Category: Reviews

By Maggie Baring

I find myself, once again, unable to write about anything other than Noah Kahan. Hot off the heels of a Grammy nomination this February and a final re-release of his Stick Season album — complete with a new song, ‘Forever’, and eight other songs featuring special guests such as Hozier and Sam Fender — Noah Kahan played two sold out shows at Wembley Arena this week. I had the utter privilege of witnessing night two. The tickets were bought months ago, before Noah Kahan was huge, before Grammy nominations and number ones, so they were highly anticipated. 

Even so, the cheapest seats I could find saw us sitting at, laughably, the furthest point from the stage. You could not have picked a worse seat. The electricity of the entire evening nevertheless assured that not a single person in the arena left without being moved in some way. Kahan himself, in one of his many quippy comments between songs, outlined his aim for the evening: that if anybody left the concert with a smile on their face, he had not done his job properly. This was undoubtedly met with laughter, and as I looked around me it was definitely difficult to find a frowning one. In fact, Noah Kahan fans, of which I proudly call myself an avid one, are very lovely people. The atmosphere of love, empathy and charged emotion shared between ten thousand people, gently swaying to the slower more gut-wrenching songs, or dancing manically — arms around one another or holding hands — to the faster-paced songs, can be attributed to the kind of people who listen to Noah Kahan’s music. I have been to my fair share of concerts where the fans have felt on-par with rowdy football fans, and so I understand first-hand how an atmosphere in a venue as well as the attitude of the audience can affect the impression of the music. Kahan has spoken frequently about his gratitude to his parents for encouraging him from a very early age to be open about his emotions, and teaching him how to convey them through talking and later singing. The fans that flock to listen to his songs are similarly emotionally intelligent. There was a deep sense of camaraderie and support, and my friend and I spoke to surrounding fans at our seats in the very back with a friendliness that one rarely finds among strangers. A shared love of music, and an understanding of the deep feelings that underlie each song, is truly a powerfully bonding force. 

Now onto the concert itself. After a rather drawn out start to the concert, with an opening from up-and-coming Wild Rivers at 7.30pm, a set that only lasted 45 minutes followed by an hours wait, Kahan emerged onto a golden-lit stage complete with drummer, bassist and electric guitarist. He himself switched from mandolin, electric and acoustic guitars regularly. A banjo was even thrown in occasionally. I was struck in equal measure by Kahan’s vocal control and musicianship, from both him and his band members. Being able to remain in-tune when the cheers and voices of ten thousand are drowning out almost all other sounds (his in-ear monitors would help with this, no doubt), is a feat that is often taken for granted by audiences in large venues. Vocal deviations from the recorded versions of songs — added vocal riffs or ‘oohs’, for example — make audiences feel special, like they are witnessing something fresh and new. Many of Kahan’s songs have instrumental breaks that offer space for guitar solos, complete with knee slides and complex drum fills that prompted raucous screams from the crowds. The image of Kahan himself, labelled as ‘Hairy Styles’ or ‘Jewish Capaldi’ acting out energetic rock guitar moves, whilst singing incredibly sad songs about mental health or the death of his dog, was rather bizarre and created some funny moments. But his self-depreciating attitude (beginning the set calling himself ‘your favourite non-Grammy winner’) means that we are always laughing with him, never at him. 

Much to our delight, Kahan brought out James Bay (who had brought Kahan on tour when he was nineteen, launching his career) and Ben Howard to sing harmonies and verses on songs. James Bay was more impressive, singing the second verse on ‘Growing Sideways’ with his classic low and vibrato’d grain, whilst Ben Howard could hardly be heard in his harmonies in ‘Orange Juice’. The guests rushed on and off the stage in quick succession however, retaining full attention on Kahan himself. 

The energy ebbed and flowed throughout the set, beginning with some powerful rock numbers including ‘Northern Attitude’ and ‘New Perspective’. Kahan was then left on his own on the stage, armed only with an acoustic guitar, captivating the audience in near silence as he sang his sadder, slower acoustic songs. He even graced us with a new song, and two songs from his oldest album, which delighted my friend who had been listening to Kahan since she was fifteen when the album, ‘Busyhead’ came out. Kahan left his most famous song, ‘Stick Season’ until the very end, and taunted the audience by leaving the stage before he played it, claiming it to be the end of the set. The cheers and screams during this tense few minutes raised the electricity to new heights and by the time he reemerged to reveal he was going to play three more songs, almost everybody was screaming. Although not my favourite Kahan song, one cannot deny that the single that sent Kahan to stratospheric fame deserves every credit it receives. There is something completely revolutionary about hearing it live. The song is incredibly lyrically complex, and yet every single word of the song was sung clearly by the audience, drowning out Kahan’s own voice. It is clear from watching his face as he sings this song that he is still not used to how it changed his life, and how it resonates with his audiences. 

Noah Kahan now leaves England to continue his tour in France, then Germany and other European countries. He will return to England in August. Get your tickets if it’s the last thing you do.

By Edward Bayliss

If I could see the world through the eyes of a child

What a wonderful world this would be

In a nondescript apartment block somewhere in London, screenwriter Adam (Andrew Scott) struggles to write about his dead parents. As he reaches for a ready meal, the cold blue light from the inside of his refrigerator illuminates his bent-backed posture. Despite his enormous apartment windows overlooking the nation’s capital below, we only really see Adam in the  white glare of his television or computer screens. We are relieved when Scott’s character decides to leave the confinement and impersonality of his high-rise block to travel to his family home, presumably in search of inspiration. Adam stands atop a field and watches the slant of sunset ripple across trees and grasses. Then, in a strangely unthreatening supernatural moment, the voice of a man in the background beckons him to come ‘home’. The man is Adam’s father. ‘Dad’ (Jamie Bell) leads Adam into his 1980s decorated home where ‘Mum’ (Claire Foy) greets him affectionately. Soft amber light swims across yellowed wallpaper, and a thin cloud of cigarette smoke lends a grainy texture to the shot. Adam revisits his childhood (trauma); most notably, to reconcile his sexuality to his parents who were unwitting products of 1980s state-sanctioned homophobia. 

