What is a Critic? The Evil of Violence Conversation Cerith Mathias looks at the Gary Raymond explores the nature of Steph Power talks to Wales Window of Birmingham, arts criticism in a letter addressed to WNO’s David Alabama the future Pountney Wales Arts Review ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL Wales Arts Review - Anniversary Special 1 Wales Arts Contents Review Senior Editor Gary Raymond Managing Editor Phil Morris Design Editor Dean Lewis Fiction Editor John Lavin Music Editor Steph Power Non Fiction Up Front 3 A Letter Addressed to the Future: Editor What is a Critic? Ben Glover Gary Raymond Features 5 Against the Evil of Violence – The Wales Window of Alabama Cerith Mathias PDF Designer 8 An Interview with David Pountney, Artistic Ben Glover Director of WNO Steph Power 15 Epiphanies – On Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ John Lavin 20 Wales on Film: Zulu (1964) Phil Morris 22 Miles Beyond Glyndwr: What Does the Future Hold for Welsh Language Music? Elin Williams 24 Occupy Gezi: The Cultural Impact James Lloyd 28 The Thrill of it All: Glam! David Bowie Is… and the Curious Case of Adrian Street Craig Austin 31 Wales’ Past, Present and Future: A Land of Possibilities? Rhian E Jones 34 Jimmy Carter: Truth and Dare Ben Glover 36 Women and Parliament Jenny Willott MP 38 Cambriol Jon Gower 41 Postcards From The Basque Country: Imagined Communities Dylan Moore 43 Tennessee Williams: There’s No Success Like Failure Georgina Deverell 47 To the Detriment of Us All: The Untouched Legacy of Arthur Koestler and George Orwell Gary Raymond Wales Arts Review - Anniversary Special 2 by Gary Raymond In the final episode of Julian Barnes’ 1989 book, The History read to know we are not alone, as CS Lewis famously said, of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, titled ‘The Dream’, the then we write for similar reasons, and we write criticism protagonist finds himself in a Heaven, his every desire because it is the next step on from discursiveness; it is the catered for by a dedicated celestial personal assistant. purest form of debate, crystallised passion. Perhaps predictably, the protagonist spends some time working his way through the fantasies his time on earth Critics are not journalists, (although they are often mistaken would not or could not accommodate. He sleeps with for journalists by artists, the public, and, often, by actual women, those whom he had known and those further journalists). Critics are not outsiders, they are not those who beyond his reach. He takes the opportunity to meet his cannot; they are the artists, the thinkers, who trawl through heroes, and then to encounter history’s giants. After what the embers while the firestarters are asleep. Criticism is a must be aeons in this timeless domain, he turns to his conversation, and the places where criticism is published assistant and declares that he is bored; he has done are the dark oaky pubs, the bohemian coffee houses, the everything he could ever have wanted to do, and much late night wine-singed debates around the dinner tables; more besides. He has climbed every mountain and sailed they are the places that host the best conversations you every sea. What’s next? His assistant takes him to a have ever had, ever wanted to have, or one day hope to. heavenly cleric to answer this question. His options are two: he can either cease to exist (he isn’t so sure of this pathway) ‘Criticism’, that label we give the speech of the engaged or he can read every book ever written. The people who artisan committed to paper, is simply an extension of the read books, he is told, are the ones who tend to last the purest connection that we, as humans, have with our longest in Heaven. The protagonist asks what happens after creative processes. When Jean Genet was locked in his that? Well, says the cleric, once you have spent the ages French prison he began to collect small pieces of brown reading every book ever written, then you get to spend even scrap paper, on which he wrote, in pencil, the whole of Our longer discussing those books with the others who have Lady of the Flowers, one of the greatest novels of the lasted that long. You can take forever arguing about books, twentieth century. He did so because of the need to do so, he is told. the need to be part of the eternal conversation. When a prison guard found the writings he burned them. Genet It is perhaps worth thinking of this parable whenever started again, and recreated the novel, knowing it would the question that sits atop this essay makes it into a never be read, never be published, and would no doubt be conversation. The consumers of literature inherit the burned again. (It was published in 1951 and duly banned). Kingdom of Heaven, or at least inhabit its pubs and What is the need to have this conversation with the page? coffee dens. Is it obsessional? Is it insanity? Or is it the thing that keeps us sane? The eternal conversation, whatever, is the thing. If art, if writing literature, is talking to yourself, then criticism is a conversation with whomever you like; your best friend, Critics have had a hand in changing things just as the artists your greatest enemy, the girl you never got or the girl you’re have. Susan Sontag is as important to photography for her grateful to have ended up with. I’ve never met a writer I’ve 1977 book On Photography as any of the great photo liked whose top-of-the-list conversation topic is their own journalists who preceded it. John Berger’s Ways of Seeing work. We swirl around books, around plays and paintings, changed not only the way people look at paintings, but in them and out of them, as writers. And we never write altered the way art is taught in universities. Kenneth Tynan anything that impresses us more than something somebody and Harold Hobson, rival theatre critics at the Observer and else has written. We always want to write the story that Sunday Times respectively, found an unlikely union of another person has nabbed and nailed. Every writer fell in outlook when they marked the profound genius of Waiting love with art before they wrote their first sentence, before for Godot for a confused and disgruntled public when they decided it was literature for them. Beckett’s masterpiece came to London in 1955. The reviews changed theatre, they made the world realise that The great critics of art and culture are almost always Beckett was a major figure, and Beckett, as we all know, practitioners first and foremost, and all the best practitioners changed everything. are consumers of the art of others before they are drawn to Tynan, who rarely wrote about his craft as a critic, did once the blank page themselves. In short, we are all readers, be write a response to the publication of a collection of essays it of books or images or soundscapes, and it is never by American critic Theodore L Shaw (author of such satisfying to keep these experiences to ourselves. If we companionable titles as War on Critics and The Wales Arts Review - Anniversary Special 3 Hypocrisy of Criticism). Tynan, arguably the finest theatre potent stuff. There is a rumble, the type most commonly critic of the twentieth century, wrote, associated with the coming of a storm; the filing cabinet rattling moments before the earthquake. The arts in What counts is not their [critics'] opinion, but the art with Wales are about to enter an unprecedented era of which it is expressed. They differ from the novelist only in creative excellence, a seismic movement that will provide that they take as their subject-matter life rehearsed, instead a significant platform that is visible way beyond the of life unrehearsed. The subtlest and best-informed of men borders Wales has held on to so dearly for so long. It will still be a bad critic if his style is bad. It is irrelevant cannot happen without criticism and criticism of the whether his opinion is ‘right or ‘wrong’: I learn more from George Bernard Shaw when he is wrong than I do from highest calibre. It cannot happen without passion, Clement Strong when he is right. intellectualism, elitism. It will not happen with star ratings (a fishing line designed specifically to catch the smallest And here is the weight behind the blade:- fish), advertorials or soft porn in the margins. Great criticism is as important as the art that inspires it and the The true critic cares little for the here and now. The last thing Critic is the writer who cannot give up the conversation. he bothers about is the man who will read him first. His real Wales is a country filled with talent; with serious-minded rendezvous is with posterity. His review is a letter addressed practitioners of the arts. And the country is too small for to the future. us all to crawl over one another doffing our caps as we pass on Escher’s stairwell. May we have permission from In Iron in the Soul, a novel in which the main character is whoever is in charge to respectfully move on from Dylan an artist and critic, Sartre wrote that the business of a Thomas? May we take the opportunity to perhaps critic is ‘to know what other men have thought.’ This may introduce this great country to the outside world as a seem obvious, but it is true on many levels.