Saturday 15 November 2008

freighted with inconsistencies

In discussing David Hare's Gethsemane, the Telegraph's Dominic Cavendish makes a point close to the one this blog has been making since it went online (see here, here, here, and here). He writes:

If we want a state-of-the-nation play that goes for broke, what we need, at the very least, is a leading Left-wing playwright prepared to hold a mirror up to the aspirations of his tribe: to confront the awkward fact that maybe it's not that the Left could do better that's the problem, but that the idea of "doing better" itself is freighted with inconsistencies.

It's by exploring these inconsistencies (and collisions and disjunctures) that the richest drama will emerge. The narrowness of the concerns of most political theatre means that it fails to grasp the broader/deeper implications of rising per capita consumption, finite resources and climate change. It isn't answers that are needed here, just awareness.

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