Monday 4th May 2026
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May’s Brexit deal has been overwhelmingly rejected: all the government can hope for now is damage control

Oliver Shaw
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May’s Brexit deal has been overwhelmingly rejected: all the government can hope for now is damage control

Writing just three hours after Theresa May suffered the worst Commons defeat in modern British political history, I’m not entirely sure what should, or will, happen next.

One thing is clear: Britain cannot crash out of the European Union without a deal. Nor can Parliament renege on Brexit. Tonight, Theresa May got one thing right: to go back on the biggest democratic decision in UK political history would be an outright betrayal of the British people.

No matter how imperfect it may be, an improved deal with cross-party appeal must be concocted in order to minimise the shock of our rapidly approaching departure. Disruptive Brexiteer backbenchers, the true architects of this mess, should be reminded that no withdrawal agreement will be perfect, that they will have to give way on the question of the Northern Ireland backstop if they are to make sure Brexit takes place at all. Even the Prime Minister, so frustratingly wedded to her disastrous handiwork, has repeatedly admitted that her deal was far from perfect.

There were certainly big question marks over May’s deal, but Labour cannot vote down a revised agreement on purely party-political grounds. Perhaps it would be different if we had months or years left until exit day. We have ten weeks left, and No Deal looks more likely by the day.

Extending the Article 50 negotiation period is an option and would provide a little wiggle room for Theresa May (or her successor) when it comes to the question of the backstop. Yet it also raises the problem of Britain’s continued membership of the EU until the new deadline and would be a boon to campaigners for a ‘People’s Vote’. Parliament must focus, however it can, on achieving the smoothest Brexit possible in the circumstances. Let’s face it, a whole new referendum campaign will only get in the way.

In the long term, there is little doubt that this government’s days are numbered. But should Britain go to the polls again in the next few weeks – whether in a general election or any kind of second referendum – it would only offer more instability and uncertainty, distracting from the real issue at hand.

Admittedly, tomorrow’s confidence motion tabled by Jeremy Corbyn will probably come to nothing – we think. In fact, the Prime Minister could use her position to the government’s advantage. She knows that both Conservative and DUP MPs, even those who voted against her efforts, dread the thought of handing Corbyn the keys to 10 Downing Street. In the eyes of many Brexiteers, a Corbyn government might only increase the risk of a second referendum, or of a Brexit even more watered down than Theresa May’s.

It is astonishing that after everything the government has been through, the Prime Minister still managed to one-up the Leader of the Opposition. Responding to the cataclysm, she was cool, prepared, stony-faced. She’s had weeks to draft her response to the defeat. Now, in theory, she can return to Brussels brandishing the results of the vote as evidence for the universal hatred of the deal. That is the best we can hope for, if we want to avoid desperately stockpiling food and medicine over the coming weeks.

Make no mistake, Theresa May’s authority has entirely collapsed. Her dogged, at times admirable, determination has descended into a fundamental entrapment in an impossible situation. This is no longer a question of Conservative politics, or of the Prime Minister’s job security. Britain is entering uncharted waters, the air of constitutional crisis hanging over Westminster tonight.

This government is doomed, wrecked, consigned to infamy. Nevertheless, there’s no time for resignations, leadership contests, elections or referendums.

Now it’s about damage control – and time’s running out.

So that’s how Bandersnatch works, but did it snatch our respect?

Isabella Welch
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So that’s how Bandersnatch works, but did it snatch our respect?

When a new technology comes to the forefront, often art communicating that new technology in the mainstream merely floats around superficial ideas surrounding it. Except in this case Netflix has spent a significant amount of money enabling people to do with their remotes what could have been installed in the 80s; people are talking about Bandersnatch a revolution in the TV industry, but as the episode itself shows, this technology has been around for decades.

I’ve spent hundreds of hours working on ‘choose your own’ adventure games (mostly now referred to as interactive fiction, because they’ve moved so far beyond their original book format, and the ‘choose your own’ brand name). Working on text-based adventures was my big teenage passion, and as I’ve spent so long arguing myself for interactive fiction to be the next step in the future of immersive artwork, it’s been fascinating to see this format finally come to mainstream attention.

