Thinking AloudEnglish Blog

AO5 (critical engagement) has a reputation.  It arrives in lessons and mark schemes like a spectral presence: vague, unsettling, prone to terrifying otherwise confident students into silence.  ‘Different interpretations’, it whispers. ‘Critical debate’ . ‘Alternative readings’.

There are productions of Othello that make you wonder why the play isn’t simply retitled Iago. This was absolutely not one of them. 

Question: Compare the ways both writers transform personal pain into public performance. There are few moments more alarming than flipping over an A Level paper and realising the exam board has gone rogue.  That’s exactly how it felt in my imaginary Paper 3 this morning, when the unseen comparative poem turned out to be Sylvia Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus’, paired without warning with Lily Allen’s ‘Pussy Palace’.

The Faction’s The Talented Mr Ripley is currently in Brighton and touring across the UK in the coming weeks.  It’s definitely worth an evening of your time - slick, unsettling, and fiendishly clever theatre that lingers long after the lights go up.  I’ll be keeping an eye on whatever this company does next.

There’s something about a Renaissance man with a God complex that just won’t die.  Whether he’s summoning devils (Doctor Faustus), murdering kings (Macbeth), or designing a theocracy under the guise of morality (The Handmaid’s Tale’s Commander), you can practically hear the self-belief whirring.  The centuries change, the tights become trousers, but the hubris?  Eternal.

TV's The (Celeb) Traitors - a masterclass in the need to plan an essay. With no spoilers! There’s something almost indecently satisfying about pulling off a plan.  The clean click of cause and effect.  The sly grin of inevitability.  It’s why The A-Team and every child of the 70s loved it when a plan came together.  And why The Traitors, especially last night’s celebrity edition, is the most exquisite piece of clockwork on television.

Six - The hype machine tells us something is unmissable, revolutionary, the Next Big Thing.  Sometimes it is.  Often it isn’t.  Sometimes it’s just… fine.  And sometimes, whisper it, you might actually dislike the Very Important Cultural Moment everyone else is queueing for.

Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is uncomfortably relevant. An intelligent man - a scholar, no less - trades his soul for limitless knowledge and twenty-four years of supremacy. In our world, the Mephistophelean pact isn’t written in blood but coded in algorithms.

In a world where the news reads like a rejected Black Mirror script, it’s no wonder dystopian fiction is having a moment.