Hi Rupert
> The real world is ever more broken open and yet imprisoned; languages
> fracture - and influence or are built anew from below. Though displaced from
> the real, aren't the languages of writing and art similarly broken and yet
> imprisoned; fractured and built anew from below? I don't know but...
>
> To hell with style, long live invention.
I just posted this on another list, but it so directly answers your post
I'll put it here too. Reading Barker again yesterday, and he is most
interesting and provocative on the question of politics in theatre, since he
is so utterly against the kind of liberal humanist stuff that dominated (and
still dominates) English theatre - the Joint Stock Company, say, but also
what Max Stafford Clark is doing with documentary theatre. He calls this
the theatre of journalism, and he can't see the point of it since it offers
nothing which challenges any assumptions, it tells its audience what they
already know (torture is bad, people ought to be nice to each other). He's
a great antidote to moral earnestness and wonderfully argumentative.
Anyway, here he is:
"In a society disciplined by moral imperatives of gross simplicity,
complexity itself, ambiguity itself, is a political posture of profound
strength. The play which makes demands of its audience, both of an
emotional and interpretive nature, becomes a source of freedom, necessarily
hard won. The play which refuses the message, the lecture, the
conscience-ridden expose, but which insists on the inventive and imaginative
at every point, creates new tensions in a blandly entertainment-led culture.
The dramatist's obligation is (to) his own imagination. His function
becomes not to educate by his superior political knowledge, for who can
trust that? but to lead into moral conflict by his superior imagination."
Elsewhere, he says: "Art has no duty".
Best
A
Alison Croggon
Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au
Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com
Blogs: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com http://alisoncroggon.blogspot.com
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