that defined the queer scene of the time. The style and content of The Ballad cannot be over pronounced in their influence. Her ‘snapshot’ portraits of friends at their most open capture the universal humanity of that desire for connection, in whatever manifestation of sexuality it is to be realized. In her own words, the direction of The Ballad was “to kind of glorify them” in admiration for those “who can recreate themselves and manifest their fantasies publicly”. 

Perhaps there is no more lucid an expression of this than Trixie on the Cot, New York City, 1979. Between the carelessly sensual debris of magazines, empty bottles, and cans of beer, the eponymous Trixie luxuriates like a psychedelic take on Boucher’s Madame de Pompadour. Draped in an anthology of ivories and rubies, cigarette perched between fingers and lips, she casually cradles her battered high heels. A camera lies to her left, its back ironically turned to the scene, and deaf to the bohemian elegance beyond. Quite a wily if unintentional symbol, one could wager. Further still, the magnetism of Rise and Monty Kissing, New York City, 1980 bottles the salacious lightning that pulsates through Goldin’s early work. The pair are unapologetic, absorbed, and as ignorant of as ignoring the observer in the orbit of their desire. Here, as in so much of The Ballad, Goldin articulates a truth that does not have to be staged for it to be demonstrated. 

The diaristic, deliberately unchoreographed style of these works has contributed to their endurance and continued resonance as much as the content. The hagiographists among us enjoy the idea that Goldin precipitated the social-media-style of photography that is so omnipresent in contemporary content. While I may not share such retrospective elasticity of optimism in the aesthetic components of this argument, what sings to me is the spirit behind her work. The courage to capture so much of one’s life and lives is a factor that has become all too familiar to us. And yet, Goldin’s insistence on elevating it to the boldest walls of galleries (and consequently below the loftiest noses of criticism) was unquestionably radical and revolutionary. 

As such, it was not without consequence. Freely exposing so much of oneself to the caprice of review is a posture for the confident or unwitting. In this period, Goldin has freely admitted to wanting to be a “junkie”, the “slum goddess” of whom bands like The Velvet Underground and Television wrote. The honest portrayal thereof, in all its excess and masochism, has been criticised as glamourising images in the circuit of the “heroin chic” tagline, with grave implications for those under her influence. The tortured artist trope is nearly as old as art itself, and Goldin’s intimate reflections of her own bouts of addiction personify the archetype without the usual protective distance of a name on a novel’s title page or below a painting. Perhaps there is a particularly cruel if tenuous parallel between Dostoevsky writing “The Gambler” to pay off his gambling debts, and the commercial success of Goldin’s “heroin chic” epoch funding her crippling OxyContin habit later in life. 

The nature of the criticism she received becomes more twisted still in its accusations of voyeuristic tendencies. For all the vibrant and animated beauty of her corpus, it is not without darkness. Gotscho kissing Gilles, Paris 1993 captures the ravages of the AIDS crisis in a personal, private setting. The former gently presses his lips onto the forehead of the latter, whose eyes weakly pry themselves open to burrow into the camera lens, and our sympathies behind. It is a brutally uncomfortable image. We cannot help but feel invasive, inappropriately forced into a setting of mourning usually reserved for the related. Questions of being imposters in this arena are natural, and easy to extend to the person behind the camera. The moment certainly raises disconcerting questions about the relationship of subject and object in art more generally. Does the solidification of a few images as representative of a person leave too much space for unfair projection or manipulation? Where is the border between the person behind and in front of the lens, and is it immoral to add such inflection of meaning to a scene that should or could be “objective”?

My apologies for the evasion, but this is neither the right writer nor setting to provide confident answers to these issues and their accompanying fragrances. And yet, perhaps we may poke at cadence with respect to Goldin herself. There is an obvious if implicit resolution in Goldin’s practical responses to such claims. I do wager that she is unquestionably a force for good in her exposure and humanisation of the more taboo queer subjects within her contemporary scene. The sincerity and intimacy of her works in this field are revelatory in their glorification of her family’s then-unorthodox beauty. Moreover, following her own struggles with addiction to OxyContin, Goldin has proclaimed that becoming an activist is “more important to [her] than propelling [her] art career”. Indeed, the “die-in” rallies and personal missions of Goldin’s P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) have found such gravitas as to remove the Sackler name from gallery after gallery, even dissuading the Royal Portrait Gallery from taking a £1.5 million donation from the Purdue Pharma magnates.

