Passive Change?

I was wondering today whether a political play, to be a good political play (and I have yet to decide if that is an oxymoron), needs to, rather than having a view itself, let the audience project their own views onto it.  (Which is basically what I’ve said before, methinks.)  The new thought being (oh yes, I have new thoughts on occasion – I schedule them twice monthly): if an audience has to project their own views onto the play to extract a ‘point’ being made out of it, does that mean that the play itself can never be more than a passive…thing?  (I can’t think of a better word than ‘thing’.  ‘Entity’, perhaps, but that’s akin to someone writing ‘germane’ instead of ‘relevant’.  (Please shoot me if I ever write ‘germane’ in earnest.))  If it’s the audience who makes their own ‘point’, and the play has nothing to do with it, can a play ever be, to any real extent, a vehicle for changing an opinion?

I could spend another ten paragraphs teasing all that out, but I don’t think it’d get me anywhere.

And it’s not that I’m interested in writing that type of play anyway.  Was The Comedy of Errors meant to change the world?

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Did the cryptic crossword in the SMH today.  Answered everything.  One clue was for some city in Laos that I’d never heard of (Vientiane), but I managed to reconstruct it and, checking on the internet, I found I was right.  (That is, I didn’t cheat – I would’ve put that answer in if I had a gun to my head.)  Rather happy with myself.  Only took me twenty minutes or so.  I still got the gift, it seems.

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Read a tiny amount about D.H. Lawrence today, and looked at a few of his pictures on the interwebs.  It was quite surprising, seeing his pictures.  There seems to be a very palpable sense of a soul in the man when one looks at the pictures, much more so than with most other writers’ pictures I’ve seen.  Really quite striking.  It’s something about his eyes.

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13/588 in American Gods.  I remember reading a bit of it once, and I think some guy having sex got sucked into a woman’s vagina.  (As opposed to a man’s vagina, apparently.)  Haven’t got to that bit yet.

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