Andrew Haigh’s film operates, apparently, across the separate plot paths of Adam’s personal and familial history, and the ‘real-time’ story of his delicate but passionate relationship with fellow apartment block dweller, Harry (Paul Mescal). We first meet Harry as he knocks tentatively on Adam’s door – he grips a bottle of whiskey – an object that will gain some significance at the film’s climax. Adam confronts his loneliness by wandering somnambulantly into the oneiric episodes of his childhood, whereas Harry drinks deep in an act of burial and suppression. He has, as he admits defeatedly, ‘drifted to the edge’. They begin to talk. And talking, we should know already, is the only avenue of escape from the torture of loneliness. 

Above all else, All of Us Strangers is an acutely honest film. Unashamedly and forthrightly, the lens isn’t afraid to dig through the rubble of lost childhoods and reclaim something of intense value. With a cast of just four, whose faces seem always to fill the screen in extreme close ups, it perhaps can’t help but be sincere. Andrew Haigh’s film, however, lifts the lid on the traditional trauma-confrontation film and takes us on welcome diversions we didn’t know were accessible. The director focuses on the remarkably abstract and obscure way in which mental turmoil affects memory. 

Terrifyingly, Adam’s mind mangles time and reality. It has its toll on him – at one moment he sees his own face warped into some semblance of a screaming Francis Bacon portrait on the curved tube window. Like many directors before him, Haigh enjoys the use of glass and its distorting qualities in his shot selections. Adam finds it too easy to slip into his childhood life as it becomes an attachment onto which he clings relentlessly, almost unhealthily.  Harry  warns Adam: ‘Don’t let this get tangled up again.’ 

We learn two things from Adam’s progress through the film: 1. That you must coexist with your past self; 2. That in equal measure, you must learn to leave that past self behind when you no longer need it. Adam’s parents, you could say, are almost pseudo-Nanny McPhee characters, reminding us that ‘When you need me, but do not want me then I must stay. But when you want me but no longer need me, I have to go.’   

The lyrics that commence this review are heard near the end of the film when Adam meets with his parents for the last time. With golden light seeping into the edges of the shot, Scott’s character and his parents eat at their favourite American-style diner in Croydon. In an incredibly touching moment, Adam says goodbye for good, and they urge him on to his wide futures with Harry. Yes, Adam has seen the world again through the eyes of a child, and it was instrumental in his reckoning with the past, but he must now learn to look ahead, and wrestle with the complexities of 21^st C. life and living. 

By Robin Reinders

December began with Saltburn. As someone reading English at a top three university in the UK, and one of Oxford’s foremost competitors, the atmosphere of the first act of this film really sat with me. Sacrificing air conditioning for the sake of ‘the fucking wood fucking panelling’, lonely evenings at the pool table, indoor smoking, and the awful anxiety of sitting at the dining hall on the first day of term – haunted by paintings of who-knows-the-second and three-quarter-portrait-the-fifth looming above. It’s terrible. Constantly surrounded by signet rings, sterling cigarette cases, the question of where do you summer? and what school did you go to? If you haven’t got a family crest or a father who knows a department head in some vague ritualistic clap-on-the-shoulder way, you’re sort of fucked. But sometimes, if you’re especially quick and clever, you find a way to worm yourself in. 

Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn is a cinematic tour de force. Grandiose, with a scale large and looming amplified by its aspect ratio, Fennell creates an opulent cinematic experience that reaches for the unthinkable and certainly doesn’t shy away from the perverse. Saltburn primarily functions not as a surface-level class commentary (as it’s doubtlessly going to be misconstrued), but as a character study – an intense experiment of empathy, as the narrative focuses on its paradoxically ambiguous and yet radical protagonist.

From the very beginning, we find that Saltburn is – essentially and at its core – a British film. The opening jingoistic anthem ‘Zadok the Priest’, composed by George Frideric Handel and used for royal coronations since the 18th century, sets this up fantastically. We find this British quality again in the tense, dissonant interplay between dialogue, action, and context in an unforgettable scene involving a pie. This here is particularly British, and particularly upper-class British. The refusal to acknowledge even the most terrible, soul-crushing thing and to simply carry on eating and drinking and politely confabulating is quintessentially British in a way that I think audiences from other cultural contexts might fail to appreciate completely.

A piece with so much personality, it truly is constructed and cemented by its influences. Pasolini’s impression is felt with lucid clarity. An homage to River Phoenix is paid in a subtle yet very present moment. There are faint hints of Hitchcock in the framing of a particular scene, along with long, dragging takes evocative of Kubrick. The literature that forms the foundation of this film is genius and marvellously curated. There are obvious traces of Waugh and Forster, with strains of Brontë and du Maurier in the gothic-romantic details. These all blend in a manner so rewarding, as if forming the bouquet of a particularly lavish vintage you might find in Saltburn’s cellar.

‘Quiet, harmless, drawn to shiny things’ is how Venetia (Alison Oliver) describes the central character and unreliable narrator Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan). He is incredibly obscure throughout much of the film; vaguely northern, amorphously working class, and ill-defined in terms of his feelings towards Felix (Jacob Elordi). His attitudes, desires, sexuality, and motives are always inexplicit and undefinable. His actions, however, tell a different tale. Beneath this pretence – and Oliver is well-versed in pretence – he is an incredibly radical character. Machiavellian in the pursuit of his object, whatever it may be. We see fierce, concentrated eruptions from him often when we arrive at Saltburn, as he is overwhelmed by what visceral affections he is constantly trying to conceal from character and audience alike. He is intense, almost militant in these actions. There is no presence of shame or regret – just base, perverse, urgent necessity; a heightened and somewhat violent ‘giving-in’ that engenders a lasting, grieving ache in us as viewers – as voyeurs. 

Voyeurism, exhibitionism – both lead to the discomfort of the audience. Uncomfortable art is always controversial, but it is also always adored by me. I will always advocate for art that makes us squirm, that arouses us in an unconventional and sometimes frightening way. Fennell takes what is normal and twists it into the abnormal, further the subnormal and further still the supernormal. It is a film preoccupied with fetishisation – fetishising mess, fetishising wealth, fetishising poverty and pity and misery and broken birds. Fetishises watching; from an ajar bathroom door, practically an invitation, to the very way the affluent and aristocratic live and move in their own home (dirty underpants discovered as the maids rifle through your luggage). A detail I’d like to highlight: the bathroom Felix and Oliver share has two mirrors positioned in an awfully clever way. Even when the two have their backs to one another, there is no scenario in which they can’t look. The film is obsessed with fervent, zealous, destructive yearning and desire. It explores how these feelings can mutate into self-loathing, further – into violent, intimate anger.

