Category Archives: Culture

Arts, Books, Culture, Drama, Films, Literature

Hamnet

FILM REVIEW

Intro: This film adaptation is based on Maggie O’Farrell’s deeply moving historical novel that reimagines the life of William Shakespeare’s family, specifically focusing on the death of his only son, Hamnet, and how that tragedy may have influenced his most famous play, Hamlet

In 1596, William Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, died at the age of 11. Sometime between three and five years later, Shakespeare wrote a play which almost shared the boy’s name, and which has since become one of the most lauded dramatic works in existence. The possible link between these two events was the subject of an acclaimed 2020 novel by Maggie O’Farrell.

Now comes this quietly astonishing screen adaptation – with a script sensitively adapted by O’Farrell and the film’s director, Chloe Zhao – and with Jessie Buckley as Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway, and Paul Mescal as Shakespeare.

As in the book, Hathaway is here called Agnes, the name she was given in her father’s will. Her husband, meanwhile, is no famous playwright yet – his name is not mentioned for more than an hour – but the educated son of a Stratford glovemaker keeps pootling off to a London theatre for work. Agnes, meanwhile, remains with their three children – daughter Susanna and twins, Judith and Hamnet – close to the ancient woodland with which she shares a deep and strange bond.

– In cinemas now

We see in this play that Zhao has swapped the Terrence Malick-like lyricism of Nomadland and The Rider for a less insistent style that allows the story’s emotions to naturally drift to the fore. These emotions are often tough – Agnes’s life, alongside her mother-in-law (a superb Emily Watson), can be hard, even before the plaque comes that will claim the life of one of her children. But there are also constant flashes of everyday wonder and joy, many of which we’re invited to imagine might have inspired elements in Shakespeare’s future work. (The twins often disguise themselves as one another for a game: very Twelfth Night.)

The slow start to this production is groundwork, and the sober visual approach puts a greater burden and expectation on Zhao’s leads, but they don’t so much rise to the challenge as spiral above it. Mescal has never been better, while as Agnes, Buckley seems to discover her character before your eyes: every moment she plays rings transparently true.

This is a category of film that is described as devastating, heartbreaking, even hard to watch – and at times it is certainly all of these things. But, without any doubt, it isn’t a downer, thanks in no small part to the sublime final reel.

Here, Agnes makes the journey to her husband’s playhouse in London – only for her grief to be both complicated and clarified by this play he has written called Hamlet, and is now staging with acutely moving variations on the same two-humans-swap-places trick that the couple’s children once adored.

One of these springs from the casting: the actor appearing as the young Danish prince is played by Noah Jupe – the real-life older brother of the child actor, Jacobi Jupe, who portrayed Hamnet in the earlier scenes.

The play’s speeches are raw and revelatory, despite being among the most worn in the English tongue: that sense of freshness is one of the film’s wildest achievements. What Hamnet leaves you with isn’t sadness, but joy – at the human capacity to reckon with death’s implacability through art, or love, or just the basic act of carrying-on in its defiance. It blows you back on to the street on a gust of pure exhilaration. 

Hamnet U cert, 125 min

Verdict: An exceptionally delivered adaptation ★★★★★

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Arts, Books, Culture, Literature, Society, Theatre

Wokeism has lost its grip on the arts

THE ARTS

Intro: This year has been one in which the tenets of woke, for so long held unquestionably in the performing arts and literary professions, started to be questioned.

From the literary world to the theatre, we have seen a pushback against identity politics

FOR many arts critics’ 2025 was the year that wokeism perished. And not before time.

Everyone, of course, is entitled to hold their own opinions, with some still representing a section of the liberal bien-pensant opinion in the arts that believes wokery to be a commendable necessity rather than an outdated and invidious ideology. Julian Clary, for instance, when interviewed recently, made his customary and screamingly inappropriate remarks that easily surpassed any definition of satire.

Nonetheless, this year has been one in which the tenets of woke, for so long held unquestionably in the performing arts and literary professions, started to be questioned. Unsurprisingly, it was swiftly discovered that the emperor had no clothes.

