Trip to the pictures to see ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’, based on the 2009 ‘mash-up’ novel by Seth Grahame-Smith – for those unfamiliar, this genre typically grafts horror onto a classic text.

Jane Austen, who famously declared two or three families in a small village the very thing to work on, would surely be spinning in her grave at the adulteration of her work, but the splicing of schlock onto a much-loved late-Romantic novel was surprisingly successful and at times almost seamless. In this society, the feminine accomplishments of embroidery and sketching are secondary to the martial arts – Japanese for the privileged aristocracy; Chinese for less fortunate gentlewomen. A nice point when Caroline Bingley enacts social exclusion by speaking in the high-status Japanese; Lizzie responds to the snub in kind, plucking The Art of War from a bookshelf and declaring in fluent Cantonese that if it has not been read in the original language it has not been read at all. The mash-up also allows crude physical expression of Lizzie’s seditious spirit, which in the original is confined largely to her rapier-like tongue. The zombie strand is not always so happily integrated – the division of zombie society by an aristocratic minority who lord it over the common undead was rather laboured.

Confusion (for viewers of a certain age) in that Lily James, who is spot on as Lizzie Bennett zombies or no zombies, bears more than a passing resemblance to Elizabeth Garvie of the 1980 BBC TV adaptation. She is also fresh from her role as Natasha Rostova in the beautifully produced BBC serial War and Peace. To compound this confusion, her poor, plain friend Charlotte Lucas is played by Aisling Loftus (poor, plain cousin Sonya in War and Peace), while the famous lake scene, which elevated Colin Firth to sex-symbol status but is not part of Austen’s novel, is nicked from the 1995 BBC version.

The film raises a hornet’s nest of adaptation issues, but such is the cultural influence of the novel (and presumably the desire of those involved to appeal if at all possible to Austen acolytes as well as horror-lovers), that the spirit of the original can still be discerned through TV intertexts and in spite of the mash-up. It’s absolutely bonkers, but visually appealing and quite entertaining. Worth a fiver (cinema tickets seem to have got cheaper) if you have a free evening. On the other hand, you could also safely wait until it comes on the telly.

There is a wonderful Matisse exhibition on at the Tate Liverpool (free, till May). The centre piece is undoubtedly the surprisingly large ‘The Snail’, but there are 14 other fascinating pieces tracing his development from a figurative painter, through Impressionist and Fauvist phases, to the abstractions of colour and shape of the 1950s. ‘The Snail’ represents the development of this process to a pure experimentation with colour and shape. The orange frame contains cut-out blocks of hand-mixed colour which both contrast and balance each other, while at the same time suggesting the natural spiral of the snail’s shell.

The gallery is a wonderful day out on its own, but it is also surrounded by museums (Maritime, The Beatles and Liverpool), as well as great places to eat and shop. And, if you have the time, there’s always the ferry across the Mersey.

If, like me, you are prepared to believe that the Sheriff on Nottingham has a sudden Marxist epiphany that there are Robin Hoods all over the country ready to topple the odious King John, that it is Robin himself who forces John’s hand to create a great charter for the people (and call it Magna Carta), and that they are all terrified into doing this by a baby dragon, then you would have had as much fun at the New Vic’s production of Robin Hood and Marian as we all did last week. Students and staff bought their extra-small students (ranging from 5 to 11ish) to enjoy the perfectly pitched and paced singing, dancing, juggling and tumbling, and proper scary sword fighting. We even had the added excitement of the set catching fire a little bit. My 7 year old was seeing it for the 3rd time – once with school, once with family and friends, and here on the departmental outing – and was still mesmerised.

Marian here is cast as Robin’s equal in sword fighting and archery, instead of just his love interest and a damsel in distress. And, because the New Vic is theatre in the round, the whole audience are within a sword’s length of the stunning fight sequences, leaving everybody on the edge of their seats. The circular stage becomes the archery target on which the struggle between the sheriff, Robin, and the brilliantly name Hubert the Archer (son of Hubert the Archer, son of ….) is played out.

This family production, which thankfully avoids any pantoness, is as impressive as the wonderful The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe which the Vic put on a few years ago and productions of which are staged all over the country every year. Recent years have seen Alice, The Borrowers and 101 Dalmatians; I can’t wait to find out what next year will bring.