It is a film that asks us to look at our desires, look at them with both eyes and see them for what they are: grotesque and animal and writhing. Fennell argues that we as the authorities of our narratives cannot make something ‘frictionless and sweet and streamlined and easy; you have to make something complicated, and you have to make something that’s going to make people argue.’ Visceral and coarse and servile – these are things we find in Oliver. We see him reduced – bared and broken – in any number of contexts. His actions and our reactions are what Fennell plays with; she wants us ‘aroused and alive but also kind of freaked out.’ She nobly succeeds. We never hate Oliver. Never. We are always forgiving, understanding and terribly, terribly empathetic.

Saltburn is crucially a film obsessed with the beauty of stuff – mundanity as defined by the upper class. The stuff of life, the stuff of wealthy domesticity. The intermingling of Flemish tapestries draping the wall and half-smoked Marlboros dying in a diet Coke can on the desk just below. ‘It’s the kind of surreal and the kind of mundane – the kind of beautiful and the sort of silly, all together in one’, Fennell says. It’s really a glamourisation of opulent, tart’s boudoir filth. Crystalline reflections sparkling off crisp packets and Carling cans in the college bar. ‘The constant dismissal of beauty’, Fennell calls it. It’s this blending of the Edwardian stately home life and the languid, dripping summer haze of the late noughties that gives Saltburn its unique atmosphere. The bridging of the two is achieved through the efforts of production designer Suzie Davies, costume designer Sophie Canale, and their respective teams. The aspect ratio of the film allows us to see not only the vastness of the estate, but the height. Shots which include both floor and ceiling are common, with details strewn about everywhere (an old piece of flypaper hanging limp on a diamond chandelier). Something I’d like to note about the costume design is Canale’s clever use of material – particularly her penchant for sheer materials. By way of capturing light through linen and gossamer night dresses, we are further able to empathise with Oliver’s frame of mind; when you are in love with someone, you are constantly aware of their body, constantly distracted – as we see in the long-take of Felix’s tour.

I do believe that is Emerald Fennell’s main goal with Saltburn. I’ve seen many ask ‘What are we supposed to take away from this?’ And no, I don’t believe we are supposed to walk away with a tepid inner monologue droning about class criticism. Saltburn is less an ‘eat the rich’ film and more an ‘eat out the rich’ film (notice the fixation on bodily fluids, so far as to be assigned to each character with the same casual purpose as any other idiosyncrasy; Venetia and blood, Farleigh and spit, Felix and spend). Its commentary on the middle class – particularly the upper-middle class – and its relationship to the extraordinarily wealthy is present, but takes a backseat. Saltburn is fundamentally an interrogation of our relationship with our own desire and how destructive that desire can be. It’s why we empathise with Oliver. It’s why we connect as much as we cringe. The film has to be queasy and uncomfortable; it has to freak you out and grip you in order to show you how impossibly carnivorous, locust, and insane that desire can be.

‘I…I hated him. I hated him! Yeah, I—I hated him.’ Oliver sighs at the end of it all. His monologue to whom? A comatose witness, a nobody audience? Desperate to convince himself and him alone it seems. Convince himself that this is what he wanted—all he wanted all along. Defensive. Cagey and paranoid around his own self-failure (don’t look! don’t look!). Willing to turn himself inside out to cope with the grief of his mistake: ‘This was always the way it was supposed to go. I meant for it. I meant for it.’ The events of the maze mark the frantic spiral of it all. There it goes, down the drain. And Oliver meant to pull the plug, he did. You have to believe him.

By Anna Johns

How to Have Sex is a deeply uncomfortable film. Not because it is overly graphic in its depiction of sexual assault, but rather because, throughout its short 90-minute run, I couldn’t shake an agonising feeling of déjà vu.

Remember when this was you? the film whispers. There’s the post-exam, early wake-up calls because you had booked the cheapest flight for your girls’ trip, which inevitably was a 6:00 am Ryanair flight from Stansted. The frantic, hourly texts from your mum to check that your plane hadn’t, in fact, fallen out of the sky mid trip. The crinkle crisps and bottles of vodka that you could convince yourself would work as breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the next four days. The colour palette is awash with nostalgia; the film shimmers with luscious pinks and oranges, reminiscent of your first foray into sun-bathed freedom. Blurry camera work and light-bathed montages capture the kind of binge-drinking you could only ever have hacked at sixteen. 

How to Have Sex follows three teenage girls, Tara, Em, and Skye, on their post-GCSE girls’ holiday to Malia on the Greek island of Crete. Though their fears about their futures and apprehensiveness about their forthcoming results linger in the background, they are mostly concerned with who will be the most successful in their four-day shagfest.

As she sits awkwardly bundled up on the sun lounger, Tara is bombarded with messages of loud sexuality. Sheepishly, she watches the men and women of her resort interacting, avidly curious about these performances of flirtation. Uncannily cheerful holiday reps encourage guests to get off with each other, whilst intimate, muffled bathroom conversations reveal the awkwardness of these girls trying to figure out what exactly it is they’re supposed to be doing. As Skye nearly reveals Tara’s virginity to the group at large, her discomfort is obvious, and it’s impossible not to feel sympathy. Hasn’t every girl been scared of being too uptight, too prudish? Haven’t we all been confronted with the insatiable need to be seen as sexually liberated, to be laissez-faire with our virginities, to be the cool girl.  

After a sexual interaction that toes the line of consent, silent close-ups on Tara’s face show her wrestling with the enormity and yet the apparent insignificance of what has happened to her. Her reactions capture the universal feeling of ‘it wasn’t supposed to be like this’. As she stumbles down the deserted strip in broad daylight, seemingly a million miles away from the camera, we’re hit with the overwhelming reminder that she’s just a kid, after all. 

Molly Manning Walker’s debut feature doesn’t deal simply in black and white. The problem lies more in ignorance than insidiousness, as she captures the blurry boundaries for young girls’ first sexual experiences, who are told repeatedly: come on, this is what everyone else is doing! Tara’s awkward flirtation attempts show her grappling with the expectation that she should be throwing herself into it all, at the expense of her gnawing feeling that something is amiss. 

