You can use the hashtags on this page to navigate to a page that contains all posts with that hashtag.

Each review is marked either #fiction or #nonfiction

Each review lists the medium of the review’s subject: #books #films #theatre #tv #videogames

Works of fiction will have one or more genres listed: #cyberpunk #dystopia #fantasy #literature #SF #solarpunk #speculative #superheroes

Works of non-fiction, and some works of fiction, will include a topic: #culture #ecology #economics #feminism #history #politics #socialism #tech #unions

Finally, I found that some reviews share a theme, or a perspective, that is separate from the topic of the work I’m reviewing. These themes are also marked, and include:

• #boundedimagination for reviews that consider how the limitations of our political imagination express themselves in both fiction and non-fiction works.
• #protagonismos for reviews that consider where works of fiction place agency and heroism. This theme was directly inspired by two essays by Ada Palmer.

Warning: Contains some mild spoilers

So Young is a play about five people, one of whom is dead. Central to the play is Helen, who died of Covid but around whose absence the remaining characters continue to orbit. We are witness to a single evening when couple Davie (Andy Clark) and Liane (Lucianne McEvoy) are invited by Milo (Robert Jack), Helen’s widower, to meet Milo’s new girlfriend Greta (Yana Harris). At twenty years old, Greta dramatically fails the ‘half + 7 rule’ for forty-something Milo, and his friends are unsurprisingly unimpressed. What follows is an evening of escalating strife as tempers rise as fast as glasses of wine get downed, and each friend wrestles with grief, death, aging and loss in their own way.

The 2025 production of So Young performed at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow is superbly acted, with Liane frequently stealing the show with biting diatribes on the folly of men. All actors bring copious energy and pathos to the play, managing to navigate the fine balance between comedy and tragedy. And this is necessary, because from the first minute So Young is fighting a rearguard action against the cliched nature of its subject matter. “Older man fucks younger women instead of dealing with his emotions” is after all a tale as old as time, or at least as old as English Literature professors, as Liane points out. Can So Young offer us something new?

The answer is an ambivalent “yes and no”. So Young very productively shifts the centrality of this story away from both the older man and the younger woman, instead putting the focus on Liane and her unresolved grief about the death of her friend. Liane is the real star of the show, and the only character with an emotional arc, going from feigned tolerance of Greta to belligerent disavowal, to cautious acceptance. Although the play cleverly alternates group settings with the pairing off of each potential dyad of characters, Liane is the motive force throughout, compelling the other characters to react to her. At its best, the result is a powerful reflection on grief and friendship.

Unfortunately, despite frequent moments of brilliance and hilarity, So Young remains caught in the narrative cul-de-sac that is the midlife crisis cliche, because of the inherent difficulty of refreshing it. Inevitably both humour and pathos must spring from observations on diminished sex drive, faltering careers, marital fissures, and above all an inability of adults to communicate except when lubricated by copious amounts of wine. So Young further handicaps itself by buying instant laughs with a steady stream of revelations from Milo and Greta (‘we’re in love, we’re engaged, we’re getting married next month, we’re moving to London’), at the expense of the otherwise serious note it is trying to hit. Milo and Greta’s relationship is unnecessarily over the top. Had Greta instead been 28 and Helen’s death a year ago, the play would arguably have worked better, creating at least a chance of portraying Milo as a sympathetic and understandable character. The widower who after a year tentatively tries to move on with a new partner, and who is aware that she is borderline too young, has more potential than the traditional man-child who hides from his emotions in the bed of a girl half his age.

It is not only Greta and Milo’s relationship, but also the characters themselves which further weaken the play. Milo’s man-child stereotype may be funny, but by its very nature it is arrested in its development and hence devoid of complex motivations or emotions, which means it isn’t really interesting. Lacking compelling interiority, the man-child is neither a compelling subject nor a useful lens through which to reflect on society more broadly, a flaw that also marred Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx & Crake. And insofar as Milo proclaims his reaosns for loving Greta, the situation gets worse. For with the narcissism typical of a toddler, all his reasons are about how Greta makes Milo feel. None are about who Greta herself is. Milo’s love is based on the complete objectivication of Greta, using her to achieve an emotional fulfillment that he is too immature to attain himself.

Where Milo’s interest in Greta is egotistic, Greta’s interest in Milo is entirely unexplained. Not that So Young requires the love interest to have any agency or motivation, but in failing to provide either, it prevents Greta from acting as the counterpoint to Liane in the way the play implies she might. Greta’s forceful retort that she is not in this relationship because of unresolved daddy issues would have been significantly more persuasive if we had been given any insight into what attracts her to Milo. Do they share a passion for travel? A love of the performing arts? A commitment to revolutionary socialism? The only thing we do know is that they do not share their respective social circles, and it is legitimate to ask what a 20-year-old would get from a partner who is otherwise completely detached from her life.