From a design perspective, Bandersnatch falls into a lot of traps. Choices are quite infrequent and always binary, whereas it’s standard for most interactive fiction games to allow you to choose almost every line of character dialogue. It’s fine as an introduction, but it’s ultimately incredibly basic as an example of the format. Many of the choices are meaningless and lead you towards instant failures you have to rewind, or you get railroaded where the choice you make gets overwritten and the opposite happens anyway. Because of all the dead ends, I didn’t necessarily feel much was at stake, since I could end up getting killed or forced to take an action regardless of my input.

It is very likely that Bandersnatch takes inspiration from one of the more famous visual novel game series Zero Escape (starting in 2009), the premise of which is that certain individuals can see into different pathways of fate, and learn information from the player’s successes or failings in those other paths. The speeches on the nature of clairvoyance and pathway convergence by Will Poulter as Colin are some of the most memorable moments of the episode, and the episode is at its best whenever there is a recognition of the player’s presence, and the primal fear protagonist Stefan has at the concept of Netflix watching over him. However, as with all Black Mirror episodes, Bandersnatch tries to say too many things at once. At times life seems presented as inherently futile and deterministic, at others it seems that this determinism is presented as a result of human consumerism (and Netflix use), at other times the bondage of fate and inevitability of certain outcomes (think of the ending where Stefan boards the 8:45 train) is presented as beautiful. Black Mirror is strong when it engages in social commentary, but one ending will feel like it backtracks on social commentary made by another, rather than working together as a cohesive entity to try and question what fate is.

Above all, I think that interactive fiction deals with emotive response in an entirely different way to other artwork. You are the player, characters are your friends or enemies, and because their relationships with you are determined entirely by your actions – when you feel that fraction of real feeling as a result of your own responsibility for what has happened in the game, that’s the mark by which I would judge its success. There’s a reason why so many interactive fiction games include strong romance subplots (for example the Choice of Games publisher). Interactive fiction novels, which can reach millions of words in length, and contain thousands of player choices are the closest substitution current technology has for a real relationship. This desire for an escape into another world you have more agency over, where decisions are clearly presented, and where if you just take the right steps anyone can love you – these are some of the key temptations of interactive fiction. Hence, I would say that the USS Callister episode of Black Mirror is as much about the cruelty of an interactive media world the player has agency over as Bandersnatch, wherein a developer uses a simulation to enact fantasies about his real-world relationships.

Choice in a piece of media doesn’t devalue the decision-making process we face in real life, as Bandersnatch often suggests – instead it brings that piece of media terrifyingly closer and closer to real life. Look at the forums of interactive fiction fan communities – they aren’t filled with people obsessed with the butterfly effect, who have started to see life cynically as a series of algorithmic choices, as is reflected Bandersnatch. They’re filled with people who love having complete control over their friends, as long as they are fictional, and want to live in worlds where the meaning of their actions is made clear through a mapped-out pathway. I mention this because Bandersnatch is about the existential crises behind interactive fiction developers, and I think it doesn’t get to the heart of the enwrapped, tortured obsessions with controlled worlds that fans of these games can have.

Bandersnatch is perpetually exciting, and many of its gimmicks put a smile on your face. A lot of Netflix shows try to inject themselves with cliffhangers just to make themselves ready for binge-watching addictions. Bandersnatch is a single entity that contains a lot of jokes about demands for action in entertainment and all its frustrating dead-ends that encourage you to keep watching mocks Netflix effectively. But it is not really a social commentary about consumerism in television, nor about determinism, nor about the issues of applying game logic to life, although it seems to try its hand at all of these. As much as I hope this kind of technology is used in more and more mainstream media, I doubt this quite messy episode will be the breakthrough to start it. 

What’s on: Txking Oxford by Storm

Diren Ozcelik
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What’s on: Txking Oxford by Storm

TxkeOff and Land, a branch of the I2L Entertainment company alongside Déjà vu and Arcade Party, is set to bring the best of Hip Hop, Grime, Rap, Trap, and Afrobeats to the very heart of Oxford: its leading independent live venue and cocktail bar, The Bullingdon- on 6th March 2019.

Having taken over Marseille in the summer of 2018, the company has previously been met with a sizeable public reception, which is a mere indicator of what is in store for Oxford in early spring!

The company supplies only the hottest artists in the UK music scene whilst simultaneously upholding an international appeal, not least owing to its deliverance of an inclusive clubbing experience that caters for audiences of all ages, backgrounds, and colours.

What can you expect from TxkeOff and Land’s March visit to Oxford?

