It turns out that employers don't actually care about your uni grades that much [National Student archive]

~~~THIS ARTICLE was originally written for THE NATIONAL STUDENT it has been archived on my personal blog anticipating the TERMINATION of that VENERABLE ESTABLISHMENT~~~



New research suggests that employees value experience over education.

Indeed.co.uk, the job site used by more than 200 million people, has released new research about the decision-making of small businesses during the employment process.

Unfortunately, some of the findings may come as a shock to those who have invested 3 years and over £27,000 of debt into their degrees.

A survey of 1,000 small business employers found that 81% place a higher premium on a candidate's experience rather than on their education.

Philip Reeve releases new 'Mortal Engines' short stories and we're so excited [National Student archive]

~~~THIS ARTICLE was originally written for THE NATIONAL STUDENT it has been archived on my personal blog anticipating the TERMINATION of that VENERABLE ESTABLISHMENT~~~


Philip Reeve has brought out a collection of three short stories in the universe of the Mortal Engines quartet, to tie in with the film adaption of Mortal Engines coming out later this year. As if fans of the original series didn’t have enough to lose their minds over already.

[Image probably copyrighted, author too lazy to check.] 

The collection, entitled ‘Night Flights’, is centred around Anna Fang, the Anti-Tractionist aviatrix supporting-character from the original quartet. It’s essentially a prequel to the main saga which, as Reeve says in his 2018 Book News update, ‘adds a bit of detail to the stories of Anna Fang’s early life which are hinted at in Mortal Engines’. The middle story in the collection is based on ‘Traction City’, Reeve’s World Book Day novella release from 2011, refocussing the events on Anna who in that book was more of a deuteragonist, while, excitingly, the first and last stories are wholly new creations. 

Vote Leave Breaking the Law Won't Stop Us Leaving the EU

An edited version of this article was published on the National Student website on the 18th Jul 18

Leave may have broken the law. Specifically, electoral law. That’s not a good look for a campaign who were supposed to be all about the sovereignty of British democracy.

To get everyone caught up: the Electoral Commission has referred Vote Leave, the official Brexit campaign, to the police, for breaking their campaign spending limit to the tune of almost £500,000 over the £7m cap. They allegedly did this not through direct spending, but made a donation to another Leave group, BeLeave, which the Electoral Commission consider significant evidence of coordination, joint spending which goes over the spending cap. The Commission also levelled several fines against several people and organisations, including a £20,000 fine against Vote Leave for ‘failure to cooperate … because we found it so difficult to get Vote Leave to work with us in this investigation’ – that’s the Electoral Commission’s chief executive, Claire Bassett, speaking.

'Tau' - Film review

An edited version of this review was published on the National Student website on the 11th Jul 18

'Tau' is a surprising film of two halves – or rather an out-of-place-20%, if that’s a thing, but it’s a rewardingly intelligent film if you can get through the first 20 minutes without eye-rolling too hard.

The film establishes itself in such a strange way. Maybe it’s an intentional misdirect, but that would still make it intentionally derivative. It starts of as 'Ex Machina' meets 'Saw'. The opening nightclub and city scenes look like budget ‘San Junipero’, though the camera following Julia, our protagonist, home is quite creepy. Plus, in the baddy’s mansion (who naturally listens to classical piano), you get the obligatory minor jump-scare at something which shouldn’t actually be scary, namely, on seeing the other prisoners. 

Trains Over Planes: A cheaper, greener way to travel

An edited version of this article was published on the National Student website on the 9th Jul 18

Trains are greener than planes, they can also be cheaper, even affordable. This may be surprising to a British reader, but I’ve done the 200-mile journey from Florence to Milan in only an hour and a half, faster than any British train, for £18. To holiday train-travel is actually viable once you leave our island nation, in fact it’s often cleaner, comfier, faster, more punctual and crucially cheaper.

Unfortuately of course, trains practically reduce your range, probably to just western and central Europe. Plus, you’ve got to get to the continent first, which depending on where you live could mean an expensive (British) train journey to the coast, but the whole point of this train-over-plane method is that getting there is half the fun. I recommend getting a coach to the coast and then a ferry – the north-east and east coast can get you to Germany and Holland, and the south coast can get you to France. Thisismoney.co.uk recommend SeaFrance for getting you from Dover to Calais for £50. Don’t worry landlubbers, the crossing’s only 90 minutes.

