the casual critic

theatre

#theatre

On 21 December 1988 at approximately 19:02, Pan Am Flight 103 was cruising over Scotland when a bomb exploded, rupturing the aircraft. All 243 passengers, 16 crew, and 11 residents of the small town of Lockerbie were killed as the aircraft crashed onto the town, its jet fuel igniting on impact. The majority of passengers were Americans, travelling home for Christmas. After a long investigation, Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbasset al-Meghrahi was convicted in 2001 for planting the explosive, though his single conviction remains controversial to this day.

37 years later, there has been remarkable amount of interest in the Lockerbie bombing, with two TV series on British television and Small Acts of Love, a new play to celebrate the reopening of Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre. Yet where the TV series focus on the investigation into the bombing and questions of responsibility and attribution, the play focuses on people: how they react and move forward after their lives are shattered, and how kindness can grow new bonds of friendship in the scorched earth of loss.

Read more...

#theatre

There must be a point where history becomes culture. When the cultural artefacts by which we choose to remember an event overgrow it to such an extent as to obscure it. It seems this is what has happened to the Great Financial Crash of 2008. The shock, despair and anger of those times have long since dissipated, while we continue as if nothing has happened in our Eternal Present, and cultural commentary on the Crash has been safely defanged for consumption as mere entertainment.

The immediate aftermath of the Crash saw a flurry of books, movies and documentaries trying to make sense of what happened and, maybe more importantly, what didn’t happen afterwards. These were followed by plays, such as the The Lehman Trilogy. Premiering at the Edinburgh International Festival this year Make It Happen is a play in the same tradition about the meteoric rise and fall of Royal Bank of Scotland and its CEO, Fred Goodwin.

Read more...

About the author

A long time ago, I had a blog of political polemics. Then life happened and I stopped writing.

Yet the desire to write never went away, and so this blog was born. Of polemics we already have a sufficiency, however. One only has to read a news site. Instead, I am trying my hand at reflections on the cultural artefacts I ‘consume’: books, games, movies, and so forth.

The name of this blog expresses my capacity as an ordinary consumer, and hence merely a ‘casual’ critic. I cannot boast of a degree in art history, cultural studies or English (or any other) language. Nor am I a paid reviewer. I do believe though that most authors create an artefact because they want their audience to actively engage with it, rather than merely consume it passively. Writing reviews is my way of entering into dialogue with a text, as well as an opportunity to be creatively active myself. If people enjoy reading the end product, then so much the better.

About the blog

The function of this blog strongly informed its form. I ended up on Write.as because of the minimalist aesthetic and the deliberate absence of social media plug-ins, Fediverse integrations excepted. There is no SEO, and no trackers. It does mean that the blog lacks some features that readers will have come to expect, most notably the ability to comment and a navigation menu or archive.

To help find your way around, Write.as uses hashtags. Clicking a hashtag will generate a page listing all the posts with the same hashtag. I do my best to label all reviews, and my most common hashtags are at the end of this page.

Posts will be cross-posted to my Mastodon feed, so feel free to leave a comment there. Any feedback or response is much appreciated. You can also subscribe to receive future blogs via email using the ‘Subscribe’ button at the bottom of the homepage, or by adding this blog to an RSS feed.

How to navigate

Every post has one or more tags (‘#’) associated with it to help categorise it. Instead of using menus, you can click on a tag to retrieve all posts with the same tag. You can do this from within any blog post, or you can use the list below.

Mediums #books #films #theatre #tv #videogames

Type #fiction #nonfiction

Fiction genres #fantasy #literature #SF #speculative

Non-fiction categories #history #politics