The Dreamers
Perhaps the quest of the playwright is best summed up thus: “If I could describe this place, portray it, I’ve tried, I feel no place, no place around me, there’s no end to me, I don’t know what it is, it isn’t flesh, it doesn’t end, it’s like air.” Quite. In any case, this term will run the gamut from the strange to the sublime. Stoppard jostles for space with Shakespeare; Coward shares fourth week with Oxford’s Christina Bejan.
The playwrights of Trinity term’s productions make for as much entertainment and intrigue as the subjects dealt with in the plays themselves. These subjects range from a “shady and amorous” restoration female spy and adventuress imprisoned in a debtors’ prison, Aphra Behn, to the most ‘postmodern’ – and possibly misogynistic – of British writers in the 20th century, Samuel Beckett. We run the whole gamut of social, racial and cultural backgrounds.
The lives of these particular playwrights could read like something from a play itself (albeit one of a dark and twisted nature): Scene One – remembers own birth; Scene Two – attacked by a pimp. Reality and fantasy are never as far apart as one might suppose, and one feeds naturally in to the other.
Playwrights create people and shape our language; they build dream-like worlds and delight in crumbling them to dust; they shape society, for which they are at once the spokesmen for and the derisive satirists of. They stand up for equality of the sexes, for creative and sexual freedom, for the schools of philosophy, psychology and theology.
If the plays themselves are not reason enough to become interested in the theatrical world, then even the most cynical and bored audience cannot fail to be intrigued, fascinated and titillated by the real lives behind the ones we see on the stage. Those of us who delight in scandal and in matters of a rather more under-the-covers nature should be able to discover enough in the lives of the writers to satisfy even the most worldly and jaded of palates.
21st Apr 2005