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?
—
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.
—
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.
—
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.
Leave a Reply