This spring we will taking in Northern Broadside’s Merry Wives, a new production of Pinter’s The Caretaker, and perhaps a trip to the RSC to see Hamlet.

 New Vic Theatre

You may have heard that Stoke is bidding to be the next ‘UK City of Culture’ (2021).  This accolade brings to the title-holder economic benefits of millions according to the 2014 Government consultation paper and has previously been bestowed on areas commonly considered cultural backwaters (Derry 2013, Hull 2017).  The very idea has met with derision in some quarters, but Stoke is in with a chance on two counts – it fulfils the implicit criteria of economic depression and social deprivation, as well as the stated requirement for ‘a high quality cultural programme that builds and expands on local strengths and reaches a wide variety of audiences, creating a demonstrable economic impact and a catalyst for regeneration as well as contributing to community cohesion and health and wellbeing’.  In recent years community-directed arts programmes such as Appetite, B-Arts and Live Age have burgeoned.  Stoke also hosts the very well regarded British Ceramics Biennial and now has its own ‘Hot Air’ Literary Festival.

There is a small but distinctive literary heritage, for those who care to look.  Stoke’s best-known literary son, Arnold Bennett, realised quite early in his career the potential of the Potteries for artistic representation and attempted to awaken his audience to the grimy glories of the industrial landscape:

They are mean and forbidding of aspect – sombre, hard-featured, uncouth; and the vaporous poison of their ovens and chimneys has soiled and shrivelled the surrounding country …. Yet be it said that romance is even here – the romance which, for those who have an eye to perceive it, ever dwells amid the seats of industrial manufacture, softening the coarseness, transfiguring the squalor, of these mighty alchemic operations. Look down into the valley from this terrace-height where love is kindling, embrace the whole smoke-girt amphitheatre in a glance, and it may be that you will suddenly comprehend the secret and superb significance of the vast Doing which goes forward below.

Today award-winning, Stoke-born author, Lisa Blower, nods to Bennett in her forthcoming novel Sitting Ducks, a story set squarely in post-industrial Stoke: http://fairacrepress.co.uk/shop/sitting-ducks/.  Watch this space.

Repeating last year’s rapturous experience of our Level 4 English and Creative Writing residential trip to Grasmere, Lake District, everybody again had a blistering good time. On this occasion, we filled up some of the vacant spaces with level 5 and 6 people, and there was even a stray post-grad MA student… The mix of levels turned out to be a benevolent thing: we intellectually and otherwise cross-fertilised covering the range. Once again, the atmosphere was distinctly Halloweeny, what with the trip dates actually coinciding with the very event itself, and the local Youth Hostel being a rather spooky place at the best of times, hidden away in a nooky dell between thick, mostly dripping wet  foliage in a secluded spot en route to Easedale Tarn. One room, too frightening for anyone even to contemplate to stay in overnight, had a big wet patch on one of the walls and a putrid smell of wastage, hinting at oozing ectoplasm, the remains of the not yet fully, still somewhat active, dead.

We did Dove Cottage Saturday afternoon, getting us into the frame of mind of the Romantic situation. Obligingly, it was raining it down by the bucketfuls… Last year, on the first night, Paul Houghton, for some inexplicable reason, had turned all green in the pub, and we had, admittedly with not much success, tried after hours, in the cavernous basement, to conjure the spirit of my dead grandmother in a rather fruitless Seance. This time, some (!) beers in the pub later, with heightened senses and a high degree of exuberance, we did an extended reading in the lounge: a hellraisingly inspirational affair – we sampled some highlights of the Romantic repertory, and, best of all, excellent Creative Writing student work. We were all impressed by the high quality and intensity of the material. Lisa stood her ground, still capable of steering us through proceedings with a steady hand to the last.

Next morning, some of us set off on a  6 1/2 mile walk around Lakes Grasmere and Rydal, which, rather than a gentle ramble, as promissed in the brochure, turned out to be a real hiking tour-deforce, well, at least to us Stokie couch potatoes, in excess of 4 hours: intensely enjoyable in many ways, but this is also where some suffering occured (as in ‘blistering good time’ of the first sentence of this). Let us spread the sponge of amnesia over this stinging aspect of an otherwise wholly enyoyable outing…

Great trip.

Dr Martin Jesinghausen

Photography: Dr Melanie Ebdon

Congratulations to Professor Douglas Burnham who has been appointed Head of the Graduate School.