With respect to the queries of voyeurism and the recklessness of her biography, I think it of the utmost importance to appreciate just how much of herself is in the work. With the camera as her “voice”, Goldin gives us a flipbook dialogue through which she negotiates her own personality through immense tragedy and hardship. Whilst I do not claim a total absence of artistic direction within her work, we must note our privilege of responding to it rather than participating in it. The characters of her corpus are not topics under examination, they are her “party”, and perhaps the family she deserved. The love affairs had their reverberations in the strands of her social spheres; the deaths and victims were sincere losses to the community that she was a member of. Placement thereof in a private, intimate setting only magnifies the impact on an observer detached from personal connection to it. Perhaps I mean to say that, to me, Goldin is not clipping the wings of butterflies to collect them, so much as she moves to accompany and admire them in flight. 

These remarks are of course my own, and my only desire in writing this is to stimulate your own interpretations of her work. The critics continue to laud: her 2022 biopic All the Beauty and the Bloodshed was peppered with awards and applause, and her placement on ArtReview’s list will only prompt more panegyrics and vitriol. Goldin’s original pledge to her friends was to “reflect to you the beauty that you are ”. In her constellations of ragged decadence, excess, intimacy, sincerity, trauma, and ultimate splendor, we must grant her that.

Brava, Nan Goldin. 

by Vadim Goss

The English Language, in all of its forms, holds a particular place for those who were born outside of its whiteness. It is the language of the oppressor; no amount of lectures on Wordsworthian poetics nor Wildean stylistics can ever erase its association with centuries of colonial enterprise. In the colonial era, the English Language itself became a product, in which its reproduction was enforced upon a population on whom this product would always be semiotic of the language and culture they had lost. It wasn’t enough for this language to be shared with native languages, it had to create total erasure. In other words, there could be no before, only after. Only then would it serve as the signifier to Empire’s and by extension whiteness’s power; only then would it become a product of whiteness itself; and any non-white seeking to attempt the language would only be, could only be, appropriating it—cementing their status as what Edward Said calls “The Other”. So it must have been hard for those same ideologues when an African-American homosexual expatriate living in Paris became the most important prose writer in the English Language since James Joyce. 

James Baldwin was never able to shed the language oppressed onto him. A language that, even by the publishing of his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, he had mastered. In their famous debate at the Cambridge Union, William F. Buckley accused Baldwin of adopting a ‘British accent’, in turn suggesting that Baldwin was in effect “acting white” for the white audience. Baldwin, throughout his whole career and indeed his whole life, was faced with an insurmountable situation: for if the English Language is a White Language, then how can a Black man—to which this language has been forcibly imposed upon—preserve his own identity if in the very words he speaks assumes an inexorable reproduction of that whiteness? Moreover, how can he escape being a product of a White system to which he is unwillingly reproducing? 

Ultimately, how could James Baldwin speak in his own words, and not theirs? 

As a Black and Gay man, Baldwin spent all of his career resisting the relegating categorisation a white-heteronormative literary culture sought to reduce him into. Already it had happened with his first novel and his subsequent essay collection Notes of a Native Son. He was known as a “Black writer” producing “Black Literature”. That such a thing would continue to happen was something he acknowledged even before the seminal Giovanni’s Room was published. Hence why he chose not to feature any Black characters in the story: a decision prompted out of protest at the literature culture placing genre onto an identity. Still, upon the release of Giovanni’s Room it fell immediately into the sub-genre of “Gay Literature”. To make my point clearer, “White Literature” is just called “Literature”. 