The event, designed particularly for the local students within the Oxford area, Brookes University and Oxford University students alike, is due to accommodate some of the hottest names in the UK music scene. These could potentially include rap legends, the likes of Chip and Abra Cadabra, to name a few, as well as artists that have recently established themselves within the music scene with their club bangers, like Russ and Unknown T, amongst others.

These artists will, of course, be preceded and introduced by some of the UK’s most renowned and iconic DJs/producers, the company teasing of prospects for the likes of Tim Westwood and/or Kenny Allstar to fulfil these roles whilst maintaining the mystery of the acts that are due to perform on the night.

So what’s in store for Oxford?

A multitude of acts that have shaken up the music industry from their very entrance, telling their tales of life on London’s streets through the genres of UK rap and drill; some that have been rapping since they could speak; some that have risen to popularity through their creation of viral hooks and dance moves; potential artist collectives, comprising of various artists who cannot be constrained to a single genre but who work in unison to collaborate their music.

TxkeOff and Land’s visit to Oxford will no doubt bring a new energy to the city, offering an elite clubbing experience to all its attendees with live artists performing. It is set to transport a new culture to Oxford, to shake up the mainstream, and to take Oxford by storm!

TxkeOff and Land comes to The Bullingdon on 6th March 2019

 

Insta – @txkeoffandland

 

Knight Of: read the one percent

Juliet Garcia
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Knight Of: read the one percent

The independent publishers Knight Of have launched a crowdfunding campaign to open a permanent children’s bookshop in Brixton, selling books which have a BAME protagonist to fight against the lack of diversity in literature for younger readers.

Aimée and David Stevens set up Knights Of after leaving Scholastic and ever since the pair have been dedicated to publishing more inclusive children’s fiction, in which ethnic minorities are not pushed to the sidelines or forced into demeaning stereotypes, but are given accurate representation. This is a particularly pressing issue given that less than 4% of the publishing workforce in Britain is non-white and a report in 2017 from the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE) exposed the disillusioning statistic that out of its 9,000 children’s books published that year, only 1% had a BAME main character.

As a celebration of the company’s birthday, Knight Of decided to set up a #ReadtheOnePercent pop-up shop in October and were overwhelmed by the response. Stock was sold out in mere days and they were met with tearful responses by parents and their overawed children who finally, for the first time, saw themselves in the books lining the shelves. Knights Of are now raising money not only to recruit a permanent professional bookseller to run their shop, but also to open pop-up stores around the country, with projected locations including Liverpool, Birmingham, and Edinburgh. The pop-up shops would be intended to forge lasting, positive relationships with independent bookshops in order to meet regional consumer demand for more diverse children’s fiction.

Although their original intention was expand access and attention to books by writers of colour, the shop has now expanded its range of books to include disabled, neurodiverse, and LGBTQ+ characters. This is already making a valuable impact, with one Twitter user commenting “As a disabled child, I was desperate to see myself represented but all of the books I brought home were medical. I fully support the inclusive pop-up bookshops and can’t wait to visit.” Knights Of have now raised over half of their £30,000 target and the campaign has caused a stir in the publishing world, which has seen editors offer their services as a reward for large donations and signed book auctions held to help their mission.

Displayed resplendently in the shop window and across its airy, white interior are some of the best reads in children’s fictions, including For Every One by Jason Reynolds and Alesha Dixon’s Lightning Girl, as well as their very own Knights and Bikes: an adventure book series set on a sleepy island and about the courage of two friends. This year has been a landmark year for diverse children’s fiction, which saw the commercial success of books such as Tomi Adeyemi’s West African-inspired debut Children of Blood and Bone and Natasha Ngan’s acclaimed LGBTQ fantasy Girls of Paper and Fire, based on Asian mythology.

Yet, the reality remains that not enough books like these are signed by agents or published in the first place. When collating a beautiful, handpicked selection of books in which BAME characters are not singled out for their ‘otherness’ but rather celebrated, Knights Of often had to seek out tiny publishers or look through backlists. Knights Of have been adamant that this fundraiser should not be interpreted as a charity case. More diverse children’s literature is not a luxury; it is a commercial necessity and a duty to a younger generation who deserve to see themselves in the books that they read.

If you would like to donate, visit https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/readtheonepercent

Andy Murray – the champion we didn’t deserve

Greg Ritchie
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Andy Murray – the champion we didn’t deserve

Before Andy Murray, British tennis was in nowhere land. No other sport possessed such a high standing in British national identity and yet such a miserable dearth of homegrown success. The green and pleasant lawns of Wimbledon had become a vestige to an England of old, which once upon a time dominated a very English sport. It was now only an annual home to excessive Pimm’s consumption and a regular cycle of very noble disappointments.