There are no blow-out confrontations – Tara doesn’t even admit what has happened to her until the final moments of the film. The unshakeable feeling that something is wrong simply bubbles underneath the surface, as we watch Tara bottle up her emotions. As the camera focuses on her reflection in the mirror, it’s clear that questions are flying around her head: it was yes once, why shouldn’t he think it was yes again? How do I find someone to blame? How does he get to move on when it feels like I’ll have to live with this forever? And God, doesn’t everyone feel like this, even a little bit?I’m not rushing to rewatch How to Have Sex. But it’s important viewing in an age where girls are bombarded with messages that scream that they must be having casual sex to be liberated, that it’s their duty as good feminists. It reminds us that sometimes a ‘yes’ is constructed by our outside influences, and that consent is an ongoing conversation rather than just a tick-box question.

By Edward Bayliss

When asked why he is so committed to his profession as a surgeon and scientific experimentalist, Dr. Godwin Baxter, or ‘God’, replies coolly: ‘My amusement.’ Physically disfigured and clinically disposed, Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) bears all the hallmarks of a madly possessive psychopath as we see him rear his newest design, Bella Baxter (Emma Stone). Godwin’s literal brainchild (Bella’s brain is replaced with that of her unborn baby) is a young woman beginning to understand afresh the ways of the world. You’d be forgiven for thinking Godwin was a wicked and perverted man. It is however established early in the film that Bella was dead when Godwin performed his restoring surgery on her, and that Godwin is characterised more as a father figure than a Humbert Humbert of Lolita. He asks his creation, ‘Would you rather the world did not have Bella?’   

Bella learns quickly; at first we see her stumbling across the black and white marbled floors with the awkwardness of a toddler, then, there comes her self-realisation and yearning for ‘experience’ and ‘adventure’. The main object of comedy in the film exists in the contention between Bella’s naïve outlook and her exposure to ‘the real world’ as she elopes with the seedy Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo). For her, sex is ‘furious jumping’, food she dislikes is allowed to be spat out at high society dinners, and it is acceptable for her to ask Wedderburn in public if he would like to ‘tongue play’ her. Her physical comedy is also deftly crafted – she hasn’t yet mastered her own body, let alone her mind. It is hard to overstate the hilarity with which Bella’s character is met, accelerated also by Wedderburn’s growing frustration with her and his constant reprimands (‘You cunty cuntface dipshit’). 

The two embark on a kind of odyssey, travelling to Lisbon, Alexandria, sailing across the Mediterranean, and eventually arriving in Paris. Lanthimos’ fantastic use of soundstages with painted glowing backdrops adds a surrealist slant to these settings in the film. These are especially striking as they are pitted against the black and white Victorian gothic look of London, with its strangely postmodern architecture and steampunk-inspired outfit. We move from the trivial treatment of gore and exacting empiricism in Godwin’s laboratory littered with nightmarishly Boschian animal hybrids, to the artistic and cultural wonders of the continent; the wide eyed Bella is arrested by such beauty. In tandem with Bella’s growing emotional awareness and intelligence, the camera becomes more excitable and adventurous. Its fisheye lens begins even more to distort and liven the frame, with increased use of wide angle tilt-shift shots (almost Luhrmann-inspired) that place small figures against fantastical set designs. Cinematographer Robbie Ryan clearly has had his fun, not at all at the expense of the film. 

Bella encounters emotions unlike any she has felt before as she exclaims energetically, ‘my soul has been buckled’. Her mind becomes alive to ideas of politics and philosophy. Where once we might have considered her the ward, child, or sexual object of Wedderburn, she now intellectually outperforms him, and even prostitutes herself in Paris as an act of paradoxical sexual self-determination. At one moment in the brothel, Bella carries out vicious intercourse with a customer, at which point the camera shrewdly cuts to her reading a book entitled ‘Ethics’. She involves herself with socialist doctrine and vies for workers’ rights along with another prostitute colleague. Despite her means or methods, she is as the brothel manager asserts, ‘a woman plotting her course to freedom.’

Poor Things is, at its most basic form, a study. Occasionally, the camera will retreat into a circular frame and watch from a faraway wall, as though we are peering cautiously through an unadjusted microscope. This is a study that calls into question the critical notion of selfhood. Who is Bella Baxter? Is she the warped play-thing of Godwin? her unborn baby whose brain she possesses? or simply, her own evolving and learning creation? Moreso, Lanthimos makes it difficult for the viewer to discern who the real monsters, or ‘deformed’, are in his film. We meet so many characters who are debased, ugly, and despicable, but essentially human, that it leaves us wondering what exactly a ‘monster’ is. 

My friend and I left Tyneside cinema with much to discuss – a train delay of over an hour gave us ample time to do so. I agreed with him when he said that it feels, upon watching Poor Things, like you have just read an entire book. That is how much this film offers.   

By Lizzie Walsh

‘An overwhelming blast of passionless kitsch’ reads the Guardian’s reckoning of David Hockney’s 2023 ‘Bigger & Closer (not smaller and further away)’, from an unfavourable review published last February. For the inaugural show at the Lightroom exhibition space at Kings Cross, Hockney was a big catch and exhibited for an extended period after great success from the initial running period, rounding up to eleven months at the venue. It goes on to say, rather damningly, that ‘unfortunately the kitsch is not just a twinkle but an overwhelming crescendo’; that the hour long ‘immersive’ exhibition joins all other immersive shows in the ‘passionless dustbin of forgetting.’ 

While this may have been the case for that certain reviewer, I remember the show from last March as a delightful dive into the artist’s process, as a welcome crescendo that placed the traditional gallery purveyor as witness to the process on the artist’s dimension (not the dustbin). Particularly striking about the show, which stays with me, was the play upon (or rather upheaval of) human visual perspective. The exhibition was split into six sections or chapters of looping on repeat, illustrating the joyful relation the artist has with the natural world and technology. His desire to share his art with the world- the way he sees things- was palpable in his voice recordings from different points in his life that run over Nico Muhly’s contemporary score. While it was critiqued by some as occupying a strange space in the immersive world, with most shows of that nature being when the artist is dead, such as the recent retrospectives for Gustav Klimt and Van Gogh, the magic of this event was the artist’s sheer attentiveness to time, space, and photographic placing- he seems to draw with a camera. After all, if we can have retrospective immersions, why not prospective? Hockney reveals what is probable and possible for people who make pictures. 

His lesson on perspective sets us up for a very precise placing of his pictures and reflection upon his own life’s works, his meticulous need to create and expand. Taking us on a brief tour of the camera obscura and the advent of photography, he observes how ‘we see psychologically but cameras see geometrically.’ By layering his pictures in a cubist style, as for example in Chair, Jardin du Luxembourg (1985), we might become, in a sense, closer to the realities of space, despite it being a digital show. Indeed, Hockney elaborates that ‘by putting more in, you get more reality, I think.’ The experience is ebulliently experimental, even including some of the artist’s works for operas from the 1980s – a welcome midway juncture from his landscapes, pool paintings and iPad creations. This is the man whose Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold for 90.3 million in 2018, becoming one of the most expensive paintings sold at auction by a living artist. 

