In 1958 I wrote the following:
'There are no hard distinctions between what is real
and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what
is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true
and false.'
I believe that these assertions still make sense and
do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I
stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true?
What is false?
Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite
find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives
the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon
the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape
which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have
done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth
to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other,
recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each
other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you
have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips
through your fingers and is lost.
I have often been asked how my plays come about. I
cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what
happened. That is what they said. That is what they did.
Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word or
an image. The given word is often shortly followed by the image. I shall give
two examples of two lines which came right out of the blue into my head,
followed by an image, followed by me.
The plays are The Homecoming and Old Times.
The first line of The Homecoming is 'What have you done with the
scissors?' The first line of Old Times is 'Dark.'
In each case I had no further information.
In the first case someone was obviously looking for a
pair of scissors and was demanding their whereabouts of someone else he
suspected had probably stolen them. But I somehow knew that the person
addressed didn't give a damn about the scissors or about the questioner either,
for that matter.
'Dark' I took to be a description of someone's hair,
the hair of a woman, and was the answer to a question. In each case I found
myself compelled to pursue the matter. This happened visually, a very slow
fade, through shadow into light.
I always start a play by calling the characters A, B
and C.
In the play that became The Homecoming I saw a
man enter a stark room and ask his question of a younger man sitting on an ugly
sofa reading a racing paper. I somehow suspected that A was a father and that B
was his son, but I had no proof. This was however confirmed a short time later
when B (later to become Lenny) says to A (later to become Max), 'Dad, do you
mind if I change the subject? I want to ask you something. The dinner we had
before, what was the name of it? What do you call it? Why don't you buy a dog?
You're a dog cook. Honest. You think you're cooking for a lot of dogs.' So
since B calls A 'Dad' it seemed to me reasonable to assume that they were
father and son. A was also clearly the cook and his cooking did not seem to be
held in high regard. Did this mean that there was no mother? I didn't know.
But, as I told myself at the time, our beginnings never know our ends.
'Dark.' A large window. Evening sky. A man,
A (later to become Deeley), and a woman, B (later to
become Kate), sitting with drinks. 'Fat or thin?' the man asks. Who are they
talking about? But I then see, standing at the window, a woman, C (later to
become Anna), in another condition of light, her back to them, her hair dark.
It's a strange moment, the moment of creating
characters who up to that moment have had no
existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although
sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche. The author's position is an odd
one. In a sense he is not welcomed by the characters. The characters resist him, they are not easy to live with, they are impossible to
define. You certainly can't dictate to them. To a certain extent you play a
never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man's buff, hide and seek.
But finally you find that you have people of flesh and blood on your hands,
people with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made out of
component parts you are unable to change, manipulate or distort.
So language in art remains a highly
ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might
give way under you, the author, at any time.
But as I have said, the search for the truth can never
stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right
there, on the spot.
Political theatre presents an entirely different set
of problems. Sermonising has to be avoided at all cost. Objectivity is
essential. The characters must be allowed to breathe their own air. The author
cannot confine and constrict them to satisfy his own taste or disposition or
prejudice. He must be prepared to approach them from a variety of angles, from
a full and uninhibited range of perspectives, take them by surprise, perhaps, occasionally, but nevertheless give them the
freedom to go which way they will. This does not always work. And political
satire, of course, adheres to none of these precepts, in fact does precisely
the opposite, which is its proper function.
In my play The Birthday Party I think I allow a
whole range of options to operate in a dense forest of possibility before
finally focussing on an act of subjugation.
Mountain Language pretends to no
such range of operation. It remains brutal, short and ugly. But the soldiers in
the play do get some fun out of it. One sometimes forgets that torturers become
easily bored. They need a bit of a laugh to keep their spirits up. This has
been confirmed of course by the events at Abu Ghraib
in
Ashes to Ashes, on the other
hand, seems to me to be taking place under water. A drowning woman, her hand
reaching up through the waves, dropping down out of sight, reaching for others,
but finding nobody there, either above or under the water, finding only
shadows, reflections, floating; the woman a lost figure in a drowning
landscape, a woman unable to escape the doom that seemed to belong only to
others.
But as they died, she must die too.
Political language, as used by politicians, does not
venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the
evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the
maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people
remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of
their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon
which we feed.
As every single person here knows, the justification
for the invasion of
The truth is something entirely different. The truth
is to do with how the
But before I come back to the present I would like to
look at the recent past, by which I mean
Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and
throughout
But my contention here is that the
Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact
been
The tragedy of
I was present at a meeting at the
The United States Congress was about to decide whether
to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of
Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a
rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in
diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity.
'Father,' he said, 'let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always
suffer.' There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.
Innocent people, indeed, always suffer.
Finally somebody said: 'But in this case “innocent
people” were the victims of a gruesome atrocity subsidised by your government,
one among many. If Congress allows the Contras more money further atrocities of
this kind will take place. Is this not the case? Is your government not
therefore guilty of supporting acts of murder and destruction upon the citizens
of a sovereign state?'