Andy Murray changed all that. A gangly frame of a boy, bludgeoned with constant heckling from pundits and spectators alike, he fought his way to the top and restored British tennis’s pride. And boy, did he fight. Tim Henman – a great player possessing an even greater character – came firmly from the British tennis establishment. He had family members who had played at Wimbledon and a grass tennis court in his back garden. Murray’s rise to the top, meanwhile, reads more like an epic. While clearly being blessed in having an incredibly dedicated coach as a mother, he had to constantly endure: whether it be living with the trauma of the Dunblane massacre, having to spend his teenage years abroad to further his development, or forever battling the pain of a chronic knee injury, Murray’s rise was a Hollywood tale of perseverance like few others.

When he finally got there, the off-court challenges did not stop. He was not the darling of British lawn tennis clubs as Henman had been before him. Instead, the tabloids christened him ‘Mopey Murray’: he was too frank, too ill-mannered, too not English. An off-the-cuff joke about supporting anyone but England at the 2006 World Cup became a running saga, haunting him for years. It was perhaps no surprise that he was so unwilling to speak about his views on Scottish independence, only revealing his support for a Yes vote with a last-minute tweet. Once again, the same knuckleheads came calling with more vile abuse, attacking the dedication of a man who had contributed more to British tennis than anyone else this century.

If it was not his politics, it was his family. The media asked why he was not more like his personable brother Jamie, who had won the nation’s hearts when he was the first Briton to win a Wimbledon title for twenty years with partner Jelena Jankovic. When Andy’s success finally made him too much of a British institution to receive so much unjustified derision, the haters gleefully maintained the barrage on his mother Judy. Invariably portrayed as the snarling tiger mum with a devil stare to boot, she became so self-conscious that she had her teeth whitened and straightened.

Yet what the media lampooned him for was also what made him a success. It was his competitive drive, so often portrayed as ungentlemanly, that won him his titles and restored the pride of British tennis. It was his frankness that made him such a great feminist, repeatedly ridiculing the institutional sexism that surrounds the sport. And it was his family that has helped push him to glory, making the sacrifices to pay for his training in Barcelona when the Lawn Tennis Association would not spare a penny of its large endowment. People even began to like his personality. What was once portrayed as dourness is now rightly seen as his dry wit. The man who was oft-portrayed a petulant boy was now winning over the country with a tearful tribute to the supporters who had stood by him and kept him going.

Time and time again Andy has proven those haters to be nothing more than envious bystanders, watching from afar as this lad from Dunblane tears apart the global tennis circuit. He emerged from one of Scotland’s darkest day to become the country’s greatest ever sportsperson, and – by many reputable accounts – the greatest British sportsperson of all time, while at the same time inspiring millions with how far a mixture of perseverance and basic decency can get you in life. For that, all we can do is thank him while we savour the swansong of his playing career. I fear it will be a while before we truly realise what we’ve all lost.

Technical difficulties delay Union term card release

Cherwell News
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Technical difficulties delay Union term card release

Traditionally released during 0th Week, the publication of the Union’s term card has been delayed due to technical difficulties with the society’s new app.

The Union intended to coincide the release of the term card with the introduction of their app to “maximise the publicity”, according to the Union President Daniel Wilkinson.

However delays when Apple held the app in review because of problems with its software.

Wilkinson told Cherwell: “There has been a slight delay on what we thought the timeline of release for the app would be due to the registration process taking longer than expected.”

The online term card will be released at the latest by tomorrow, with the physical copy pidged on Friday.

The Bookshelf: Vita Sackville-West’s ‘Solitude’

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The Bookshelf: Vita Sackville-West’s ‘Solitude’

One drear November day, in the English Faculty Library with laptop open before me and screen perpetually blank, books piled to either side waiting to be opened, I stood up and wandered over to the shelves – for each (wo)man procrastinates the thing (s)he loves. It was in so doing that I came across what has become one of the most important poems to me, matched only by T. S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets and Emily Brontë’s collected works; the text, Vita Sackville-West’s 1938 book-length poem, Solitude. Amounting to 56 pages of iambic pentameter, the poem is as soothing as it is poignant, as beautiful as it is understated, and its overriding sense, although obscured in its ambiguous ending, is of light in a darkening world.

