Review
Culture
Music
Resurrection
Romance
Taylor Swift
6 min read

Taylor Swift proves Mr Bennet right

Romanticism: ruining lives since 1800. And we love it.
Hand-written poetry on a page
Memo: to JA from TS.
@taylorswift Instagr

In Pride and Prejudice, Mr Bennet has a conversation with his favourite daughter, Lizzy, about her older sister’s heartbreak. He says,  

‘Your sister is crossed in love, I find. I congratulate her. Next to being married, a girl likes to be crossed a little in love now and then. It is something to think of, and it gives her a sort of distinction among her companions.’ 

It’s one of those lines, genius as it is, that I would hate were it not written by Jane Austen. But it was, so I don’t. I do, however, like to think that his words are outdated. His thoughts, an artefact. That such a notion may have been true when women were unable to have any kind of aspirations that transcended romantic (and not-so-romantic) attachments, but we’re definitely over that now. I sit smugly in the knowledge that Mr Bennet’s words are a jibe that I can affectionately roll my eyes at; witty, yet redundant.  

At least, that’s what I did think. Now, annoyingly, I’m not so sure. What changed my mind? Well, Taylor Swift’s latest album dropped. And now I think that Austen, as usual, was onto something. 

The Tortured Poets Department has broken more records than I can count, many of which were broken before it was even released. Love it or hate it (I happen to be in the love it camp), Taylor is going to make it pretty darn hard for you to ignore it. Housed within this juggernaut of an album are thirty-one songs that seek to remind us that it’s better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all. Thirty-one songs that offer a masterclass in melodrama. Thirty-one songs that prove Mr Bennet right.  

Somewhere along the line, have we been taught that tragedy is a signifier that our love is some kind of epic thing that is happening in the universe? 

Here’s the theory, the premise, the pop-culture context you need to understand this album’s intentions: ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ was/is a WhatsApp group that Swift’s past-love, Joe Alwyn, was/is a part of. And so, this album is their story; it’s the story of their relationship crumbling, their hearts breaking, their understanding of one another disintegrating. Whether the lyrics are filled with fact or fiction, it doesn’t really matter. We’re soaking it up - every reference, every hint, every clue. These tortured poets have captivated us.  

Agony, tragedy, ecstasy, torment, regret: that’s the currency this album deals in. Heartbreak, I suppose. This record-shattering album is about heartbreak. And it got me thinking, why are we so obsessed with love hurting? Why are Romeo and Juliet something to aspire to? Why is tragedy some kind of signifier of ‘real’ love? Why, as Mr Bennet says, do we like being ‘crossed in love now and then’

The key lyric that holds the first song on Taylor’s album together sums it up pretty well, as Taylor melodramatically declares – ‘I love you, it’s ruining my life’.  

Firstly - no it’s not, Taylor. You’re Taylor Swift, a life less ruined no-one could find. But secondly, why is that tumultuous kind of love something to idolise? I’m genuinely wondering. Because, admittedly, I’m as guilty of this as anyone.  

Maybe it’s a way in which we feel as though we’re living a meaningful story, it’s our main-character-syndrome rearing its head. Somewhere along the line, have we been taught that tragedy is a signifier that our love is some kind of epic thing that is happening in the universe? That our relationship is re-arranging the cosmos somehow? That this pain is so powerful, stories will be told of it? Afterall, many of the greatest love stories end in agony, do they not? Would we care about Titanic’s Jack and Rose, La La Land’s Mia and Sebastian, or Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie and Lindsay had they lived happily ever after? Perhaps not. If a beige life is to be avoided at all costs, the torture of heartbreak is, I suppose, a particularly vibrant shade.  

Taylor’s whole album is an ode to Romanticism: its lyrics are dramatic, beautiful, grand and religious. 

Or perhaps it’s a sensation thing, akin to our obsession with jumping out of airplanes or walking over hot coals. Maybe we just want to feel. And according to most psychologists, heartbreak is one of the most powerful and emotive experiences one could face – a plane could not get high enough, nor coals hot enough, to compete. The science behind it is fascinating. I truly had no idea.  

Which leads me onto my second question – why don’t we care for the science of it?  

Why, when it comes to explaining what we’re feeling, do we declare our ‘heart to be broken’ as opposed to ‘the right side our brain is experiencing a deeply distressing emotional sensation following a shattering of an emotional attachment, triggering feelings of loss and inadequacy’? 

Interesting, isn’t it? How that second definition somehow feels less true. Maybe we have Romanticism to blame for that - the poets, philosophers and writers who shunned reasonable, practical, scientific language in favour of the tragic, the grand, and the sublime. Taylor’s whole album is an ode to Romanticism: its lyrics are dramatic, beautiful, grand and religious.  

In her song, Guilty as Sin, Taylor writes –  

What if I roll the stone away? They’re gonna crucify me anyway. What if the way you hold me is holy… I choose you and me, religiously.’ 

Yes, she’s comparing her crush on a man to the crucifixion of the Son of God. If this isn’t over the top, I don’t know what is. In many ways, this album knows it’s being silly, over-dramatic and naïve. But it also knows that to be those things is to be as honest as possible. It is shunning human-sized explanations of heartbreak, and is instead desperately searching for the deepest, highest, grandest language it can find - because that kind of language just feels truer. And I find it pretty fascinating that such language still has Jesus all over it.  

All of it has got me thinking, we don’t really want everything controlled, measured and understood, do we? We don’t really want to be the most powerful thing we know. I think that’s a myth. A convincing one, I grant you. But one that has cracks in it. Romanticism is one such crack. School of Life says this about the Romantics, ‘Romantics don’t believe in God, but they go in search of the emotions one might find around religion’. Awe. Transcendence. Our own small-ness in the face of something great – that kind of thing.  