However, critics went on to say, as in Time out, who described their experience as: ‘looking for the art in it is like looking for the music in a bacon sandwich’. A sizzling and crisp critique that lacks in the imagination department, a stifling remark that suggests complete disaffection from either sandwich or show. Here the clue is in the title ‘Bigger and Closer (not smaller and further away)’ it is a collection of pieces that form a moving loop of art that is primarily about the practice of looking and the interpretation of getting closer to that sensory game rather than looking at art in the traditional sense of the gallery goer. Instead, the observer is within Hockney’s shifting artscapes, as his hands turn the concertina pages of East Yorkshire scenes, vast tracts of trees and drawn-out fields. Pathways light the floor, meandering onto the walls of the Lightroom as the music rises in vivacity. 

The virtual installation such as The Wagner Drive (San Gabriel Mountains 2012), is itself a beautiful story of climbing, vertiginous views. In the recording over this piece, which projects onto the ‘cavernous sort of gigantic warehouse type room,’ (Rich Roll) just off Coal Drops Yard in London, Hockney speaks to his audience recounting listening to Wagner again and again on the road that winds through the San Gabriel Mountains. Conducting his ekphrasis, the stereo music and the pixels to be choreographed with the car just reaching the top of the mountains. And yet, my mum recalls feeling travel sick during this particular segment of the show. All perspectives are subjective. 

“I don’t care what critics say about me,” Hockney says in one interview. “I think it’s really good.”

By Eliza Warfield.

Exploring the limits of pain, mental control, and danger are all concepts that have enshrined Marina Abramović’s performance art for the past fifty years. She is considered the figurehead of this form of artwork and is highly recognised. Her work is deeply visceral and requires the combination of her emotions, her body, resilience, and an interaction with the audience. By nature, her work is extremely controversial, she tests the limits of physical and mental endurance through public displays that include; ‘The Artist is Present’ (which involved 3 months of sitting opposite participating audience members in complete silence), ‘Rhythm 0’, (which explored the abuse of power – the audience were presented with 72 objects including a loaded gun and could subsequently use them in whatever manner they pleased on her). Finally, ‘Lovers’, (where she and her partner Ulay walked the Great Wall of China from opposite ends, to then meet in the middle to say goodbye to each other).

Abramović is now synonymous with performance art, referring to herself as ‘The Grandmother of such’. Her recent exhibition at the Royal Academy was testament to that. Extraordinarily, the first woman to have a solo show at the Royal Academy in 255 years, which is stupefying in several ways! (but that’s a different story). The exhibition in London is recreating performances of her early work. I went along to find out what these performances were like to experience in the flesh (in one case – literally!) .

The show includes several of her most important performances. One of my favourites was ‘Imponderabilia’ in which an entrance to one of the galleries is lined with two naked performers in a narrow doorway. The only way ‘through’ is to awkwardly, or not (if you have limited care or awareness for personal space), push through whilst attempting to not touch anything untoward or get a coat corner stuck somewhere (arguably worse). It’s a difficult manoeuvre, and one I found surprisingly confronting. The discomfort and willingness to participate is intended to vary person to person, making it a deeply personal encounter with the vulnerability of the human body.

The desire to go to this exhibition started from watching ‘The Artist is Present’ documentary, however in this instance it was slightly different as Marina wasn’t the focal performer at the RA. This is due to the fact the 76-year-old suffered a life-threatening embolism this year, rendering her too weak to perform any more so the options were reperformance, or I suppose, eradication.

In essence, after witnessing the recreated performances it made me question this… 

Is Marina Abramović, the ‘Grandmother of performance art’, by getting the works performed by others, compromising and diluting the power of her work? The raw vulnerability in her pieces are inimitable, it doesn’t matter that her actors are trained personally- surely they are attempting something acting can’t replicate. The actors haven’t faced the specific turmoil of her life, experienced her heartbreak, put themselves in front of death to challenge society and I certainly don’t think any of them sat in MOMA every day for three months in complete silence, ushering audience members to sit in front and then have the impact she generated. Can a second-generation performance artist EVER deliver a piece of performance art with remotely the same energy and power as its creator (especially MA) did? 

The reperformances I suppose offer a new perspective and opportunity for artists to give the work longevity; the new Van Gogh and Hockney experiences have exemplified this, but is this suited to her work? I think some do still provide the same feeling and are successful, this includes ‘Imponderabilia’ – it doesn’t matter which two naked bodies are lining an entrance, it still makes the audience uncomfortable and then challenge themselves looking inward. However, the new iteration of ‘House with a View’ just wasn’t as strong as Abramović’s. The performance involves being in this façade of a house for 24 hours a day over 12 days without any communication or form of entertainment. In this I would argue the actor didn’t quite replicate the authenticity and feed off the audience in the way she does, which makes a huge difference to the ‘success’ of the piece as there was a lack of connection between artist and audience. 

I am by no means berating her work, I deeply admire her, and I wish I got to witness a performance with her in my life. Marina Abramović’s work is not ephemeral art, it’s more worthy than that and with proper showings and documentaries, her work can still hold the same impact it did when she moved people to tears from sheer eye contact and commanding presence. In preserving her legacy, it’s imperative she remains at the heart of the narrative as the pivotal figure around whom her artistic journey evolves. In the reperformances the acting task itself is virtually impossible, but maybe that’s the difference between the new pieces that work and those that don’t… they require a really brilliant actor to play the role. Maybe this is why there haven’t been as good of a performance artist thus far. 

The exhibition is running until January 1^st 2024, so urge everyone to go and experience it for themselves, it is something special. I will certainly be going again… 

Link to Show:
https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/marina-abramovic?gclid=CjwKCAiA0syqBhBxEiwAeNx9N9kR9weV03T0bYG3T0osq8jtY1rR_cuMJGiPBDlykRxaBtsu7QNY7hoC4EIQAvD_BwE

By Xanthe de Wesselow

It’s a Saturday night. Big city lights. “Bride to Be” sashes scatter every street corner with hen-dos en masse. A friend and I are venturing to Geordie land for a big night out.