The publishing industry has been the most striking example of the upturned order. Around 2020, there was a clear edict that the profession had been taken over by white middle-class gatekeepers, and that this had to change in the interests of social justice.

If you stood against this – on the grounds that a bad book was a bad book, no matter what the skin colour, sexual orientation, or social background of its author – you were accused of being “elitist” and your career was promptly curtailed.

Scapegoats were routinely found, most egregiously the teacher and poet Kate Clanchy, who was the victim of little less than a witch hunt. Her apparent crime was that of “cultural appropriation”. Clanchy was driven to near-suicidal despair, and her publisher Pan Macmillan took ostentatious delight and glee in washing their hands of her.

Five years later, Clanchy has received a long overdue apology from Pan Macmillan for the reputational damage she suffered; the publisher stated that the hounding represented “a regrettable series of events in Pan Macmillan’s past”. A sympathetic and thorough BBC Radio 4 documentary, Anatomy of a Cancellation, examined the controversy afresh, interviewing those involved from all sides. Few would doubt that Clanchy emerged vindicated.

There have been other indications, too, that the wind is shifting. The Booker Prize for 2025 went to David Szalay’s Flesh, an unsparing account of the sexual and social coming-of-age of a taciturn young Hungarian man.

Szalay, the Stowe and Oxford-educated novelist of some standing, is a heterosexual white man – a category of people who are no longer supposed either to write or read novels – who has written a good book, rather than some piece of woke agitprop. There is every chance that it will endure far beyond flashier, less accomplished fiction.

So, too, should Thomas Peermohamed Lambert’s stunning debut Shibboleth, one of the funniest and wisest satirical narratives available on the hopeless state of contemporary academia.

Away from publishing, the National Theatre remains in thrall to modishness under its artistic director Indhu Rubasingham, but the visionary regime of the RSC’s Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey has demonstrated that classical theatre done well, with great actors, is what audiences really want to see. The arts world will be hopeful that the incoming artistic director of the Old Vic, Rupert Goold, will bring similar rigour to the South Bank next year.

Opera and classical music are following the lead, prizing clarity and intelligence above trendiness. Vanity Fair declared approvingly in recent times that “the opera is having a woke renaissance”. How things change. “Misguided wokeism” has been criticised as being the philistine impulse on part of the small-minded who believe that amateurism, with the “right” motivations, was somehow more impressive than non-ideological professionalism. Most people should agree.

The battle for good sense is not yet won, and we should be mindful of this. There are arts apparatchiks with their vested interests, wielding their pronouns and non-binary statuses like weapons of war, who will fight what they see as anti-progress for their entire lives. Yet others, who have been tired and fed up with tokenism and the oppressive rise of being told what to think – or else – may breathe a natural sigh of relief.

Most of us should be happy to end 2025 by seeing those who embrace wokeism with the same élan as they did previously [as being] behind us in time-honoured fashion.

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Arts, Books, Christianity, Culture, Middle East

Book Review: The Vanishing and The Twilight of Christianity

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: Janine di Giovanni provides a deeply personal and journalistic account of the rapid decline of Christian communities in the Middle East. As a former war correspondent, and a practicing Catholic, di Giovanni blends political analysis with oral testimonies and histories to document what she describes as a “vanishing” world

THE veteran war reporter Janine di Giovanni roams far and wide to find out why 2,000 years of Christianity and its history in the Middle East may be nearing an end. In trying to understand the exodus, she tours monasteries in Syria’s warzones, visits embattled enclaves in Egypt, and meets Iraqi Christians from Mosul, who had “N” for “Nazarene” daubed on their doors by Islamic State.

Yet, among the more poignant symbols she notes are not the bombed-out churches on the frontlines, but the crucifix tattoos on the young restaurateurs who serve her lunch in the tranquil northern Iraqi city of Irbil. The tattoos are not hipster affectations, but symbols of a creed whose adherents no longer know their place – “the garish link depicting a permanence belied by their current predicament”.

