I did not say this...

Mr Criticulous here. I am interrupting normal transitions to tell you that the author of this blog, Gareth K Vile is ill. He has a very sad disease, one that can strike the most well-adjusted explorer into artistic theory. He has gone down with "fair mindedness".

Have a look back at that article on Chto Delat. He admits that his instinct is to shout at the stage. Fortunately, I am all Id and no Superego, so I'll take off my shoes and throw them on his behalf.

Here's the right shoe. The Russian Woods is touted as a learning play. It recruits local volunteers and whacks them on stage. It has a clear agenda - isn't capitalism nasty, and how can art be a meaningful form of protest? It is mind-bendingly simplistic, the left wing equivalent of a photoshopped picture of Obama's noggin stuck on Stalin's body. It made the volunteers look awkward on stage, had a post-show discussion that gave the artists plenty of time to explain themselves. It was crass, lazy and quite obviously prefabricated.

Here's the left shoe. The master's tools will not destroy the master's house. If Chat Delat's discourse is genuinely threatening to the powers that be, it is very unlikely that Glasgow City Council would be letting them use Tramway. Arika get funded by Creative Scotland. Yes, these radicals make their living from the very institutions they seek to undermine.

Mr Criticulous has no time for Marxism. Throughout the twentieth century, entire countries were used as laboratories for an experiment. The hypothesis was that the theories of Marx could be used to run a successful nation. So, Russia spent seventy-odd years as an extended stand-up routine about queues for bread, secret surveillance and state hypocrisy. Cuba got a nice track record for persecuting "enemies of Castro". The most efficient role communism managed was the bad guy in a manufactured drama about the battle between freedom and feudalism. The legacy of communist nations might be that they acted as the prop to capitalism, a system itself diseased and idiotic.