These false genre handles served a purpose designed to thwart Baldwin. It was a deliberate tactic designed by a literary marketplace that governed itself in line with this normativity; with the explicit purpose of delegitimising his artistic merit by characterising his work as deliberately divisive; whilst simultaneously knowing they could profit from his work by marketing its taboo subjects as forbidden novelties. And by emphasising these traits of his work, it was thus a design to subsume this perception about his work as the content of it entirely. This measure was employed by normative critics determined to impose their definition as the only meaning to the novel; and to destroy its chances of ever being perceived as great art by ridding his art of its nuance and depth. This ensured normative and deviated identities remained such. It was an attempt by the literary canon to propagate a taxonomy that supported a system guaranteeing what was deemed normative, i.e. whiteness and heterosexuality, control. They controlled the discourse; so they controlled the reception.   

And it wasn’t so much because of Baldwin’s own, so-called “deviated” identity that triggered Giovanni’s Room’s reception, but rather, it was the novel’s topic matter. Literature by the 1950s had more than become accustomed to homosexual writers, so long as queerness itself remained out of the pages, or at best, only subversively hinted at. That’s not to say there were no stories depicting queerness, but they could never be considered with the same aesthetic and formalistic merit they deserved compared to their heteronormative peers. Nor could they end happily—indeed this was an explicit, editorial order by publishers. Love was not allowed to transcend in queer stories; queerness had to cause ruin. If it didn’t it would not be published. All stories centring on homosexuality were, and could only ever really be about shame. Giovanni’s Room, in all of its brilliance, could not escape this.

But Baldwin refused to hide nor did he accept the consequence of being visible. So when Another Country was published in 1962, a story that featured characters both gay and straight, black and white, it could no longer fit into these categories forcing critics to revaluate their approach to his work—with The Sunday Times writing, ‘Let other novelists read Mr. Baldwin and tremble. There’s a whirlwind loose in the land.’ Baldwin had wagered how his contemporary society’s obsession with racial and sexual barriers would not be able to contain a novel determined to show them “another” world in which all aspects of identity could intersect. He was correct—with the ‘whirlwind’ becoming an apt metaphor in describing how the rigorous system, which prevented Baldwin from ever being able to speak, had finally been turned against those who had imposed it in the first place. Language, which had been designed to designate a normative and an Other, had now been used to demonstrate their assimilation. 

This, by his own admission, became Baldwin’s chief ambition. As he stated in the short film Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris, when asked who he is writing for, he responds: ‘I’m writing for people, baby. I don’t believe in White people. I don’t believe in Black people either for that matter.’ White and Black; Straight and Gay, are all labels all supplanted by an equal Humanity.

Through this tenet Baldwin saw how segregation was detrimental not just to Black Americans, but all Americans. Because it encouraged a system which disallowed the opportunity for unity under this common, universal flag of humanity. Nation, race, religion, sex: in Baldwin’s eyes the taxonomy associated with each category, and the categorisation itself, detracted and prevented society from achieving this ultimate realisation. Suddenly, writing wasn’t enough to communicate this necessary message. It was why he became such a revered orator during the Civil Rights Movement, and why he expanded his work into public speaking to begin with. He was a public speaker who could write; he was a writer who was just as eloquent with a microphone as he was with a typewriter. And if, in his novels and his essays he matched the compassion of Martin Luther King, then it was in his rhetoric he emulated the determined fire of Malcom X. Indeed, if Malcom X symbolised the sword and Luther King the shield of the Civil-Rights Movement then it was Baldwin who symbolised the knight capable of wielding them both.

James Baldwin took the language forced upon him and claimed it for his own. In turn, he became the first Black-Gay writer who was able to successfully, on a public scale, integrate blackness and queerness into a white and heterosexual aesthetic. English Literature as such owes him a debt. For Baldwin reminds us that language and literature can and should belong to everyone, in equal measure. And whilst, yes, the English Language and overall literary aesthetic of today can still be seen in terms of hetero-whiteness due to its societal role as the normative, he made it possible for future Black, Queer, and other minority writers to assert their own agency over a language which historically took it away. James Baldwin knew his limitations: he could not erase history, but he could write his own. 

By Lydia Firth.