Seitz was imperturbable. 'I don't agree that the facts
as presented support your assertions,' he said.
As we were leaving the Embassy a
I should remind you that at the time President Reagan
made the following statement: 'The Contras are the moral equivalent of our Founding
Fathers.'
The
The Sandinistas weren't perfect. They possessed their
fair share of arrogance and their political philosophy contained a number of
contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilised. They
set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was
abolished. Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back
from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. Two thousand
schools were built. A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in
the country to less than one seventh. Free education was established and a free
health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated.
The
I spoke earlier about 'a tapestry of lies' which
surrounds us. President Reagan commonly described
Six of the most distinguished Jesuits in the world
were viciously murdered at the Central American University in
The
But this 'policy' was by no means restricted to
The
Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout
these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while
it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest.
The crimes of the
I put to you that the
It's a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually
employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a
truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back
on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your
critical faculties but it's very comfortable. This does not apply of course to
the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and
women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the
The
What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we
ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely
employed these days – conscience? A conscience to do not only
with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of
others? Is all this dead? Look at
The invasion of
We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted
uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to
the Iraqi people and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the
How many people do you have to kill before you qualify
to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One
hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it
is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal
Court of Justice. But Bush has been clever. He has not ratified the
International Criminal Court of Justice. Therefore if any American soldier or
for that matter politician finds himself in the dock Bush has warned that he
will send in the marines. But Tony Blair has ratified the Court and is
therefore available for prosecution. We can let the Court have his address if
they're interested. It is Number 10,
Death in this context is irrelevant. Both Bush and
Blair place death well away on the back burner. At least 100,000 Iraqis were
killed by American bombs and missiles before the
Early in the invasion there was a photograph published
on the front page of British newspapers of Tony Blair kissing the cheek of a
little Iraqi boy. 'A grateful child,' said the caption. A few days later there
was a story and photograph, on an inside page, of another four-year-old boy
with no arms. His family had been blown up by a missile. He was the only survivor.
'When do I get my arms back?' he asked. The story was dropped. Well, Tony Blair
wasn't holding him in his arms, nor the body of any other
mutilated child, nor the body of any bloody corpse. Blood is dirty. It
dirties your shirt and tie when you're making a sincere speech on television.
The 2,000 American dead are an embarrassment. They are
transported to their graves in the dark. Funerals are unobtrusive, out of
harm's way. The mutilated rot in their beds, some for the
rest of their lives. So the dead and the mutilated both rot, in
different kinds of graves.
Here is an extract from a poem by Pablo Neruda,
'I'm Explaining a Few Things':
And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children's blood.
Jackals that the jackals would despise
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate.
Face to face with you I have seen the blood
of
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives.
Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers
from every socket of
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull's eye of your hearts.
And you will ask: why doesn't his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land.
Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets!*
Let me make it quite clear that in quoting from Neruda's poem I am in no way comparing Republican Spain to
Saddam Hussein's
I have said earlier that the
The
The
Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the
I know that President Bush has many extremely
competent speech writers but I would like to volunteer for the job myself. I
propose the following short address which he can make on television to the
nation. I see him grave, hair carefully combed, serious, winning, sincere, often beguiling, sometimes employing a wry smile, curiously
attractive, a man's man.
'God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is
good. Bin Laden's God is bad. His is a bad God.
Saddam's God was bad, except he didn't have one. He was a barbarian. We are not
barbarians. We don't chop people's heads off. We believe in freedom. So does
God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a
freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate
electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am
not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I
possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And
don't you forget it.'
A writer's life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked
activity. We don't have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is
stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some
of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no
shelter, no protection – unless you lie – in which case of course you have
constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.
I have referred to death quite a few times this evening.
I shall now quote a poem of my own called 'Death'.
Where was the dead body found?
Who found the dead body?
Was the dead body dead when found?
How was the dead body found?
Who was the dead body?
Who was the father or daughter or brother
Or uncle or sister or mother or son
Of the dead and abandoned body?
Was the body dead when abandoned?
Was the body abandoned?
By whom had it been abandoned?
Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey?
What made you declare the dead body dead?
Did you declare the dead body dead?
How well did you know the dead body?
How did you know the dead body was dead?
Did you wash the dead body
Did you close both its eyes
Did you bury the body
Did you leave it abandoned
Did you kiss the dead body
When we look into a mirror we think the image that
confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are
actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer
has to smash the mirror – for it is on the other side of that mirror that the
truth stares at us.
I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist,
unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to
define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial
obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.
If such a determination is not embodied in our
political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us –
the dignity of man.
*
Extract from "I'm Explaining a Few Things" translated by Nathaniel
Tarn, from Pablo Neruda: Selected Poems,
published by