DOCTOR FAUSTUS at the CITIZENS THEATRE

Christopher Marlowes classic play was part of an acclaimed new adaptation which features three of  Marlowes original acts, intertwined with two completely brand new acts by writer Colin Teevan.

What is apparent is when Faustus makes a pact with the devil , the whole arrangement is a disaster , and perceived to be a disaster by the main character himself , from the very moment the pact is made.Sure there are distractions like the empty vacuous superficial rock star lifestyle  , but the mood is always sombre , disappointing and laced with foreboding doom about the trifling price the soul of Humanity is sold for superficial material , ephemeral , fleeting gains.

The vice of Faustus in this production is pride , conceit and arrogance of a scholar who thinks he has nothing to learn from lesser sciences , but is now able to depose the Divine from his high and mighty plain of existence.

This review from The Herald captures the feel of the play.

"..as a deluded Faustus (Kevin Trainor) starts to flail about like a greedy child in a sweet-shop of forbidden pleasures, it's Redmond's Mephistopheles that voices, with poignant dignity, just what it is that Faustus craved and destroyed: true love on earth and bliss in Paradise"

In the video below the Director discusses the themes and challenges of the production and its accessibility to todays audience.



The play also has a lot to say on the matter of a debate that was very central during the time of Marlowe about pre-destination and the concept of "The Elect" the topic is touched upon in this link.

More themes of a philosophical nature are explored in the notes in this link.

A special mention is required for the superbly played role of Mephistophilis played by Siobhan Redmond , a performance that suggests the utter folly of the choices and actions of the conceited and arrogant when they think they have outgrown the confines of the universal values and morals of the wise.

WUTHERING HEIGHTS at THE ARCHES

A version of Wuthering Heights performed by an all male cast was a curiosity worth seeing.How on Earth are they going to do it? , what on Earth will it be like?

Well , they done it superbly , and it was surreal other worldly spiritual journey unlike anyone could expect.

One of the characters admirable performs with the role of a Swiftian Horse with a depth of character and texture that makes the audience believe and have sympathy of his yearning to be free like his ancestors , unlike the shackles and reins he is tied to in this story , and like the horse you feel the hope that a better future is attainable especially as the horse is already liberated in spirit , with only the body waiting to catch up with its soul.

The Human characters are at most times set to the rhythms and routines of the horse and they synch with its movements , no doubt a metaphor for the worldly and material constraints on the full expression of the Human spirit and soul.

The characters are highly expressive and there is a happy and liberating feel to the performance , one had a sagacious Shimura smile , another a mischievous though benign grin , knowing but comely.The others also had a quality of grace over stress about their demeanour.

Clearly the play does not follow the Novel , but it does capture the essence and give a contemporary take with a message of hope , as long as one takes the responsibility to right wrongs when there is the time for rectifying left.

This review from "The Scotsman" is pretty fair:

"Peter McMaster’s Wuthering Heights, by contrast, is a strikingly graceful and well-shaped show, despite elements that demand an audience with a certain tolerance for the daft. Performed by a group of five fine young male theatre-makers in their twenties, Wuthering Heights is a powerful 50- minute reflection on themes suggested by Emily Brontë’s great novel, and notably on the character of Heathcliff, the damaged, violent romantic hero at the centre of the story.
It’s possible to quibble with some elements of McMaster’s work. The group dance-in to the sound and movement of Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights is too jokey to sit easily with the rest of the material, which shows a real respect for the brooding darkness of Brontë’s vision; the imagined presence of the horses, neighing and galloping around the place in some scenes, is a high-risk strategy.
Yet time and again, in McMaster’s piece, the sheer quality and focus of the ensemble performance sweeps away any reservations about the show’s content, and vindicates McMaster’s decisions. The acting, the writing and the choreography of the piece are all beautifully prepared and crafted, and the show’s quiet conclusion – a series of meditations on modern male lives, followed by a tiny, vivid final glimpse of Heathcliff and Cathy playing as children – is truly moving, as one of Scotland’s most interesting young theatre-makers moves forward, into new ground."

You can see an earlier , less complete , version of the play recorded earlier in 2012 in the video below ( the one features is the last part of 4)



In a STV interview Peter McMaster explained: “From the outside from an audience's perspective it's not changed too much since Arches Live, the biggest difference is our understanding of the work. I took the guys away on a retreat to look into the emotional side of the journey.
“I think I would find it really hard if we were trying to condense the text into an hour show, it's more responding to the story rather than trying to recreate it.
“There's not too many references to a particular time period. There's five men they all wear a suit and they all take on the part of Heathcliff at some stage or other."

it was a unique experience that adds value to the understanding and themes of the Novel.