I grew up with my Dad being an ultimate hardcore Bob Dylan fan, to the extent that he claimed he no longer needed to listen to his music as he knew every song and every line (absurd behaviour). I dismissed Dylan’s music as a shambolic attack on the ears made for balding English teachers to harp on about. Cut to several years ago, my two elder brothers joined the Dylan fanbase and proceeded to have long conversations with him about his extensive back catalogue and to wash up after dinner to the dulcet tones of a man with a voice like a revving motorbike. They were completely captivated by him, and I simply did not get it. 

Around that time, I was beginning to find my way into the world of 60s and 70s music and I stumbled upon Joni Mitchell. I was immediately mesmerised by her and her music. I spent a year listening almost exclusively to Joni, immersing myself in her rich world. To my family’s delight, I no longer resisted the pull of folk music, but I gave in to its seduction. She became my Bob Dylan.

Joni’s equally colossal discography demonstrates her incredibly versatile talent, starting with her 1968 debut album ‘Song to a Seagull’ which reflects her wistful and elaborate storytelling abilities, contrasting with her later more mature and worldly jazz albums. In 1971, she released ‘Blue’ which has to be the ultimate no-skip album – every song is absolutely sublime. To no surprise, it is regarded by music critics as one of the greatest albums of all time. It is intensely personal (‘Little Green’ talks of Joni’s daughter, whom she gave up for adoption in 1965) and yet feels like both an ode to the female experience and a perfectly precise and tragic “break-up album”. The last track on the album, ‘The Last Time I Saw Richard’, opens with this verse:

‘The last time I saw Richard was Detroit in ’68

And he told me all romantics meet the same fate someday

Cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark cafe

You laugh, he said you think you’re immune, go look at your eyes

They’re full of moon

You like roses and kisses and pretty men to tell you

All those pretty lies, pretty lies

When you gonna realize they’re only pretty lies

Only pretty lies, just pretty lies’.

This embodies her hopeful yet embittered personality that we can track throughout her music, a fusion of romanticism and pessimism that I both adore and identify with. In ‘Woman of Heart and Mind’ from the underrated 1972 album ‘For the Roses’, she untangles romance and disappointment:

‘Drive your bargains

Push your papers

Win your medals

Fuck your strangers

Don’t it leave you on the empty side’.

This cutting summary of her ex-lover’s downfalls feels particularly loaded when combined with an f-bomb and sung by a woman who also sings of eyes ‘full of moon’. She really is a woman who can do it all.

Not only does she sing of love and loss, but her lyrics are also steeped with political sentiment. The well-known ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ (1970), despite sounding upbeat, addresses worryingly current environmental concerns, and ‘Sex Kills’ (1994) talks of ‘little kids packin’ guns to school’. It is undeniable that Joni is politically and emotionally perceptive and perpetually current.

So, my Joni obsession began. I became far less resistant to the harmonica-infused tones of Bob Dylan and I was now able to join in with my family’s folk-based conversations and bond with my Dad, who was, and still is, impressed by the Google Home’s ability to play any song you ask for. 
Ironically, Joni absolutely detested any comparisons to Dylan, as she was often (sexistly) paralleled as the female equivalent to him. But, for me, she was that female equivalent. I was drawn in by her musical, emotional, and poetic brilliance. She stated ‘We are like night and day, [Dylan] and I… Bob is not authentic at all.’. Whether or not to agree with this contentious statement aside; they are night and day, with Mitchell providing a perfect, and equally strong, antidote to the domination of Dylan in both my household, and the music world.

By Max Shanagher

Sitting on the DLR to Woolwich, I started to question the life decisions that I had taken six months previously. Six months ago, at the Library bar in Durham, my friend and I decided to start an Immersive Theatre company. My only problem was that I didn’t really know what immersive theatre was. In my head, I must admit, I had a hipster version of the London Dungeon where over-confident actors are followed by over-pretentious audience members.  

So as I sat on the DLR to Woolwich, I was questioning whether it was wise to get involved with a theatre company that specialises in it. These questions were finally given an answer when I reached my destination: Punchdrunk’s ‘The Burnt City’.  

