Published: Revolting Women @ Bad Reputation

I have promised myself I will NOT BLOG until this chapter plan is finished, but I did just want to share my  – belated – glee at being published with the fabulous feminist website Bad Reputation. I was unable to make their anniversary party in Camden on Oct 7 (having, on Oct 6, hosted a certain amount of wassail myself) but am delighted to call myself a contributor, even on the strength of one article.

I wrote on French LGBT activist Genevieve Pastre for their Revolting Women series (available under this tag).

To read the article, click here, but in any case, I hope you enjoy this picture of the first big French gay rights protest, which might usefully be subtitled “dear god, French gays are so much cooler/more stylish and generally better than the rest of us”. There’s an intensity of leather and cheekbone to which one can only aspire.

Before I head back to Cymbeline and my dead Shakespearean girlfriends, however,  here are three BadRep posts for your consideration:

• A Little Begging Letter About Reproductive Rights (abortion law & Irish feminism)
• Is ‘Chav’ A Feminist Issue? by Rhian Jones (clue: yes, and there’s some brilliant stuff on the intersections between feminism and class, aka the dynamic which it really pains many feminists of all colours, creeds, and variations of middle-class experience to acknowledge… /personal-rent-a-rant)
• The Matchgirls’ Strike (or: Working Class Teenagers Kick Corporate Ass) by Sarah Jackson (Does what it says on the tin. Brilliantly. Also from the Revolting Women series).

Happy FRIDAY.

Radcliffe Camera Occupation: updates & links primer

Please follow/share/RT/propagate. Thank you.

http://www.occupiedoxford.org

Earliest interior & exterior shots of the protest (1.30 p.m.)

Occupation statement from inside the Radcliffe Camera

Video of student protest party from inside the Lower Cam

Facebook event for the Oxford Free University teach-in

Requests from BBC Radio Oxford for protesters to make contact with the media

for protesting!

@occupiedoxford #oxuncuts #demo2010

Apparently some of the Cherwell School protesters are as young as 14… hopefully they are out of there by now. If not, do keep safe.

 

 

[REVIEW] CUPPERS 2010

Last week, I was lucky enough to be a judge for OUDS Cuppers 2010, the first-years’ college drama festival. This involved gazing into the tiny, uplifted faces of fresh thespy youth and then brutally marking them out of 10 in a variety of categories including acting, design and marketing. As in 2007 (the last time I judged), the process was accompanied by a lot of moaning, whinging, averted eyes and tears, chiefly from the panel. Onstage, the Freshers were relatively restrained, stopping at fellatio and the odd anal rape. As in 2007, I actually really enjoyed the process – especially running the feedback sessions for competing teams -  and hope that OTR sends me back again next year.

I haven’t seen the final awards list, but my Oxford names-to-watch would be Matthew Brooks and Frankie Goodwin as directors; and Rhiannon Kelly, Charlotte Lennon, Emily Norris and Claire Taylor as performers (hey, guys? If you’re reading, be awesome, it’ll make me seem clairvoyant).

Anyway, for posterity’s sake, my reviews:

Wednesday 17th November

2.30 p.m. The Wizard of Argoz, St. Peters College

“Warmly appreciated by a large College audience, which, after all, is one purpose of Cuppers” Sophie Duncan ★★

3:00 p.m. Phaedra’s Love, Wadham College

“If Michael Brooks develops this version of Phaedra’s Love into a more nuanced but no less intense production, he’ll be the director to watch.” Sophie Duncan ★★★

3:30 p.m. Comic Potential, Jesus College

“I rather lost my heart to this engaging cast” Sophie Duncan ★★★★

4:30 p.m. The Choice, Corpus Christi

“His unexpected intensity made Choice, for a moment, a completely different play.” Sophie Duncan ★★★

5:05 p.m., Love of the Nightingale, Somerville College

“Claire Taylor as Procne gave the performance of the day.” Sophie Duncan ★★★★

[REVIEW] THE ROYAL HUNT OF THE SUN, OXFORD PLAYHOUSE, FIVE STARS

Rushing home to tell you this, I felt like a ‘30s war correspondent sending reports down the wire. Charlotte Benyon’s production blazes out in a declaration of theatrical glory, and marks the start of an exciting year in Oxford student drama.

Peter Schaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun is the story of two illegitimate sons who seek to  become gods: one as a Spanish conqueror, and the other with an Inca crown. The first half had problems: inaccurate sound design set by a sadist, with recorded music blaring over nervous student actors, and Schaffer’s sweeping epic wobbling as the characters defined their relationships. To criticise more would be churlish. From the first scene the production celebrates sharply individuated performances from the officers General Pizarro (leading man Jacob Taee) takes to Peru. Before the interval, my impression of Taae was of a performance still emerging, confidence still gathering and a physical characterisation ever slightly out of reach. I expected to write a review focussing on Alfred Enoch as the aristocratic Hernando de Sota, whose maturity and restraint create the play’s most generous performance. Adam Baghdadi and James Leveson are equally good as the Conquest’s crusading priests; James Leveson, as the younger friar, leads us with great sweetness through his manifesto for mankind. Love, capitalism, Christianity and freedom: Leveson’s intelligent eloquence sets the bar high for performance of Schaffer’s all-encompassing text.