“Now to my little death the pestering clock / Beckons, – but who would sleep when he might wake?” begins Sackville-West’s gentle yet penetrating exploration of what it means to be in oneself, by oneself. Her use of the adverb “[n]ow” draws the reader immediately into the poem’s distinct time, which characterises it as much as it serves as its background; a night that untangles as a thread across the pages, as, in darkness, she succeeds in finding her “private, personal shape”. As the night goes on, so the poem tunnels deeper into the self, “the alien language of the day forgotten / That we as foreigners were forced to learn”. Sackville-West presents the self as a native of the night, inhabiting the days only awkwardly, an interloper barely managing to maintain its disguise. With the coming of the night her “little self to nothingness/ Dwindles”. As the trappings of society slip away, the self finds its truest expression and seems to flow across the page. The “alien language” becomes gender, as Sackville West; the ever-shifting subject of Virginia Woolf’s            gender-bending biography Orlando; emerges “unvexed, unsexed, and unperplexed”. Thus, for Sackville-West, the solitude of the night becomes radical and liberating; “[o]nly with nightfall could I stand apart / And view the shaping pattern of my way”.

Sackville-West’s poetry is spellbinding, and its power in the poem’s beginning lies in how it enacts the very healing it describes, for, in reading, the reader, like Sackville-West’s speaker, is most likely alone. After a day spent fraught with socialising “[s]hreds of [the reader’s] self, that others took and wove / Into themselves, till [the reader] had ceased to be”, are returned. The redress of reading is enacted as it is relayed on the page, and the “daily scars” Sackville-West speaks of, the scars we all know; feelings of being over socialised, overworked, and anxious; slip gently away between the lines of verse.

This is not to say that the poem is purely one of pain absolved and questions answered. Often will Sackville-West lament how she is “forced [-] to live, feel, suffer”, often will she acknowledge the very necessity of pain, “since pain holds beauty in a fiery ring”, and often will she question God, “[w]hy, why and endless why again”. Indeed, faith in the poem sits as an uneasy thing, as Sackville-West declares herself “Christian in all but name” (italics my own), and demands of God answers to the eternal unknowns – why there should be evil, why we should suffer so. The poem does not follow the trajectory one might expect of it. It is as we go on, as the Solitude deepens and so our sense of herself, that uncertainties present themselves and despair rears its head, rather than that they are resolved. By the end of the poem the opening lines are turned on their head; “but who would wake when he might sleep?”, she asks. The reader must ask, has she given up, or has she simply and finally succumbed to sleep, that “little death” so scorned at the poem’s beginning? Is this a journey to be traversed night upon night as she fights the pull of sleep over and over and the end of each day to come, or is this her journey’s end, her final Odyssey into herself, and then into nothing at all?

At the time of the poem’s publication war loomed as a heavy gnarled cloud over the continent, closing in, threatening with each day to shut out more, then all, light, and the reader might be forgiven for “choos[ing] night not day for his eternal round”, to “sleep in forgetfulness” rather than face the horrors to come. Yet the poem ends on a question, as if whether to give up or not remains a choice on the part of the reader. The earlier part of the poem sees Sackville-West, in being by herself, humbling herself, declaring; “When I must die, I’ll drop as the leaf, / Raising no piteous yelp of desolation, / No tardy plea of unrehearsed belief”. Is this a noble relinquishing of human vanity, of the very stubbornness that breeds war, or is this simply Sackville-West giving in? Is this a faithful act or a faithless one? The poem itself is never sure, and neither, I imagine, was Vita. But for all this uncertainty, and for the poem’s uneasy trajectory, the beauty, the urgency of the verse shines through; shines, not violently, but passionately; and we are, in the pleasure of reading, “Happy for once, illusion though it be. / Hoping for sunlight on the other side”.

Thus, Sackville-West’s poem, which seems at first a case of gentle redress, but develops into something more challenging and more profound, finds a light in the darkness of the solitary night; hope, if obscure, of “sunlight to come”. It is the tale of every soul that wanders the earth, often overwhelmed, often alien even to itself. In these words, both the uplifting and the uncertain, the solitary self emerges to the reader once more, steps forward and truly sees the world, for all its beauty and pain:

“The night I love is Death, shared mystery.

Only in this deep darkness can I see

Luminous gleamings of a wider porch.”

