When Dan Stevens decided he wanted to leave Downton Abbey, the writers and producers were faced with a problem. They couldn’t force Stevens to keep working – and yet it would be difficult to give Matthew an exit that made sense inside the show’s universe. Simply upping and leaving his responsibilities would be out of character. So they resolved to kill him off, invoking the ire of many of the show’s viewers, who found the death cheap and melodramatic (especially so soon after Jessica Brown Findlay had left in similar circumstances). This is a problem which affects a great deal of film and TV today: the connection between characters and the actors that play them.

The challenge facing most programme-makers is to achieve the ‘great lie’: ensuring characters and stories exist consistently within the rules of the world they have created. With regard to actors, this means that they must be ‘believable’– so you could imagine their character looking, sounding and acting like their facilitator. While occasionally there is a piece of woeful miscasting, people generally fit their roles at least passably (there is a whole industry based around casting). The larger issue is those actors who do it well. For some, this means typecasting – whether through their skill or natural similarities, in the audience’s eyes they are their character. Ironically, they have succeeded in creating a character so realistic that now their appearance anywhere else illuminates its artificiality.

So what do you do when actors leave?

Characters’ storylines often have to veer wildly from what may have been expected in order to fit with their actors’ lives. They age quicker, have other commitments and sometimes (in the most unfortunate of cases) pass away. Probably the most organic way to deal with an actor moving on is to simply replace the cast members with new characters that fill similar roles. This can vary in effect. In some cases it inspires greater creativity, as in Being Human. Necessity acted as the father of invention due to former cast members changing commitments, but new actors ended up revitalising later episodes after a sluggish season three. On the other hand, another genre show, Misfits, suffered from a question of relevance as the original cast almost all died, emigrated or were incarcerated. The introduction of new characters felt forced, and too much time was spent integrating them into the world whilst not entirely convincing us of their significance. By the end of series four, things looked more promising – but it had taken the length of those episodes to get there. More characters means more exposition, and that means less actual story.

Perhaps a simpler solution is just recasting a character. In The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Vivian Banks was recast a couple of seasons in, and despite the huge differences between the actresses there did not seem to be much of an effect on the show. More recently, Game of Thrones has occasionally recast minor characters whose importance has grown in later books. This can be jarring in a more basic way than characters behaving or leaving oddly, but if handled well it can maintain the quality of story to a greater degree. If the audience is willing to play along, there is no reason for the characters to leave with the actors.

Doctor Who and James Bond have built recasting into the very structure of their franchises. A weakness becomes a strength through the recognition that restructuring long-running characters is often a plus. In Doctor Who, the jarring effect of recasting even becomes canonical. Thanks to the ‘renewal’ idea brought in to replace original Doctor William Hartnell, by the Tom Baker era the show had the concept of ‘regeneration’ firmly in place. Admittedly this is easier in a science-fiction show where the rules are different, but the James Bond franchise’s approach (before it was the all-conquering juggernaut that it is today), kept the series fresh with every new 007. 

Could Downton’s Matthew have been saved? Probably not. The sight of Dan Stevens bursting with light and morphing into another actor would probably be too much even for the most die-hard of fans, and the structure of the show means that it couldn’t feasibly have been reconstructed without him. But it’s important to remember that actors don’t own characters, and that creative consistency is the most important thing.

Orwell was a dedicated Social Democrat, committed to fighting the twin evils of state oppression and inequality. This was the commitment that propelled him into fighting the Spanish Civil war, a campaign that would see him get shot through the neck by one of Franco’s snipers. However, for all his left-leaning credits it seems to be a truth not universally acknowledged that Orwell’s dedication to ending inequality was not something that always played out in his own life.

Orwell had a complicated relationship with women. In 1929, upon returning from Paris, Orwell met and hastily proposed to Brenda Salkeld, who rejected his offer but became a lifelong friend.

A few years later, Orwell married Eileen O’Shaughnessy. The marriage was marred by suspicion about Orwell’s continued correspondence with Salkeld, and the writer’s engagements in Spain. Indeed, Orwell set off to fight a foreign war only a few months after the wedding bells had ceased pealing.