We’re off to see Scouting For Girls at Newcastle’s O2 City Hall.

Dinner is booked in a cosy Italian on Dean Street. This sets the tone nicely and we imagine we’re on a hot date until the bill arrives, upon which we return to our cripplingly single reality and regretfully split the damage, taking it in turns to play Apple Pay roulette before we submit to a slightly embarrassing yet unsurprising decline on the first tap.

Remarking on Newcastle’s club scene looming large in comparison to our favoured Durham-bed-by-2:30 night out, we venture forth arm in arm and join the enormous queue that pours out of City Hall; practising lyrics and guessing the set list to pass the time. By the time two (slightly uninspiring) warm up acts have played and tiresomely repeated their Instagram handles to a somewhat uninterested audience, Clemmie has sore feet and I’m beginning to regret not watching Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging with her the night before, as I internally question how many lyrics I will actually know.

Revealing their latest retro album cover (The Place We Used To Meet) backdrop, the curtain eventually comes up and our qualms are dissipated as Roy Stride leads the band on stage with a palpable bundle of energy at his disposal. That undeniable boy band-esque melody strikes up, and soon the whole auditorium is cheering to “there’s a hole in my heart” before joining in by the time it’s “…and you’re the missing part” in a sort of teenage fangirl frenzy. Yet this is not exactly Newcastle’s demographic tonight. Far from it, the audience lacks a common denominator and instead we are surrounded by a varied multitude of people. Older couples, drunken mid-thirties friend groups, high-pitched, screeching women head to toe in pristine merch as well as the odd fifteen-year-old girl possie who are assiduous in their mission to spend the entire three hours sending filtered videos of themselves to their Snapchat fanbase. This eclectic mixture is a nod to Scouting For Girls’ longevity and deserved recognition that continues to stand the test of time.

The gig centres around this very fact. The band transport us on a whirlwind tour of their various albums in which Stride breezily mocks their youthful naivety during the early days (when he’s not singing or darting around the stage). Their humble roots are visibly touching: Ellard and Stride were Cub Scouts comrades while Churchouse met the lead singer on their first day at Queensmead School, West London.

We go back in time to 2007 – the release year of their debut album – to relive some of their teenage bedroom tracks where they would play together after school (newly tee-total Stride points to the latest album cover’s top floor window of his childhood home, cheekily telling us that it had to be open because he was always smoking out of it). The amateur sound of the early days are mimicked when an old, basic drum set and a couple of acoustic guitars appear, and all three men take centre stage as they nostalgically play It’s Not About You, I wish I was James Bond and Michaela Strachan from their debut album. This is when the crowd interaction reaches its peak: the crowd is split down the middle and we aggressively ping pong lyrics left to right, right to left, in a bid to be the loudest.

Peter Ellard, the unassuming drummer who holds each song together like a stoic pillar post at the back, takes the right side while Greg Churchouse, the bassist who’s sporting a wide smile that reaches the edges of his khaki baker boy hat, takes the left. Stride stands diplomatically behind his keyboard in the middle and tells Churchouse’s side we are having more fun when we shout ‘Just for the day’ louder than Ellard’s group (rather like that slightly over-enthusiastic deputy head figure at school, who would eagerly feed on the power trip during a morning’s assembly). It’s this charming schoolboy-ish crowd interaction coupled with the criminally catchy, serotonin filled songs that make this concert so euphoric.

Another highlight is Posh Girls. We are informed that the three ‘magic’ words are boys at school before Stride launches into the iconic opening bars. By the first chorus he has bounced his way up to the balcony, armed with a selfie stick. He’s now filming the crowd interaction as we enthusiastically chant the magic words expected of us, as though we’re in an artificial world where Roy Stride is our master. This time he plays the floor off against the balcony (“floor cheer, balcony cheer, floor, balcony, floor, balcony…”) and we hardly know whether he’s the lead singer of a boy band or the principal boy of a pantomime – all the same, Clemmie and I are just two of the of the hundreds of people immersed into this happy, childlike, dream land for as long as we’re robotically generated to follow Stride’s commands.

It’s true, his electric stage presence is making him the star of the show, although Churchouse and Ellard appear to be having just as much fun as their wide-eyed fans. As for newbie Nick Tsang, it soon becomes clear he is some sort of God of the music industry – his expertise on the guitar is wheeled out as and when for all the big stars in need of ‘elevating their sound’ or ‘enhancing their tracks’ (Sheeran, Capaldi and The Backstreet Boys have all been prone to the Tsang drug). Stride jests that a front row die hard, going by Louisa, knows the songs better than this fresh-faced guitarist himself, who simply grins and nods in return. His appearance on this tour may initially seem subtle yet it certainly packs a punch.

Whether or not it’s just another day at the office for Tsang doesn’t matter; his upbeat performance is adding a new dimension to a timeless boy band and no doubt a generous pay cheque helps to keep any glimpses of superficial showmanship at bay. But then again, who wouldn’t be having fun playing iconic English indie-pop music with this illustrious trio?

The night goes on in much the same way, with evenly interspersed songs from the latest album The Place We Used to Meet, which manages to go back to the band’s roots and hit the same, life-affirming notes as all the infamous favourites. This somehow amplifies the success of the older records, which come as a celebratory treat when the whole audience rejoices in knowing all the lyrics.

There is a rather low key ending when they sing the album’s opening song, Glow – a slower, melodic number. But the crowd isn’t easily fooled and it’s only a few repetitions of “One More Song” before the four men appear back in position and strike into a cover of Thank you and Goodnight, specifically for the aforementioned Louisa, who is screeching chaotically at the front.

Then, the moment we’ve all been waiting for finally arrives. With the triumphant opening chords, everyone erupts, relishing in the playful atmosphere for the final time. The pure animation that is felt in the room as we all sing in unison: “she’s so lovely, she’s so lovely, she’s so lovelyyy” is remarkable, and a true token of their songwriting genius.

Having felt hungover and slightly sorry for ourselves at the start of the evening, we left City Hall that night feeling quite the opposite. Scouting For Girls has entertainment, lightness, and stage presence in abundance and I urge anyone and everyone to buy a ticket for their 2024 tour. Having fun? Feeling down? Need to laugh? Just listen to Scouting For Girls. Their music is a kind of nostalgic solace that can be the remedy you never knew you needed.