Now, these four words may not make any sense to you (they certainly didn’t to me) so I shall define both ‘Punchdrunk’ andThe Burnt City. Punchdrunk is an immersive theatre company that was founded in 2000 who hire large venues and convert them into elaborate, multi-room spanning plays. In New York, they perform a play called Sleep No More that takes place in the McKittrick Hotel, an abandoned hotel from the 1940s. Sleep No More is a Noir adaptation of Macbeth, and audience members are allowed to explore the hotel and to decide which rooms they want to stay in or which actors they want to follow.  

The Burnt City is this premise of audience autonomy brought to two large arsenal buildings in Woolwich Dockyard. The play takes place over two spaces and is set at the time of the Trojan War, with one building being designated to represent Greece and one to represent Troy. I went with my family and was excited to see their reaction to the completely converted arsenals. 

Entering the arsenals, I was struck by the scale and detail with which the set was constructed. I was able to wander into rooms and read letters sent from soldiers back home. I lost my family quite quickly, as encouraged by the actors at the start, but once entering the wide expansive room representing Greece, I saw a man who seemed to have found the only seat in the whole venue, and I assumed it to be my dad. You are not allowed to talk in Punchdrunk performances, but I approached this strange figure and asked him what he thought of it so far. Thankfully, it was my dad, but I wasn’t thankful for his one-word response: ‘bizarre’. I suppose it was bizarre. All the audience were wearing masks and were dotted around the different rooms searching for meaning in these choreographed spaces. That was the joy I thought though, the feeling of being able to choose my experience and choose what I get out of the play was unlike any other theatre I had been to. 

It seemed fresh and new to me, and reinvigorated my passion for theatre. It may have felt fresh, but it wasn’t particularly new. In the 1980s, Laura Farabough wrote and directed Surface Tension which took place in a swimming pool, first performed at UC Berkeley Campus. In India, there have been performances of Ramlila since the 19th Century, the play having been inscribed into UNESCO world heritage status in 2008. In a performance of Ramlila, according to UNESCO the ‘audience is invited to sing and take part in narration’ and the audience take active roles in the production. This is the blueprint for immersive theatre: audience autonomy and transforming spaces into theatrical realms.  

Why this type of theatre feels to me particularly relevant to modern times is because of the theatrical potential for virtual reality, augmented reality, and AI. Virtual reality has almost the same premise as immersive theatre: transforming the virtual space and allowing the participant to have autonomy in their decisions. Augmented reality similarly is about transforming space and AI may have the potential to change the ability to improvise in theatre. Immersive theatre allows for audiences to have real, lived experiences where they might have otherwise had a virtual experience. Making the effort to see a play in person and seeing the dedication that actors and the crew put into creating a performance is unlike anything that can currently be achieved by these technological advances.  

There is no hiding in immersive theatre but that is the joy of it. Seeing live performances, with their brilliance and their mistakes is what makes theatre, to me, so great. The allure of being able to decide your own journey does not have to be limited to the virtual world, but can also be physical and present. All this I realised on the slightly less bleak return journey from Woolwich. 

Which brings me to Antony and Cleopatra, a play I’ve been directing for the past few months. We have hired Durham’s Student Union Ballroom, and for three performances, are transforming it into Egypt and Rome across two rooms. The audience can decide at the start whether they would prefer to be in Egypt and Rome, and from that point on will have different experiences. Getting actors (some of whom specialise in classical theatre) to imagine the audience in rehearsals and work on their improvisational skills has been a joy.  

Thanks to Hetty, Kate, and Teagan, our student writers, we have been able to create a simultaneous script for Egypt and Rome, inspired by Shakespeare’s script. Shakespeare’s language is key, however, and supports our reasoning that the play would adapt well to immersive theatre because of its focus on space and the occupation of different spaces. One of my favourite lines from the play is Enobarbus’ ‘Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale | Her infinite variety’ in describing Cleopatra. In many ways I see these lines to describe theatre as well, immersive theatre, in my view, currently contributing a small but important part to theatre’s ‘infinite variety’. 

Antony and Cleopatra will be performed on the 10th and 11th of November in Dunelm House. Find out more via @walkaboutproductions on Instagram.

Photo Credit: westendtheatre.com

By Cosmo Adair.

“All romantics meet the same fate

Some day, cynical and drunk and boring

Someone in some dark cafe.”

