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APPENDICES AB: Yes. My understanding of what you are saying is that the dramatizing of the analysis is linked to breaking up the event and keeping it in the logic of reality. EB: Yes. I now automatically, when I am writing, dramatize the analysis and not the surface. If you want to make the play work for you then you’ve got to do the same. But I believe this to be true of all drama as opposed to theatre. And that’s a big difference, theatre has no analysis, but drama obviously does, because it is trying to create the meaning of things. And drama would not do that by lecturing anybody, it does it in much more concrete ways, by using people in situations. AB: But then the dramatization is done to open questions. How specific do these questions have to be? Is it done to direct the audience’s attention to the important questions, like why does this dying man get up to wipe the bayonet? EB: Well that is to do with the connection between the stage and the audience. Because if you are doing theatre, then the audience just look, watch, they become spectators, but if you are doing drama, then the stage becomes the site of the audience’s mind. The stage goes into there (points at his forehead) because then you are engaging with the audience’s problems, which they bring to the theatre, so the drama is written in such a way as to enter into those problems. In a way there is often no final solution, I mean will you please tell me what I am doing in this world? What is the objective of being alive? Now, Brecht will tell you. It’s to be a good communist and serve the party, or a Christian would tell you it’s to be good and to serve God, but I am saying there are no solutions of that sort. So, the only possible solution is that what do I think of this situation, how do I relate to this situation, how can I make this situation bearable and creative. That’s the audience’s concern, but then you can act that out on the stage. Because the character will say, this is how I relate to this problem, this is what I think of it as a human being and then the audience can either say that’s rubbish, or you can have engaged with things like the invisible object and radical innocence. Because the invisible object is the appearance of radical innocence. If you can make the drama work like that, then the drama illucidates the audience’s problem, and their reaction to the problem becomes the only possible human solution. Because the problems are big moral problems. You can say, look these people are starving, we have two problems, one problem is how can we get food to them and the other problem is, but why should we? And it’s that second question that makes civilization. + 268 +