By Zoe Worth

Paris, Texas is a work of exquisite beauty and is something written quite permanently in my memory. Wim Wenders’s stylish tale of weather-beaten drifter Travis Henderson, who finds himself a stranger in his own life, is wistful and haunting. Wenders contemplates the fragility of the Americana cult that dominated much of the era while also leaving us to reflect on lost memories.

Set in the profoundly American desert, the film is printed with a breathtaking sense of emptiness. We are introduced to amnesiac Travis who is in solitude for a reason he doesn’t remember or perhaps doesn’t know at all. Travis, dressed in a shabby suit and baseball cap, is America’s everyman. Henry Dean Stanton’s crusading face is both gaunt and visibly plagued by regret. Bathed in sunlight, Travis is painted with innocence. Wenders offers a poignant meditation on Americana. Akin to Kerouac’s On the Road, sometimes stamped with the ‘nothing happens’ critique, the lack of a linear journey is troubling. We are forced to celebrate and find meaning in the caprice and disarray. The directionless feeling is so familiar. We are reminded of the “heartbreaking potential of the present moment”. It is the art of looking for something that leads to catharsis, despite the complicated feelings of nihilism and nostalgia on the road. When Travis’s long-suffering brother Walt finds him, he is left with no choice but to confront the past. Wenders exhibits this encounter when Travis opens up about his long-forgotten dream to live in Paris, Texas.

Müller’s stunning slow-burn cinematography is utterly mesmerising. Jane and Travis’s romantic road trip is shot through the warm, hazy Super 8 film. There is so much tenderness and comfort in these scenes; contrasting the vast desert shots that precede and follow it. Natassja Kinski plays the gold-hearted Hollywood girl Jane: the American Dream. Part of Paris, Texas’s allure is its impressionability. It is irresistible to watch as the delicate nostalgia seeps through the old Super-8 videos and we find our own memories trickling into this intimate footage. Jane is undoubtedly ethereal, and we are awakened to what Travis is mourning. The disconnection of this scene from the rest of the film is strangely moving. Though we are watching the unfolding of their past, it feels like we are no longer watching a film but rather reminiscing about our own lives. Being so separate, we begin to understand the transience of such memories which are destined to break away.

The moody, elegiac score haunts the nearly two and a half hours of Paris, Texas. Cooder manages to evocatively mirror Travis’s odyssey through the empty Texan prairies. In pursuit of not only some resemblance of modernity, promised by Americana but also his lost past. The simple guitar twang ripples beneath the rare dialogue in the film – cutting through the silence. We are swept away by the power of the “scarcely uttered words”. Cooder sculpts a soundscape that is sad yet whimsical. Like the music, the memories aren’t completely gone but simmer gently beneath: always on the verge of surfacing.

Paris, Texas’s standout scene takes place in a sleazy peep show where Jane is first seen again by her long-lost lover Travis, who has been in limbo trying to find her. Featuring two elegantly wrought monologues, the irreconcilability of their past is finally unveiled. This scene begins with Travis’s sincere recollection of their romance, talking to Jane for presumably the last time. Her face is touched by every brutal revelation of her self-destructive past. Kinski’s sublime beauty encapsulates this, as she stares at the mirror looking for Travis, or rather answers. When she realises she cannot see him, her honesty flows even more in her pining monologue: “I walked around for some months talking to you. Now I don’t know what to say. It was easier when I just imagined you”. Her ice-cold voice shatters the one-way mirror, and we feel like she begins to recognise herself. Permanently separated by the mirror, and their past, these lovers see each other with a despairing clarity. This offers a stunning reflection on the timeless struggle of moving forward, one that ceaselessly taints the American Dream.

Melancholy and minimalistic, Paris, Texas’s charm lies in its subtlety. Even its oblique title gives it a somewhat surreal essence. It transcends the Atlantic creating a sense of distance and removal. Forged from the European eye, it leaves us to observe. It is the American Dream from the outside- for all its glamour and flaws. The perspective is truly unjudgmental. Its bittersweet ending where Travis watches Jane and Hunter’s reunion reminds us that though it may be pretty to long for the past, there is much to cherish in the present. In an act of touching selflessness, Travis sacrifices his romantic nostalgia for Jane and Hunter’s future. Paris, Texas, in a Hemingway-esque style, reminds us that the sun always rises even if the past is behind us. Wenders captures the lust for memories that will never satisfy the longing for something more enduring. We are left to hope that this family find this.

A gorgeous postcard of redemption and reverence; Wenders casts an eye on America as only an outsider can. It is as much about the words left unsaid and the things left undone. A brutally honest love letter to Americana- Paris, Texas is a film I will certainly come back to.

By Cosmo Adair and Emma Large

For a more thorough explanation of Immersive Theatre, please refer to Max Shanagher’s article “Teasing  the fourth wall”: A short Immersive Theatre manifesto,” pub. 6 November 2023.

Alexandria

Cosmo Adair

“Well, Fuck,” I thought to myself as the bouncer — the Roman one — confiscated my notebook and said, “That’s contraband.” This being immersive theatre, and me being supinely hungover, I didn’t want to interrupt his flow. I tried to discern whether this was a part of the play: in my head, I cursed the name of Max Shanagher (the co-director alongside Harry Threapleton) and pondered why he should invite us to review the play, only to pull off some cocky stunt and have one of his actors mug me and thus stymie my pen. 

By the time I’d reached the bar (their very own bar, with Rome/Alexandria-themed cocktails: Red Roman, Nile Iced Tea, and Death by Passion), I started to think, “You know what, I really need that notebook. In fact, there’s no way I could possibly write a review without that notebook.” And so, I ordered myself one “Death by Passion”, drank it quite quickly, and then returned to the bouncer and spoke with the proud authority of a tipsy critic: 

“Excuse me. I really hate to trouble you. But, you see, that notebook, I kind of need it actually. Of course, if — um —- only if that’s alright with you. But yes, I’m supposed to be reviewing this play.”

“What play?”

“Oh yes, sorry. Aha — I see now. It’s a Roman play, I believe.”

“Well, I’ll trust you this time.” Throughout our interaction, his face of cold, Roman hardness had not wavered. Lips sealed assertively, black moustache and dark sunglasses: he was Rome, or, rather, Rome-meets-humourless-celebrity-bodyguard. He was not  going  to break character. Generously, he handed over my notebook. And I immediately wrote this down: I thought it quite emblematic of the uniqueness of the experience offered by immersive theatre, and the challenges it poses both to its actors and to rather shy, awkward audience members such as myself. 