SEUMAS MILNE & DANIEL STEDMAN JONES at AYEWRITE

Seumas Milne in his new book makes a bold yet rhetorical deduction that the Neo-Liberal project has failed , and has been seen to fail on all fronts,  in the first decade of the 21st century.The main failures have been the military ones in the pursuit of the disastrous War on Terror with the failed occupations of Iraq and the listless sapping one of the worlds poorest nation Afghanistan coupled with the economic collapse in 2008 and its failed litany of ineffective remedies of more and more borrowed money being sent into black financial holes.There may be some political and economic counter-arguments ( like the preposterous book by Kaletsky , Capitalism 4 , the man who preposes a tax on fresh air for poorer nations to be policed by the Air Power of the Anglo-Saxon nations if the poor fail to pay up) or the rabid revisionisms of Nick Cohen and the foaming Peter Hitchens who at best move the goalposts to a pantomime -of the-absurd level or at worst turn the world upsidedown to justify the unjustifiable neo-status-quo based on rehased arguments to prop up the bankrupt neo-con goals if not applications of these policies.Milne is adament that the core is rotten and the corpse cannot be brought to life.

Alas the issue that concerns Milne is not the pronounced bankruptcy of neo-liberal economics and policies , but why the Left has not failed the void with a workable alternative , the answer is most likely that if the neo-liberal right became bankrupt in 2008 then the Left as we know it was probably declared the same some decades earlier.

Milne has a degree in economics and so is placed to make considered judgements about the financial and political consequences of the neo-liberal project.One telling observation he makes that is relevant to us is the EU has the failed neo-liberal policy written and enshrined into the constitution , hence why the solutions are more doses of the same ineffective solutions , with with the even more toxic solutions of the IMF policies which devastated many a third world economy.

This talk by Seumas given at Sheffield University tracks almost word for word the one he gave here at the Mitchell Library.

   


Daniel Stedman Jones traced the neo-liberal project from the root of the later 1920s when European economists , mostly from Austria , fleeing the menace of totalitarian voyaging regimes came up with a system that would create a balance from the macro-management that only states could provide with the counter-balancing checks of individual input and quasi-private control mechanisms that would provide an outlet for a hoped-for measuring of individual non-state entrepreneurs to prevent total state management and ultimate control of all means of production.These are traced in his book "Masters of The Universe:Hayek, Friedman and The Birth of Neo-Liberal Politics."

According to Jones this concept traveled to the United States , along with the fleeing founders , where it transmogrified with contact with US economists like Friedman into the overt individual privateer with minimal state interference in wealth creation that we see in our time.

As with Seumas above the video below also gives a deeper insight of the talk given by Jones.

 

A very telling observation was the full acceptance of the audience of the thesis of Milne and Jones as an established judgement on the nature and failure of the neo-liberal project.Though , while Milne is happy to give a anti-eulogy of its corpse , Jones ( the more wary of early pronouncements of deaths of ghastly attempts of domination of HumanKind) is more cynical and believes neo-liberalism may still give itself life by sucking out the lives of the ordinary person both at home and abroad , it is far from done with blighting and exterminating innocents lives yet.

PANKAJ MISHRA at AYEWRITE

Pankaj Mishra has the admirable and rare ability for an accomplished academic and scholar of being concise; precise and sticking to the salient points of the question asked.

The clarity of his exposition of the deep historical analysis contained on his latest book has the audience spellbound and in awe of the story of the victims of imperialism from the victims and what may ultimately be the winners of this ghastly project of rapacious capitalism in which everyone , including the individuals of the West were turned from Humans with Spirit to commodities with an expendable shelf-life.

The Book tells the story of the reaction to the brutal inhumane conquest of industrial capitalism and it needed the resources and markets of non-European civilisations to feed its insatiable consumer needs.All in the name of Free-Trade; Democracy and civilising the savages.

This detailed and highly perceptive review of Mishras "The ruins of Empire" gives a good synopsis of the Books tale of how the intellectuals of the Muslim and Chinese Worlds reacted ; analysed and then came up on the other side of this extraordinary two century experience and have yielded some of the movements that are taking on neo-liberalism and the neo-con projects full on even whilst we in the West are impotent to the march of the market economies that have seen to be failing in the last few years.