Theatre review: 'SS Mendi Dancing the Death Drill' @ Nuffield Southampton Theatres 09/07/18

An edited version of this review was published on the National Student website on the 9th Jul 18

'SS Mendi Dancing the Death Drill' is the Isango Ensemble’s retelling of the negligent wrecking of the SS Mendi, a steam ship bringing black labourers from South Africa in 1917 to assist in the trench-building, latrine-digging and cooking of the Western Front. The play was commissioned by Now14-18, the national arts programme to commemorate the centenary of the First World War, to play at the Nuffield Southampton’s new downtown NST City. For NST, this show is also designed to coincide with their Now-Here theatre festival, supported by Black History Month South, which explores the theme of Southampton’s hidden of migrants and refugees (and accidently became an excellent pun on Theresa May’s “citizens of the world are citizens of Now-Here”).

Sam Hodges, artist director of NST, said that ‘For a story of this magnitude to have been whitewashed from the history books beggars belief’, and this is certainly true. I’m a local and I never learnt about this at school, and for the Southampton audience, the repetition of the phrase ‘12 miles off the Isle of Wight’ is a stark condemnation of the priorities of white, western, US-eurocentric historiography. The play’s paratext is vital in this regard, with a very informative programme and a supplementary booklet free to pick up from the Maritime Archeology Trust, a 43-page history of the ‘Black and Asian Seamen of the Forgotten Wrecks of the First World War’.

Unpack the secrets of your hometown on a microadventure

An edited version of this review was published on the National Student website on the 7th Jul 18

Popularity can have negative impacts on tourist honeypots, as one can see in Venice and other tourist honeypots fighting back against AirBnB’s hostile takeovers and resultant gentrification, and the ecological damage that overcrowding can cause sites of natural beauty. Instead of crowding into Florence, Ho Chi Mihn City, and New York, there is an alternative which is less damaging to tourist hotspots, your wallet, and the planet - especially the latter two when you don’t have to fly! I’m referring to micro-adventures, taking the time to explore your locale as if it were a holiday destination.

Now, I know that you can’t cloy the hungry edge of appetite by bare imagination of a feast, and that’s not what this is about. However, it’s worth remembering that the people in the far-flung cities that we find so exciting are just people pottering about their day like people anywhere else (and a smattering of tourists of course, as you’ll know if you ever tried using a pavement in London), and with the right frame of mind you can make your own hometown feel far-flung.

Theatre review: 'The Big I Am' @ Liverpool Everyman 20/06/18

An edited version of this review was published on the National Student website on the 27th Jun 18

The Liverpool Everyman Company’s new Ibsen adaptation, ‘The Big I Am’, is fantastic. At times anarchic and juvenile, sometimes harmonious and poignant, it transfers Ibsen’s Peer Gynt into 20^th-century Liverpool, tracking the eponymous Gynt through the 60s, 80s and noughties and corssing continents in the process. Its mix of heightened realism and absurdism is highly energetic, and throughout cast demonstrate imagination in absurdist choices. Sometimes the juvenility is too much – only sometimes though, and certainly not enough to take away from what a fantastic experience this show is.

The play features a great cast, all 3 ages of Gynt – young, middle-aged and old, each played by a different actor – are equally good. The ensemble is great, and the attention given to peripheral characters (in Gynt’s world, all characters seem peripheral, even when he’s offstage) is sufficient to amuse without being distracting from the scene. There’s plenty of music throughout, sometimes in the scene and sometimes as backing, from a variety of eras and genres, and there’s also singing in perhaps unusual or unexpected places which is very enjoyable. The production is a good track of the passage of slow time but the first act is too long. It did keep my attention throughout, but the play in total runs to 3 hours so be warned. It requires endurance, but it pays off in a big little way.