But then, after the interval, something happened. Joe Robertson’s boy-god Atahuallpa stepped down from his pedestal, and Taee changed before our eyes, fully replaced by his character. Having crushed the city, massacred thousands of Indians and imprisoned Atahuallpa, the tormented Pizarro offers this Incan Cleopatra freedom in exchange for impossible amounts of gold. When Atahuallpa’s unexpectedly fulfils the bargain, Pizarro is forced to choose between killing his men and sacrificing the boy-god who has become his soul. The second half of the play has dizzying scope, its debates ranging over Church, State and immortality: but as Pizarro’s own death approaches, his incessant cry for purpose, ‘What for?’ is answered only by the revelation that he cannot countenance Atahuallpa’s killing. Unless, of course, the Sun’s son is as immortal as he believes.

The climactic scene of The Royal Hunt of the Sun takes the audience to the threshold of revelation, in a theatrical moment where anything seems possible. Taee and Robertson give outstanding performances; like Benyon, they deserve unadulterated praise. Overall, though, the cast could be braver with their delivery; Schaffer’s black-gold comedy is sometimes lost as their delivery relentlessly drives the savagery home. Horror is more shocking for a little laughter. Benyon’s company, backed by ambitious design and a brilliant lighting plot, have a bravura hit on their hands. Not for a long time has a show made me feel such wonder.

Please hurry and book your tickets – this is a five-star production with only five shows left.

The Royal Hunt of the Sun runs until Saturday 30th October at the Oxford Playhouse. This review was originally written for the Oxford Theatre Review, and appears on their site here.

[REVIEW]: A History of the World in 100 Objects

The British Museum was founded on the death of Sir Hans Sloane, aristocrat, collector and shoe fetishist. Sloane left his 71,000 books, curiosities and antiquities to any government who’d perpetually maintain them for the enjoyment of all races, creeds and colours, free of charge. Fortunately, the British Government of 1753 was still prepared to invest in public education. As Lead Curator JD Hall puts it, ‘Then we had to wait 250 years for the BBC to be invented’.

From the British Museum’s 6-million strong collection of artefacts,  Hall, with writer and presenter Neil MacGregor selected 100 items through which to tell ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’, broadcast daily on Radio 4. Addressing an audience at the Oxford Playhouse, on the day of the final episode, Hall explained the series’ ideology.

Traditional history is based on written records, only covering the last 5,000 years of life, and excluding 2.2 million years of human culture. Objects exist in places before documentary records, bearing witness to histories suppressed or unrecorded, whether because they date from a time before writing, or because, traditionally, history is written by the winners. For JD Hall – and for me, as an obsessive fan of Listen Again – the most poignant of the 100 was the bark shield used by the people of Botany Bay, to defend themselves against Cook and his invaders.

The big difference between 100 Objects on radio and this ‘curator’s cut’ in theatre is that in theatre, we see the objects, albeit as photographs. Arguing for the radio format, Hall argues that TV history is too linear for the series’s discursive, electric approach. For Hall, a TV adaptation would have meant endless Starkey-esque establishing shots, MacGregor walking through fields, and silly reconstructions. But surely these are just the conventions of lazy broadcasting; popular series such as Who Do You Think You Are mediate all kinds of immigrant, emigrant and emotive histories without hand-waving or Henry VIII in a cheap wig. The real issue, sadly, is one of finance.

Despite my gripes, the impact of radio is undeniable. So far, A History of the World in 100 Objects has been downloaded by 10 million people, 5 million outside the UK. A further 3.5 million have been listening via radio; these astonishing figures exclude listeners on the World Service. Discursive and imaginative programming, History was the result of a four-year partnership between the British Museum and BBC Radio 4; a partnership which earned neither organisation any revenue. In these days of the Browne Review and the British cultural Apocalypse, that’s another way of saying: this will never happen again. What would the 101^st object be, I wonder, if we wanted to record our present as well our past? A P45?

This review was originally written, while suffering from a filthy cold, for the Oxford Theatre Review.

ARTICLE: Nushu @ Dimsum

NUSHU: A secret code of the sisterhood

I’m really excited to be writing for Dimsum, the British Chinese community website. The idea for this article came about during last-but-one weekend’s visit to London, and I’m impressed by how quick the turnaround’s been. I’d love to work for these guys again in the near future – I’m enjoying articles by their columnist, Suzie Wong, and this thought-provoking piece on theatrical yellowface by Anna Chen (especially as it eviscerates a playwright I’ve previously enjoyed).

Click below to read the rest of my article. Turning pure research into features writing was fun & an important learning curve. Now, off to order that MLA handbook – it’s time to start reformatting some more/other work for journal submission…

The story of Nüshu is uniquely fascinating in the history of the Chinese language: yet, for many, the word still means nothing. Now, as a once-secret script becomes a tourism moneyspinner, it’s time for everyone to learn about Nüshu – the two thousand characters that make up the world’s only single-sex writing system.  This secret code has survived for seventeen hundred years, inspiring songs, poetry and journals of the most personal kind. And it was created by women denied the chance to read or write. (read more)…