Hi Ken, Tom
Williams - sexual? Hmm. He was terribly aware of gender, and in particular
misogyny, and of the fragility of human beings. It's the fragility that
sticks with me.
On 13/2/05 1:47 AM, "Kenneth Wolman" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> God yes. I mean Moral, not you sticking your neck out. We lost yesterday
> maybe the last of the writers who addressed great moral themes and used
> them as the dramatic core. Who does this now: not obliquely, but directly?
Miller could be a dreadful bore, you know (did you ever try to read his
essays on theatre?); that might go with the territory of addressing Great
Moral Themes. But you could wave a stick at Tony Kuschner; there's a few
GMT in Angels in America. And Kuschner did a charming children's book with
Maurice Sendak that had a GMT in it too, about social responsibility to the
less fortunate, &c.
But there are loads of contemporary writers who address moral themes, even
directly. The danger of doing so is of course didactic or moralising
writing. If we're talking of playwrights, Harold Pinter's still alive, and
so is Howard Barker, who is waging a one-man war against humanistic ,
liberal theatre that takes a moral stance as a priori, thus shutting down
huge avenues of moral questioning in favour of an agreed consensus about
what's right and wrong. Lately I've been getting my GMT fixes via an SFF
writer called China Mieville, whose most recent book, Iron Council, is a
fantasy based on the trade union movement.
Best
A
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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