A Defence of 'Orwellian'

An edited version of this review was published on the National Student website on the 25th Jun 18

For Orwell’s birthday, I’d like to make a defence of Orwell on account of a quirk of our political parlance. Someone who spends an unhealthy majority of their time reading about politics on the internet tends to run across the term ‘Orwellian’ in a bafflingly diffuse array of sometimes fairly unrelated contexts. Sure, the big bads like the Snoopers’ Charter and the NSA and most things occurring in Russia get ‘Orwellian’ labels and it’s fairly justified. Justified in its use by the average Facebook-user-cum-political-analyst’s loose grasp of a book they almost definitely haven’t read, anyway.
 Enough people have seen ‘Orwellian’ standing for ‘bad oppressive state apparatus’ to learn the broad context and make an educated guess in their own writing. Unfortunately, enough people have learned the word from people who haven’t read 1984who also learned the word from people who haven’t read 1984that such instances as LBC firing Katie Hopkins, Sadiq Khan’s anti-junk food advertisements, and Tommy Robinson being arrested for breaching the peace of court find themselves referred to as ‘Orwellian’. Apparently the somewhat baggier definition of ‘Orwellian’ is “a decision made by someone in a position of power which I don’t agree with”. I wager a tidy sum that at least one person has accused the British state of acting ‘Orwellian’ for arresting the men doing Nazi salutes at the ‘Free Tommy’ demonstration in London.

Shriver Was Wrong on Diversity

An edited version of this article was published on the National Student website on the 19th Jun 18

Let me some up a recent controversy: Leonel Shriver’s gotten in some trouble recently for this article, originally entitled ‘When diversity means uniformity’ as you can tell from the URL, but recently fuzzily renamed ‘Great writers are found with an open mind’, which is bitterly critical of the publisher Penguin Random House’s new diversity policy. The policy aims to make their staff and published authors reflective of UK society by 2025 by ‘taking into account ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social mobility and disability’ – quelle horreur. As a result of her article, she’s been jettisoned as a judge in Mslexia’s 2018 Short Story Competition, who in a tweet quoted their editor as saying Shriver’s comments ‘are not consistent with Mslexia’s ethos, and alienate the very women we are trying to support’.

To my mind, Shriver’s tone in attacking the policy and an accompanying questionnaire used to survey the publisher is almost as offensive as her content. For example, her oh-so-coy complaint that ‘the old chocolate-or-vanilla sexes have multiplied into Baskin Robbins’, and that trans identity ‘merits a whole separate query’ separate to the question on gender. Of course, she could easily defend herself in the first instance as merely using a metaphorical description, as ice cream is frivolous and the disdain is so lightly shaded, but this dog-whistle-inflammatory-language tactic is popular with the Spectator and other reactionary writers and publications for riling up lefty readers and fuelling the stereotype of oversensitive lefties for those who perhaps don’t understand what all the PC hullabaloo is about. 

And then we get to the substantive argument of her article, which you can read yourself or allow me to oversimplify as “diversity is the wrong criterion on which to hire staff and choose which manuscripts to take to print”. But diversity not being the only criterion on which we hire or choose by no means suggests it shouldn’t be highly important among the other criteria. This is the point at which we realise her comments about a ‘gay transgender Caribbean who dropped out of school at seven and powers around town on a mobility scooter’ being published are not only offensive but also wrong. Her defence here to accusations of a host of discriminatory –isms in that one terse phrase will undoubtedly be the caveat she gives that their manuscript is an ‘incoherent, tedious, meandering and insensible pile of mixed-paper recycling’, again obfuscating a reactionary disdain. But it nontheless misses a crucial point: isn’t the idea of a text from a more diverse array of perspectives actually exciting?

Theatre review: 'Trying it on' @ Birmingham REP 12/06/18

An edited version of this review was published on the National Student website on the 18th Jun 18

Trying It On, a new one-man-show by David Edgar which attempts to is not entirely good theatre. Certainly not in the traditional sense of the slick professionalism we’re used to on the modern stage. There are moments that were jarring and awkward, or moments where Edgar took pauses which were perhaps a little too long to regain his place in the story, with the aid of a prompt. It’s not slick, it’s slow and stumbling, but what it is is honest.

The faltering nature is perhaps a reflection of its source material – we were frequently vox-popped along the lines of those over- and under 47 (for purposes as political as you can imagine). Likewise, while the set is nice, the interactions with it are simple and performative (not in the duplicitous sense), but this is the point somehow. The performance is honest, candid, and this closeness to or confidence in the audience allows nuance that an arm’s-length performance wouldn’t.