Why fashion can be whatever it wants to be

Sophie Grapentin
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Why fashion can be whatever it wants to be

It’s 10.30 pm. While my friends are inside dancing, I sit outside, crying. It’s not because I’m heartbroken. It’s because of the orange sprinkles of curry sauce on my white woollen coat. Of course, wearing a white coat is impractical, and such mishaps have to be expected. Nevertheless, I got angry at the guy who told me that I should have worn a more reasonable jacket.

I am appalled by the very idea of sensible fashion. For me, the notion that fashion has to be practical is deeply flawed. I don’t even think the majority of consumers are actually looking for practical clothes! Here’s why…

First of all, fashion doesn’t have to draw solely from reality. It is about fantasy and image: creating a new identity out of the illusions an outfit can offer. Sure, there have been many conservative fashion movements but they didn’t boast much success. The ‘reform dress’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is mostly remembered in the delicious caricatures it inspired. My personal favourite was published in the satire magazine Simplizissimus in 1904: two women talking, one dressed in a plain sack dress with a simple hairstyle whilst the other boasts a corseted waist, high-heeled shoes, a frilly skirt and a wide brimmed hat. The image sparks associations of a court dress style in the era of Louis XVI. The first woman speaks: ‘The reform dress keeps the body healthy and suitable for motherhood.’ The second responds: ‘As long as you’re wearing those rags, that won’t be a problem for you.’ And while that response is exaggeratedly comic, I agree with it. Practicality excludes the seductive appeal of dreamy illusion.

Fashion is crafted through a design process that necessarily includes a few crazy things on the way. Take for example, the French fashion designer Paul Poiret who is celebrated for putting women in trousers. The wide and fluttering harem pants he invented in 1911 became popular among early feminists intending to shock high society. You could do anything in them. Poiret also popularized the loose ‘reformed’ dress shape that we still associate with the glamorous 1920s.

Conversely, in the same show, Poiret presented his models in ‘hobble skirts’. The ankle-length skirt was so tight around the knees that the wearer was only able to do the smallest steps – they could only hobble. There were countless caricatures depicting women desperately jumping after trains or buses to make fun of the impaired customers – but that didn’t affect the skirt’s popularity.

There’s also clothing that really only exists for the sole purpose of being impractical. I am talking about couture: made to outrage, amaze, and display the designer’s creative wiles. When I first saw a picture of Alexander McQueen’s 2010 Armadillo shoes, I was fascinated. They were mockingly christened ‘hoof heel’ by the newspapers. In hindsight, I’m not even sure I immediately recognised them as footwear. But their impracticality was such an integral part of their very being that perhaps its normal function was meant to be totally unrecognisable. Bulky, misshapen, ugly and probably a danger to the wearer’s ankles, they embody a very basic truth. Fashion is an art form like sculpting or painting and it deserves the same freedom to invent impractical and weird creations.

As students, we have the chance to dress freely, without regulations from school or work. It would be an absolute fashion faux pas not to make the most of the opportunity. Just remember that any visibly impractical garment makes a statement. When I wear my white wool coat (home-sewn with a 1954 pattern that blatantly plagiarises a 1950s Pierre Balmain design) I discovered that for some people this is a provocation. One instance saw a bus driver take a little swerve after spotting me on Magdalen bridge, just enough to drive through a puddle and leave me covered in mud. The result: hundreds of greasy dark stains on a white woollen coat! But what can I say? For me, my very own fashion fantasy is worth the effort.

Review: Hadestown – from myth to musical

Katie Knight
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Review: Hadestown – from myth to musical

To know how it ends, and still to begin to sing it again,

As if it might turn out this time, I learnt that from a friend of mine…

The story of Orpheus and Eurydice has been told time and time again – but if, like me, you have listened to Anais Mitchell’s Hadestown for years – never once expecting it would make its way across the Atlantic – watching it all pan out gives more than the usual sense of déjà vu. The messenger god Hermes (the inimitable André de Shields), charmingly greeting the audience in a folksy bar, starts his tale with a warning. We know how it ends. There’s only one way this story can end. And yet what surprises me most of all is how un-inevitable it all feels; how full of life a story half in the underworld can seem, infused with New Orleans jazz and relentless, bittersweet optimism.