What we are missing here is context. In So Young, we have four individuals and the links between them, but not the wider social ecosystem in which they are embedded. That is not surprising, and So Young is far from unique in this. The ‘common sense’ of our times is that we are not a society, but a collection of individuals with particular relations to one another. But humans are social creatures. We aren’t atoms linked to other atoms by unchangeable bonds, but parts of complex and dynamic social ecosystems. We can only be understood through the whole web of relationships we create.

Isolation from social context is also at the root of the clichés that So Young interrogates, but ultimately cannot challenge because it accepts the premise that they have some universal truth. Again, it is hard to fault the play because our culture does regard the midlife crisis, the manchild, the poorly communicating couple, as universally recognisable archetypes and patterns. Yet our familiarity with these clichés obscures their historical and geographical contingency and how they are resultant from how contemporary society is organised. Would Davie fear old age if we revered the wisdom of our elders in the same way as the virility of our young? Would Milo have the same escapist urge if we continued to have transcendental experiences throughout our life? Would all of us communicate better if we had more quality time for our partners, family and friends?

These are the sort of questions a play could ask, but So Young ultimately doesn’t. In this, it is not unlike Make It Happen. Both plays offer powerful critiques of the world we live in. Both plays combine dark comedy with searing insights and genuine pathos. Yet both plays remain stuck within the limited imaginative horizon of contemporaneous bourgeois discourse and are therefore both left with nowhere for their critique to go. In So Young, this is most palpably felt at the conclusion, where after many narrowly averted fallings-out our friends agree to go forward together. It is a brave and mature attempt to resolve the play’s central problem, but ultimately fails to convince because we have not been offered any reason to redeem Milo, and because beyond that, it i not transformative. So Young shows that we can potentially overcome our crises of middle age, but never wonders if what it would take to build a world where we might not suffer them in the first place.

Notes & Suggestions

• For a humorous and surprisingly insightful take on how we might reckon with the anxieties of growing up, one can do worse than giving Marvel’s Thunderbolts* a watch.
• Both Capitalist Realism and Hegemony Now! explore how neoliberal ideology constrains our imaginative horizons, and so limits what futures we might think are possible.

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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.

Small Acts of Love is a music theatre mosaic, its narrative weaving back and forth between different times, places and people. It demands that the audience pay attention to cues indicating when, where and who is on stage, but pays off by showing the bonds formed between people as a tapestry woven of many threads in time and space, rather than a single narrative line through time. The musical parts are as evocative as the dialogue is poignant, although at times I felt the wordless vocals to be slightly at odds with the sombre substance of the play, possibly because they reminded me of Hamilton, which operates in an altogether different register.

Small Acts of Love is at its strongest when showing how mundane humanity copes in the face of incomprehensible disaster. A farmer brings in the body of a victim for fear that foxes might otherwise get at it. There is a search for the matching shoe in a pair. A rose is planted where a body was found. A decision emerges to clean and iron the effects of the victims before they are returned to their families, simply because it is the right thing to do, and once that rightness has been expressed, it is impossible to do otherwise. Small Acts of Love is a play of people searching for a path forward from tragedy, who find it because they are guided by compassion and kindness.

Arguably, it is the Lockerbie community that faces the greater challenge, despite the lesser loss of life. It is the Lockerbie residents who have to choose not to merely be victims, but to give comfort to bereaved strangers across the Atlantic, all while surrounded by the constant reminders of the disaster that befell their town. But kindness is a way through grief, even though for some, such as pastor Patrick Keegan, this journey is more difficult than for others. Small Acts of Love succeeds in conveying the different nature of the pain in both communities, without implying a difference in significance. The sorrow of the bereaved families is surreal and abstract: a plane fails to arrive at the allotted time, family and friends suddenly deleted from existence. The trauma of Lockerbie’s residents is real and visceral: debris, victims and destruction overwhelm their daily reality, leading not only to loss, but also PTSD and survivor’s guilt.

If there is a critique to be made, it is that in its desire to show how something good could emerge from catastrophe, Small Acts of Love elides the more complicated and sorrowful consequences and risks sliding into saccharine sentimentality. In reality, not everyone in the town was included in the collective response. Some were discouraged by the authorities, others too peripheral to the community to be invited in. Not all those who were wounded were healed. As the years passed, not all survivors survived. If the message of Small Acts of Love is one of communities coming together through compassion, it achieves this by omitting those who, for whatever reason, were not or could not be part of those communities.

In the end however, this selectivity is justified. We are the stories we tell about ourselves, so what is the purpose of national theatre if not to help us decide what we want those stories to be? I cannot think of a better play to mark the reopening of the Citizens than one that chooses to find hope, compassion and kindness in what can so easily be portrayed as merely catastrophe or controversy. Spinning a sensational story out of disaster is easy. Standing on a stage to tell a story of hope about a tragedy that is within living memory of your audience is hard. What Small Acts of Love tells us is that we have a choice in how we let the past shape who we are. At a time when hate and division are ascendant and compassion and kindness are on the retreat, the choice to centre the small acts of love that connect us as humans is couragous and right. As the chorus sings at the end of Act One: Let us remember.