It’s an intriguing exploration of the generation who dreamed of revolution in 1968 but to varying degrees abandoned it by the current day. A clever device in this involves talking to a recorded voice through a microphone – Edgar’s 20-year-old past-self who reacts in horror at some of the more bourgeois successes of his 70-year-old self – and a key concern of the play is the extent to which we should be allowed to betray our old beliefs or disown or old selves.

Theatre review: '3 Sisters' @ Royal Exchange Manchester 09/05/18

An edited version of this review was published on the National Student website on the 30th May 18

Rashdash is a three-woman ensemble, and from 3^rd-19^thof May they played ‘Three Sisters’, after Chekhov, in the studio space at the Royal Exchange, Manchester. The phrase “after Chekhov” is crucial to the play, a modernised self-referential adaptation of Chekhov’s original intermingled with an abstract dramatisation of Rashdash’s thought process when debating dramatising the Canon. This is such a far postmodern stray from the lackluster realism of conventional theatre that, having asked in their flier for rating out of ‘a) 42’, ‘b) gf%’, ‘c) ★★★★★★★★★★★★★★’, or ‘d) other’, Rashdash would probably be dismayed to see me give them five stars. But the production deserves it, it’s brilliant.

The production (play? artwork? experience?) was anarchic, energetic, joyful. In fact, it was refreshingly disrespectful - disrespectful in the way modern artists probably should be to the revered Classics. A milder form of this phenomenon would be Emma Rice’s euphoric stint at the Globe Theatre. Emma Rice’s critics would have been struck dumb watching Rashdash’s ‘Three Sisters’. Good riddance. I know very little about Chekhov’s original, but I don’t doubt that here the eponymous sisters are given far more stage time than the author intended, and seeing into their world, refracted and distorted as it is by the modernisation, is a rich exploration of character. Rashdash played perfectly with the ambiguity with which female artists approach the mostly male canon and there was also an ambivalence in the actor-character relationship which allowed the knife edge of sincerity and irony to be teetered all the more precariously. At one point for example, a radical feminist grieving the end of an intense romantic relationship questions how her current lived experience interacts with her strongly-held abstract philosophies.

Theatre review: 'The Kite Runner' @ Liverpool Playhouse 27/02/18

An edited version of this review was published on the National Student website on the 3rd Mar 18

‘The Kite Runner’ is a Nottingham Playhouse and Liverpool Everyman & Playhouse co-production with UK Productions and Flying Entertainment. It’s an adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s novel which the trailer, programme and posters urgently remind us is an ‘international best-selling novel’ which went on to spawn ‘a major feature film’. All of this is meant to sound impressive, which makes the play all the more disappointing: it’s a cheap capitalisation on a cultural phenomenon which, whatever its merits as a novel, should never have been made into a play.

The pacing throughout is appalling thanks to an impossible script which relies on endless tonally-unvarying narration for a crutch to what amounts to a recounting and not an adaptation. “Show, don’t tell” is an elementary commandment, but this is precisely where ‘The Kite Runner’ falls down. One gets a sense of the powerful poetry of Hosseini’s original work, but it jars with Raj Ghatak’s insincere, static delivery which must make up at least a third of the entire runtime, and it overrules the brief snatches of actual dramatic representation the audience is allowed.

The verbose retrospective of the narration created an ironic distance between past and present, particularly in the first half of the play when Ghatak would flit incessantly between the older-narrating and childhood-acting version of Amir, which made it impossible to fully empathise with our protagonist. The overuse of telling also created instances which clearly robbed director and actors of choice and sometimes forced actors into carrying out described actions which did not feel believable, particularly in almost every instance in which a character was said to have cried and the actor was then expected to do so on the spot. 

Theatre review: 'Crimes Under the Sun' @ Bath Theatre Royal 19/02/18

An edited version of this review was published on the National Student website on the 28th Feb 18

‘Crimes Under the Sun’ by new Old Friends is directed by James Farrell and stars Jill Myers, Jonny McClean, Heather Westwell and Feargus Woods Dunlop – a cast of four actors who have to multi-role between them a dramatis personae of fourteen characters. The somewhat farcical pastiche to the period detective fiction of Agatha Christie clearly took some cues from Patrick Barlow’s multiroling melodrama ‘The 39 Steps’ which played the Criterion in London. Highlighting this similarity isn’t a criticism by any means: if a successful and popular production has found a winning formula then why not emulate it?