Hadestown faces an almost insurmountable problem right from the get-go – how can you capture a voice from the gods in human form? The original concept album solved this problem by using Justin Vernon (better known as the lead of Bon Iver), his voice layered threefold to create an eerie, startling effect. For a moment, as Reeve Carney sings his first lines to a spectacular ensemble harmony, it appears this production is going to go along the same lines – such that it’s almost a shame when he begins to sing solo.

Carney’s voice can’t reach the haunting high notes of the original stage Orpheus (Damon Daunno) who many fell in love with, but this production has wisely lowered the range, giving this hero a more rock-star feel – and interestingly, to accompany this more mortal voice, an earthly goal.

Orpheus’ revolutionary call to arms is an unexpected but welcome development to this script, although the atmosphere is truly made by the fantastic ensemble who add another dimension to this tried and trusted story. It’s certainly interesting to see Orpheus evolve into the socialist revolutionary we always suspected (but – here I emphasise – never, ever, ever imagined) he would be.

Eva Noblezada as Eurydice is a surprise delight and a standout performer. Her role in this production has been developed, with suitable changes to the script: “A lyre and a player – I’ve heard that one before”, she quips, unimpressed by our hero’s chat-up lines. Noblezada’s version has a tough edge, refreshingly cynical against the fairy-tale-like narrative. A second-act rendition of the mournful ‘Flowers’ in Hadestown is the culmination of this character, making her tough and believable, strong and complex and powerfully mourning – a heroine in her own right, rather than a muse. It’s her performance I leave the theatre most remembering, and it’s wonderful to see an interpretation of the ancient myth which doesn’t overlook Eurydice’s significance.

High regard of Patrick Page (Hades) and the fantastic Amber Gray (Persephone) has preceded them, and it’s obvious to see why – the two positively are their characters, inhabiting their roles with ease. Each steal the limelight whenever they appear (Persephone even more so in her lime-green dress): yet even when the pair aren’t centre stage, I find myself constantly looking for them in the shadows, waiting to see their complex reactions to the events panning out before them. In ‘Our Lady of the Underground’ Gray charms audience and ensemble alike, while Page’s eerily timeful ‘Why We Build the Wall’ proves a formidable first-act finale; first written by Mitchell in 2010, and originally inspired by the imminent threat of climate change, its lyrics have gained such recent relevance that uninformed critics have accused it of being a cheap shot at a famous political figure:

Who do we call the enemy?

The enemy is poverty

And the wall keeps out the enemy

And we build the wall to keep us free

That’s why we build the wall

We build the wall to keep us free.

A testament, perhaps, to the absurdity of recent times. It’s by no means a perfect production; parts of it are still very much a work in progress, a fact which is acknowledged and indeed embraced by both director Rachel Chavkin and Mitchell herself. I attempt not to be jaded by some of the biggest lyric changes, and there’s been a definite move towards streamlining the plot of a very ethereal play, but some of these changes feel a little too speltout – Orpheus’ song-writing mission is emphasised for the audience, as he rescues the marriage of the immortals we are repeatedly told are in love. It’s an understandable addition, given the ethical ambiguity of the original myth. But Orpheus’ signature song has been changed from a tune imbued with his own divine power to a literal love song written by the gods, first sung by Hades in Persephone’s garden (a garden no longer her mother’s – Demeter is conspicuously absent from this telling of the myth). This makes Orpheus’ climactic confrontation with Hades all the stranger. Page and Gray are skilled enough to communicate a loving relationship through stolen glances – that much is made obvious in the play’s second act – as such, it seems a shame to force such an explicit narrative upon them. Orpheus’ skill shouldn’t just be that he has unique access to the divine, it’s that he’s able to challenge them in spite of his mortality.

What I would be interested to see is how the production changes as its run progresses. There’s no Wicked-esque blueprint for this sort of thing, and there’s nothing else quite like it, particularly on the West End – and with a Broadway transfer confirmed for 2019, its clear this play hasn’t yet reached its final form. At times it’s frustrating to watch, attempting to catch subtle changes to lyrics, sometimes wishing the whole thing would stay still for just a moment. But for a show about the power of the spoken narrative, such fluidity feels strangely fitting.

And yet despite its haphazardness, no words can quite capture the zeitgeist of seeing it on stage. An undeniable strength of this production is in its set design – although a stage spinning in concentric circles makes me feel lightheaded by the end. It succeeds in capturing the endless movement of Orpheus’s journey and the eternal, monotonous work of the underworld laborers. A lift rising to the heavens and falling deep beneath the stage assists with some of the most emotional moments of the play: as Carney journeys down to the underworld, and the wonderful ‘Wait for Me’ builds to a crescendo, I’m left in awe by just how wonderfully it’s staged.