 " Not content to rehash the East versus West debate, Mishra’s purpose is more ambitious and valuable. In his account, the legacy of imperialism does not fade to irrelevance after World War II — it lives on in the Iranian revolution, the Muslim Brotherhood, the policies of the Chinese Communist Party. Hearing the lesser known non-Western voices in Mishra’s book provides an important reminder that neither the simplistic formulas of “modernization theory” nor the hollow campaigns for “Asian values” can do justice to the historical trajectories of countries outside of Europe and North America:"

A brilliant point made by Mishra was the unity towards non-Europeans by both the right and the so called Left.Whilst the right had the Cecil Rhodes and other megalomaniacs  , the left at the time had no real objection to imperialism as such , their efforts seemed to be limited to the share of the imperial cake being more evenly divided by the West.Hence we have Dickens commenting in the most crass and lurid xenophobic manner on the Mutiny of 1857 and how harsh the reprisals should be , and in the US such champions of the common man like Jack London are looking to find the Great White Hope to restore the premium place of the White Man against the "Ethiopian" Jack Johnson , and even Fabians like H.G. Wells are never to concerned of the plight of the Peoples who suffer in the dominions that supply the ingredients of the cake they wish to distribute to their nationals and we even have the example of the author of the great left-wing Bible "The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists" only known trade union activity being the organisation of strikes to prevent Black Workers taking white peoples jobs.

Pankaj Mishra also his a website in which you can find out more about the Book and his previous work. 

Another vital point Mishra expressed was the very cosmopolitan nature of the Islamic and Chinese world and how tolerance was one of their qualities which made them unable to deal with the militaristic western entry into their domains.In 1800 India has a GDP of 20% of the World and China had better Crop Yields and less incidence of Medical death rates than Europe.After a century of Western domination the GDP of India was less than 3% and China was synonymous with Famines and deadly diseases and floods.

Another contribution Mishra has made is in the debate between the hypocrisy of Salman Rushdie and his condemnation of the Chinese Nobel Prize for literature winner Mo Yan.

"Vladimir Nabokov was not declared ethically deficient, or his filigreed sentences examined for intellectual rot, after he congratulated Lyndon Johnson for his "admirable work" in Vietnam. Bellow hardly met any Palestinians in To Jerusalem and Back, his admiring account of Israel published a decade after the country became a colonialist power in the West Bank. Later, Bellow, widely hailed in Anglo-American circles as a great humanist, also endorsed a bogus book that claimed that the Palestinians did not exist."

This article got a reply from Rushdie which yielded this cogent response.

" Salman Rushdie (Letters, Guardian, 16 December) helpfully clarifies that he approved of the assault on Afghanistan since he saw it as simple retribution rather than, as I incorrectly if charitably implied, an attempt at democracy-promotion. But my article was not about Rushdie's strenuous justifications of his government's fiascos. It did not propose a "moral equivalence" between what he calls "free" and "unfree" societies. Nor did it advance the preposterous argument that, as the estimable Perry Link puts it, "if A is a citizen of country Y, he or she should shut up about country X."

In the video below Mishra gives a detailed in depth interview about the book and its themes , especially the weakness of the nation-state model  and why it may not be the answer to Europe , yet alone the rest of the world ,  with the historian Michael Woods: ( see especially from 58 mins on)

SACRED GLASGOW WALK by MARTIN PALMER

According to his website Martin Palmer is "a writer, broadcaster, religious historian, environmentalist (head of the Alliance of Religions and Conservation, a charity linking religions and conservations) and translator of Chinese classics.
He was born in Bristol, a city where his family has lived for more than 500 years. His surname, Palmer, suggests that sometime before the Reformation his ancestors were professional pilgrims. They were called Palmers because they brought back palm leaves from the Holy Land to show their clients (who had hired them in order to gain some merit in heaven without actually having to make an exhausting journey themselves) they had done the trip."

Though it was well past noon , Martin Palmer had a disorientating manner of saying "Good Morning" to assembling individuals for this fascinating and illuminating walk around Glasgow haunts of my childhood , putting a fitting , revealing picture to many things that were in my mind mysteries of youth , the truth as revealed by Martin was more wondrous than anything of the imagination.

No one plucked up the gumption to correct Martin as to do so would have seemed a crass and crude way to address such an amiable and gentle soul.As the time for the walk to commence approached with the clocks about to announce 1 pm some more patrons joined our party to be put on the backfoot by Martins genial "Good Morning".

