Musings on art and modern audiences

A Streetcar Named Desire : Reading plays, watching plays Revisiting literature offers us a chance to impart new perspectives and insights - that’s not a revolutionary idea but it’s an important one. Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire is a play close to my heart, and one for which I think I will always reserve the label “Genius.” In part I wonder if it’s because I spent so long poring over it, picking at the bones for every detail in word choice or staging or soundscape. Streetcar is one of those stories which haunts you. Not necessarily because you can really empathise with the characters but because their troubles are so complex, difficult, and entwined that you feel you can’t let go of them. Part of the problem is Williams. If he wasn’t so good at writing maybe we wouldn’t care so much; alas, he’s rather brilliant. Previously I’ve made the case for stories which have made for excellent adaptations, where adaptation has breathed new life into a text rather than dulling its...

  Young Frankenstein : Gothic comic Since we’ve been enjoying the spooky season, I felt it would be a missed opportunity not to post about a spooky film at some point. (Please forgive the hiatus on blogs recently, life has been hellishly busy.)  Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is one of my favourite novels ever, and is also helpfully a quintessential example of Gothic horror. It doesn’t just contain all the hallmarks of a great Gothic story, it originated many of them: a dark, stormy night in autumn, mad scientists, communes with dead bodies, messing about with the natural world, the horrifying prospect of having our morality questioned, all the usual stuff. Don't take that as discounting all of the very serious and necessary questions which Frankenstein asks us to think about, just as acknowledgment that it makes iconic the Gothic genre and its aesthetic of the strange, the terrifying and the macabre.  So what happens when we make it a comedy? Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstei...

  Poor Things : radical feminism? Yorgos Lanthimos’ adaptation of Poor Things was one of the most anticipated films of 2023 alongside the other big hitters of the year - Barbenheimer and the like. It was hugely popular with audiences for Emma Stone’s performance as Bella Baxter, the cinematography and special effects, and the bizarre Frankenstein-esque story. I don’t deny that those things are worthy of attention and that this film is unusual and shocking, however I would advise caution when we talk about any feminist messaging in this story.  It’s not that this film doesn’t have powerful female characters who are interested in living life on their own terms, I am simply sceptical of the desire to label every film with a female main protagonist as an automatically feminist and therefore “good” film. To be frank, if a film happens to have a female main protagonist and also happens to be a bad film, I’m not likely to think highly of it. It seems we’ve become so afraid of being...

  The Great Gatsby : Just a green light on a dock F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is utterly iconic, but we often don’t really take the time to think about what the story actually means. We often make an effort to locate the story in a very particular time and place, as if The Great Gatsby is only relevant there and then, and not here and now. The aesthetic of the 1920s - the clothes, the cars, the music - is cohesive and easily recognisable, so it makes sense that we tend towards that approach. But to be so determined to locate the story in that time and place is to imagine that its issues and questions are not relevant to us right now. It’s as if we feel that we can take a casual and very shallow aesthetic interest in the story but leave it behind us when we close the book or leave the cinema or theatre. That’s not how I think we ought to approach this story.  That said, why do we continue to return to The Great Gatsby if not for the visual pleasure of it? One of ...

Manon : a story made for dancing As far as ballets go, Manon is no Swan Lake or Nutcracker . Few people have heard of it and fewer are remotely interested, but I’d like to make the case for this ballet. Manon is a tragic love story, with imperfect and complex characters tackling difficult circumstances and decisions. In some ways it seems to not make sense as a ballet, but at its heart it really is a love story. It asks: what will we do for love, despite love, and because we love? How better to express that inexpressible and inarticulable feeling than to dance it? Kenneth MacMillan’s ballet Manon is based on the 1731 novel Manon Lescaut by Abbé Prevost, and obviously one involves words and the other does not. (Take a wild guess which is which.) In some ways, Manon needs Prevost’s words to help contextualise Manon’s world, her peers, and her circumstances. It’s useful for us to have those things explained to us so that we can make informed judgments about what we read. But that’s ...

  Matilda : beating the back-to-school blues WIth everyone going back to school and uni over the past few weeks I thought it an opportune moment to think about one of the most famous students in children’s literature: Roald Dahl’s eponymous heroine, Matilda Wormwood.  Matilda is a young girl, curious about the world she lives in, the family she was born into, and the possibilities of her own power. She’s only very young, but she shows such a sensitive and open perspective on the world that you can’t help but be drawn into her story. Just as Matilda finds escape from her troubled family life in books at her local library, so too do we wonder what it might be like to go back to being a child finding our way in the world. But this is not a story just about a girl going to school; there’s an element of magic and fantasy, too. We can imagine how she manages to lift a pencil with only her mind, and we wonder whether we can do the same. We follow her schemes to challenge Miss Trunchb...