Photo: Promotional imagery for Inside Out and Rattigan.
‘The wonder of life that is presented’: Cultural highlights of 2024
‘In each movement, the redemption available through Christian faith arrives through a shift of key.’
For Horace B Pointing, ‘the search in art’ matches the search in religion: ‘for the rhythms of relationships, for the unity, the urge, the mystery, the wonder of life that is presented’ (Quaker faith & practice 21.32). With that in mind we thought we’d ask some Friends you might recognise about what sustained them culturally over the last year.
Paul Parker, recording clerk, Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM)
I recall vividly a Meeting for Worship where someone sitting behind me rose and declaimed ‘The World is charged with the grandeur of God!’ in one of those spine-tingling, edge-of-the-seat moments that Meeting gives us from time to time. A few weeks ago, the choir I sing with tackled Inscape, a setting by the twentieth-century English composer Edmund Rubbra of four poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins. The poems are ‘God’s Grandeur’ (from which that line comes), ‘The Lantern out of Doors’, ‘Spring’, and my favourite, ‘Pied Beauty’ (‘Glory be to God for dappled things’).
The poems alone are beautiful, of course, with Manley Hopkins’ typically densely-packed imagery, quirky and innovative word choices, joyous alliteration and deep faith. Well worth looking up if you don’t already know them. Rubbra’s musical setting celebrates all of this, but also brings out the contrasts: the two-tone view of the ‘dappled things’ and ‘finches’ wings’ of ‘Pied Beauty’, the dark and the light of ‘The Lantern’, and the bucolic and the industrial landscapes of ‘God’s Grandeur’.
In each movement, the redemption available through Christian faith arrives through a shift of key, another binary shift from minor to major, from discordant to harmonious, from occluded to clear. A remarkable piece, challenging to sing (how we struggled!), but deserving of greater exposure.
Listen to Inscape at https://tinyurl.com/InscapeEdmundRubbra.
Gill Sewell, editor, the Friends Quarterly
I’d like to recommend Inside Out 2, the Pixar movie, which is a great reflection of the turmoils of puberty, and indeed the value of good emotional self-regulation – which I have to admit I still don’t manage to achieve 100 per cent of the time! It was the top grossing animated film of 2024 (and eighth highest grossing film of all time). It particularly moved me in a year in which the women of Afghanistan were further silenced both on the streets and in their own homes. If only some of the Taliban could be encouraged to watch it and ponder on their own fears and arrested emotional development.
The book I want to mention is Stone Yard Devotional, by Charlotte Wood, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. I found it an unhurried unfolding, but the sense of the slow work of God remains with me. We rarely understand how the spirit works within us.
Marisa Johnson, clerk to trustees, BYM
Quakers, court and the Ukrainian family don’t leave me a huge amount of time! But I did recently go to the theatre in Cambridge to see a revival of a double-bill of Terence Rattigan’s one-act plays, Summer 1954: Table Number Seven and The Browning Version, with Nathaniel Parker and Siân Phillips. It was imaginatively staged, with a revolving platform, and very moving, full of repressed feelings and inexpressible longings. It spoke of other times, and was evocative even if we would not wish to get back there.
‘The sense of the slow work of God remains with me. We rarely understand how the spirit works within us.’
As for books, I picked up an older Kate Atkinson on the swap trolley in the Meeting house. I love the way Kate Atkinson writes and was a fan from her very first book, Behind the Scenes at the Museum. The one I read this year was called When Will There be Good News?, which these days seems a most apt question. I loved it, in spite of its brutal opening chapter, and was engrossed in it for the few days it took me to read it.
But I’m really a radio addict. I love radio drama and spend hours listening, especially at night. A trio of plays by BBC Radio Scotland on the subject of mediation had me hooked, as a trained mediator myself. Each play portrayed a different scenario, with the same mediator taking on each case. The one I particularly enjoyed and was moved by was Spilt Milk, which focussed on the breakdown of the relationship between a Ukrainian refugee family and their British hosts. It was poignant because I also host a family from Kharkiv, and while they have brought us nothing but joy, I know that some arrangements have not been happy, and the nuanced portrayal of each side brought home the complexities of such relationships.
The play is still available to listen to, and I warmly recommend it!
Listen to Spilt Milk at https://tinyurl.com/bbcspiltmilk.
Joseph Jones, editor, the Friend
My favourite books of the year were Percival Everett’s James (a reimagining of The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of the enslaved Jim), and Samantha Harvey’s Orbital (in which six astronauts do very little except ruminate beautifully). But these books have received a lot of attention elsewhere, and, to be honest, they didn’t move me as much as my rewatching of the HBO TV show, Station Eleven.
This was first broadcast in 2021, when its overt subject matter – a pandemic that devastates humankind – was very close to home. Watching anxious, masked, families in a hospital waiting room was, for some, too much too soon. Three years on, I was better able to pick up on the wider themes of Emily St John Mandel’s novel, on which the show is based.
Station Eleven begins with the arrival of a virus, but soon jumps forward twenty years, when, although government has collapsed, civilisation has, in small pockets, regrouped. We meet the Travelling Symphony, a ragtag troupe of actors and musicians circling the Great Lakes. A generation gap – between the ‘prepans,’ who survived the virus, and ‘postpans,’ born later – tells us a lot about how humans approach, and attach ourselves to, the past. Lines of Shakespeare, learned, remembered, passed on, operate as a treatise on memory, grief and nostalgia. It’s beautifully done – as is the in-show rendering of Hamlet – and holds true to its literary origins. It’s also a story of how to maintain community in difficult circumstances – Friends might understand why I’m recommending it.
A word too for Lee, the biopic of artist-turned-war-photographer Lee Miller, starring Kate Winslet. Two Quakers make an appearance, but we’ll tell you more about that in the New Year.
