Reality Check

If playwrights really want to get to grips with modern terrorism, they need to switch off the daily news, argues Dominic Dromgoole

Saturday October 23, 2004
The Guardian

In days of old, Sophocles would write of his city-state, Shakespeare of his nation-state. Now, there is little choice but to write of the world. Al-Qaida, oil and the internet have ensured that no man is, or will be, an island for a long time yet. Hare has brought that reality to the stage.

This new form is one future for political theatre - a fertile one. But let's hope that not all future drama adheres so closely to its second cousin, journalism. Much recent political theatre is informed by the desire to be either a report or an essay. Getting the facts out there is good - putting them on stage gives them electricity they would otherwise lack - but it is not the same as a play. When Shakespeare wrote his great historical plays, he chucked everything in: nonsense about witchcraft, battle scenes, father-son stuff, pageants, philosophical introspection. History, the record of facts, was a release for the great heap of images inside him - not a clamp on his imagination.

Theatre is a place of imagination, of compassion and of obsession. Much of the new journalism is too dry, too flatly written, too studiedly impersonal. Everybody leans on the authority of the everyday, rather than relying on the authority of the imagination.

When they were first produced in the 1920s, Sean O'Casey's trilogy of plays about Ireland - of which Shadow of a Gunman was the first - had all the force of news. He wrote with a rich, wild extravagance about how a new sort of person was being forged in the crucible of the tenements. Yet his plays remained far distant from journalism. He found in the morass of compacted slum life a perfect mirror for the insanity of the Ireland of the time, where innocents were the prey of extremists, and where all actions became a display of political allegiance.

For 70 years, these plays were owned by the problem that created them. Now, though, they can be seen as universal plays about oppression everywhere. Their relevance to the current situation in Iraq is unnerving. But once we have abandoned Iraq, and gone on to disgrace ourselves somewhere else, that relevance won't fade. The plays achieve a universality and a timelessness through their fully imagined life.

It may be useful for dramatists to stop trying to ape journalism's task of making people understand. I think we are all sick of trying to understand the Iraq war. I am sure that nothing amuses George and Dick and Osama more than watching everyone burn all their energy up on understanding, while the three of them carry on merrily dynamiting the foundations of the crumbling palace of enlightenment. We need our theatre, and our art, to stop understanding, and to help us jump forward.

Our greatest theatre, from Aeschylus through Shakespeare and Chekhov and O'Casey, has been about creating a new idea of the human. We need less opposition, less thrashing about in the open sea, arguing with the nearest body to hand, strangling and tugging each other under water. We need our artists to swim off in new directions, so that we can follow them. Hare, to his credit, posits this for Iraqis at the end of Stuff Happens. I don't think it's just the Iraqis who have to set their house in order.