Antony and Cleopatra is the second piece of immersive theatre which Tully Hyams and Shanagher’s Walkabout Productions have put on, following the success of last year’s A Wilde Night. On entry, each theatre-goer is presented with a choice: Rome or Alexandria. In effect, this is a choice between politics and romance. I chose romance: I got love and Cleopatra, whilst Emma had to suffer the steely machiavels of Rome. Only four others chose Alexandria, whilst about fifty travelled to Rome: either, they are more serious, or else they haven’t read the play, I thought. Given that most of the last two acts happen in Alexandria, I assumed those in Rome wouldn’t catch the play’s ending. But they did: at the Battle of Actium, the divider between the rooms opened and I caught a glimpse of Rome through the red mist of Actium. 

Not only does the audience have to choose between Rome and Alexandria, but so too does Antony. That, to me, is the most successful element of the play’s staging: Ed Clark’s Antony flits between the rooms, endlessly, until he opts for a drunken Epicure Alexandria. But the characterisation of Antony, here, allowed for no doubt over his eventual choice: he was soft and effete, with a pony-tail, jewellery, and Doc Martens. He was always going to opt for Alexandria. This was effective when he was in Alexandria, but it did mean the central conflict of the play was slightly lost. Then again, I wasn’t in Rome; perhaps there, he was different. 

Cleopatras have always infuriated me. Shakespeare’s characterisation of her temperamental nature lends itself to shrill, shallow, and over-acted performances. But not here. Alexa Thanni was excellent: the swift mood-changes were carried off with a subtlety I doubted was possible — not least in a student  production. In Act 2, Scene 5, where Cleopatra beats the messenger, I usually switch off out of sheer irritation. Here though, Thanni  delivered a scene which was not only comic but possessed a psychological realism. Another such moment to note was just after the interval when Antony and Cleopatra kissed. It was so genuine as to make the viewer speculate as to whether Clark and Thanni might be following the lead of their forebears Burton and Taylor. 

Cleopatra was complemented by her supporting cast. Charmian, played  by  Clara Dammann, was especially good. The Alexandrian court is difficult to pull off – especially  given how most of the talking is done by Cleopatra, and so the courtiers have to show their presence and attention without much chance to speak. Dammann’s raised eyebrows, rolled eyes, and covered smiles all accompanied well the depictions of Cleopatra’s whims and hysterics. 

It was an interesting, thoroughly thought-out production, which made me consider these familiar characters and themes in a different light. I suspect it might be the first ever production of the play to take such an approach. The very feat of making the play work in an immersive fashion was impressive enough, but to do so with a student-sized budget and a student cast is yet more impressive. So, congratulations to all involved: not least to Shanagher, Threapleton and Hyams. And now, as Caesar says, “to Rome…” 

Rome 

Emma Large

​​The consequences of consuming several Death by Passions at 3:00pm on a Sunday afternoon hit me, rather unfortunately, during the launch of the Battle of Actium.

“Get away from the wall!” Caesar turned to us with a startling passion. “Get away from the wall!”

I, like the rest of the bumbling, bemused (potentially drunken?) audience, blundered uselessly to the left and stopped to await some further instruction from our ruler, as if the first hadn’t been clear enough. None of us had moved even remotely away from the wall.

“GET AWAY FROM THE WALL!” he roared.

Christ, I thought, we need to move. We scattered to the other side of the room to watch the partition, once deceptively solid, be rapidly drawn back, marking the dissolution of the geographical boundary between Egypt and Rome. The fourth wall and its tangible counterpart broke alike with dazzling intensity: the golden lights and secrets of Alexandria were revealed at last, like the glittering opening of a treasure chest. Those of us who had been cloistered in the purpled privacy of the Roman council room, envisioning Cleopatra from across the continents (summoned by Enobarbus’ famous lines, “The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne…”, still resonant in our ears), scanned the room for the Egyptians that we had heard rowing mutedly, from the other side of the wall. The play was not even at its interval, nor its dramatic climax; I had another Death by Passion yet to consume, but it was at this moment, the stage membrane shifting and permeable, that I understood the absorptive power of an immersive performance.

The stagnancy of the audience is fairly absolute in traditional theatre; we know our role is to sit quietly and to observe, to laugh and cry accordingly. In immersive theatre, I realised while stumbling to the other side of the stage during Max Shanagher and Harry Threapleton’s Antony and Cleopatra, the audience has no clue what their role is and what part they will be expected to play – and this is precisely its thrill.

In Rome, we were drawn from the margins to eavesdrop on the political quarrels of a fraught Roman council – until formally welcomed, by handshake, to the ‘Roman side’ – becoming equally complicit in their plot to win Antony back from Egypt’s seductions. Caesar (Olivia Clouting) simmered palpably with cool pride, his sudden flashes of fury both startling and exhilarating the audience, who were drawn into unnervingly close quarters in the small assembly room. The sultry, brooding movements of Octavia (Daisy Summerfield) provided relieving feminine contrast on a stage clustered with hearty Roman generals – to the credit of the all-female Roman cast (Antony omitted.)

Watching the performers flit around the central meeting table while they gesticulated and debated, I recognised that adapting Antony and Cleopatra into an immersive production had perhaps rendered it more open to interpretation than a traditional, more static performance. Each audience member, dispersed around the room’s edge, beheld every scene uniquely. As the actors circulated like the hands of a clock around a vital heart, the ever-darkening face of Caesar shifted in and out of view. The easing countenance of friendly Enobarbus (Francesca Singh) moved into my eyeline, before his back was then turned; I watched the left side of Mark Antony’s face (Ed Clark) as he protested indignantly to Caesar’s accusations, then tracked his right-hand side as he fled across the room. The dynamism afforded by immersive theatre electrified both the performance unfolding in front of us, but also our collective imagination. We wondered about the faces of the characters flashing out of our sight lines; about the events occurring in the neighbouring Alexandria; until the wall broke and all sprawled out before us as a figurative battleground between two nations, the room now bearing the strangely unifying quality of a no-man’s-land.

The play culminated in a thrilling final few scenes – the suicide of Cleopatra and her courtiers, I thought particularly moving. But as I left, I felt oddly guilty. Why? In his dying breath, Antony had reached out to me with his hand, a desperate supplication for help. I had stared back at him rather stupidly and recrossed my legs. You bitch, I thought to myself. Such a hopeless sentiment, I suppose, implies both the emotive power and incapacitating effect of immersive theatre – if I could have, I would have, Antony.