This production is a lot less polished than its West End equivalent. It’s unprofessional, but charming, funny and self-aware of the opportunities its lack of slick polish allow, with a cabaret-like inclination to try out outside-the-box ideas and the mixing of comedic modes which create a lovely evening of eclectic silly fun. Some of these choices may have been hit-or-miss, for example the song and dance recapitulation of the character introductions which was questionable whilst endearing – although that being said, it’s a more interesting way to stage Christie’s typical introduction of the future suspects than other plays would think of and was enjoyable.

In a decidedly unserious production the multiroling has hilarious opportunities as in Heather Westwell playing all three policemen in the investigation and having to switch between them in one scene with only her voice and the assistance of a moustache, a pair of glasses and crouching for the short one. However, it means the actors are sometimes relying on a silly voice, a stereotyped physicality and an accent to differentiate the more important characters. The acting is affected but works with our sense of the propriety of the time of writing and also works with the ironic tone of the comedy which has to come from the ridiculousness of the premise.

Theatre review: 'A Passage to India' @ Liverpool Playhouse 07/02/18

An edited version of this review was published on the National Student website on the 9th Feb 18

A Passage to India is an adaptation of E M Forster’s novel co-produced by Simple8 and Royal & Derngate, Northampton, adapted by Simon Dormandy, who co-directed the production with Sebastian Armesto. The production is on a 6-stop national tour, having just played the Northampton’s R&D, the Salisbury Playhouse and the Bristol Old Vic. It’s playing at the Liverpool Playhouse till the end of the week (10 Feb). If you want to catch it, and I recommend you do, it’s going on to play Bromley’s Churchill Theatre (13-17 Feb) and a long run at London’s Park Theatre (20 Feb-24 Mar).

The Liverpool Playhouse is joint-owned by the Everyman and is only a short walk from either the Central or Lime Street railway stations. The Playhouse certainly isn’t modern in comparison to its sister-theatre, the Everyman, but neither is it shabby – it has old-fashioned charm, a spacious first-floor bar with a view over Williamson Square and elegant décor in its delightfully traditional proscenium arch auditorium. There were few empty seats in the stalls and the auditorium buzzed with excited chatter, which is always heart-warming in a time of much pessimism with the lack of engagement in theatre.

This is the best professional production I’ve seen in a long time. Simple8 have assembled a truly stunning cast – and star-studded too. Just a glance at the programme shows that the cast have trained at RADA, LAMDA, Bristol, and most have at least a full column of theatre and film credits, and it shows. The acting throughout is precise and believable, and the cast’s utter conviction help sustain our suspension of disbelief in the more interpretive non-naturalistic moments.

And Time Goes by So Slowly

'Unchained Melody' by the Righteous Brothers is a beautiful song. I don't really know enough about music to talk about time signatures, but I love songs like that, where each chord is a lilting arpeggio of 6 notes. 'For Your Precious Love' by Otis Redding, 'Last Kiss' by Taylor Swift, 'Hallelujah' by Jeff Buckley, 'Sanctus' from Fauré's Requiem, and, of course, possibly the most beautiful song ever written, Schubert's 'Ave Maria'. If you can collect enough of them, put on some headphones with a playlist of them and close your eyes. That class of song, they are irrefutably utterly beautiful. There must be something very specific about that rhythm for so many disparate songs to achieve the same effect.

So in amongst its kin, 'Unchained Melody' is probably third after 'Ave Maria' and 'For Your Precious Love'. What brings it to my mind to highlight is a section which, musically, just blows my mind every time. It's that bit near the beginning which goes '... such a long lonely time / and time goes by / so slowly / and time can do so much'. The emotion in those dulcet tones as the first stanza glides into the second really does one on the heart-strings.

However.

'Batman v Superman' - Film review

Review contains spoilers for this film. (But lets be honest the majority of the spoilers in this film are ridiculous. Besides, who worries about spoilers for the second film in a series?)

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was directed by Zack Snyder and is the second entry in the DCCU (If Marvel have the MCU then do Detective Comics have the DCCU? Does it have a name yet?). The first was Man of Steel which was fairly well received in the comic-book movies community but which I personally haven't seen. To be honest you don't have to have seen it to watch this film because Superman is Superman and he's pretty well established in this film anyway. I'll try to avoid comparisons to the MCU, although it can't be ignored that, coming second, the DCCU has to make a clear decision whether to avoid or embrace emulation.

