I attended a funeral of a friend some weeks back. At the end of the occasion, they played "always look on the bright side of death ..." from Monty Python's "Life of Brian". And this reminded me of the absurdity of all our existence and the weight we place on our own experience and even our ethics. The comical antics of despots in culture and nations is imaged and reflected in the comical antics of despots in families, communities, institutions and businesses of all kinds. And I wonder if so much of the rampant neurosis we see in society today is more the product of our inability to reconcile our idealistic perception of what ought to be OR what we would like to be with what actually IS! What if it is this inability to make this reconciling attribute more potent than any chemical imbalances in the brain that makes for our culturally insane society?
Erich Fromm and The Sane Society and Aldous Huxley
It is practically a truism that George Orwell's "1984" and Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" are not futuristic works but are descriptions of much that is evident today. Orwell's world of fear as a control method and Huxley's "love your slavery" positions sum up so much of what is happening to this human frog in a socially and metaphorically tepid tank water that is continuously hotting up. Either situation is of course doomed to ultimate destruction; taking with it much of the human race! And so we "always look on the bright side of death" as the Monty Python group so ingeniously imaged in the late 1970s.
Theatre simply smiles and flicks the bird at the insanity of the brilliant personages in our society. The discourse of our intellectual gods entrenching the vaccine of indolence towards the deplorables who despise them is providing even wider schisms between the reality of what we see and know and the semantics of egoistic cleverness worthy of a Harvard Ph D! The clever ones who use language as a debasing weapon to construct totally absurd notions as absolute truths in order to placate very questionable agendas; these clever ones who have manufactured viruses to infect the most intelligent minds with perfect arguments to prove the great delusions as being necessary truths; such an intelligent and clever neurosis so obvious to the deplorable minds that cannot process the machinations of slight-of-hand academia will nevertheless create the dividing lines between Orwell's "1984" and Huxley's "Brave New World".
The Tik Tokers and Instagrammers gladly parade their never-ending despair in posts about their meaningless lives while the masters of the ruling elites cast despising glances and eye-rolling at the plain absurdity of whole generations contributing to their inevitable lemming-like plunge into nothingness! The insane society of Erich Fromm's "The Sane Society" (1955) was a companion piece to Huxley's fictional "Brave New World". Nearly seventy years later the largely hidden cultural neurosis of disorder is so evident with large scale drug companies the biggest beneficiaries of neurotic enslavement. And when it suits to label a certain disquiet or emotional response as a psychological disorder, the smart ones and the elite minds of academia are quick to find the correct label so easily contain the disturbance that can erupt if the elite were to see such response as more than some natural response to the absurdity of human condition!
Depending on where your ideological stance is placed will depend on what you consider this piece is actually talking about. While the metaphorical Nero is fiddling and the coliseum is packed for the circus, the real agendas are engaging allies and reinforcing the neurotic society in order to maintain and increase power. The political domain is of little consequence except in the construction of perpetual wars. Academia and academic institutions linked closely with the big corporations hold the real oligarchical power in the Western world. The Alliance with Jihadism while publicly opposing terrorism is the most obvious example of neurotic response! In bed with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan and elsewhere, while bleating about the condition of Gaza, the USA and the West, and the UK, proffer financial gain over any consideration of ethics or the human condition. At the same time, the Deplorables or the Proletarians don't understand the mind speak of the elites and just know that their lives are being ignored and demolished. They are made to feel like ghosts in their own countries. Have a look at enclaves like Luton in the UK! Then have a look at peoples' experience in Alice Springs as still alien cultural precepts smugly over-ride any sense of personal belonging by indigenous populations!
So as we create theatre, does any of this ring bells? I haven't seen or heard such bells. Where are the Deplorables in all this? Simply seen as fodder for Donald Trump? Or other hard rightists in Europe? Or simply as a joke in China or Japan? Yet, do people's real lives that are disrupted by the machinations of elitist groups simply not matter.
This is the central question for theatre in this era. Yet it is not addressed nor is it contemplated as a true subject for writers. Where is the Arthur Miller who wrote "The Crucible"? Or the Ibsen who wrote "Enemy of the People"?
Do contemporary writers and theatre practitioners accept their own betrayal of their art and practice by not addressing the most pressing issues of the age? Cultural neurosis and cultural hypocrisy! Is it cowardness or self-preservation? One has to wonder if that same neurosis of "politically correct" conclusions isn't providing the straitjacket of conformity to the elitist rules dictated by unseen and covert shaping of agendas by the Ministry of Truth (George Orwell "1984"). Yet we are all so happy in a neurotic kind of way by the ease of Consumerism (Huxley, "Brave New World") that our main focus is on our sexual attraction and narcissistic feelings fuelled by drugs from the international global conglomerates!
Joe Woodward
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