Theatre: Dennis Poole

The Morning Star arts editor this year commented that if you leave a show whistling the set it can’t have been a great show.

Be that as it may, a unifying thread in my 2014 theatre-going experience has been the inventiveness and superb quality of sets and staging in many productions.

The evocative representation of a subterranean Soho bar was a seminal feature of the splendid production of Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East.

Wonderland saw the transformation of the Hampstead Theatre into a convincing depiction of a working pit face and there was a stunning set design for The Nether at Jerwood Royal Court, where the audience were (mis)treated to a dystopian glimpse of a cyber-space inspired, nightmarish, pseudo-reality.

Outside of the West End, fringe and alternative venues, despite the ravages of spending constraints, continue to go from strength to strength. The Tricycle and the Almeida continue to be proving grounds for new productions and this year saw the successful transfer of Handbagged (below) and Charles III to the mainstream commercial stage.

The Finborough Theatre in the eponymous Earls Court pub maintains a well-deserved reputation for exciting, challenging and innovative productions. Jimmy Boyle’s The Hard Man was a brutal, gritty and disconcerting exploration of what was, and possibly still is, Scotland’s dysfunctional justice system and penal institutions.

As part of Black History Month the Finborough Theatre offered a rarely seen production of Rachel. Written by Angelina Weld Grimke in 1916, Rachel was the first play by an African-American woman ever produced professionally and one of the first to feature an all black cast.

As we tentatively progress into 2015 we should applaud the vibrancy, breadth and diversity of London theatre but we should not be complacent.

There are enough ex-public schoolboys in senior political roles and the cultural life of the nation is increasingly being colonised by the same.The arts will be a soft spending target for whichever nest of political vipers insidiously wriggle into Downing Street next May.

Time to rally behind the red flag, comrades.

Film: Jeff Sawtell

Communism appeared to be the spectre haunting the cinema this year, continuing to prove its potency in the face of ruling-class paranoia.

Opening with what can only be described as a hagiography, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom quite incredibly edited out anything that could be construed as his communist politics.

It was immediately followed by Steve McQueen’s Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave, where again reality was sacrificed for aesthetic effect.

Then we were hit by a storming performance by Leonardo Di Caprio as a dodgy dealer in The Wolf of Wall Street in which capitalism is depicted as cannibalistic and anything to the contrary like a co-operative considered communistic.

Another strong release was Jean-Marc Vallee’s Dallas Buyers Club, illustrating the incredible battle of people attempting to access anti-viral drugs which combat the pain of HIV/Aids.

With Matthew McConaughey losing three stone to play the part, the film’s a timely reminder that the pharmaceutical industry is making a fortune out of misfortune.

Carrion capitalism and the US’s love of incestuous sects were central to Jim Mickle’s topical horror film We Are What We Are. Following in its wake was Peter Berg’s Lone Survivor, a jingoistic US war film designed to drum up support for the evil empire’s beleaguered troops.

Then there was The Patrol — a British version of the same with similar intentions — and Kajaki, financed by various patriotic societies and timed to coincide with Remembrance Day.

The dubious nature of this “war on terror” was also underlined by the master of realpolitik Donald Rumsfeld with his tongue-twisting mendacity in The Unknown Known.

There was not sufficient appreciation of the crucial contribution of the Soviet Union in WWII in the underwhelming Fedor Bondarchuk’s Stalingrad, in which the battle that broke the back of the nazi war machine before liberating the world for democracy was rendered as a 3-D spectacle.

Conversely there was Errol Morris’s The Invisible War, documenting US soldiers raping their own recruits, never mind the enemy.

Signs of resistance to the status quo were evident in the X-Men: Days of Future Past which provided a metaphor in the unity of mortals and mutants to defeat an evil plot to hijack the presidency.

Another ugly aspect of US history that continues today was featured in Fruitvale Station, where an armed white policeman killed an innocent, unarmed black man.

The US’s perennial problem with immigration and its attendant crimes was graphically depicted by director Diego Quemada-Diaz in The Golden Dream.

Yet the most contentious film of the year, as always, was provided by Lars Von Trier’s five-and-a-half hour Nymphomaniac.

Critics who accused Von Trier of misanthropy failed to see that Trier was trying to employ Marx’s dialectical method and, like Brecht, invert anti-human notions through shock and awe.

On the home front, Ken Loach produced the excellent Jimmy’s Hall (below), a romantic tragedy inspired by the real-life travails of communist Jimmy Gralton.

Given Loach’s adherence to Trotsky, the film appeared like a mea culpa, recognising that the primary task of communists is building a united front.

That other anti-establishment director Mike Leigh also returned to form with a tribute to an anti-establishment artist in Mr Turner.

With the unprepossessing Timothy Spall as JMW Turner, it demonstrated that the process of painting can’t be replicated by numbers.

There was also a fitting tribute to the great man in Tony Benn: Will and Testament and a superb reminder of Margaret Thatcher’s declaration of class war in Owen Gower’s Still the Enemy Within.

The 1984-85 miners’ strike was the focus of Pride, which told of a heartwarming act of solidarity with their cause organised by gay activist and young communist Mark Ashton.

The Art Party illustrated the massive opposition to Tory cuts of the arts, alongside the expanding anti-austerity campaign that’s often ignored by the press.

There were a number of films from the former socialist world that ranged from anger to nostalgia. Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida was an apolitical parable demonstrating the dialectics between so-called sinners and saints.

It was closely followed by Danis Tanovic illustrating the return to scavenging in Bosnia to survive in An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker.

However, the honours must go to Andrey Zvyagintsev for Leviathan (above), a Russian tale castigating the gangsters and clerics now ruling the roost.

Threaded through it are references to make you aware that there’s still a skeleton of socialism that could be fleshed out.

Winter Sleep, directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, was another poignant parable stressing that change requires conscious effort.

It’s a fitting tribute to the father of Turkish cinema Ylmaz Guney, a communist who suffered jail for propounding social justice.

Leila Sansour’s Open Bethlehem, a documentary filmed in the holy city after the Israelis walled it in, was timely as the season to be ripped off by every commercial con-trick got into full swing.

The box-office award will undoubtedly go to Peter Blackman’s The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, adapted from a modest little book that’s been unnecessarily extended to exploit its commercial spin-offs.

Supposedly an anti-fascist story in its original it serves to remind that the whole enterprise was sparked by the dwarves’ avarice for gold.

Temptation is ever present, especially given the strength of a capitalism built on the erroneous notion that everybody can succeed if they endeavour. That, of course, is not possible in a situation where 1 per cent of the population own and control all the means of production, forcing us all into being wage slaves.

In the real world, as the Picturehouse Cinema battle shows, wage slaves aren’t even being paid a living wage, a dreadful indictment of a company that began life showing left-wing films.