This is a very large image if you click on it.

First let's talk about what the film got really right - Ben Affleck's Batman. Here we have the new best film interpretation of the caped crusader, better, even, than his incarnation in the Arkham videogame series. This dark knight really is a force of nature: the first time we as an audience encounter him from the perspective of an outsider, a policeman investigating a case, the atmosphere is distinctly oppressive and threatening and his first appearance heart-jolting. Maybe Bale's Batman was more valiant and honourable but he now seems lumbering, relying merely on brute force in comparison to Affleck's, who uses stealth and intelligence and demonstrates martial and athletic prowess in all of his confrontations. What's more, Affleck's more cerebral, reserved Bruce Wayne who gives the impression of an inner strength was a more complimentary and coherent fit to his Batman than in Bale's Bruce/Bat pair. There's something about the distance the audience are afforded from Wayne here which creates a sense of mythology around this bat - a force of nature, something of the dark which is separate from our sense of reality, which doesn't necessarily obey our laws of physics as he leaps from wall to wall and vanishes into darkness. We're occasionally offered a little look into how this effect is created, for example seeing Alfred tinkering with the voice alterer, but here Batman v Superman somehow manages to have its cake and eat it because while we see that it's just technology and can marvel at Wayne's prowess it doesn't take away from the fact that that 'Tell me, do you bleed?' is chillingly un-human.

'Eye in the Sky' - Film review

Eye in the Sky is an international political thriller directed by Gavin Hood and starring Helen Mirren, Aaron Paul and the late, great Alan Rickman. It tells the story of a British military officer seeking authorisation for a drone strike in a foreign country on a British national.

The film is a hugely complex moral question based on a very simple premise, so its strength comes from the attention it gives to setting the stage and form the time it took to be intelligent, thoughtful and sensitive. Take for instance the news/documentary exposition on El Shabaab at the beginning of the film. This sequence stands out so much in contrast to the cliche of other more low-brow thrillers, exemplified perfectly by the breakfast scene in Olympus Has Fallen with the offhand reference to rising tensions on the Korean peninsular to create a vague sense of intrigue. There the news programme is used for the opposite purpose for which it's intended in the real world - to tantalise slightly, but mostly to leave the audience in the dark. Eye in the Sky totally turns this trope on its head in the opening sequence, as the news programme is probably the best way to get vital information across. What's more, this blatant exposition doesn't feel in anyway cynical, or rather its cynicism completely pays off as the film evolves requiring a well-informed audience.

Inheritance (for S. Davies)

That you and I are similar this is true,
Lucretius' glass reflects again to see
What great bounty I owe to thee:
Love of art and life inherited of you.
Damned procrastination though
You think part of this fillial 'deed';
So think you that document dishevelled be -
What good be goals if wait is all I do?

But fear not, there may be hope, perchance:
Aware I was that soon was Mother's Day
I actually wrote this sonnet in advance!
So, aye, flit and fancy rule me that they may
But if surely I can write a couple stanzas,
Surely, then, concerns are washed away!

Explanation for a Hiatus

Having a while ago received praise from a friend (and fellow-blogger) on the regularity and consistency of my work on this blog, I feel I owe an explanation for a hiatus which as of this writing has lasted just in excess of 2 months. Besides this I'm pleased to see growing evidence of an irregular and inconsistent yet relatively sizeable readership - and my gratitude for this is another part of what compels me to justify this lack of content from me.

Firstly, what started it to begin with. As I may have referenced before, I'm an actor in my local youth theatre, the Nuffield Youth Theatre, while on my gap year before going to university in October. Shortly after my last post here would have been my last show with the Youth Theatre proper, as Odysseus in an adaptation of The Odyssey which played on allegories of the current refugee crisis. (Disclaimer: this is a large youth theatre, so I wasn't actually playing the main character, I was one of six people playing Odysseus at different points). Immediately after this I was in a 'grassroots' production directed by a member of that youth theatre, Emil Rousseau - whose name I include here as a possible claim to fame when I'm older, yes I was in my youth in a play directed by Emil Rousseau. The play was called Scuttlers and was set in gang-ridden 19th century Manchester, which meant producing my best Mancunian accent, which was awful.