O’Shaughnessy died in 1945, aged only 39, with her husband across the channel in France. It is reported that Orwell’s response to her death was characteristically muted. “Such a shame,” he purportedly said, “she was a good old stick”.

Although one should be wary of psychoanalysing the dead, it appears that Orwell’s attiutudes towards women can appear less than savoury. His personal diaries recount a meeting with a certain Mrs M. This lady “as usual, does not understand much about politics but has adopted her husband’s views as a wife ought to; she pronounces the word “comrade” with manifest discomfort”. Reading this calls to mind characters from Orwell’s fiction. Julia, the liberated heroine of Nineteen Eighty Four is “only a rebel from the waist down”. Lying in bed with Winston, who is pouring over a copy of Goldstein’s The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, she is thoroughly uninterested by the political revolution.

Mollie, the shallow, vain carthorse from Animal Farm, can also be read uncontroversially as an indictment of the female gender. Orwell’s work is intended largely to be observational. He imbues his fiction with as much insightfulness and animosity as he does his non-fiction. It seems at odds that such a staunch campaigner for social equality could overlook the bias that underpins some of his most influential work.

In seeking a reason for why Orwell might hold these prejudices, one is not attempting to excuse them. Mabel Fierz, a close friend of Orwell’s in his later years recalls that “he used to say the one thing he wished in this world was that he’d been attractive to women”. Following the death of O’Shaughnessy in 1945, a desperate Orwell made failed marriage proposals to four younger women before successfully courting Sonia Brownwell, whom he married shortly before his death in 1950.

This final lonely period shouldn’t necessarily be the lens through which we should read Orwell’s writing; it seems all too simple a narrative. Yet isolation was a fever that marked the writer’s life just as keenly as the Tuberculosis that eventually took him. Orwell flitted from job to job, often struggling to publish his work. Many of his friends have remarked on the self-consciousness that Orwell was afflicted with; an affliction shared by his characters Winston Smith from Nineteen Eighty Four and John Flory from Burmese Days amongst others.

It is sad, but perhaps fitting, that Orwell now rests as Eric Blair, in a graveyard not of his choosing, surrounded by those he never knew.

Imagine you’re a funding board for theatre in Oxford. Among the myriad ideas heading your way comes this curveball: an experimental rendition of life in the higher echelons of ancient Babylonian society, complete with – wait for it- a heavy metal soundtrack. The premise of Ashurbanipal: The Last Great King of Assyria is exactly that, an intriguing attempt to reconcile three seemingly disparate corners of the arts.

Examining playwright Selena Wisnom’s attempts to understand the bloodthirsty writings of Ashurbanipal himself, the reasoning behind the choice of music becomes more apparent. However, the soundtrack does not merely pander to metal’s stereotypes of evil unwashed Satanists; it’s an altogether more erudite affair, pairing crunching prog riffs with more ambient electronic passages. “Our aims…were to provide momentum through the more experimental scenes” state Andrew Garner and Tom Clucas, the composers of the soundtrack.

With obvious inspiration from the likes of Opeth, Mastodon and Porcupine Tree, nobody could accuse the soundtrack of being original. However, Garner has plans to add a range of vocals over the top of the soundtrack, providing a narration of the play in ancient Akkadian, for all of those Classicists who will understand…

How does the rest of the team feel about working with a metal soundtrack? “It was a big risk” admits Wisnom, but it appears to have paid off; with 3-6 hours put in to every minute of the music, it has been carefully tailored to meet the needs of the play. Others weren’t quite so keen to begin with- “I can’t say I was exactly thrilled when this was announced to me,” said producer Alexander Woolley, “…but I’ve come round to Tom’s way of thinking: the heavy metal will impart a vitality to the play that a more traditional, slightly operatic soundtrack would have been unable to provide.”

So will this evolution in thinking spark a metal revolution in the Oxford drama scene? Garner certainly hopes so: “I have plans to write a metal musical at some point” he says; Wisnom also intends to create a series of plays on the topic of Assyrian Kings if Ashurbanipal is a success.

Unfortunately for metalheads everywhere, the genre remains stereotyped and divisive; however, if Ashurbanipal is a success, Oxford should start to seriously consider the versatility of metal as an art form.