Critic Cal

Was reminded of this when trying to say whatever it was I was trying to say last time I tried to say something . I know, I know ... it's cheating to re-punctuate but it's the best I could manage so far. Who'd have thought a form with only five distinct lines could prove so problematical! I TRIED (a triolet) The whole world set to fighting; I tried to be the one who didn't. Envy, rivalry, back-biting – The whole world! Set to fighting It – contenting, quieting Myself – I found I was no different. The whole world set to. Fighting, I tried to be 'the one'. Who didn't?  Carolyn Whitnall, August 2014 "What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spe

I watched in spellbound horror as the fragile thread by which this turbulent, treacherous, tormented, temporal world precariously dangles ... -snapped- ... and the whole thing came crashing down in a pandemonium of light, glitter, smoke, leopard print, automatic gun-fire, luggage, canine skeletons, and virtuosic violining. And then we went to Wagamama's. Kneehigh  theatre company's  Dead Dog in a Suitcase (and Other Love Songs)  [1] is an immense tragicomic rollercoaster of satirical mayhem, beautifully crafted with a searing, seamlessly genre-fusing score (dubstep, ska, metal, classical, you name it), superb musical and theatrical performances, and all manner of impressive choreography, puppetry and set work. It charts the fate of a town embroiled in the self-serving schemes of wealthy pilchard magnate Peachum and his malevolent genius of a wife (an hilarious stage turn by scene-stealer Rina Fatania). Not that the inhabitants themselves are innocent victims -- most will

So, I let vent the other day about the way that cinemas sanitise death for a family audience. This got me thinking -- though I just about managed to restrain myself from throwing it all in to one particularly extended and rambling discourse -- about the other aspects of human existence you do and don't expect to see in a 12A. One obvious no-no is, understandably, graphic sex -- cue lots of suggestive cut-aways just at the moment of hand-buttock contact, or of one foot leaving the floor, or of a directional transition towards the horizontal... (Basically, any of the various happenings they warn you about in those start-of-term Christian Union pep talks). But, as with death, sex can be cheapened even while it is not being explicitly depicted -- and that's what I think happens when it's treated as 'no big deal'. Of course it alienates me terribly to say so, because 'no big deal' is, in most cases, the widely agreed-upon standard of healthy sexuality that w