The tour began , at the beginning.The point of the founding of Glasgow , a still preserved grassy knoll which was a bank of a burn which is still said to run beneath a roadway under the bridge that links Glasgow Cathedral to the Necropolis.

Martin explained religious Christian settlements in Celtic lands would sprout near the supply of water , for use of full immersion baptisms.All early churches would have an East-West orientation with the burial grounds to the South of the complex , and the North being the side of the devilish dark side , a tradition resulting from the old Bible citing most enemies of ancient Palestine came from the North , the town of Megiddo  being the most Northernly town in the Judaic Kingdom being sacked more than seventeen times in just over two centurues.This town is built on the hill from which we get the word Armageddon.A concept of Northern enemies also exists in Chinese culture of which Martin is a renowned expert scholar.

In later years , Martin informed us , the Calvinist and Protestant churches in the area around the cathedral were orientated to a North-South direction as a form of protest against popery.

In the centre of the square is a statue to King William , the closest the protestant religions got to a patron saint to replace catholic sacred symbols.

Then we went down the High Street , High streets throughout Britain are named because they would lead to a High Cross in the market area which would symbolise the presence of the Almighty , forming a sacred bond to all deals of a commercial or trading nature which would take place in this area which came under the influence and rules of the Church , with all traders and their activities being bound to honour promises of transaction made in this market or be answerable to the Church authority.

Then we went past a shop called Ladywell , this is near the spot the Church subsumed the Celtic rites of religious worship at water sources therefore christianising them by renaming the wells from deities to reverence for the Maternal Family of Jesus.Martin related a remarkable linguistic journey of words we have for rivers and waterways that begin with the phonetic "dh" , this being a word of sanskrit origin for sources of water.This means Celtic words for rivers like "Don" , "Dee" and even "ClyDe" have a Sanskrit  source emanating from the movements of peoples many centuries ago.This means there is in fact a connection between our word for river "Don" and the ones in Russia called the "Don" and "Dneiper" and "Dniester".The name "Ladyann" Wells is a play on the ancient Celtic and Sanskrit names for dieties of water sources.

Then we came to Blackfriar Street , the place i grew up in.When i was a kid this area was a rat-infested slum , so bad that people came from all over Europe to see an example of the only working example of a Victorian slum.The only consolation we had was the reassurance from the students of dereliction that the only place worse they had seen was in Naples.The street had three closes , some warehouses and areas used by the Fruit and Cheese Markets ( hence the manna which was a lure for the rat-about-town aristocracy of the vermin world) and FOUR pubs.Martin told us Blackfriar street is actually in the section that was occupied by the Franciscan Monks.The gentrified backclose remains i remember as a gooey congealed burst drained communal outhouse laundry and some outhouse toilets shared by many houses were built on the foundations of the Franciscan church.

Martin revealed a part of History which should make us re-visit the "Dark Ages" in a different light of which the Monks and Monasteries were vital and essential solutions that under-pinned a long and necessary period of consolidation from the ecological and agrarian disaster that precipitated the collapse of the Roman Empire when a mixture of corporate run agrarian markets and heavy taxing of the very grassroot farmers that husbanded the land took place in a climate of supra-state monopolies of three massive entities pursuing a ultra-capitalist profit without replenishment model in which they avoided taxes and granted themselves bonuses like the bankers of today.The result was the tax-burden required to bail out these corporations when they collapsed on homestead farmers was such that it was not worth farming the land.The Monks and Monastaries took up the burden , taking many centuries to get land production to pre-implosion levels.

The tour ended in Royal Exchange Square , where the present day MOMA ( housed in a mansion once belonging to a tobacco lord who made fortunes in the slave plantations) , hence Church and Saints replaced by Military Generals , Banking institutuions and Merchants making fortunes from the exploiting of the Human Commodity.The irony is the building is protected by its own secular patron saint - Wellington.

Palmer rightly pointed out the Merchants , Generals and Bankers who promised an everlasting progress in the worship of the material to the exclusion of Devine values have somewhat lost the faith of their flock and followers.Maybe it is time for the Sacred to re-enter our lives.

And with that we bid each other "Good Morning" and went of to our Evening engagements.

Palmer is Secretary General of the Alliance of Religions and Conservation, a secular, non-governmental body founded in 1995 by HRH Prince Philip. ARC helps the major religions of the world to develop environmental programs based on their own core teachings, beliefs and practices.

In this video below he sets out the logic and sound reason of a faith based approach to environmental solutions that can work in harmony in our climate and times.