Читать книгу Hello ? hello - Karen Hines - Страница 6

Hello … Hello was written during the nineties, when serious cuts to spending on the environment, the public sphere and the arts were underway. The general idea was that we should adhere to more commercial models on all fronts.

My reaction, perhaps perverse, was to embrace this new order by writing a love story set in a place and time where art and commerce have finally and completely conjoined: a romantic fable for a new world. The absence of props and the near-empty set, which began as budgetary necessities, quickly became key to the play’s point of view. Words were free, so I used a lot of them, and soon the spoken stage directions, with their lush descriptions of glowing snowfalls, mammoth set pieces and dancing accountants, set the stage for a piece of theatre that could both celebrate and subvert the classic styles of escapist entertainment it employed.

Despite the fact that Hello … Hello was riddled with romance, comedy and songs, it became increasingly clear during the very first workshop that it was not really a romantic musical comedy, and shouldn’t pretend to be. Or should only pretend to be. Perhaps, we thought, it was an ‘allegorical romance with songs.’ Or a ‘black romantic tragi-comedy.’ Whatever the genre, obstacles became our compasses and limitations our guides. The ironic juxtaposition of nothingness and ‘everythingness’ was mined for its comedy. The romance was mined for its appeal. The darker suggestions regarding romantic love and its macrocosmic reverberations were left to seep out from between the lines.

The world has changed a lot since this play was begun, and it’s changing faster and faster. The belief I had just ten years ago in the power of art to change the world is being challenged by the probability that economic progress can change it faster and more everlastingly. But, as Kalle Lasn, founder of Adbusters magazine, says, ‘On the far side of cynicism lies freedom.’ And I suppose, at its most basic level, this play is an ode to the pursuit of freedom. It is also an ode to art itself, which seems, increasingly, to be something akin to that tiny endangered frog we have all seen in National Geographic or Scientific American: the one that is tinier than a fingertip, exquisitely beautiful, morbidly fragile …

This play is an ode to that frog.