Di Giovanni spoke to them about their insecurities. She sought to understand how they had been separated from family during the ISIS invasion, how they fear the future, and how they are saving their wages in a quest to pay illegal smugglers to get them out of Iraq. “But once out, where would they go?” she asks. 

To quite a few places, actually. Such has been the turbulence in the Middle East over the last half-century that its Christians have been forced out: diasporas range from Chicago to Ealing in west London. The exodus is particularly marked in Iraq and Syria, where the Christian minority had traditionally enjoyed the protection of secular strongmen such as Saddam Hussein and Bashar al-Assad. In Iraq, where an estimated 1.4 million Christians once lived, there are now only 250,000. In Syria, around 700,000 Christians of the pre-civil-war population of 1.1 million have departed.

The author, who has been covering the Middle East for more than three decades for high-end publications such as Vanity Fair, is well placed to chronicle the mass retreat – and astute enough not to blame it all on some sinister grand scheme by the region’s Muslims. In recent years, after all, some in the West have been quick to portray this as close to a genocide, underplayed by a liberal media that now finds Christianity a bit embarrassing. But while Christians have suffered at the hands of Sunni fanatics like ISIS, so too have many Muslims, Yazidis in northern Iraq, and other minorities: the reason they are fleeing is often just the general lawlessness, lousy government, and a desire to seek a better life abroad.

Still, di Giovanni makes it clear why many Christians in the Middle East feel their fortunes to be particularly on the wane. After 1945, they often formed an educated middle class, whose acumen in commerce, medicine, and teaching was appreciated by progressive-minded despots. For example, the courteous and urbane Christian Tariq Aziz, Iraq’s foreign minister, was for many years the acceptable face of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Even after Saddam’s 2003 downfall – which many saw as a US “crusade” – there were no organised reprisals against the invaders’ co-religionists. And while al-Qaeda’s Sunni extremists focused on murdering fellow Muslims, Christians in the region also suffered. Then, in 2010, Islamic State gunmen stormed Our Lady of Salvation Church in Baghdad, killing 58. The group’s subsequent seizure of northern Iraq, including ancient Christian towns such as Qaraqosh, was for many the final straw. Many are leaving because there is no life and very little or no incentive to stay.

In Syria, things are scarcely better. Christians have had little choice but to rely on the Mafia-like protection of President Assad, himself a minority Alawite. A Syrian bishop tells di Giovanni that only Assad can hold Syria together – aware, presumably, that by taking sides, his flock may be tainted.

Indeed, the only Christians whose future seems reasonably assured in the Middle East are Egypt’s Copts, who, at up to 10 million, are perhaps simply too numerous to be pushed out. Ironically, it is here that community tensions seem worst. In 2013, mobs attacked 42 churches, and in the Christian districts di Giovanni visits, locals bitterly complain of being treated as second-class citizens.

Di Giovanni writes elegantly, her reporting and careful analysis informed partly by being a Catholic herself. However, the focus of this book is likely to surprise many readers’: nearly half of it is about Christians in Egypt and Gaza, where now barely 1,000 live. It is a source of amazement her editors didn’t ask her to concentrate mainly on Iraq and Syria, where the Christian decline has been at its most dramatic.

As such, it underplays some key chapters in the “exodus” narrative. The reason Christians first fled post-Saddam Iraq in droves was because their prosperity made them targets for criminal activity, and because they tended to turn the other cheek rather than form militias. There is no mention of how the Baghdad Christian enclave of Doura – once labelled “The Vatican” – was overrun by al-Qaeda in 2006, or how the Iraqi capital’s Christian flock is now among those most at risk of becoming extinct, having reached a tipping point where most Christian families have more relatives outside of Iraq than in.

On which note, it would also have been interesting to read about life for the diaspora in the “Little Baghdads” of Chicago and Ealing. The irony is that, by offering Christian sanctuary, the West is inadvertently hastening Middle Eastern Christianity’s demise all the more.

– The Vanishing: Faith, Loss, and the Twilight of Christianity in the land of the Prophets is published by Bloomsbury, 272pp      

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