Monday, October 25, 2004

 
The Difference Between Plays and News:
...let's hope that not all future drama adheres so closely to its second cousin, journalism. Much recent political theatre is informed by the desire to be either a report or an essay. Getting the facts out there is good - putting them on stage gives them electricity they would otherwise lack - but it is not the same as a play. When Shakespeare wrote his great historical plays, he chucked everything in: nonsense about witchcraft, battle scenes, father-son stuff, pageants, philosophical introspection. History, the record of facts, was a release for the great heap of images inside him - not a clamp on his imagination.
Theatre is a place of imagination, of compassion and of obsession. Much of the new journalism is too dry, too flatly written, too studiedly impersonal. Everybody leans on the authority of the everyday, rather than relying on the authority of the imagination
(from Guardian Unlimited).

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