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APPENDICES
then the actors will take over, and that is very different from writing. Because
the actor has immensely subtle ways of conveying information. If there is a
little child in a pram and you stare at it too long, the child will cry. It can read
danger that early. And sight is prior to speech, we interpret the world visually
before we can speak and answer questions and do anything. Now the actor
has all that and radical innocence is seeing something before you can speak
about it. Then you have to find words for it, and I think that is very important.
Drama has to do with language, our problem at the moment is that we don’t
have any dramatic language. It’s all empty stuff wisecracks, and it’s made up
from a mixture of language people get from advertisements and films and
pop-manuals on science and outer space. We don’t really inhabit a world that
we have a human language for. That’s a big problem for drama. But there are
solutions, because if you can create that situation which requires definition,
which requires some action, if you can create that and then put the actor in
that situation, then the actor must respond to it in some way and that is the
invisible object. The two come together. The invisible object is what is absent
from philosophy. Philosophy can’t provide that because it is just thinking. That
is very important. There are eras when philosophy becomes very important
because it is trying to map out new social relationships, but it can only pursue
that up to a certain point. And then you need a new epoch of drama. Historically
the pattern in history is like this, you had Greek drama, then Greek society was
falling apart and so you had Greek philosophy; and then you had the Roman
bureaucracy organising society and then you had the Church, which is itself
drama. The church deals with all the Greek problems, but says God is real.
So instead of the creative logic of fiction you have the force of bureaucracy, hell
and the inquisition. The Gospels were written in Greek. But that organisation
breaks down in the Renaissance and so Shakespeare and the Jacobeans say,
we have to invent a new form of drama. And Hamlet and the others come on
the stage and say, oh you don’t know who I am, what a human being is, so lam
going to tell you. Their audiences were used to texts, to do with the religious
reformation and reading the bible, they very much related to texts, and so
that worked. But then you get the industrial revolution and a whole new wave
of philosophy, Kant, Leibnitz, Descartes and the philosophers that I became
interested in. And that works until you get the second industrial revolution,
and then you get a new series of plays, Ibsen and Chekhov. and now you have
the new French philosophy and al lot of it is rubbish. So we have to create a new
drama. But the problem is, you cannot put French philosophy on the stage in
the way that Shakespeare could put theology on the stage, because the language
of theology then was also the language of the market. That’s the amazing thing
about Shakespeare. He can use all those languages. We can’t do that. I am not
going to get ... if one of my characters says “Derrida thinks...” The audience
will start looking him up in the programme, who is Derrida? If you look at say,
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