Joni Mitchell, “The Last Time I Saw Richard”

Hollywood Boulevard, 1940. Two lovers, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sheilah Graham, are strolling along as the blue sky fades to pearly darkness. He recites a poem. They notice an advertisement outside of a record store which reads: “Make your own records — Hear yourself speak.” They enter, and he begins to speak into the microphone, reciting John Masefield’s “On Growing Old”, before reaching its final couplet: 

“Only stay quiet while my mind remembers

The beauty of fire from the beauty of embers.”

That second “beauty” gets caught in his throat. He reads on, now his favourite poem, the one whose words have found their modern reimaginings in so many of his works, John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale”. He dwells, quite lovingly, on each delicate syllable, before tailing off at the close of the third stanza, where he misquotes and says: “And new love cannot live beyond tomorrow … Or beauty cannot live.”

Herein lies both the biographer and the critic’s dream — a moment of recognition, as a percussive sadness sets in, one which turns back with vague glimpses of the past, and looks forwards, ‘beyond tomorrow,’ and sees the exit-lights dully flashing. As Jonathan Bate questions in Bright Star, Green Light was Fitzgerald, here, moved by a sense that Keats was not only writing of his own fears of mortality, but with an “uncanny anticipation” of Fitzgerald’s own fears that his twilight relationship with Sheilah Graham would soon end, and that the beauty he had sought in his novels would not survive? After so many miserable years of alcoholism and depression, of “the process of breaking down” as he calls it in The Crack-Up, had he now found an aesthetic close, an ending befitting his characters — those great Romantic heroes, all of whom are cut-down or beaten or embittered by the realities of an unforgiving world, but who receive some restitution of dignity in the recognition of the beauty of their dream. 

Throughout his life, Fitzgerald suffered from prolonged bouts of depression and from an indefatigable alcoholism. An early literary career, imbibed with phenomenal talent, which had promised so much — with This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, and The Great Gatsby, all published within five years of each other — tailed off into alcoholic black-out, with only one more novel, Tender is the Night, published in the next fifteen years. There is, throughout his life and works, a sense that the impossibility of squaring his romantic pursuits and ideals — of beauty, of love, of Art — with the real world condemned him to sadness and a presiding sense of failure. 

In The Crack-Up, a candid sequence of three essays dealing with his depression, he writes that “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and yet still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.” This seems a fitting guide to both his life and to his characters: that despite the hopelessness and futility of life, you need to keep the dream alive — of Daisy, in Gatsby’s case, or else of Beauty in Fitzgerald’s — so that life might remain bearable. 

That’s at the heart of The Great Gatsby’s famous conclusion: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further … And one fine morning — So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Had Gatsby not been killed, he would have navigated a disillusioned 1930s in much the same way as Fitzgerald did: as soon as the ideal of Daisy has been shattered that elusive green light loses its meaning. Gatsby, like Fitzgerald, would have adhered to Joni Mitchell’s words in the above quote: “All romantics … [become] cynical and drunk and boring.” The child whose sandcastle has collapsed becomes an advocate for the futility of sandcastles. So it is with our dreams and ideals — but ours tend to be smaller than Gatsby’s, smaller than Fitzgerald’s, and we must ‘run faster, stretch out our arms further’, even if all we meet is failure and futility. 

For Fitzgerald, the dream’s death was like the death of the sun; after it, he could only declare, “I must continue to be a writer because that was my only way of life, but I would cease any attempt to be a person — to be kind, just, or generous.” But in that recording of 1940, as he stutters over ‘Beauty’ and misquotes Keats’ “Nightingale”, there is a sense that — somewhere, between the mists of depression and booze, under the influence of a beautiful but fleeting love with Sheilah Graham — he recalls that dream which once so enthused and justified him and his life’s work, and that there is a sadness, an inenarrable sadness, in the recognition that he so easily relinquished his dreams and that so much beauty was wasted. And so, that year, as the bombs began to fall in London and Europe shrunk to the size of a map, Fitzgerald drank himself to death at the age of only forty-four, taking him with him a little bit of the Beauty and the Romance so needed in a world which, day-by-day, was self-flagellating into ugly and brutal deformity.