Review essay: When the dancing turned to mourning: Theological responses to the pandemic

This review essay considers four books published within the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. It guides us through how each of these texts offers a timely Christian response to, and not explanation for, the challenges that we face: innumerable deaths, the inability to worship together, deserted streets and shut-up businesses, the place of viruses in the Earth’s ecology, and the apparent absence of God as the innovations of modern science seem to be our only salvation. Reviewed works:John C. Lennox, Where is God in a Coronavirus World? (Epsom, Surrey: The Good Book Company, 2020)Tom Wright, God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and its Aftermath (London: SPCK: 2020)Walter Brueggemann, Virus as a Summons to Faith: Biblical Reflections in a Time of Loss, Grief, and Uncertainty (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2020)Robert Keay, Reframing Pandemic (The Window of Christianity series; New York: Basiliad Publishing, 2020)

White Hot Technology

This chapter focuses on the UK as a well-placed tech hub with a cutting edge that is made sure it's not blunted as the UK takes a new path outside the EU and seeks to recover from the trauma of the Covid pandemic. It cites the driverless car that was tested for the first time on Britain's streets, which is considered an enormous advance on previous UK trials that involved a driver manually operating the vehicle. It also discusses the Milton Keynes exercise that showed the government's determination to make the UK a world leader by being at the forefront of developing driverless technology. The chapter talks about the UK's Jaguar Land Rover group, which took up the driverless challenge posed by Google's Waymo and China's Baidu company. It explores the automotive industry's thrust towards a new generation of vehicles that has advanced technology in developing hybrid, dual fuel and electric cars.

The Fairy Gokmother: Representations of gender and sexuality in the Qdos pantomime Cinderella

Although cross-dressing is a long-standing pantomime tradition, recent pantomimes have featured a male actor playing a traditionally female part while not cross-dressing. An illustration of this is the part of the Fairy in a version of Cinderella developed by production company Qdos Entertainment and performed at the Milton Keynes Theatre in 2017–18, while being toured elsewhere in previous and later years. Casting British celebrity fashion consultant Gok Wan as the Fairy had transgressive potential to promote empowering and positively disruptive attitudes towards gender. Wan the celebrity, in a similar way to the Fairy in Cinderella, uses psychological transformation, with a helping hand from clothes, to give women more confidence in their bodies. However, the overriding focus of the pantomime was on signalling Wan’s homosexuality while dispelling it as harmless. Clichés about gay men were reinforced in the production and paratexts, particularly through the approach to transformation, the use of costuming to frame Wan as Other, the language around being a fairy and the emphasis on male friendship as opposed to romance. When each of these aspects is compared to alternative representations in other popular and widely circulated versions of Cinderella, the reductive nature of this pantomimic portrayal becomes clear, irrespective of Wan’s degree of complicity.