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Most plays are no damned good (Neilson Barnard/Getty Images)
We all know our consciousness is corrupt, and a long life, examined, brings the burden of regret, shame, and indeed a horror at our own actions that, at times, becomes scarcely bearable.
The theatre, and tragedy particularly, offers a median between outright confession and conscious, rational (which is to say flawed or at least untrustworthy) understanding.
The tragedy is like the story around the campfire and, just like the joke, frees us from rational consideration. In listening, we are transported into another world. “Once upon a time”, just like “there were these two guys”, not only reassures but instantly bypasses our, necessary, quotidian concerns with our own position, well-being, and self-image.
In hearing these mystic incantations, we relax, because we know the story is not going to be about ourselves. Should we suspect, in our unprotected state, that we are actually listening to a cautionary tale (that is to say, to an advertisement), the spell is broken, and we must bring our self-protective capacities to bear.
Here we are like the radio listener, as the host describes the humiliation of some public figure, when he segues, unannounced, into a commercial for internet-image protection and we realise we were hearing an ad.
When we thought we were getting a bedtime story.
The bedtime story exists to address the child’s fear of the night and his understanding of his own frailty. He is not called upon to face it and to deal with it through reason (“There are no such things as monsters”), but he is soothed by a mechanism bypassing his frail consciousness, and his equally frail capacity to be soothed by the same. Which frailty the child shares with us all.
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SubscribeI love a playwright who can quote Friedman like that; it actually gave me a little chill along my spine. This sadly makes me think of how art is turned to propaganda under totalitarian regimes; please let’s not slide further from here…
If you’re looking for propaganda masquerading as art look no further than the UK playwright David Hare (or Sir, as he is). His is a complex world view: left=good, right=bad. His characters have the complexity of Donald Duck (sorry, Donald – I take your name in vain.) He is more than happy to excoriate the state that has paid him so handsomely for his polemics (drama to Sir David) over the past half century. His hero is Berthold Brecht – that should tell you all you need to know about both the content of his work and the quality.
David Mamet says it like it is. He will take some heat, no doubt. But at this stage (pun intended) of his career, he doesn’t care a fiddle.
What he is doing is a rally cry for those of us, like myself, who are further down the creative totem pole. But who, like Mamet, want to write honestly, from the heart, without feeding some sick social agenda.
Then good luck with your work.
Thanks.
A hundred years ago, when new immigrants stepped ashore, finally, at New York, a world of wonder and possibility and cheer in theatreland must have instantly warmed the cockles of the hearts of those artistically inclined among them who could quickly gravitate to Broadway and the dazzling lights of its environs. What value cheer was for many who escaped hard and cruel, very cheerless places to get to America!
A hundred years later and the West shoots itself in the foot. New arrivals from cruel and harsh lands, deserving of wonder and cheer, will in the 21st century arrive at a scenario that less than warms the shackles of their hearts, the last remaining shackles that are the almost permanent legacy of having lived under tyranny or cruelty for so long. They get a lecture. They get warned instead. Now new Americans, they are told how concerned they ought to be. How concerned and not proud their fellow Americans are. Now they can’t shake loose those last remaining iron shackles that take all the heat. There’s nothing warming on the scene, no tonic. No cheer. Nothing to inspire or that would be a good night out – with one’s dear. Among them, some may never know unadulterated entertainment. (They might have to stumble upon The Muppet Show on TV for that). They may never know if the idea of entertaining for entertainment’s sake is forever lost.
The faces of laughter and tears, those signature signs of the theatre, seem amiss now. They seem amiss in a place of pontification. Who or which country in the world now is left to cheer up the world? India? Through Bollywood? The immigrants arriving today hoping for a dose of Elvis instead receive angry rap. No matter how much they fiddle with the dial.
The great and open-to-all capital of entertainment and dreams and stories has been Broadway, over many decades. I imagine! There have been dips – the great nights-out sometimes at risk by a tendency to too much seriousness and gloom, such as in the 1960s. But America was always an open society, not the crass depiction of a so-called privileged society for an élite make-up only.
If society is to be upended, must the fare, entertainment-wise, have that miserable sting to its tail now? Even if it’s already billed as fun? The sting of being lectured to. Oh the condescension!
I am very partial to a decent drama, but rarely go to the theatre now. When they do put on dramas now they are either straight out propaganda laid on with a trowel, so that even when I agree with the sentiment it puts my back up, or dramatisations of actual political, historical or social events with the obvious pupose of (and you guessed it) propaganda. There are the occasional plays which still serve the pupose that Mr Mamet mentions, I recent saw o performance of When the Long Trick’s Over in Bury St Edmunds (title taken from the last line of Masefield’s poem Sea-Fever), a thoughtful, human-scale drama about … swimming (and other things).
We used to attend theatre regularly to see standard productions and the odd challenging piece, but you’re right, it’s a big gamble these days that you’ll be lectured at by a writer who doesn’t understand other views.
On TV I try to keep an open mind about new dramas and comedies and watch at least half an hour or one episode before I make a call on continuing with it.
So Derry Girls was a big win for me.
I watched Mamet’s play Oleanna when I was in grad school back in the early 90s. It was such a refreshing and nuanced exploration of power relationships. At the end the producers hosted an audience feedback discussion for people to react (likely not sanctioned by the playwrite). The first person to stand up was the ‘Sexual Harassment Officer’ from the university who went on an emotional tirade that the play should never have been allowed to be shown and saying that the objective to stamp out campus sexual harassment had been set back decades. Then she promptly marched out of the hall before anyone could respond.
I stopped going to theatres long before the covid shut them down for months.
Do we still expect good shows in the theatre to entertain, surprise, shock or make us think? Have we not become used to films on TV, Netflix, or YouTube?
I suppose I’ll always have a soft spot for a good musical ( West Side Story, South Pacific, Hair etc. ) but it seems nobody writes them any more, and that being so, I’ll make do with reading plays at home and using my imagination.
Sorry.
A great piece. Our situation reminds me of the scene in Watership Down where the rabbit(s) come across the terrible dead atmosphere of a rabbit pen.
I found it odd that vice-President Pence, or vice-President-elect Pence, had been singled out for hectoring from the stage at the conclusion to Hamilton – it must have been in the run-up to Christmas of 2016, shortly after Trump’s shock victory in the election.
Perhaps some of the cast from Hamilton felt a little tinge of guilt afterwards, four and a bit years later when they would have seen Pence at Biden’s inauguration ceremony listening intently to the young and dignified poet, the young African American lady, deliver her poem to mark the occasion.
I just remember at the time when reading about the Hamilton-Pence incident that something had gone terribly wrong with show business. And even the audience may not be looked upon as ladies and gentlemen.
Yes that was disgraceful.
‘Socialist realism’ actually produced some great work, ‘And Quiet Flows the Don’ for example. But what prospect that ‘social equity’ can manage anything even remotely close to that?
America is nothing like the Soviets were.
There is doubt Sholokhov wrote the novel and Solzhenitsyn has expressed similar thoughts. He shared a prison cell with a white russian officer who died.
David, how can we foresee when the decadence of this inquisition has opened the way for a spiritual awakening — for a profound sense of conviction, faith, and redemption?
Ahem, Broadway has always promoted ideology. It promoted Mamet’s once.
“The painter or composer may work in solitude. The creation of the dramatist is complete only with the addition of an audience.”
Wow! A very blinkered judgement from a supposedly intelligent writer – there are virtually no painters or composers who have produced work without consideration of their audiences and need for their approval. Just like him, they almost always need some kind of validation.
A reasonably debatable point, hardly worth the ‘wow’ or ‘blinkered’.