They don’t believe in God, but they crave him. Interesting.  

I think maybe that’s (at least partly) why we want our love stories, the good and the bad, to engulf us, to be something we must succumb to, to be written in the stars – predating our awareness of it and transcending our control over it. We think, at least to an extent, that love and heartbreak, they happen to us. They’re a sacred hand that we have been dealt and must grapple with. This is Romanticism - and apparently it hasn’t gone anywhere, Taylor Swift and her band of tortured poets have just proved it.  

Perhaps Mr Bennet was right after all; perhaps we do have an odd thing about heartbreak. But hey, don’t blame women. Blame the Romantics and that God-shaped hole within them… and within us too, apparently.  

Review
Awe and wonder
Culture
Theatre
5 min read

This Narnia play left me yearning to cheer on good

The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe is still relevant at 75.

Steve is news director of Article 18, a human rights organisation documenting Christian persecution in Iran.

 A play set shows a witch and lion on stage.
EMG Entertainment.

This article contains spoilers.  

It’s been 75 years since C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe was first published, and the story is still captivating audiences and even sparking fresh controversy. 

If you hadn’t heard the news, the role of the lion, Aslan, is rumoured to have been offered to Meryl Streep, a woman, for Greta Gerwig’s upcoming film, set to be released in time for Thanksgiving next year. 

I recently saw another adaption of the famous book - Adam Peck’s play - in a theatre in Torquay, as part of a 75th anniversary tour of the UK.  

And having previously read the book and watched two different film versions, I still found myself considering elements of the story I hadn’t previously, hidden depths I hadn’t noticed - even if these didn’t include Aslan’s gender. 

For those not familiar with the tale, it follows the journey of four children through the doors of a magic wardrobe, which transports them into a fantastical kingdom in which a lion reigns but a witch has held dominion for 100 years. 

Under the White Witch’s spell, there has been only winter for a century - “always winter and never Christmas”, as one famous line from the story goes. 

But now, thrust into this story in the fulfilment of a prophecy long foretold, four “sons of Adam and daughters of Eve” - boys and girls, to you and me - come as the lion king returns, and a new day dawns. 

The winter begins to thaw, Spring is in the air, and Father Christmas even shows up to shower the children with gifts. 

But the return of Aslan - and even Santa Claus - doesn’t signal the end of the story. There is still a battle to be fought; the witch still has power and even ensnares one of the children, Edmund, with the promise of all the Turkish delight he could wish for, and the title of a prince. 

It is at this moment - still early in the tale - that the battle between good and evil is clearly laid out, and the forces of light and darkness clash thenceforth. 

In the play, those enslaved by the witch are clad in black to emphasise the distinction, while much is made of the meaning of the name of the youngest child, Lucy: “bringer of light”. 

The imagery is abundantly clear, as it has ever been in Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, of which the The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe is the first and most famous of seven books. 

And the author, renowned for being an atheist who later became a Christian, leans heavily upon his newfound faith throughout the Narnian tales, and not least in the character of Aslan. 

Yet while you and I may frustratingly regularly let ourselves down, there is also something within us - is there not? - that ever yearns to cheer on the forces of good. 

At Easter, it is especially hard not to see in Aslan’s death and resurrection a striking similarity with the figure at the centre of the Christian faith. 

Indeed, it was this moment of greatest sacrifice - for the “traitor”, Edmund - that most struck me this time around, even though I already knew the story so well. 

At church the following day, as I took Communion, I was still reflecting on Aslan’s sacrifice and wondering whether Edmund more closely resembles the average Christian - myself included - than the older, nobler brother, Peter, in whom most of us would prefer to see our likeness. 

My mind returned to a moment in the theatre that had humbled me, when the lady sitting in front of us handed me £20 to treat my children for being “so good”, having at the interval made me bristle by asking them to sit quietly and stop kicking her chair. 

“Fair enough?” I hear you suggest. Well, perhaps, but I didn’t think it until that humbling moment after the curtain had closed. 

My son later told me he hadn’t thought the lady had been unkind, which again got me thinking about my own imperfections and need to be more childlike. 

Yet while you and I may frustratingly regularly let ourselves down, there is also something within us - is there not? - that ever yearns to cheer on the forces of good. 

I doubt many audience members were rooting for the witch, while I suspect most can also understand the need to “beware the witch”, as one song from the play puts it 

Another biblical parallel is the fulfilment of a prophecy long foretold, while both the Bible and The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe highlight the special significance of someone innocent dying to save the guilty. 

There is even a clear reference at the very start of the book and play to one of Lewis’ most famous pieces of theology, when the professor in whose wardrobe the children later get lost asks them a question as they consider whether or not to believe Lucy about the magical kingdom that she first glimpsed. 

She’s either lying, mad or telling the truth, the professor says, in much the same way that Lewis says of Jesus Christ’s own central claim: he’s either “mad, bad or God”. 

As for the success of the play, as someone who no longer lives in London, I was certainly impressed by this West End product. 

The scene changes are creative, aided by music, dance and possibly even a trapdoor - my children and I had different opinions on how the magical disappearances of certain characters were achieved. Maybe it truly was magic. 

There’s also the nice touch of the play starting even before it officially begins, through the twinkling of a soldier’s fingers upon the keys of a piano while the audience take their seats - perhaps to help us turn our minds from a sunny day in the English Riviera to dreary London at the time of the Blitz. 

So, do go and see the play if you get the opportunity - it’ll do you good and make you think, whether or not you choose to consider if the lion is male or female.