Notes and Suggestions

• Small Acts of Love is still running at the Citizens until October 4th.
• A memorial and garden of remembrance have been created in Lockerbie and can be visited.

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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.

Make It Happen follows the pattern of a Greek tragedy (complete with chorus) where the protagonist’s downfall results from a combination of hubris and the transgression of divine and/or social laws. We follow Fred Goodwin – played by Sandy Grierson – as he takes over as CEO of the Royal Bank of Scotland and propels it from a provincial and sedate Scottish bank to a global behemoth, only to watch it all fall apart as the overextended and overleveraged RBS becomes one of many casualties of the Great Financial Crisis, only rescued through government intervention. Notwithstanding the obvious banker tropes (sordid affairs and cocaine fueled nights out), Goodwin’s fall from grace develops subtly over the course of the play. Grierson’s Goodwin is first of all an outsider: to banking (he is an accountant), to Edinburgh (he is from Paisley) and to the milieu of Edinburgh (he has a working class upbringing). It is this outsider status that gives Goodwin the edge. Not only is he more ambitious and unconstrained by the mores of the Edinburgh gentry, but he also has a firm grasp of detail and opportunity. His first coup is the takeover of the much larger NatWest, sensing both the weakness of their balance sheet and the decadence of its management.

Victory, however, comes at a price, and as the play progresses, Goodwin slowly turns into the stereotypical banker he initially despises: arrogant, hedonistic and disinterested in details. After deciding to move RBS out to a white elephant of a campus outside of Edinburgh, Goodwin lavishes more attention on the removal of a tree marring his view than on the toxic assets that RBS accumulates. Erstwhile scrutiny and detailed instructions of his underlings give way to a singleminded mantra: make it happen. The callousness though, was always there, grounded in a social Darwinist reading of Goodwin’s hero: Adam Smith.

An Adam Smith who, played by Brian Cox like a self-conscious ghost of Christmas past, makes an appearance when Goodwin finds himself stressed or frustrated. Smith acts as the foil to Goodwin’s hardcore neoliberalism, reacting with puzzlement, denial and outrage to Goodwin’s repeated invocations of Smith as the justification for his dog-eat-dog capitalism. The scenes where an exasperated Smith queries if Goodwin has actually read The Wealth of Nations or ‘his other book’ (The Theory of Moral Sentiments) are solid, if at times predictable, comedy, carried by the two excellent actors and their interaction. Yet for all the dramaturgical fireworks, these scenes expose the fundamental limitations of a liberal analysis and critique of the causes of the Great Financial Crash.

By centring Goodwin as the hubristic yet misguided banker, Make it Happen implies that the causes of the 2008 Crash are to be found in greedy bankers and a misunderstanding of Smithian economics. The repeated exhortations by Smith to read The Theory of Moral Sentiments feel addressed as much at the audience as at Goodwin. ‘If only we had read Smith properly,’ the play seems to say, ‘none of this would have happened.’ Presumably though, economists (and bankers) do know how to read, and yet not only do we hear precious little about Smith’s hostile views on monopolies, there is a veritable industry devoted to maintaining the hegemony of the economic model Goodwin so fervently beliefs in. This includes an actual institute named after Adam Smith which has the express purpose of furthering the neoliberal economic model that, if Make it Happen were to be believed, Adam Smith himself would be appalled by.

Make it Happen follows the common liberal mistake that ideas drive history, and hence that progress is achieved by replacing erroneous ideas with better ones. We saw this same weakness in Rutger Bregman’s Utopia for Realists. Yet as the fellows at the Adam Smith Institute would probably be the first to admit, it is having power to disseminate your ideas and make them hegemonic that really matters. The rest is just moralising.

Moralising can still make for an evening’s entertainment, but morality without power denies us the catharsis tragedy promises. As the real Adam Smith said (in his other book): “Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.” Goodwin is no modern Pentheus or Agamemnon – he may have lost his job and knighthood, but retains a comfortable retirement package. Meanwhile, over 300,000 people have died in the UK alone as a result of the austerity imposed to repay the ballouts of the banks. The exasperated lament by the play’s Gordon Brown that those who caused the crash should have been dragged away in handcuffs can count on a sympathetic hearing by the audience. But our collective knowledge that this didn’t happen only underscores our impotence, and voids the play of accusatory power. If after nearly twenty years it is still the financial sector laughing all the way to the bank, then really the joke is on all of us.

Notes & suggestions

• We all need a bank, but Ethical Consumer has recommendations for those who would rather that their money didn’t support finance’s most destructive and parasitical behaviours. Alternatively, consider a credit union.
• On the theory of how ideas serve power, rather than the other way around, see Hegemony Now!
• The What’s Left of Philosophy podcast have an episode where they discuss Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and its centrality to Adam Smith’s thoughts.

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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.

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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.

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