Blood and Bones: Part One: Belief, Bias and Common Humanity

For me, poetry is the distillation of a moment.  A play is the distillation of a life.

Is it possible to unbutton from the prevalent atmosphere of greed and power hunger that surrounds the world?

Following on from last week’s Introduction, here is part One of the series I made about writing plays in the 21st Century. It may also chime with writers and readers of other forms. Although I first made this series eight years ago, I hope you can still enjoy it. As always, please leave your own thoughts in the Comments section.

Here is the full text if you’d prefer to read:

For me, poetry is the distillation of a moment.  A play is the distillation of a life.

There's a lot of weird stuff about.  It's only to be expected, I suppose.  With seven point odd billion individuals in the world dreaming their dreams and thinking their thoughts, a lot of stuff is bound to come out weird

But at the moment we seem to have been plunged into a world completely out of joint. Trump, Brexit, Putin.  This is the age of irrationality; The Great Endarkenment. Reason and truth no longer have any meaning.   This is the world of hyper reality where we convince ourselves that what we know perfectly well to be Untruth is in fact the Truth. The world is mad and we are all mad in it.  And I'm the worst of the lot. Because I'm a writer working in the world of theatre.  A time waster at a useless piece of frippery that merely adds to the madness because it depends upon people pretending to be someone else uttering words they didn't think up in a stuffy black room that we're all kidding ourselves is the deck of a ship or a ballroom in eighteenth century Vienna or the surface of Mars.

The whole fabric of our society is being deliberately ripped apart before our uncomprehending eyes.  And I ask myself how does this all relate to our existence as a story-telling, metaphor using species?  How is it, that the very thing that has made the human species rise up and achieve the possibility of a rich and fulfilled life for us all has been subverted through advertising and propaganda and downright lies into a strangulation of the soul to bring riches beyond comprehension to a very few and misery to so many?

And how is it that the people with the greatest influence in the world are the cheap pulp fiction writers like L. Ron Hubbard and Ayn Rand whose laughable, totally daft ideas are yet again echoing down the corridors of the White House and Wall Street and whose books are being promoted to shelves of every Republican politician and industrialist in America and, I bet, on many of the fifth formers at Slough Grammar school.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s not for me to quibble about the work of other writers.  We all need to earn a bob or two and I have written a few pulpy pieces in my time Where it all goes tits up is when this sort of fantasy becomes taken for a philosophy 0r a religion and people who should know better take it as some sort of truth.

Oh look.  Kittens.  In hats.  That’s brilliant. If I look up from those amusing kittens in hats on the internet I see out the window my young acquaintance Skidmore pounding along the paths of the Westcliff in his expensive trainers, baseball cap facing backwards.  Just a minute.  “Skidmore.  Skidmore.  No answer  he’s got his  headphones clamped to his ears completely cut off and unaware of the surf sighing on the shore and the birdsong echoing through the trees.

This seeping disengagement with reality and humanity has caused some of the great human catastrophes of the twentieth century and on into our own, so why is it surprising that we writers should feel we are the ones with a duty to attempt to claim back the only thing we still have in common: this language of poetry and metaphor;  claim it back from the propagandists and the Untruthers  and try and make it a tool for exploring the human experience as it actually is and place it in a cockpit of the imagination where we can all use it to explore together what it is to be human and how we go about our humanity?

In this era of stuff and accumulation of stuff and money for money’s sake and activity for activity’s sake where we yearn to blot out the reality of what is happening in the world with utter mountains of shit and we are so terrified of not having enough we go on accumulating and doing mindlessly until it becomes a habit, a psychosis, it is up to artists of all stripes  to try and cut through this fog of accumulation of junk and try to centre back on people.  Individuals.  Not individuals against the rest of the world- that nasty cut throat world of Ayn Rand or the individuals as mugs to be preyed on that L. Ron Hubbard would have us believe in, but individuals as part of the great interconnected network.  We need to put the spotlight on those individuals and their struggles.  We can use the full force of our imaginations to draw from what we know and place the evidence before our audiences.  We need to help people to speak to people about their hopes and fears, aspirations and disappointments.  We ought to help give a voice to those who are so trodden down by circumstance that they can only lash out in an unreasoned blind fury We need to sweep away all the bullshit of spectacle and superficial soap opera drama and try to explain to the world just what is going on.  We need to use our skills and imaginations to engage our audiences in new worlds of possibilities, new perspectives on this one. Nobody else is going to do it for us.  Not the newspapers or TV.  Not the bizarre world of the internet.  Not even the kittens.  Theatre is fantasy but it is fantasy concerning the real world.

Disrupt the system

And those of us who make theatre, as contemporary jargon would have it, need to think broader and dig deeper.  We need to pull ourselves out of the morass of introspection where characters on stage can be defined only by the issues they represent instead of their inner immutable humanity. And where acrobatics and special effects in production replace true engagement with ideas..  Playwrights need to eschew the writing courses and competitions, exploring and understanding the true power of theatre by engaging with its living force.  They need to abjure maudlin introspection and be encouraged to explore broader universal themes. The very essence of theatre and what sets it apart from all other art forms is the fact that it is alive.  It occurs here and now in front of our eyes.  We must harness that vital power. The power of theatre that comes down to us in a shaky wavering line from the Greeks of classical antiquity and before that from a deep shamanistic desire to capture the world originating with our hunter-gatherer forebears.  A theatre that has encompassed Shakepeare, Racine, Behn, Goethe, Ibsen, Chekov, Churchill and  . A theatre of Blood and Bones and sinew and Brains.  Big, deep theatre that requires not only an understanding of the world it lives in but, as importantly, a fundamental connection with the craft and skills of the stage and how it is a fundamental coming together of writer, director, technical staff, actor and audience.  It is us speaking together about the world. Theatre is power because it enables us to know things that others do not know and to visit places no one else has been and, because it is fleeting, that knowledge will be between us and no one else. Paradoxically, the illusion of theatre is no illusion. The magic of the theatre is real and enables us to experiment with the very fabric of reality that can only be achieved by those who have committed themselves unequivocally to its dark arts.

Blood and Bones says:  Engage with the world

Disrupt the system

In my next essay I shall try to understand something about truth and reality authenticity and plausibility and how those distinctions should be at the heart of every writer’s understanding of the world.