Musings on art and modern audiences

  The Doll Factory : feast your eyes… I think one of the main reasons why we’re curious about and seek out visual art is because we want to see things from a different perspective. That’s a very simplified statement of what I’m sure is an extensive academic debate, but I know it’s why I’m drawn to the arts myself. Whether that’s pictures or films or otherwise, the arts in their various forms give us the most immediate and literal means of seeing differently. We see through the eyes and lenses of others, and in so seeing we wonder about how we are connected to and disconnected from each other. Why are we drawn to some arts and artists over others? How can subjects worlds away from us - real and unreal - feel familiar, or present, or important in some way?  This sense of legacy and insight is one of the key throughlines of Elizabeth Macneal’s novel The Doll Factory , where aspiring painter Iris Whittle meets the (fictional) Pre-Raphaelite artist Louis Frost. As you might imagine, they fa

  Mortal Engines : disturbing dystopian prophecies Dystopian fiction gives us an opportunity to imagine what our lives might look like if we take things to an extreme version of their current state. Dystopia can often feel repetitive, melodramatic, or unrealistic, but it can also feel uncanny, disturbing, and terrifying. Dystopian fiction for young people often finds itself somewhere in between. The world of Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines is the post-apocalyptic product of global war in which capitalism, imperialism and aggression make people do horrible things to each other and their societies.  On the one hand, Mortal Engines isn’t necessarily doing anything new. It reimagines the systems and structures of power and control and progress that already exist and places them under extraordinary circumstances to propose a scenario that we should try our best not to replicate. In this case, roving cities are great monsters of consumption and violence which quite literally prey on other gr

  Hadestown Hadestown is a breath of fresh air. It is everything I wish myth retelling novels were, it is everything myth prevails for, and it is everything music and the arts exist for. For a story and a soundtrack originating in 2006, Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown could not be more relevant or urgent right now. It is set in no real time or place, and its musical and narrative origins are distant, jumbled, and hybrid. There are shadows of a climate catastrophe, whisperings of socioeconomic revolution, but always the promise of art - music and song and all the emotions they carry. Because Hadestown does feel like a promise. One person declaring their love and acting upon that feeling. One person leading another out of darkness to in turn lead others towards freedom. We are not guaranteed a way out, but if we can learn something, if we can make some small difference to the world we live in right now, that is enough. Hadestown will I hope, I fear, never stop being performed. As long as

  Derry Girls : Up to no good... Lisa McGee’s Derry Girls is a show which takes the sitcom genre and makes something truly genius. The show is based on McGee’s own experiences of life as a teenager in 1990s Derry towards the end of the Troubles, but rather than being a dreary political and historical drama, the politics of the setting are written into the everyday lives of the Derry girls. Police checks of school buses, checkpoints at the border, these are just features of day-to-day life for the Derry girls, alongside all the other normal problems of teenage rebellion, identity crisis and existential crisis. When each season comes to an end, we’re moved because we’ve seen these kids go through so much together in ways that are more personal and fundamental than the politics of their time.  Derry Girls depicts a very particular time and place, but it’s also a great reminder that our history is never far behind us. We are now thirty years on from the Good Friday Agreement but it’s cle

  Normal People One of the strange things you notice about Normal People is that Sally Rooney doesn’t use quotation marks for dialogue. For some people, it’s a groundbreaking and genius choice; for others it’s performative creativity and generally unnecessary. I personally believe there’s real purpose in that decision and that it does have a powerful (if subtle) effect on how we connect to the characters. I also think that how the novel has been adapted by Hulu for the screen develops Rooney’s reasoning beautifully, and I’ll explain why.  When you look at a page in Rooney’s novel you can’t always tell what lines are dialogue and what lines aren’t, at first glance. It's on a closer inspection when things become more clear. For a novel which relies so heavily on its main protagonists’ struggles with communication and connection, blurring the lines between the said and the unsaid in this way makes perfect sense. It’s as if Marianne and Connell don’t ever actually speak to each other

  The Winter’s Tale : Feeling beyond reason The Winter’s Tale is definitely not one of Shakespeare’s most famous or beloved plays. It's also not one of his more accessible plays either, and understanding the depth and extremity of emotions which come into tension in the story might not come as naturally to audiences as the easy laughter we get out of something like A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Much Ado . The Winter's Tale charts the rise and fall of a royal marriage, tainted by jealousy, insecurity, madness and destruction. Alongside this darkness, however, there is hope for love all the same, hope for lightness and folly, and hope for redemption and forgiveness. The emotions of King Leontes are extreme and their consequences are tragic. But there is something about that extremity which still moves us - perhaps because it is so extreme it shocks us into submission, into imagining precisely what it might be like to feel such emotions and go through such turmoil. The roles of