And there are beautiful, fantastic moments of tableau – the musical’s poignant ending is inevitable, oh so inevitable, but the way it is played out is an undeniable highlight of the production. As though things could change. As though it might turn out this time. As spring comes back around and the play resumes its start, as I leave the National with a smile on my face, I go against my age-worn instincts – I leave just believing it might. Hadestown is showing at the National Theatre until 26 Jan.

Historicising Fashion

Georgia Corrigan
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Historicising Fashion

The 1971 Yves Saint Laurent Collection du Scandale highlights the instant, ever-changing nature of fashion as well as the day-to-day freedom it bestows. The scandalous collection – at the time a commercial failure – sparked outrage for displaying what have now become high-street staples of today – black flares, blocky strapped heels, chunky fur jackets, and waist-glorifying silhouettes.

Retro looks are the bread and butter of the contemporary fashion moment, but Saint Laurent, who asks the question “What can we really call ‘new’ in fashion?” was heavily criticised for the resuscitation of feminine 1940s styles in his ’71 collection.

This collection is but one of many portals into the greater cultural debates that exist within fashion. Fashion does not exist in a vacuum, it is made up of rules and temporal references whether you choose to break, follow, or twist them – you can only manoeuvre within this network of visual symbols.

Momentarily fleeing the constraints of academia, I see fashion as an escape – yet this is perhaps ironic as history often shows us that fashion is also something to escape from. Virginia Krause writes about the social codification of clothing in Renaissance France, where women were reified whilst men reaped social prestige from the sartorial adornment of their wives and daughters. Having an expensively dressed wife was a status symbol for a man, proving his wealth and status capable of supporting female dependants. Women’s idleness was scorned, and ‘idle’ women who did not have to work could dedicate themselves to a personal grooming regimen that was commodified and appropriated by men.

Though things have changed a lot since then, the “highly codified language of prestige inherent in how one dressed” identified by Krause reverberates with some aspects of our own society [Krause, 2003. P. 105]. She observes that the 16th century French poet Louise Labé understood that lavish clothing procures only the illusion of personal honour while in reality reinforcing male hegemony, which perhaps bears an echo of the ‘self-care’ trend of our own time; I’m certainly not the first person to draw attention to the fact that painting your nails is perhaps not the purest embodiment of self-care. According to Krause, Labé believes that “women can aspire to loftier ambitions for their leisure than self-adornment”  which generates symbolic capital for men [Krause, p. 107]. Whether men or women are the target audience of an outfit, a conversation in Sex and the City between Carrie and Charlotte about the former’s new heels highlights the calculated communication potential of garments in our own time:

[Carrie]: Do you think they make the right statement?

[Charlotte]: Well what statement do you want them to make?

[Carrie]: I am beautiful and powerful and I don’t care that you’re only 25 and married my ex.

[Charlotte]: I thought you didn’t have a complex about how you look to other women?

[Carrie]: Oh no, it’s not a complex, it’s a Natasha-specific obsession, which will be over as soon as she sees me, at the benefit looking fabulous in these shoes, and this dress I saw at Bergdorf’s that’s gonna cost me a month’s rent.

The literature of Early Modern France depicts a world where everyone is hyper-aware of codified outward appearances, and on many levels it doesn’t seem so different from today. Nothing stands alone in fashion: it is fundamentally a form of communication with a receiver, a viewer, a target. Perhaps this is part of why fashion-blogger Leandra Medine’s philosophy of “man repelling” through clothes took such a hold. It completely subverts the Renaissance French system, taking female ownership over fashion as a form of expression and focussing on, in her own words, “trends that women love and men hate”. These ideas are fortified in her book – Man Repeller: Seeking Love, Finding Overalls. Yet the notion of man-repelling suggests that this form of dressing still functions in a male-focused system, only this time dictated by what men don’t like.

Is it really possible to dress entirely for yourself? Is fashion a codifying device that traps women in a system of visual reification? It is virtually impossible to dress completely neutrally; every choice makes some form of statement and an outfit speaks a thousand words.

Maybe fashion is at once freeing and constraining. But this tension may be exactly what makes it exciting and unsettling: this visual world of constant flux somehow manages to be both a refuge from the real world and something to seek refuge from.

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